Hi guys,

We are going to upload a new version of the Balance mod in a few moments!

The focus for this version are the victory conditions and the battles (space and ground). Here are the release notes (version 3.0):

VICTORIES
- Made Tiny Galaxy more visually compact and it should now contain 36 nodes rather than 48
- Rebalanced Conquest Victory thresholds (lowered by a factor of 2 or more according to galaxy size)
- Added gameplay effects to the Victory Wonder
- Increased cost of Wonder victory obelisks by x5 on strategic resources
- Increased cost of Victory Technologies for Science victory (progress factor increased from 2.5 to 3)


BATTLES
Space Battles:
- Complete weapons rework:
-- Increased damage of beams, lasers and kinetics
-- Projectile weapons are now higher risk/reward with more limited ranges but higher damage outputs:
--- Kinetic efficiency is 100% at short range
--- Missile efficiency is 100% at long range and 25% at medium range
-- Energy weapons are more balanced but with lesser damages overall:
--- Beams efficiency is 100% at all ranges
--- Lasers efficiency is 50% at long, 100% at medium, and 50% at short
- Explicited flak damages in kinetic module tooltips
- Added Critical Hit Chance to the Offensive Military Power computation
- Increased life of Medium, Large and Ark ships
- Doubled shields' absorption, Tripled shields' life
- Defensive Military Power is now computed according to modules' values, not set by hand

Ground battles:
- Reduced "Monstrous Opponents" assimilation trait from +75% infantry health to +15% infantry health and +15% infantry damage
- Rebalanced attacker ground battle strategies
- Increased Preemptive bombing damage from 200 - 400 to 400 - 800
- Rebalanced troop stats:
-- Infantry: Reduced damage from 20-40 to 10-20
-- Armor: Reduced damage from 40-60 to 20-50
-- Plane: Reduced damage from 140-180 to 90-110
-- Plane: Reduced health from 300 to 200
-- Plane: Reduced manpower cost from 30 to 20

Other:
- Added improvements (Military Presence and Propaganda Efforts) to increase ownership change rate at the price of manpower or influence (as infinite improvements for now as a test)


OTHER CHANGES
- Moved advanced strategic resources (adamantian, anti-matter, orichalcix, quadrinix) down one stage
-- Also moved their related technology unlocks
- Increased advanced strategic resource costs of all system, wonder and quest improvements by a factor of 5
- "Luxury Lottery" improvement now does not unlock for Horatio (they only have their specific "Glorification of the Gorgeous" improvement)
- "Propaganda" for Dictatorships is now a free law that occupies a law slot (can also be used in Autocracy) as a test

As usual, don't hesitate if you have any feedback!

jhell wrote:

Hi guys,

We are going to upload a new version of the Balance mod in a few moments!

First bug encountered. Moments do stack.

Groo wrote:

jhell wrote:

Hi guys,

We are going to upload a new version of the Balance mod in a few moments!

First bug encountered. Moments do stack.

I had to LOL at this...

Trying this with the Sophons I notice that system Food in the standard start is 11 (24.4 Consuption), compared to 33 (46.3 Consumption) without the mod (patch 57); hence colonising a second system puts the home system Food immediately into the negative. I do not read any mention of FIDS in the notes. Is this an intentional change? I have been playing CyRob's mod but removed it to try to Balance mod.

Pop grows too fast for my taste, even in Endless speed, but this is--shall we say--a bit silly? Immediately upon expanding the empire enters the gain Pop/lose Pop/gain Pop cycle, which is irritating enough without the problem of having no control over which race is lost. It would be nice if the engine prioritised feeding in-system Pop before sending Food to Outposts or to Manpower. Even better if the player was able to choose the priority, but that involves adding UI elements.

Gzar wrote:

Let's see this new balance.

Let's check how the starting weapons compare and what are our choices.

Basic OPAL laser 14 damage 50%/100%/50%

Basic plasma beam 7 damage 100%/100%/100%

so the damage they do is

Basic OPAL laser 7/14/7

Basic plasma beam 7/7/7

So basic laser is just plain superior to beam. To add insult to the injury the laser is also cheaper at 7 industry vs 10 industry if the choice wasn't obvious already.

Not a very good start. I wasn't expecting much but I'm still disappointed.

Overall the range profiles of beams and lasers are very similar and they have basically the same role. Both do bulk of their damage before kinetics but after missiles. 

Hey Gzar,

Yes, they are indeed weaker. We'll push additional balancing to the mod as we go and recolt your feedback. :)

Do you have anything else to feedback ?

Cheers,

MinisterofSillyWalks wrote:

Trying this with the Sophons I notice that system Food in the standard start is 11 (24.4 Consuption), compared to 33 (46.3 Consumption) without the mod (patch 57); hence colonising a second system puts the home system Food immediately into the negative. I do not read any mention of FIDS in the notes. Is this an intentional change? I have been playing CyRob's mod but removed it to try to Balance mod.

Can confirm there is something definitely up with consumption. Here is a screenshot from the balance mod:



And here is one without the mod:



I'm not running any other mods. For the modded game I colonised first turn, putting me on -9 food (so I would immediately lose a pop). I guess this could be alleviated by Drone Networks, but it's still a bit much if intended.

jhell wrote:

Other:
- Added improvements (Military Presence and Propaganda Efforts) to increase ownership change rate at the price of manpower or influence (as infinite improvements for now as a test)


OTHER CHANGES
- "Propaganda" for Dictatorships is now a free law that occupies a law slot (can also be used in Autocracy) as a test

How do these work, I haven't seen a "free law slot" for either the Horatio or Cravers at start? I haven't had a chance to dive deep into a new game yet, but these changes (especially the second one) sound like they could lay the ground work for some game changing mechanics.

The idea is that rather than blocking the construction queue of a system with a propaganda system improvement (as in vanilla), you can set it as a law instead, with an empire-wide impact. Currently you have to unlock the propaganda law after the first election but we're considering making them available right at the start.

Gzar wrote:

That function can't be right. It's almost vertical after just a few pops.

Graph

I noticed a mistake in my formular and changed it, only making the mistake worse

The changes while they were there:

Consumption = 1.25( ( ( (PopCount*0.03)+1) * PopCount*(300*GameSpeedModifier) )^1.32) / (300*GameSpeedModifier))

Graph

CyRob wrote:

Gzar wrote:

That function can't be right. It's almost vertical after just a few pops.

Graph

I noticed a mistake in my formular and changed it, only making the mistake worse

The changes while they were there:

Consumption = 1.25( ( ( (PopCount*0.03)+1) * PopCount*(300*GameSpeedModifier) )^1.32) / (300*GameSpeedModifier))

Graph

Ok. That looks better. Also can we simplify that to just (POP+1)^2 +2 * POP because that's basically what it is?

Comparison

Found a bug playing Horatio. With the balance mod active, Ash and Lava planet colonization abilities associated with the required techs (Atmospheric Filtration and Maximized Exploitation) disappear entirely. As you can see here, the techs themselves are available for research but they don't unlock Ash and Lava colonization.

Save file

Lava and Ash colonization missing Horatio.sav

Also I'm not sure whether the new propaganda law is that useful. The problem with the old propaganda was that it took space from otherwise valuable system production and the new propaganda is doing the exact same thing, but now with law slots. Dictatorship still suffers from having only one law slot (in addition to sticky law) and the propaganda law would take even that, meaning dictatorship is still something you want to ditch in favor of better government types. Maybe it would make more sense for the new propaganda law to get its own propaganda-only slot, kind of like a second sticky law? 

The core problem with Dictatorship is that it starts out as the worst government type and gets left even more behind later on when all other government types unlock even more law slots than they start out with. Perhaps Dictatorship should be given at least one additional law slot at some point in tech tree?

In addition Horatio are the only vanilla faction to start out with Dictatorship (as Cravers get the better Autocracy version), but their own gameplay already makes preferred party popularity a non-issue. Gene-splicing lesser races also means less political diversity to begin with so you're left with Horatio pops' Ecologist / Anti-Scientific traits. In addition Horatio's unique Ecologist laws pigeonhole them even more into staying as Ecologists, so even if you for some reason wanted to stay as Dictatorship there's really no incentive for Horatio to ditch Ecologist party altogether. As such if you want other parties you're just better off changing to another government type since it's not likely you're going to lose Ecologist support at any point even if you turn to Democracy. I haven't tried out Cravers but I assume they're roughly the same and don't really need propaganda as Militarists, both because of it being their pops' preferred party to begin with and because Militarist party is the easiest party to keep popular with any faction considering the amount of gameplay actions associated to it.

Strategic resource changes are great, though I didn't really get into trying out endgame toys or Science / Wonder victory types yet due to premature Conquest victory. My game was Twin Elliptical, Medium Size, High Density galaxy with 8 factions and getting victory required conquering measly 18 systems. (I'm the green player on top)

jhell wrote:

Hi guys,

We had been making tests internally on consumption following the discussion in one of the G2G threads (that sprung the creation of the community mod). The change has been active for us for quite some time already and it wasn't specifically made for the balance mod, hence its absence from the release notes. It wasn't meant to be tested in a vacuum so we'll revert the formula in the balance mod.

I've never seen the AI do any of those two victories and I've also never achieved them in Endless difficulty, medium size galaxy, Fast speed - it's always economic victory winning the game for me or the AI. Do they really need to be made more difficult?

Since the changes to trade we haven't seen the "too fast economic victory" feedback again... actually just a few posts above yours another player thinks that Dust is now too scarce :).

The idea is to align all the victory types in how easily they can be achieved, so if you with our changes Economy is still the easiest/fastest, then we can further tweak it; we'll just need to know if other people share your sentiment.

In any case thanks for the quick responses.

With all due respect if you wanted to make the economic victory more challenging you could have added extra victory conditions, instead of reducing dust income.