Bad Hissho start.sav

Home planet only, no colonizable planets and the rest require high tier research. Mixed anomalies and no resource deposits.

I'm not sure if this should actually be filed under general bug reports. It's as if every start is a Chaotic start (Planet tier and quality wise that is. The starting number of planets doesn't change as with Chaotic start enabled.) regardless of actual home system quality settings in the game's starting options.

I honestly don't think Hissho suffer from starting system as badly as you may beleive. They have no downsides whatsoever to colonising any planet (with the exception of mixed/negative anomolies - and even then, they are less effected by them than other factions), which means going ecologist at their first election and colonising their home system turns them into an early game power house, no matter what planets they roll. Starting with a behemoth means if you dont have strategics on your home system, you can still mine them from others on turn one while still keeping the coloniser.

Wide Hissho got nerfed in this mod iteration but I'm not sure why. Wide Hissho is nowhere near the power level of tall, single-system Hissho by a long margin.

Whytee wrote:

Bad Hissho start.sav

Home planet only, no colonizable planets and the rest require high tier research. Mixed anomalies and no resource deposits.

I'm not sure if this should actually be filed under general bug reports. It's as if every start is a Chaotic start (Planet tier and quality wise that is. The starting number of planets doesn't change as with Chaotic start enabled.) regardless of actual home system quality settings in the game's starting options.

I honestly don't think Hissho suffer from starting system as badly as you may beleive. They have no downsides whatsoever to colonising any planet (with the exception of mixed/negative anomolies - and even then, they are less effected by them than other factions), which means going ecologist at their first election and colonising their home system turns them into an early game power house, no matter what planets they roll. Starting with a behemoth means if you dont have strategics on your home system, you can still mine them from others on turn one while still keeping the coloniser.

Wide Hissho got nerfed in this mod iteration but I'm not sure why. Wide Hissho is nowhere near the power level of tall, single-system Hissho by a long margin.

Wide Hissho? What exactly do you mean by this? Hissho colonize planets twice slower than others man. And if you are talking about warmongering Hissho, then I don't agree. Hissho are absurdly strong because of their obedience mechanics. Their newly conquered systems don't suffer any food and influence penalties and don't hit their approval at all. Also all their hero and faction traits support war - and war has no purpose other than expanding -> wide playstyle. And pushing ecologists turn 20 and colonizing 4 planets in your homesystem is not even near the definition of Tall playstyle. You can do it with every faction in the game. This is just a setup for a further expansion through war -> wide playstyle. Or did you mean having some colonies but making them send their resources to your home system via ancestral reverence? In that case I can kinda agree, stacking wonders that way is kind tallish as well as growing through transfered food, because the definition of a tall empire is growing through population. And tall means tall towards the end of the game, if you saw an opportunity and switched to conquering or pacific conversion, then you are not tall anymore. And that is why it works kinda poorly in ES2, there are no good enough pops to support a small empire with high population (except for Horatio). And there are no penalties to any FIDSI for your system count. Civ 5 BNW was very clever about this, because it also introduced penalties to science per every city you have.

I also think that in early turns (1-20) Hissho should not be able to pop Obsidian Eagle and their +25% FIDSI law at the same time. That, on top of the fertile starting planet snowballs too hard. Either make them start with less Keii to delay Obsidian Eagle a bit, or make this law 1 tier higher.

Dragar wrote:

mamarider wrote:
 Civ 5 BNW was very clever about this, because it also introduced penalties to science per every city you have.

I disagree. This made expansion become a net-negative at a certain point in the game. Expansion should always be a positive investment. Some factions, it might not be the most positive investment (and for many factions, it rarely is once only a little beyond the colonization limit), but making it a net negative has severe implications for how a 4X plays.

So what if it was a patch? Wouldn't you mind then?

Great! I'm looking forward to it

Yes, I agree with Kuma and jaypad07!     

Just take a look at Aitarus Vodyani rework. I believe he gave the Vodyani AI even more cheats than it already has, which actually turned it into a viable competitor.

This game thrives off of its community. As you can see the community wants faction balance! The Lumeris and Horatio changes were a great step into the right direction. As Kuma and others have stated, the Riftborn approach still needs to be looked at.     

You guys have implemented ideas and basically the whole 'later victories' mod by Aitarus implemented into the game. Maybe you should talk directly to the modders who have in-depth knowlesge about the Riftborn, or the combat mods. 

As I have stated before, the game heavily favours damage bonuses over defense bonuses. Look at the combat rework mod, the first thing it did was to simply double the hp of all ships, allowing all 3 battle phases to play out. The new battle cards allow you to ignore huge amounts of defenses, making them even more useless! This is clearly the wrong approach to combat. And its clear why Unfallen players complain about their ships being so bad, if you make defense useless, a faction that is focused around defense modules becomes useless.      

Again we see a theme for the Cravers. You rack up tons of damage bonuses from your population trait, together with low ship costs and very high CP fleets. The cravers are already the most specialized faction for warfare, yet with the Juggernaut tech modules, you turned their fleets into unbeatable fleets by stacking up 10% damage, health and crit chance on their whole fleet!

Modules like these for Cravers or the Riftborn equivalent should simply not exist, since they make their fleets unbeatable. Remove the special juggernaut modules for all factions until you come up with a better solution, or leave them out. They don't add anything meaningful if some factions get miniscule bonuses but other factions gain invulnerable fleets. This is terrible design.

And lastly, please weigh up the pro's and cons when adressing issues. Yes we know that Unfallen, Hissho and Vodyani AI's are doing badly. But they don't ruin our game. Something like the double obliterator shots ruins our game. Craver fleets which are impossible to beat once juggernaut tech is researched, this ruins our game. Other players winning a multiplayer game because something so poorly designed was added.      

You can have the most fun in this game when playing with friends from the community. So focus your efforts to turn multiplayer games into the most balanced and most fun it can be.

We can deal with AI modding or buffing AI cheats later.

Well I disagree with everything that was posted above. AI should be your priority because the vast majority of us DO NOT PLAY multiplayer and nothing will make us. This game is a single player game first and foremost and should be treated like one.

I also think that actually good AI would be the optimal solution that people would like to have and I'm assuming the majority do play 4X games in single-player (I do), but by this point I would also be content with a more realistic AI patchwork, temporary or not. 

Like others mentioned plain resource cheats for the AI on higher difficulties, especially when they're controlling some of the non-standard factions would hopefully go a long way in making them more competitive in single-player. A temporary patchwork like this means the game quickly becomes more playable and challenging in single-player with minimal development effort, while assumedly opening up dev time for the more important general balance issues that plague both single- and multiplayer.

Though as a more general AI related issue that I've complained about on various occasions and which I think needs to be fixed ASAP is the lack of victory condition pursuing on the part of AI. Faction specific AI issues can hopefully be fixed with quick number changes, but lack of opportunism and "wanting to win" is an issue that affects all AI factions across the board. Even on Endless difficulty the AI doesn't try to pursue victory: it doesn't target capitals, it doesn't try to nab few extra systems even when they're close to conquest victory, I've never seen it research victory techs or build victory wonders, Economically they already get notable cheats but they're very poor at placing and investing on trade routes so a player eventually overtakes them in that regard as well. It's also very abusable together with allied victory, which is another thing in need of a rework that affects both single- and multiplayer.

Hello,

Your feedback has been duly noted and will be taken in consideration about this feature. We understand that this is less than ideal to you, but this isn't an easy problem to tackle: solo play is still the way most people enjoy ES2 and we have to give these players at the very least an acceptable AI opponent, something that cannot be done by just piling bonuses on it and hoping for the best. Balance is of course important to us, but we have to find a middle ground here.

With that being said, we've uploaded a new version of the balance mod earlier in the afternoon, here's the changelog:

- Restored Riftborn creation  industry cost to its former value
- Dirty Hand Acts is now 50% weaker
- Corsair faction trait now only costs 5 points
- Free market experts will now grant only a -5% inflation reduction per trading company instead of -10%
- Converting a population into a new Horatio with Genetic Alteration Lab will now only cost 640 Industry
- Mezzari Population will now grant +0.5 influence and + 1 science per pop
- Mezzari Population collection bonus 2 will now grant +10% science on system with mezzari (instead of + 15%)
- Mezzari Population collection bonus 3 will now grant -10% technology cost (instead of -20%)
- Martial Science will now grant a + 10% science on Empire (instead of +15%)
- Sheredyn population will now grant +0.5 influence and +20 manpower capacity on system
- Increased science gains of science agreement

Have a nice week-end :)

For what it's worth, I would also like a middle ground. The best balance solutions are those that the AI can also handle. I hope something can be done about Unfallen and Vodyani AI too. 

----

Notes!

I hope you can find a way to solve the Riftborn 'build pops on one lava system' problem, but I think you're right the attempted solution wasn't working.

Dirty Hands Act probably needed that. It's still really quite good.

Genetic Alteration - that's better. It stilll might be too much but once it gets to one turn, cost hardly matters any more.

Science Agreements needed that buff. Good stuff.

I'll post more when I've had a play.

Cheers for the update.

Dirty Hands Act and Mezari nerfs were warranted, and I really like how both Mezari and Sheredyn are now unique pop types rather than just reskins of Sophon and Yuusho. The Influence bonus also feels fitting thematically and synergizes more with the main faction mechanic rather than pop switch cutting native Influence generation entirely. However perhaps United Empire path still needs a buff to make it stand out, especially now when even the two other paths have something in way of extra Influence generation?

Also, if you're still experimenting with Inflation reduction mechanics I'd like to reiterate what some others said in this thread before, namely that perhaps it should be something that all factions have access to in one form or another, even if it's very minor! Inflation reduction in general should probably be implemented more elegantly than a simple repeatable system improvement (though that probably has to do with the limitations of the mod), f.ex. through the actual empire economy screen. You could add Inflation reduction bonuses to population collection or assimilation for example, and perhaps even a much weakened version of Lumeris' mechanics?

While Lumeris should obviously be best at Inflation Reduction due to Dust being their faction shtick, they're by no means the only faction that can focus heavily on trade and Dust generation: for example United Empire's faction quest's UE path directly makes the player establish several trade routes, so it'd make sense for the completion bonus to be something that actually helps trade perhaps? Or like sheredynplayer mentioned, a simpler buff that directly stresses UE's Industry/Influence focus better: right now the pop collection bonus has the exact same issue as last tier Religious law, as in there's never enough opportunities to use it and the cost reduction is very neglible. It would be great if both UE's own bonuses and that Religious law got their effects changed so they actually helped expand your empire's influence bubble.

CyRob wrote:

For AI (having looked at it) I feel it will be a lot of work to improve it beyond its current state without bonuses. While I would approve of such an undertaking be taken in the meantime some faction tailored bonuses (like the Vodyani already have) could greatly improve their play (especially if scaled with difficulty) I implore they be given a try after all, people play Endless difficulty to be challenged not for a fair match.

I also want to stress this point. Right now ES2 is a very easy 4X in single-player and I don't consider myself a good player at all. I get my ass kicked on mid-higher difficulties in any other games in this genre, even EL, but ES2's highest difficulty doesn't provide a real challenge at all. If nothing else at least the few highest difficulties should get upped a notch so there's actually challenge available for those who want it. And regardless of difficulty level the non-standard AI controlled factions could definitely use a (temporary) hotfix buff to not make them suck completely like they do now, before a more elegant long-term solution can be implemented.

Hissho definitely need something to stall Obedience allowing their endless conquests and Federation government type also needs a nerf. Both are too powerful and let you completely ignore all over-colonization mechanics. I feel Federation's scaling effect itself is good and makes sure it stays relevant throughout the game, it's just the numbers that need tweaking since +1 limit / hero is way too powerful due to very large number of heroes you can accrue throughout the game; Academy, quests, and especially market heroes who currently are piss cheap.