Updated to 1.0.16-02 (note serial 02). No changes except updating to community mod serial 04, and ES release 1.0.16. I spent several days trying some influence effects for pilgrims, and some battle cards for hissho, but I have run into modding limits. About 40 downloads of serial 01 from mediafire; also releasing this one on moddb.

I think you should keep Genesis Project as a Horatio affinity trait, but you should get together some version of this for every race. After looking at the anomalies listings, I suggest making up new ones to allow for this option, which would pretty much equate to an extra, more limited planet exploitation slot.

From my standpoint, the whole point of this mod is to make the races play differently, not to give each of them the "same" toy.

I didn't mean give them the same "toy", I meant equal the playing field by giving everyone else a different toy. If you sharply increase one player's attack, you should increase the defense, speed, ect. of other players.



Also, maybe you should ramp up the cost of Genesis project, it's a little too powerful in my opinion.

Harel55 wrote:
I didn't mean give them the same "toy", I meant equal the playing field by giving everyone else a different toy. If you sharply increase one player's attack, you should increase the defense, speed, ect. of other players.



Also, maybe you should ramp up the cost of Genesis project, it's a little too powerful in my opinion.

This pretty much. The issue is that Garden of Eden is to strong of an anomaly, specially when you can terraform every single planet in a system to a Terran. It just currently OPs them way to much. The Garden of Eden anomaly adds 1 pop, 10+ Happiness, +2 food per 1 pop, +1 industry, science, and dust per 1 pop. Which on huge planets you can have up to 10+ pop, so you are looking at an extra 20+ food and 10+ industry. And then there are tech to increase the food output ontop of that to over 40+ food, and then the +10% increase for having them happy with the proper tech, and then the over all +10% increase for them being happy. Thus you are having about around 50+ food. Which you can turn to industry. So you are in effect adding 60+ industry to one planet.



Which that can easy be 200 industry or more to a system depending on how many planets. Which it really effects balance.



I suggest that you play a game with this, find a system with 60-70 or more pop then have all the tech and terraform to Terran and then add in Adminstator hero, check out how much industry you can have. Then add in the anomaly change.



You could be looking at maybe a 1-2k increase in industry. Which is roughly a fully decked out dreadnaught per turn.

So what you are saying is, the mod to make horatio more interesting is working. Now I have to make sure that the other seven races get toys which are just as good. In the meantime would making it 2x as expensive help? Or is the anomaly just simply too powerful?



What I was trying to accomplish is that another player invading the horatio space should find everything the same: systems full of gardens of eden with huge population. The sophon change "should" make sophon systems full of arctic, and I would love to have players invading craver space find nothing but burnt out asteroid belts.



Did anybody experiment with the cheaper seed pod modules and find them effective?

davea wrote:
So what you are saying is, the mod to make horatio more interesting is working. Now I have to make sure that the other seven races get toys which are just as good. In the meantime would making it 2x as expensive help? Or is the anomaly just simply too powerful?



What I was trying to accomplish is that another player invading the horatio space should find everything the same: systems full of gardens of eden with huge population. The sophon change "should" make sophon systems full of arctic, and I would love to have players invading craver space find nothing but burnt out asteroid belts.



Did anybody experiment with the cheaper seed pod modules and find them effective?

At first I thought you were accusing us of being rude, but yes, that is what I meant. making it more expensive would probably help, but this is a mod in progress so I can understand it being temporarily unbalanced.



Off topic, I recently got a sort of good idea: make races approve of their "main objective". i.e. Sophons are excited to learn new things, so science production slightly increases the approval of a system (also maybe researching a new tech would temporarily increase empire approval. The point of this specific trait is to counter the effects of having the Sophons able to add Ice 10 to any arctic planet. Similar traits could be added for each race, e.g. Cravers are delighted to increase their military might, Hisso are excited by conquest (ok, Bushido already does that, but you get it), Amoeba are excited by meeting new people, ect.

Idea for sophons, 'toy' tech, maybe tier 3 or higher, "Think Tank" - 25% (or some other rate for balance) of science added to dust (this is /passive/ -- it doesn't reduce the science output, just adds a portion of the science output to a colony's dust output).



This might imbalance their trait a bit more -- by boosting dust based on their science affinity, they would be able to lower their taxes for even more science, but something to consider.



And maybe a similar toy tech for sowers, "Bioexport" - the 60% reduction of food output (before the trait-natural industry portion added to food output) is converted into dust (may want to make it a fraction of that food they can't use).

I think that I have found a few bugs in this mod. The first I can point out in the save that I am uploading. For some reason, I receive an error message that freezes the game whenever I view a terran planet that I own that was once possessed by an AI character. There are a number of examples of this in the save. There are several terran planets from an enemy system that I captured, and one of my own terran planets that the enemy captured for a short time before I liberated it. Sirius and Jyem are the systems.



The second bug I can't seem to replicate. Loading a save seems to fix it, though it does show up after a time fairly consistently. It deals with your new repair modules for UE. Sometimes when I want to equip one to a ship it will be greyed out and have odd text beneath it, something like "FF##". As I said, reloading a save seems to fix it.

Sorry, forgot to upload the save. Here it is.
SHEREDYN - Turn 214.zip

stars2heaven wrote:
I receive an error message that freezes the game whenever I view a terran planet that I own that was once possessed by an AI character. ... Sometimes when I want to equip one to a ship it will be greyed out and have odd text beneath it, something like "FF##"

Thanks for the feedback. I have seen something related to the first one, and I have seen the second one. But I can't make either one happen consistently and/or fix it. For the first one, I had noticed that when I first colonized a terran and clicked to build an exploit, I would get an exception dialog and I could not build an exploit; this stopped happening, for no known reason. That makes me nervous. Your problem "sounds related", I will look into your save in 12 hours from now. For the second one, I am pretty sure the problem comes because these modules have a three digit size and power, while the icon box really only has room for four digits total. So something is "overflowing" and the color string ("#FFFFFF" is white) is being displayed in text.



Both of these will probably require the dev team to fix something, but I will try to see if there is something I can do. The first one can be fatal, the second one is cosmetic.

I guess the goal is that every race should be overpowered at the end. Then it will be a tie. But at least it will be more interesting to try out each race.

Good luck fixing those bugs.

I always feel bad when I mostly post bug reports, so let me say that I really enjoy your mods and appreciate your work. Now on to the bug report. Simply put, I can no longer buy-out anything that is on a system in which a corporate administrator is also on. It seems that any other system with or without any other hero type works fine. Also, if I unassign the corporate hero I can buyout buildings on that system again. This happened for no apparent reason very late in the game. Also, I only assume it is a bug with your mod since I know the mod tweaks corporate heroes. It's possible that it has nothing to do with your mod and I have just never seen this bug before. In anycase, here is a save where you can see this occurring.



Actually, the one thing that did occur recently was my first corporate administrator reach level 20. I have no idea if that is relevant or not, but the bug and the level 20 did happen around the same time.
Valorian - Turn 190.zip

stars2heaven wrote:
I always feel bad when I mostly post bug reports, so let me say that I really enjoy your mods and appreciate your work. Now on to the bug report. Simply put, I can no longer buy-out anything that is on a system in which a corporate administrator is also on. It seems that any other system with or without any other hero type works fine. Also, if I unassign the corporate hero I can buyout buildings on that system again. This happened for no apparent reason very late in the game. Also, I only assume it is a bug with your mod since I know the mod tweaks corporate heroes. It's possible that it has nothing to do with your mod and I have just never seen this bug before. In anycase, here is a save where you can see this occurring.



Actually, the one thing that did occur recently was my first corporate administrator reach level 20. I have no idea if that is relevant or not, but the bug and the level 20 did happen around the same time.

That's because the combination of the buyout bonus from the modded ability, when combined with the two buildings which further decrease the buyout costs, equals 100%. You can fix this by simply nerfing the ability a bit (I reduced it to 15% instead of 50%).

I see. Thanks for the info!

I had not quite gotten around to loading the save game, and now I see it is too late. The "theoretical" problem was pointed out a few weeks ago in the original corp hero mod thread. But I had never triggered it, and it looks like you have. In file simulation/HeroDescriptor.xml, find this, and change the highlighted value from -0.5 to maybe -0.35:

[code]







-0.5" OperationType="Percent" Path="../ClassStarSystem"/>





[/code]

Unfortunately, I found -50% is big enough to be noticeable in the early game, while -15% may not be. Perhaps another solution is to decrease the value of the other buyout buildings, so the total does not overflow. You can find the value for the other buildings in StarSystemImprovementDescriptor.xml; copy this file from (steam dir)\Endless Space\public\simulation into (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding\community-mod\simulation, then search "BuyOutBonus" to see the other buildings.

Sounds like a good fix, getting everything for free would have been a little more fun of a bug though :P

Previous original post, quoted for possible historical interest:

This mod contains a number of changes which I feel add diversity to the races in the game. The idea is to make each race different enough, that a player will find it interesting to replay as each different race. This description is for version 1.0.16-02 (note serial 02) released August 25, 2012. Future versions will include more races, and hopefully more stuff.



Disclaimer

• USE WITH VERSION 1.0.19 ONLY.
• This content is not Amplitude's, so this mod is installed at your own risk.
• Text changes are for English language only. The mod will work in other languages but the English text will be present.
• There is currently no way to mod new icons. So I can only reuse some existing icon. The new racial icons are all orange, but they aren't really appropriate to their technologies.
  
  

Contents

• General
  
  
  • Includes the community bug fix and balance mod serial 04.
    
    
• Horatio
  
  
  • Reduced size for seed modules (unlocked with Efficient Shielding), removed Atmospheric Shield
  • Use transports to quickly fill new systems with lots of clones
  • Genesis Project to transform a Terran planet into a Garden of Eden (new tech under Soil Revivification). Known bug: "scissors" reduction icon does not appear unless the planet has some kind of anomaly already.
    
    
• Sophons
  
  
  • Feeble Warriors now additionally gives a -10% on invasion strength.
  • Advanced Optics Lab now works best on Arctic; Arctic planets now generate more research than Ocean.
    
    
• United Empire
  
  
  • Improved fleet repair modules. Very large size, very slow, but very effective. Build fleet tender ships and keep them just behind your frontier.
  • Fearsome Warriors now additionally gives a +10% on invasion strength.
    
    
  
  
  

Installation

• Download this zip file: racial-diversity-02.zip
• Unzip into (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding. This will create a new directory (my documents)\Endless Space\Modding\racial-diversity containing a file index.xml and several subdirectories.
• In the main game menu, click the MODS button, find the mod "Racial Diversity", select it and click load.
• To keep the mod loaded: find "Endless Space" in the Steam Library, right click, select properties, and click the "set launch options" button. Add "+mod racial-diversity" to the game launch command line.
  
  

I took a poll a few weeks ago to learn which features were popular: /#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/9537-which-mods-to-update

So, rather than supporting multiple different mods, I have combined the two popular features into this mod, and discontinued the rest.

Is this mod still alive? If so, you really need to fix the Terran Crash bug. http://www.mediafire.com/view/?l9pm3os9wzdxqmp Here's a screenshot. I tried just attaching the image, but that didn't work out...



Every time I select my Terran Planet, it crashes. Maybe you can make something of the screenshot, as there are some anomalies.



Also, here's my save; it seems to happen every time. It's my northernmost colony (I forgot the name) inside of that, the left-most Terran planet.http://www.mediafire.com/?6a4b4c3e7a1wcvg