So in light of my earlier comment, I propose a couple changes to Honor Bound.

"All Approval effects are changed to Influence effects."
- Overcolonization changes from -10 Approval on Systems to -5 Influence on Systems
- Planet types and Anomalies reduce Influence instead of Approval

- System Influence cannot be lower than 0.

- Override Obedience with Ownership.
- Most importantly, Autonomous Administration is changed to have a very large Keii cost instead of an Influence cost.

This would probably need to be accompanied by toning down the Keii cost of normal colonization and Fealty Foundations. Probably somewhere around halved colonization costs, and a Keii cost of only 10 or 15 for Fealty Foundations.

Unfortunately, as I detailed in my thread here, the games growth curve would still allow things to be broken pretty easily what with Blood Sacrifices having such a negligible cost.

End result: Hissho can constantly conquer, but doing so results in a steady progression towards 0 Influence production.

IceGremlin wrote:

Unfortunately, as I detailed in my thread here, the games growth curve would still allow things to be broken pretty easily what with Blood Sacrifices not actually having a very meaningful cost. Also we'd need an answer as to what happens when Influence goes broke, though the easiest answer is that a Systems Influence can't go negative.

Yeah, something also needs to be done about Blood Ritual. It's a very cheap ability that progressively gets cheaper as the game goes on due to more systems meaning more pops, thus the loss of one measly pop for 5 Keii is nothing, and it's spammable. For comparison Cravers have a slightly similar approval related pop sacrifice mechanic that's much weaker:

- Craver pop sacrifice: Gives temporary approval and food bonus on one system, which can be reduced by usual approval related maluses on system and empire level. You may have to use it many times.

- Hissho pop sacrifice: Gives non-degrading empire wide approval bonus / more mana for unique abilities, doesn't get reduced by approval maluses and because it's empire level you don't need to waste turns queuing it on important systems.

Perhaps all the Observances in general need to be greatly limited so you can't spam them over and over again? Buggy exploit effect stacks that will receive a hotfix notwithstanding, allowing the player to use them, even in their intended form over and over again for the duration they're available opens up floodgates for all sorts of abuse. Cost of one pop per system is nothing. I think the availability should be much more limited (maybe a handful of uses on empire level so you have to choose the system to receive the bonus), but with greatly increased effect as to not completely gimp the mechanic: bigger bonus on a handful of systems but you also have to sacrifice several pops in one go. The cost could scale with the total population of your empire, making the number of pops sacrificed a meaningful decision.

If you're gonna replace all the approval maluses with influence maluses what happens when you go under 0 influence and can't sustain it? You're just at 0 forever without any additional consequences? That will only really prevent you from declaring war if you're not militarist. Not that big of a problem and easily ignorable. Converting approval to influence is not a good idea I think since they're used for different things.

Gzar wrote:

If you're gonna replace all the approval maluses with influence maluses what happens when you go under 0 influence and can't sustain it? You're just at 0 forever without any additional consequences? That will only really prevent you from declaring war if you're not militarist. Not that big of a problem and easily ignorable. Converting approval to influence is not a good idea I think since they're used for different things.

One of the upsides to Keii is you don't have Approval, but replacing the usual downsides with new downsides is necessary.

Hissho already replace the vast majority of their Approval bonuses with Influence bonuses. Kalgeros, Horatio, etc. pops provide Influence instead of Approval. The first Approval building is now an Influence building. It only makes sense to go all the way and let Hissho have a unique affinity giving a unique cost for Influence. To say the resources are different and therefore shouldn't interact is silly when replacing some resources with other resources is the root of many of the Affinities across the series. Harmony didn't use Dust, Broken Lords used Dust in place of Food, United Empire use Influence in place of Dust for Buyouts, Sowers replaced a lot of their Food with Industry, Riftborn have to be built. Replacing one mechanic with another is an interesting way to break the normal rules and currently Honor Bound only goes halfway with that by replacing Approval bonuses with Influence but doing nothing to replace the maluses.

EDIT: You know what, here's an idea. Implement what I talk about above, and Hissho will have a suitably toned down punishment for expansion.

But, to add an element of risk and limitation on warmongering, you add a Keii cost to building ships.

- 2 Keii for a Medium ship

- 5 Keii for a Large ship

- 10 Keii for a Behemoth

- 0 Keii for a small ship? 

The result is Hissho are limited economically when it comes to warmongering, but in a different way than other factions, able to conquer for a lesser cost, but having to take risks in the process of the actual war and combat.

But having 0 influence is not a really a problem. It doesn't do enough to discourage limitless expansion. It's only really used for laws which you can use the super strong keii ones instead and war declarations which you can get for free with military party. 

Also a single culture center can output like +100-200 influence per turn easily. By building a single improvement you can guarantee you have enough to sustain your whole empire easily and again ignore all the penalties.

0 Influence production does affect even militarists somewhat since they have no way around forced truces, though like you mentioned there's really no other notables downsides and the suggested Influence penalty is way too small. It sort of feels more natural to tie over-colonization penalty directly into a new passive Keii cost since it's the Hissho's main approval mechanic and most straightforward: you get a slowly ticking empire wide approval penalty (that can be countered through player actions with various Hissho abilities or increasing colony limit) whereas other factions get a higher but instant approval penalty that they deal with normally. Very easy to understand.

Passive Keii cost would also come with a side benefit of balancing the faction quest's final chapter's extremely powerful reward (passive global +20%/50% weapon DMG bonus dependent on empire approval) since over-expansion would make it harder to not only keep approval in check, but also the said bonus active. Meaning a massively snowballing Hissho doesn't just massively snowball more unless they go out of their way to control Keii consumption and acquisition.

I'm not sure what's the best way to go about dealing with negative anomalies and inhospitable planet types since applying a Keii malus to them (especially on top of an over-colonization cost) would probably be too punishing and as such they could possibly use the suggested Influence penalty instead, but I think over-colonization should definitely have some sort of a passive Keii cost.

I dunno guys. Passive Keii costs are most likely not happening because they were previously found unfun in testing, and I can see why as just going a few planets over the Hissho's already reduced threshold would mean having to win a battle every turn to keep up.

I'm trying to put forward some interesting alternative here, but the game is horrifically unbalanced so half the resources don't matter. There's myriad mechanics that don't matter, and as a result there's lots of little faction traits and bonuses that don't matter, because they play off of unimportant mechanics. Influence is useless. Excess Food is useless except when turned into Industry. Empire Dust makes itself increasingly useless over time. 60% of the Luxuries in a given match are useless cause you didn't pick them.

Nothing interesting can be done with most of the games mechanics until those mechanics are fixed to no longer be so bad by comparison, so I'd rather see the games core mechanics made to work so every unusual solution doesn't have to be shot down for relying on a core mechanic that is for some reason meaningless.

I put forward the idea of Keii costs for ships, but that got ignored I guess. One other possibility I can think of is for my Influence malus to turn into a Keii malus once the player effectively has gone bankrupt instead of just zeroing out, which would be less punishing and provide some breathing room before having to deal with the Keii malus.

I don't know how high the passive Keii cost was in beta but wouldn't it be a simple issue of fine tuning the cost (f.ex. -0.5 / system over limit instead of the suggested -1.0), rather than removing it entirely? And the player should be able to anticipate when they need to start acquiring more Keii in order to support their increasing over-expansion. 

Alternatively you could also buff the active abilities related to acquiring Keii in turn (war performance, laws, subduing systems, suicide fleets, quest rewards etc.), in order to make the matter of managing Keii an active process rather than something you can ignore completely because right now nothing in the game can realistically decrease it, since nearly all the actions that do decrease it are completely in your control and often not powerful or important enough to justify completely tanking your empire approval, especially with the overpowered final faction quest reward in tow.

But otherwise agreed on everything you said about many of the game's resources being very badly balanced. Influence cost could also be one solution to staving off Hissho snowball, if the underdeveloped core mechanics were implemented better. I also really like your idea of zero influence eventually leading to Keii decrease, and it could work fine with current mechanics if the Influence costs / over-colonized system was higher (perhaps somehow percentage based as well?), plus it would tie really well with the current Hissho mechanic of approval bonuses being replaced with Influence bonuses. 

EDIT: Though I have to still say that a direct passive Keii cost would be a lot more straightforward and easier to understand gameplay wise. It's much harder to calculate how much Influence buffer you have and how long it lasts, how much it's worth investing in Influence buildings / abilities and so on, and on top of that calculating the actual Keii cost, compared to a strictly laid out "every colony after threshold gives X amount of passive Keii malus every turn" and it has a much simpler, less roundabout gameplay solution of simply increasing the amount of Keii you acquire or increasing your colonization limit.

As for ship Keii costs I feel it may not fix the underlying issue of the player being completely in control of Keii spending (they can just simply stop producing more once they've outpaced the AI), and in addition small hulls being completely free would just pigeonhole the Hissho to field advanced small hulls en masse rather than a varied fleet. On the other hand if they did have a cost you'd run into a risk of irrecoverable loss spiral on the off chance that they do end up losing their Keii.

samsonazs wrote:

I have a better solution.

There should be a Keii cost for taking over invaded systems the same way as there is for new colonies. 

Its value would increase with each system the same way as it does now. 

In this way Hissho expansion won't be at such an insane speed and on the other hand they will invade systems without taking them over to gain Keii and be able to take over systems.

Yeah actually, since we have options other than Occupy now, it'd be reasonable that Hissho get a cost to use the Occupy action specifically.

The base costs would just need to be lowered a bit I think. Maybe 3 Keii per system instead of 5.

Or not because we still have Blood Rituals.

Ptirodaktill wrote:

aerothgow wrote:

hissho can constantly conquer only if you don't build ships and smack them. if you beat them in battle they will crumble hard because you starve them of kei.  they have nothing going for them no trade no science very little industry...all they have is moral...just outproduce them and wipe them....

military factions are very weak in 4x games. industry & science factions dominate

a passive kei penalty would make the hissho truly useless

  Agree on this. w/o Behemoth abuse, wich is banned in 100% multiplayer games, Hissho are the worst faction in the game. You are supposed to agressively annex minor civilizations, but well, no one would give you the opportunity to do so in MP.  Pirates farming is also out of question cause you will recieve the mark on the same turn that someone would find your capital. And fighting against capped pirate fleet on turn 30 w/o any tech boosts is suicide.

Why would everyboydy waste resources to put mark on Hissho if they're so weak? Wouldn't it be better to put it on stronger races? Anyway even if they get marked you can defend against pirates with just your starting economic behemoth (that other factions don't get and have to actually build fleets to defend from pirates).

They get access to ALL the planets in their home system immediately after first election and ignore any morale penalties any other faction would have from it. They also have +25% FIDS law and+20% industry keii ability turned on almost all the time early game and they start with mining probe and +10 flat to FIDS. They can have the highest FIDS by far out of any race after turn 20 except maybe cravers and vodyani. 

Here is a comparison of turn 1 FIDSI which is always the same since you only have your starting planet.

Hissho 63/65/65/42/10

Riftborn 6/45/42/47/7

Spohons 34/34/29/44/7

Cravers 52/60/55/45/7

And I didn't even use the mining probe on the starting behemoth

Right from turn 1 they already have more industry than riftborn, more science than sophons, more dust than lumeris, more food than horatio and even more FIDS overall than cravers. And the difference only grows from there. Hissho are the strongest race by far even wihout mining at all.

Ptirodaktill wrote:

[quote]Why would everyboydy waste resources to put mark on Hissho if they're so weak? Wouldn't it be better to put it on stronger races? Anyway even if they get marked you can defend against pirates with just your starting economic behemoth (that other factions don't get and have to actually build fleets to defend from pirates). [/quote]

 Good luck with pirate defence on hard or endless pirate dificulty .

[quote]They get access to ALL the planets in their home system immediately after first election and ignore any morale penalties any other faction would have from it. They also have +25% FIDS law and+20% industry keii ability turned on almost all the time early game and they start with mining probe and +10 flat to FIDS. They can have the highest FIDS by far out of any race after turn 20 except maybe cravers and vodyani. 

[/quote]

 First election is turn 30. You sit at 40 Key if you boosted your initial colony and annexed your own minor civilization. That put you intro 3 systems+1 colony at turn 30 vs 5 systems+ 4 colonies of Cravers that sits at 100% happyness, enjoy 15% discount on warships law and dont bother with faction switching.  W/o mining you will fail behind in science realy fast, IRC last time i played Carvers i had 4k science/t on turn 60 normal speed and 38 CP worth of corvetes. 

 Free happyness kick-in for Hissho at 10+ systems, but, lets be real, if you managed to annex 5 systems in MP you alredy won. 

aerothgow wrote:

now put a comparison on turn 50. hissho will be crap, just like cravers. and thats even more true now that it's harder to conquer systems

 Cravers can micro pop to avoid planet depletion for a very long time. 

Again the starting behemoth easily takes care of any pirates. You'll also have a fleet very soon to conquer minors and farm pirates. You're not annexing minors with keii. You're conquering them militarily and you GAINING keii from it not paying for it.

The +15 approval per war on a minor faction from militarists is a bug and exploit too. And I specifically mentioned EXCEPT cravers. They're super overpowered too. And let's not exaggerate. You're not getting 9 systems in 30 turns.

Here is a challenge. I played a game to turn 30 on standard speed on map seed 123 spirall 6 on endless difficulty with endless pirates. Here is my empire screen. I built a full 4 attackers + 3 siege ships fleet that already conquered one minor and also is sieging pirate base now and will conquer another minor in the next few turns. This is where the snowball starts to roll. If hissho are so weak play on the same seed with the same settings and show me another faction (except cravers) that can reach numbers close to those. Hell even try with cravers. I don't think even they can beat them. Do play out this map though and don't say you can get more without actually trying because this map is pretty tough. I also played this blind so there is some room to optimize but I doubt you can beat it even with knowing where everything is in advance. If you think this seed is non representative of a typical game pick a different one and I'll play it.

https://medias.games2gether.com/forums/gzar/Hissho.PNG

https://medias.games2gether.com/forums/gzar/settings.PNG

Gzar nice initative but can you make those pictures slightly bigger I cant make out the values.