I did a poll to find out which race people consider the least interesting, and pilgrims won. One guy pointed out the fleet errant can be a super-colonizer with a high growth pop faction, but that isn't what was "intended". Anyway, I was thinking about how to make them interesting, and the idea of changing influence, control and ownership came to mind.



So, two things: (1) what can we mod for these factors, and (2) what fits with pilgrim lore? If we can find an intersection, then I can make the mod.



Influence: we cannot affect how long it takes for an outpost to start projecting influence (30 turns) or how long it takes a conquered system to restart projecting (10 turns). We cannot affect the radius equation either, which is (pop+(fids/5))^0.35. This gives a number like 2-7. We can add, subtract, or scale the radius, but that is all I have found.



Control: this is what gets decreased to zero as you invade. It grows back at 2%/turn, although two high tier warfare techs (community defense, gravity warping) increase this by +5% and +8%. So if you have neither, it takes 50 turns to get back full control; if you have both, it takes 6 turns. We can affect the rate the same way these two warfare techs do.



Ownership: it took me a while to understand, and I am not sure I have it. I think of this more like "culture" in Civ IV/V. Normally it is 100%. Once a system changes hands, it changes over to the new owner's culture at 4%/turn. However, if the system changes hands back, it doesn't reset to 0 or 100, it starts changing the other way. Suppose a system is owned by A and then conquered by B. After 10 turns, A's ownership is still 60% because B's ownership has grown by 4%/turn for 10 turns. If A re-conquers it after 10 turns, the following turn A's ownership is 64%. Ownership is affected by Pilgrims Rebellion and the opposite trait, Deep Roots, but we don't quite know how. Ownership *gain* is doubled for pilgrims. It isn't clear how ownership *loss* works, more details and questions here:



https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/10029-invasion-recovery-works!



I successfully made a building which gives +5 (absolute) influence radius. I tried making a ship which does this, but I guess I don't have the path right: I tried "../ClassSystem" and "../../ClassSystem". Both give the right tooltip, but neither has an in-game effect.



==> If somebody has a working example of a ship module which affects a system, I'd appreciate if you could paste the one operative line into a reply.



Buildings which give a bonus to influence, control or ownership have the drawback that when a system is conquered, they start working against the former owner. That doesn't fit the theme. I would be interested to experiment with ships that improve owner influence, control recovery, and ownership recovery/loss. Ships which reduce these factors in enemy territory would be interesting also. It should be possible to use some of the existing mechanisms for offense/defense in enemy/ally territory for this, but I have not tried yet.



For ships, there is another problem: I can limit this to one module per ship, but not one module per fleet, and there is no limit on the number of fleets in a system. So any effect which could be executed by a single ship, will be amplified by 22x in case somebody puts one on each scout in a fleet, and potentially by hundreds if you are rich and build multiple fleets.



Can anybody think of other xml hooks related to this? Can anybody suggest what buildings or modules and flavor text would work within these limits?

Keep us posted - I'm especially interested in destroying system improvements when control is lost.

Since the game doesn't destroy race-specific buildings like the cravers locust-point-slowing one, I assume there is no way to do this. If only there were a "trigger" for system changing hands, with an "effect". I am spoiled by Civ IV, which let you call out to python routines that could do anything you could imagine.

davea wrote:
Since the game doesn't destroy race-specific buildings like the cravers locust-point-slowing one, I assume there is no way to do this. If only there were a "trigger" for system changing hands, with an "effect". I am spoiled by Civ IV, which let you call out to python routines that could do anything you could imagine.

They let you call out to python!? That's awesome! This is the first game I've modded - it'd be nice to use a less annoying medium than XML*



*pure XML

I used the tax rate paths to create a ship module which does effect star systems, unfortunately it effects all owned star systems and empire. You can remove the empire affect and suppress the tooltips but I hate using that method. Never figured out how to restrict it to just one system. It's some hook with the affinity in the path if memory serves right that allows modules to modify system values.

I'd try and set a flag on the system descriptor (module present in system) and from there assign the bonus. I think there are some problems between LoS between colonies and fleet, it's next to impossible to determine if one is near the other.

@ iblise and grubsnik, both of those ideas sound interesting, but I did not understand. Can you give a couple of lines of specific example of how to do this?