it's kind of a nitpick but one of the major things that bothers me the most about the Awakening DLC is that it nerfs Sophon's Omniscience faction trait for each Nakalim player; slowing down their early game. It's so blatant that it makes me think the third-party studio never realized it.

Sublustris wrote:

Shrik3 wrote:
Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard.

Classical Dunning–Kruger effect.

Editing or patching 4X video games is obviously not my line of work. However I would have thought that it would have been within the capability of the actual creators of the game without a huge amount of effort if the will was there. 

It seems more that the game was abandoned by the developers who started working on other projects before Awakening was released. Which is not very customer friendly, as, I repeat, often when games have problems they get patched but not always. 

It's pretty obvious that the developers don't want to make an option to turn off something that makes the game worse optional. It is a shame, as I have said in the last couple of years I have had my money's worth it's just an odd way to conclude the title and I won't be playing it anymore. 

That's it. 

Academy doesn't make the game inherently worse. Spawning near it is not much different from spawning near, say, Cravers.

What you are missing is that disabling it isn't just adding checkbox to UI options. Nor is it adding simple check in code. That's adding a lot of checks all over the code, almost everywhere where check for DLC itself is. Then there is problem, that Academy is main gameplay mechanic for Nakalim. They are made to be played like allies, to create symbioses. Academy allows them to conquest whole galaxy without ever going above colonization threshold. It gives them permanent tithe. Disabling this interaction immediately rises a need to substantially buff Nakalim's resource gathering elsewhere and to give them another gameplay gimmick. Yes, current Academy implementation is full of issues, but just disabling it replaces them with others. You also need to playtest all those changes, that further complicates the task.

So no, it's not "just adding an option to make the game less worse".

Sublustris wrote:

Academy doesn't make the game inherently worse. Spawning near it is not much different from spawning near, say, Cravers.

Except that in a fair game you will be at the same level as the Cravers which at least gives you a chance of invading a system if it's claimed before you could get to it.  Even at that, it will take a few turns for the Cravers to finish the colonization process.  However, the Academy starts out stronger early-game (even if the Academy difficulty is low) and they seem to colonize instantly.  And then let's say that you decide to invade an Academy system and succeed.  You'll then have to pay dust to the Academy before you are allowed to bid on the Spear again.  So there's a bit of a difference between the Cravers and the Academy.

Sublustris wrote:
Then there is problem, that Academy is main gameplay mechanic for Nakalim. They are made to be played like allies, to create symbioses. Academy allows them to conquest whole galaxy without ever going above colonization threshold. It gives them permanent tithe. Disabling this interaction immediately rises a need to substantially buff Nakalim's resource gathering elsewhere and to give them another gameplay gimmick.

Are there any other Nakalim-Academy benefits other than that?  I couldn't find any.  It looks the system donation feature could be left enabled for the Nakalim without the need for the other Academy interactions to be enabled, and that would still be fair.  The Nakalim have to build the appropriate system improvement and expand influence before they can donate a system which is a very different process than an Academy colonization ship just cruising in and taking a system.  In fact, I don't really understand what the point is of the Academy being able to colonize on its own because in my (limited) Nakalim experience it didn't look like a Nakalim faction got a bonus from Academy systems that it did not donate itself.  (Maybe I'm wrong though...)

dustwhit wrote:

it's kind of a nitpick but one of the major things that bothers me the most about the Awakening DLC is that it nerfs Sophon's Omniscience faction trait for each Nakalim player; slowing down their early game. It's so blatant that it makes me think the third-party studio never realized it.

I could see this being a problem.  I haven't played Sophons against the Nakalim, but the fact that the Nakalim have so many techs unlocked initially seems like it would hamper Omniscience significantly.

SpikedWallMan wrote:

Sublustris wrote:

Shrik3 wrote:
Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard.

Classical Dunning–Kruger effect.

Sublustris is correct that it is hard to say how objectively easy/hard such a task would be without knowing anything about the inner-workings of the game. However, in Shrik3's defense, adding a feature which simply disables the Academy faction would probably be easier than planning/implementing/testing a rebalance. So I still support checkboxes which disable just the Academy features as a simpler stopgap solution while the devs sort out how to properly balance the Academy (assuming they ever decide to rebalance at all).

If that were to be the case that would make me a happy man. 

I would like to point out that I probably sent about a 1000 bug reports during the Early Access, post release period. I feel somewhat invested in the game is what I am trying to say. 

I love the world, as I have since Endless Space 1 (which also had an awful DLC with a terrible sieging mechanic, but was eventually improved) And while of course you can just not run the DLC. The nature of releasing a DLC without rebalancing it, when it really needs it while clearly working on several other projects has taken away a lot of my goodwill for Amplitude. Even if they were not the ones who made it one would assume that if a team were to spend several years making a game they would probably want the player base to be happy. 

Even if at this particular moment in time, understandably no one would expect it to happen. 

Sublustris wrote:

SpikedWallMan wrote:
And then let's say that you decide to invade an Academy system and succeed.  You'll then have to pay dust to the Academy before you are allowed to bid on the Spear again.  So there's a bit of a difference between the Cravers and the Academy.

That's the thing, once you decide to oppose Academy, it shouldn't be that easy to get their favoritism back. I see no problem with that. What I meant is that Academy acts as another faction that denies you territory. I know that their implementation is lazy, to say the least, but that doesn't invalidates my initial argument that solution isn't as simple as adding flip switch.

I agree - getting kicked out of the Academy and having to buy back in is fine.  I also think that the Nakalim being able to donate systems to the Academy is OK too because the Academy protection would disincentivize other players invading the donated systems.  The wrinkle is that invading Academy-colonized systems has an additional cost compared to invading another player.  (Especially if the Academy has OP ships in orbit which will have to be cleared out first.)  I would argue that adding a switch that could be flipped to disable Academy colonization would not negatively impact gameplay at all since Academy colonization doesn't really seem to serve any purpose other than just getting in the way.  I also don't see where adding a switch to disable the Academy roles would be a problem either since that was the way that things were before the Awakening release.  And the absence of either of these features doesn't seem to affect the Nakalim at all.

So long and thanks for all the fish, @IcedVenom