anomalacaris wrote:
Kinda funny!

Btw, it seems Harmony is getting patched...

God i put so much hope in this, i hope for a mega buff cause nothing less is needed.

Sovereign wrote:
no ones pays actually the Dust^^ if you only have 20 Dust it will only cost you 20 Dust ; )

And if you have 2500 Dust already u can spend it elsewhere before confirming the event ;D

Kinda funny!

Btw, it seems Harmony is getting patched...

anomalacaris wrote:
They can also send pirates to enemy homeworld with 2500 which they of course do not actually pay. Or take -50 .

no ones pays actually the Dust^^ if you only have 20 Dust it will only cost you 20 Dust ; )

And if you have 2500 Dust already u can spend it elsewhere before confirming the event ;D

ArealFloodAdvisory wrote:
Definitely better, but I don't like how so many events favor the other races. All the dust and hero levels and such. I don't know how hard it would be to retool those for a specific race, be it different rewards or not appearing at all, but I think it would make an important difference.

They can also send pirates to enemy homeworld with 2500 which they of course do not actually pay. Or take -50 .

Definitely better, but I don't like how so many events favor the other races. All the dust and hero levels and such. I don't know how hard it would be to retool those for a specific race, be it different rewards or not appearing at all, but I think it would make an important difference.

Stealth_Hawk wrote:
Alliterations give your movement a nice ring to them, and that's precisely why I chose the word 'Save'



However, to give my honest take on the matter, the Harmony have, in some ways, a similar problem to what the sowers had. Although, in some ways, the problems are quite different.



I, personally, view their main problem as the fact that they can't survive the early game the majority of the time. Unlike the Sowers, who had the same problem, the Harmony are capable of taking flight and becoming a faction to be reckoned with IF they survive the early game.



If then, my conclusion is so: (based on my observations in-game) Are the Harmony Under powered? No. Are they a horribly un-balanced faction? Yes.

If they can't survive through to the mid-game, then I'd argue they are inherently under-powered. That said, I take your point about them being viable late-game but with that knowledge, who in their right mind would allow them to get to that late game? At the moment Harmony players (AI or human) are simply sitting ducks. I suppose at least they're keeping that spiral arm warm for you.



Personally, I've never managed to get Harmony through to their late-game sweet spot (though I was generally playing with Impossible or greater AI). Admittedly this is mostly because I get so frustrated by their slow pace at the start of the game, when 50% of your turns are simply clicking 'end turn', that I can't be bothered to fight off the inevitable assault from the AIs. I'll take your word for it when you say they're powerful late-game and therefore what's required is a rebalancing rather than a straight buff: give them something to buff their early game and nerf their late game slightly.



I notice some people have voted no. It would be nice to hear the reasons behind that vote; are there some special Harmony tactics that I'm missing?

Harmony really are rather unbalanced, and as earlygame is their weakpoint this means they turn out UP in 9/10 cases.



Two things I think should be solved on a global(rather galaxial) scale:

Carriers(aka the Harmony destroyer) being weak: just boost Bombers

Pirates halting developement: Rather than giving the Harmony the unique friendship of the Pirates, let Pirates only attack worlds with a progressive threshhold of dust production, Pirates are not space rebels, they are looters, let them go after rich Empires rather than poor or Spartan ones.

3)This is radical, but: There should be 1 way in which Harmony approval goes up.

A monopoly on Void Stone.

It isn't always possible to acchieve this due to galaxy Generation, but why not not give +5 happyness for every unit of gems(voidstones, Mercurite, Jadynix and Ionic Crystals) or let them directly boost the FIS Output of a planet/System



Another way to boost the early midgame would be to remove the Industry(or Food) malus from Disharmony(Expansion Disapproval- Disharmony). I don't think Cleansing a System should be boosted or further eased, otherwise the reduction techs in the Expansion tree will become even more pointless.

Shyrka wrote:
Anyway, perhaps RobM can clarify the original intent of the poll but I don't think anyone's arguing that they need a buff across the board.

Ah, the joys of semantics. Maybe "underpowered" wasn't the correct wording, as my intent was "do they need a fix to make them viably playable?" Then again, I don't think it really matters - I think from Stealth_Hawk's responses we can all agree they need a fix to their early game (preferably without making their late game any stronger than it is) and I'm not too bothered about a couple of negative responses to a poll as long as people give feedback in the thread.



To address Ail's comment about the Hissho - I think quite a few of the races may need slight tweaks to bring them into line (my personal feeling is we take Sheredyn/Automaton/Sower/Craver as a baseline as they seem to be reasonably competitive and bring everyone else up to that level), but it'd probably be better we address those in their own threads.

RobM wrote:


So. Yeah, they're broken. Horribly, pointlessly broken. This isn't even a case of "core Harmony are bad, custom Harmony can be made to work"; there's no combination of faction traits than can currently make Harmony work. My personal feeling is that they need a flat buff somewhere, but this post has already gone very long so discussion of solutions will have to continue in the thread...

Yes. Completely agree! Harmony are powerful, but not life long enough for it.



I am recommend set Harmonize Planets as 50 science 50 ind for improve situation.



Because main Harmony problem is first 1-40 turn. Disharmony penalty without approval building, dust penalty, no heroes, no buyout, ship building penalty.



Yes, after turn 50 you build Harmonize Planet and now you average race, after turn 100 you build Contamination Barrier and you best race.



But! Before this paradise at turn 30-40 any enemy spam you with destroyers and cruisers and you just die.

I'm quite tempted to ask the same question for the Hissho.



Haven't seen them do good for quite some time.

The new mechanics in Disharmony really do hurt them.



A successfull rush-capture is much harder to perform and without their Bushido they simply don't feel competative.

Stealth_Hawk wrote:
If the poll had asked if they needed help, my answer would be different. If I have misinterpreted the meaning of the poll question, I apologize.

Yeah, I think we're getting stuck on the semantics of 'under-powered' here. It sounds like most people agree they need -some- sort of improvement which was the intent of the poll. Although I've never seen their end-game, I'm reliably informed they can be strong and I'm happy to accept that. My main issue is that their early game is so poor they're unlikely to survive to see their late-game bloom! As you rightly point out, pirates are one of the issues they face: their early expansion is so slow compared to other races that pirate attacks are almost inevitable, at least in my experience.



Anyway, perhaps RobM can clarify the original intent of the poll but I don't think anyone's arguing that they need a buff across the board.

Shyrka wrote:
If they can't survive through to the mid-game, then I'd argue they are inherently under-powered.

When A faction is under powered, the quite simply require a Buff. Which was exactly what me and Sovereign were asking for with the Save the Sowers movement, as they had no early, mid, or late game goodness to speak of. (Of which request ended up with the complete overhaul of the base planetary FIDS system and a faction affinity re-balance for all factions. Go figure.)



However, the Harmony do not exactly hold true to this definition of being Under-powered as the Sowers did. You see, if you power up the Harmony's early game and leave it at that, they will be extraordinarily overpowered, as they would survive the early game without a sweat, and then proceed to build a massive empire with no limitations, or limitations. (btw, I hardly ever use dust to buy things out, so with the harmony that is an immense bonus, at least for me)



As it is, I have only seen extremely skilled players be able to work with the Harmony successfully. And, to a degree, I think this is good. As the Harmony are a radical race (no approval, no dust) it is fitting that only advanced players can play the advanced game play level. That being said, I have only seen 1000-1500+ hour players be able to do this. For me, that bar seems a little too high.



So what I implore is this: Keep the Harmony difficult to play, but not impossible. Make it so a (relatively) skilled player can navigate them through the early game, and then tone down their later game performance so a skilled player cant simply decimate the competition. Thus I hold to my position that they are un-balanced, not under-powered, wherein there is a massive difference between the two.



As to how this would be done, well, here are a few things for thought



1) Stop those ******* pirates. In the early game, what does an empire need most to grow and get on its feet? of course. But, if you have crazy pirates running around attacking the Harmony, the Harmony must need build ships to defend themselves. What does this do to Harmony ? its sends it plummeting due to reduced food output for all ships being produced. I have noticed that the early game of the harmony suffers due to this fact. Solution: Why would pirates attack a bunch of rocks who just want inner rhythmic harmony? for dust? I don't think so. So I dint think pirates should mess with the Harmony.

I have seen the Harmony perform consistently better when I have pirates turned off.



Disclaimer: Discussing this with my friend who plays ES: He says he has never seen pirates attack the harmony. So if this is a bug specific to my ES, please forgive me.



2) What Meedoc said lol



3)This is radical, but: There should be 1 way in which Harmony approval goes up.

A monopoly on Void Stone.

As it is, the Harmony cannot reap nearly as many rewards as the other factions from luxury resources. Why? Many have to do with which the Harmony find worthless. However, if Void Stone were given an ability to add Core rhythms, the Harmony would have greater harmony and would be more satisfied. Thus, I think the should go somewhat up. And by that I mean no more than 10 on all planets, and this ONLY takes effect if they have a monopoly on Void Stone. (Currently, Void Stone aids Hero Healing, which the Harmony obviously Can't use.)



Obviously there are more things that could help the early game. These are just a few.

I notice some people have voted no. It would be nice to hear the reasons behind that vote; are there some special Harmony tactics that I'm missing?

Stated above ^^

If the poll had asked if they needed help, my answer would be different. If I have misinterpreted the meaning of the poll question, I apologize.

Meedoc wrote:


For the military technology I'll wait more feedback because using this planetary improvement involves to sacrifice quite an economic income. After all, a planetary improvement can give up to +6 / pop. So this drawback may be a self-sufficient nerf, what do you think?

It would make picking up a planet purely for the resources it has more of a thing (especially one that produces a lot of dust thanks to the changes on how that works), but I don't think it would be great for a planet I actually intended to populate.

Meedoc wrote:
The trade routes income doesn't affect the malus.

Aha. So a Harmony trade-based build might be plausible. Interesting... although they're going to miss out on all the Corporate bonuses to trade routes so it might not be massively strong.

Meedoc wrote:


For the military technology I'll wait more feedback because using this planetary improvement involves to sacrifice quite an economic income. After all, a planetary improvement can give up to +6 / pop. So this drawback may be a self-sufficient nerf, what do you think?

Ah, I mis-understood. I thought you meant system improvement, not planetary improvement. In that case, yes, that might be an interesting way to handle it. You can still tweak things to get a monopoly when you're in a war but take the eco bonus while at peace. Could lead to some interesting micro.

We're working on a few things for Endless Space right now, and I don't know when we'll be come the next update.



The trade routes income doesn't affect the malus.



For the military technology I'll wait more feedback because using this planetary improvement involves to sacrifice quite an economic income. After all, a planetary improvement can give up to +6 / pop. So this drawback may be a self-sufficient nerf, what do you think?

Meedoc wrote:
It’s cool that you guys created this thread just right now because I started upping the Harmony this week.

Brilliant. Thanks Meedoc. Any idea when we're likely to see something we can play with?



How does the dust income from trade routes interact with the dust malus if that malus is now per-planet? Does that trade route dust not get factored in?



Adding the strategic resource buff might mean their military tech needs a slight tweak, as default Harmony are going to be able to get all 8 monopolies relatively easily if they only need 3 of each and deposit sizes are buffed.

Meedoc wrote:
Hi there,



It’s cool that you guys created this thread just right now because I started upping the Harmony this week.



As you say the biggest issues for Harmony is their slow early game and the impact of Dust’s drawback.



First, I rebalanced the game difficulty progression. Instead of having a huge multiplier in “Endless”, I rather decreased the number of systems before Disharmony is triggered. So in “Newbie”, you’re allowed to own 5 systems before suffering Disharmony instead of 2 with a low coefficient of Dust Corruption, however in “Endless” the Disharmony is triggered after 2 systems like before, but the coefficient has been lowered from 8 to 5 (5 was previously the coefficient applied in “Hard”)



Besides, the local malus from Dust on planet is not affecting the whole system anymore but only the planet. Thus, a planet producing a lot of Dust will have a decreased Science and Food income but it still allows a Harmony to colonize them to increase its global Industry and take possession of resources.



Finally, I removed the drawback related to the ownership to compensate the absence of buyout. Thus, when they capture a system, he is 100% operational, making them a more powerful warmonger than before.



Regarding the ship issue, I succeeded in not being overwhelmed by wars in impossible but I'll continue analyzing this. They still have the best bonus on modules to compensate the growth loss, and you can integrate it into you global strategy



One last thing I’d like to test is to give them a 4th planetary improvement which will increase the Strategic Resource deposit by 1 to emphasis their relation with them.



Cheers,

Awesome timing! Looking forward to seeing what this achieves.

Ca_Putt wrote:


Pirates halting developement: Rather than giving the Harmony the unique friendship of the Pirates, let Pirates only attack worlds with a progressive threshhold of dust production, Pirates are not space rebels, they are looters, let them go after rich Empires rather than poor or Spartan ones.

Thank you firend you just said what I was trying to say.

It isn't always possible to acchieve this due to galaxy Generation, but why not not give +5 happyness for every unit of gems(voidstones, Mercurite, Jadynix and Ionic Crystals) or let them directly boost the FIS Output of a planet/System

you are right, Void stone is rare enough that my original idea doesn't really work. However, I think having them gain 5 form every gemstone is just a little overpowered. Plus, void stone is the only gem that does nothing for the Harmony atm. So maybe +5 or +10 for every owned Void Stone?

Another way to boost the early midgame would be to remove the Industry(or Food) malus from Disharmony(Expansion Disapproval- Disharmony). I don't think Cleansing a System should be boosted or further eased, otherwise the reduction techs in the Expansion tree will become even more pointless.

Agreed.

Hi there,



It’s cool that you guys created this thread just right now because I started upping the Harmony this week.



As you say the biggest issues for Harmony is their slow early game and the impact of Dust’s drawback.



First, I rebalanced the game difficulty progression. Instead of having a huge multiplier in “Endless”, I rather decreased the number of systems before Disharmony is triggered. So in “Newbie”, you’re allowed to own 5 systems before suffering Disharmony instead of 2 with a low coefficient of Dust Corruption, however in “Endless” the Disharmony is triggered after 2 systems like before, but the coefficient has been lowered from 8 to 5 (5 was previously the coefficient applied in “Hard”)



Besides, the local malus from Dust on planet is not affecting the whole system anymore but only the planet. Thus, a planet producing a lot of Dust will have a decreased Science and Food income but it still allows a Harmony to colonize them to increase its global Industry and take possession of resources.



Finally, I removed the drawback related to the ownership to compensate the absence of buyout. Thus, when they capture a system, he is 100% operational, making them a more powerful warmonger than before.



Regarding the ship issue, I succeeded in not being overwhelmed by wars in impossible but I'll continue analyzing this. They still have the best bonus on modules to compensate the growth loss, and you can integrate it into you global strategy



One last thing I’d like to test is to give them a 4th planetary improvement which will increase the Strategic Resource deposit by 1 to emphasis their relation with them.



Cheers,

I'm sure whatever I propose as a solution, the devs will do something completely different, but let me just note some initial thoughts (and no, I'm not suggesting they get all of these, as that would be massively overpowered, I'm just spitballing potential solutions to some of their issues).



They're really slow at the start - percentage multipliers and per-pop benefits only help if there's something already there to multiply or they're able to grow their pop. They've got no equivalent of the flat plus industry/science/dust that heroes give everyone else. So they could do with some sort of flat bonus - possibly making the first science building +1 science per pop and +5 science. That +5 is going to become mostly irrelevant late game but gives them a useful early science boost.



Disharmony kills them and they have no counter to it, unlike every other race in the game who have a million possible counters to expansion disapproval. What would happen if it was removed completely? Harmony would have the same science as everyone else. They'd be able to expand and take as many systems as they like as fast as they can. Yeah, they'd still have to avoid generating dust as the loss of food and industry for dust generated would still hurt them, so there would still be some curb on their expansion, and they can't build any ships to defend that territory they've taken so they'd struggle to hold it against a determined Hissho/Cravers expansionist player, but maybe that's okay. Expand like crazy, get pushed back to a core you can hold, slowly push back out again. Not sure how this'd interact with a Tolerant build though - that might be a bit OP.



They can't build ships without hurting their growth rate. My ships get rapidly obsoleted where I can't refit, so really, do I need another reason not to build ships? How about we eliminate the growth penalty for ship building? How about (and here's a radical solution) removing the growth penalty on all ship building, including the colony ship. They'd get the same colony ship building benefit as the Sheredyn and Automatons already enjoy (no loss of pop growth while building), which'd help their early expansion/growth, and they'd be able to spam defensive ships when they're attacked without hurting their growth. Admittedly, I suspect this would scale badly late game, where infinite high tier ships with no penalty for building them would crush anyone.



They can't fight anyone as their ships are obsolete and the enemy have heroes. Their bonus to weapon/defence from strategic resource monopolies gets them some of the way there (although it's at the whim of the galaxy generator), but how about giving them an equivalent of the "Fearless Foe" hero upgrade (so fighting against enemy heroes gives them a bonus and invading enemy systems with heroes on them gives them a bonus)?