Disclaimer: what i'm going to discuss here has been implemented in my Fair Fight mod, and so far works as intended.



What's is wrong with how disapproval is handled in ES.



Disapproval is supposed to be a mean to discourage expansion (or at least quick expansion), but in reality does the very opposite, it makes fast grab the only viable strategy. The reason is simple, we get disapproval for every system we own beyond the first 2, but the twist is that outposts are free of it; that mean that each new system contribute fully (desides the dust production that is halved for being an Outpost) while everything under your influence is hit hard by disapproval. You can see the problem? Instead of curbing quick expansion, it urge you to do it because for 30 turns, your new outpost can crank research, improvements and ships at full capacity, giving you plenty to make up for the hit in approval (like researching techs to remove most of it). Expanding at a slow pace mean full disaproval hit and you get behind the fast expanding players that just skyrocket to victory.



How can this be changed?



What i did to fix the problem is to reduce the effect established systems have on the disapproval; if it's under your influence, it count only for 25% of what it would normally do under vanilla. Now, outpost count 100% (the 25% for owning it plus the 75% for being an outpost), so long as they are outside your influence, otherwise they contribute only 75% and produce full fids. Another change is that new outpost (outside your influence) produce less than 100% (currently set it to 80% dust and 90% of the rest) and they receive 75% of the disapproval (while established worlds gets 100%). Well, that could be further lowered to make absolutely sure it can't be gamed by abusing the 30 turns of relatively high Fids production. To make it works though, all approval improving means need to be halved or else players will just negate the disapproval and rush colonize as usual.



In practice, what this change does is penalize heavy colonization while doing it slower and ensuring new systems are enclosed in influence area maximize Fids.



Is that worth being implemented in ES?

Interesting. I'd have to see this at work to decide if I like it or not. Does the A.I. follow these same rules? Because they always manage to have more systems than I do, and hardly seem affected by the malus.

Nasarog wrote:
Interesting. I'd have to see this at work to decide if I like it or not. Does the A.I. follow these same rules? Because they always manage to have more systems than I do, and hardly seem affected by the malus.

They are, but at higher difficulty they have less. Also, in stock game, new outposts don't suffer expansion disaproval, only old colonies do.

i hate expansion disapproval. all it does to me is just make sure i reserach the techs that give happeness buildings and some of the earlier -expansion approval. To me it doesn't effect the game but its annoying. I would like to see it nerfed a bit

Crusher122 wrote:
i hate expansion disapproval. all it does to me is just make sure i reserach the techs that give happeness buildings and some of the earlier -expansion approval. To me it doesn't effect the game but its annoying. I would like to see it nerfed a bit

You can take a look at how i handle it in my FairFight mod. ED is used to curb rush colonizing (by having new colonies count a lot more toward ED) but only have a mild effect old slow and steady empire (the larger one always gets more of it, but it's manageable so long as you don't have many new outposts at once). It's also distributed better as all colonies can suffer of it, but home system and new colonies gets less of it.

Crusher122 wrote:
i hate expansion disapproval. all it does to me is just make sure i reserach the techs that give happeness buildings and some of the earlier -expansion approval. To me it doesn't effect the game but its annoying. I would like to see it nerfed a bit

It very much does affect the game, especially as a warmonger.



On the largest map size I have even experienced a dark age under the effects of expansion disapproval that lead to 80% of the population inside of my empire to starve to death, leaving me with little to no FIDS when compared to a neighbouring Horatio who had about one third of the space that I held.



It could be handled better yes, as Foraven suggests.

Foraven wrote:
They are, but at higher difficulty they have less. Also, in stock game, new outposts don't suffer expansion disaproval, only old colonies do.

Damn it. I need to try your mod on my MAC, but I just haven't had to time to see if it works.