So, ya.



My expansion effort? -2 dust/food per turn. This is hardly noticeable.



So, a big influence sphere (Stellar Guardians 2) is completely overpowered with this mod, amongst other things. I probably could have taken all the other players, simultaneously, in that game.



Lets just open source the XML for the game/expansion pack. Put it on GitHub and try to let the community build something better. Please.



Not sure if you can tell but I was 40% ahead of any other player score-wise and waaaaaaaaay ahead in tech.



For the sake of clarity, my FIDS were over 4000 and that was more than the rest of the players combined in the game. This was also before I built any influence expanding building.

My homeworld is in this picture(light green) with Cis-oort, due to my map position I could only cover one system with my influence ring.

You could cover 2 if you had explored it. Infact, with 1 more population you could have covered 4 :P

Stellar guardians has always been one of my favourite traits just for the defence buff, and it doesn't need any more buffing in the form of this. That said I cannot make a viable judgement since I've only thoguht about this on paper.

That was my view at the time, not his. It was only turn 30.



But really, this creates a randomness issue (distance of planets from homeworld). Mine were close compared to his.

This was Blue's screenshot... he has 5. I had explored and colonized those others, Blue just hadn't seen them yet.

This issue has always existed (slow travellers anyone?) and whilst I'll agree that the current changes has further strained that, I do have my doubts about it. Afterall, a perfectly balanced map generation set in the options SHOULDN'T cause this to happen, especially if you don't have distance set to random.

It did, nevertheless.

Perfect balance, few constelations, few wormholes and distance between systems set to short gave you this? I don't believe it. Even if I did believe it, there's a fix for this: Alternative galaxy generator. We just have to make it compatable with this mod.

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Perfect balance, few constelations, few wormholes and distance between systems set to short gave you this? I don't believe it. Even if I did believe it, there's a fix for this: Alternative galaxy generator. We just have to make it compatable with this mod.

It was many constellations. And that is your choice. And the alternative galaxy generator is not a fix for standard multiplayer games.



This is just one of the issues and there are quite a few. And even with shorter strings, my relative strength wouldn't have changed because that was after he built an influence building while I hadn't built any.

I like how this makes influence actually worth something. But its just too random, as this pic illustrates very well.



It makes your home system location and planet types much more important.

If your home is just asteroids and gas giants, for instance, you can't grow your influence, and you are sad.



But, as you can clearly see, the real problem with this test is that you weren't using a pilot.

I'm not arguing about your strength, i'm trying to find an alternative if you want to minimise this problem. Endless space has randomness. Endless space is not truely balanced because of this. However, this makes randomness slightly more imbalanced than it was before. We could argue about how stellar guardians can be replaced with other traits just as or more powerful, or we could take average distances from 100 games and make a decision, or we could do comparisons between FIDS values, we could do a lot of things. One screenshot cannot create a conclusion or conclusive argument, especially when there's also many factors withint hat one game, and some traits are better at early game and some better at mid and some better at late-game. Instead of arguing about the balance which is extremely hard unless we take a LOT more data, I'm simply trying to give you a way to play where your percieved imbalance does not affect the final game play. Afterall, if you wanted to win you could very easily tailor a galaxy generation using the options to create a galaxy that works well for your specific faction.



What I'm saying is, more data is needed before we can say anything.

I see 3 possible fixes to this perceived problem:

• Have the Expansion Effort calculation be "# of systems"/"# colonies" (Not currently possible with a mod)
• Change Stellar Guardians(and Cis-oort) to a +% influence instead of +#
• Apply Expansion Effort to all systems with a calculation of "# of systems"
  
  

That list is in my order of preference.



Ideally I'd like to see this selection of variables expanded upon as its the only counter for number of systems I can find:

Gameslayer989 wrote:
I'm not arguing about your strength, i'm trying to find an alternative if you want to minimise this problem. Endless space has randomness. Endless space is not truely balanced because of this. However, this makes randomness slightly more imbalanced than it was before. ....

Slightly? I was more powerful than 3 players -combined- in FIDS, etc.

Affinity wrote:
I like how this makes influence actually worth something. But its just too random, as this pic illustrates very well.



It makes your home system location and planet types much more important.

If your home is just asteroids and gas giants, for instance, you can't grow your influence, and you are sad.



But, as you can clearly see, the real problem with this test is that you weren't using a pilot.

Yes. I used it as an admin :P

Yet this may have only been the case for a short amount of time, especially considering how early this is. Early game dominance does not necissarily mean you will dominate late game, and stellar guardians does not scale as well as other traits. Also, from this picture all I know is that your score is the highest. I know nothing about 'FIDS, etc.' I also know nothing about the traits of any of these custom races nor what they're researching/doing/fleet status/heroes.



1 game, 1 instance does not mean this is over-powered. More data is needed.

This post is a copy of a post I made in the VIP-Forums about this very issue.



So I got invited to play a round of multiplayer with the new changes.



It was me and 3 others and we quickly noticed that one of us was outstripping the others even more than ever seen before.

The reason became clear soon enough:



He has a custom-race with the +3 Influnce-Radius-Trait and that allowed him to get his first couple of Colonies within his Influence-Radius.



The way how influence works now in 1.0.69 and in the Save the Sowers-Mod, makes this easily the most overpowered Trait to ever have existed!



I had 5 Outposts without the Radius. They stopped growing alltogether because I was at -2*(5/1) = -10 Food/Dust(no way to expand any further).

He had like 10 Outposts. But 4 of them where in the Radius, so it was -2*(5/5) = -2 Food/Dust(almost unnoticeable)



Here's some Screenshots to explain the situation a little bit better:



My empire before building CIS-Ort-Satellites on my home-system:

Wyrix was my first colony because it had a Huge-Garden-Of-Eden-Arid in it. Also it could grow pretty well because at the time when it was colnized I only had -2 Food/Dust.

Bytus and Fajis were colonized shortly after. They hardly grew at all because when I got both of them the -Food was already at 6 which leaves very little. At this point I shouldn't even have bothered to get more systems. But I did and I got punished by halting growth altogether.





One turn later: The situation is massively improved because -2*(3/3) = -2 Food/Dust and also a lot more Approval throughout the empire.





And here's what the empire of the guy who had +3 Influence-Radius right from the start looks like after allying all the others of us.

His other systems were productive right from the start and he hardly suffered any problems with his reckless expansion whatsoever.



And finally here is what this early advantage translated into:

Having more FIDS than everyone else combined.





So as a conclusion of that we were thinking that the mere Influence-Radius should not affect the state of an outpost. Otherwise the +Influence-Trait is a must and it becomes even more luck-dependant if or if not there's a lot of colonizeable-systems within the radius of your starting-planet.

Also the Formula should be reworked with some sort of offset, that prevents such a huge difference between having only your home system and having the first outpost being turned into a colony (right now that halves the burden!)

Maybe something like: -20 * (Outpost/(Colonies+Systems/Players))



This way it hits harder if there's less systems and turning the first couple of Outposts into Colonies doesn't suddenly almost remove the effect.



Some examples:



1 Outposts, 1 Colony, 48 Systems, 4 Players

-20*5/(1+48/4) = -1.5 F/D

5 Outposts, 1 Colony, 48 Systems, 4 Players

-20*5/(1+48/4) = -7.7 F/D

4 Outposts, 2 Colonies, 48 Systems, 4 Players

-20*4/(2+48/4) = -5.7 F/D

1 Outposts, 5 Colonies, 48 Systems, 4 Players

-20*1/(5+48/4) = -1.2 F/D



1 Outposts, 1 Colony, 96 Systems, 2 Players

-20*1/(1+96/2) = -0.4 F/D

5 Outposts, 1 Colony, 96 Systems, 2 Players

-20*5/(1+96/2) = -2 F/D

5 Outposts, 1 Colony, 96 Systems, 4 Players

-20*5/(1+96/4) = -4 F/D

5 Outposts, 1 Colony, 96 Systems, 8 Players

-20*5/(1+96/8) = -7.7 F/D

Its +4 influence trait, not +3, just fyi.

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Yet this may have only been the case for a short amount of time, especially considering how early this is. Early game dominance does not necissarily mean you will dominate late game, and stellar guardians does not scale as well as other traits. Also, from this picture all I know is that your score is the highest. I know nothing about 'FIDS, etc.' I also know nothing about the traits of any of these custom races nor what they're researching/doing/fleet status/heroes.

...its a 4X game. If you already have more FIDS than everyone else combined, unless they attack you immediately (and are winning) they've lost. Its just the way growth works in these kinds of games.

1 game, 1 instance does not mean this is over-powered. More data is needed.

Yes, yes. I need to find players who are my equal at exploiting the game mechanics. Do you know any?

Now that's not only 2 pieces of data, but the second piece also has more data in general, allowing much more of a comparison. Also, was that blue player horatio affinity? Because I can easily see stellar guardians with the horatio influence expanding technologies to cause a problem...

I said in the OP I had more FIDS than the rest of the players combined. :/



And no, I wasn't playing Horatio. Just the default race I had before (which 'cause of the builders/militarists change had more pts, so I tossed that into Stellar Guardians).

I was talking about the one Ali posted. Also you edited that into the post AFTER i read it and made a reply, and I didn't think to look at a post I'd already read for information you sneaky git :P

Sneaky? Hardly. I just added more info. Not my fault if you didn't read :P