Well that sucked.



Influence is still way too strong :/



The only viable thing I see is to have a counter made that counts Outposts.

Uh weird suggestion but since the cravers mechanic exists and it multiplies the base fids. Count a cravers mechanic be used on new systems that affeects the expansion effort multiplicatively. Cept say 100% for first 30 turns 0% for the rest.

Okay i made a Test run game of you mod this are my results:



1. Cant say if Sowers are saved cause Satellite Building and Stellar Guardians are still to important...without at least 1 Outpost in influence sphere the expansion penaly is just to high making Population Growth in other Outposts almost impossible or to dam slow (even if u have Methan or Tundra), and therefore ANY expansionism strategy useless.



2. In your mod there is no cap at -10 for the expansion malus (was that intended?)...making it even worse.



3. You removed the +15 Industrie ability vom Admin heroes which is just to important for Sowers.

(i would just put it to a later place in the ability Tree)



4. Still in your mod and even worse in the Devs Mod the games comes now far to strong in waves (depending on Outpost -> Colony change)



And i dont like it when a game comes in waves...this would make Multiplayergames kind of boring...cause you now...so till turn 30 nothing happens...and then comes the first wave....then another...and so on.

the +15 industry is on the corporate hero, while the +15 dust is on the admin hero, if i remember correctly.



Anyway: We're gonna need to contact the devs about this, and i would say this way:

What do we need? A counter for $Colony, a counter for $OutpostOutsideInfluence, a counter $DistanceFromEmpire.

Someone with VIP forum access can report this?

I don't know how messy is the source code, but that looks like twenty lines of code, considering there's already $Colony and $Outpost counters.

Given that, we have the tools to make all further modifications to get it to a playable state.



As to what to do with the counters:

An outpost under colony influence does not count as a colony, but does not count as an outpost, either. (Or just have outposts be outposts and colonies be colonies)



The time for outpost->Colony swap could be moved from a constant to a variable, which may be either related to population or to distance from empire influence. This way, influence becomes properly important, since in the current game state, it's a joke (if not harmful).



If we want to keep trying to mod without further dev input, we need to scrap the whole 'expansion effort' thing, perhaps crank up a little ED, and be okay.

nope its an admin hero ability









i can furthermore just agree with you especially with the point to make the The time for outpost->Colony swap to an variable instead of a constant one.

Aureon wrote:
the +15 industry is on the corporate hero, while the +15 dust is on the admin hero, if i remember correctly.

Correct. It was changed.



@Sovereign

My first attempt to balance the Admins was to remove the industry bonus and put it on Corporates. The only problem with it is Admin/Corp will be as strong as before.

Anyway: We're gonna need to contact the devs about this, and i would say this way:

What do we need? A counter for $Colony, a counter for $OutpostOutsideInfluence, a counter $DistanceFromEmpire.

Someone with VIP forum access can report this?

I don't know how messy is the source code, but that looks like twenty lines of code, considering there's already $Colony and $Outpost counters.

Given that, we have the tools to make all further modifications to get it to a playable state.

Pretty much.



Without these, I just need to remove Stellar Guardians.

Well u said the heroes where untouched yet so excuse my confusion.

I'll just chime in to say a couple words about single player here, bearing in mind that I really am a huge noob:



I think the mod improved things a lot, in general. I used to build influence but didn't really know why, other than it being an important mechanic in other 4X games. I was surprised to find that it had marginal effect pre-mod (and it still strikes me as odd that you can't "turn" a colony with sufficient influence). So, it's nice that it's a more useful mechanic now.



Balance-wise, most of the changes are appreciated as well.



However, the AI still has a lot of work to catch up to the mechanic. They pretty much still expand like crazy which, depending on randomness, means they either completely cripple themselves or end up with 75% of the game's FIDs almost immediately.



The whole 30-turn Outpost thing seems like a pretty clear Bad Idea. I can't remember the last 4X game I played that used such an arbitrary mechanic, especially for a boolean switch between "irrelevant/harmful" and "this system rocks!" At the very least, I agree that this should be more dynamic. If I colonize a one-planet small system, it should not take 30 turns for that system to stop leeching resources when all I needed it for was, e.g., strategic placement (and it could be flipped in two turns anyway).

AIParametersBuilding.xml



[CODE]

"Money" Value="0.1" />







"Industry" Value="0.7" />











"Science" Value="0.8" />









"Money" Value="0.1" />









...







"Industry" Value="1.5" />

"Money" Value="0" />













"Money" Value="1.75" />

"Science" Value="0" />



[/CODE]



I assume the terraformation and colonization values weren't revised in accordance with the new planetary FIDS. The AI terraforms planets to tundra to get more science and colonizes desert planets to get more industry.

binjured wrote:


The whole 30-turn Outpost thing seems like a pretty clear Bad Idea. I can't remember the last 4X game I played that used such an arbitrary mechanic, especially for a boolean switch between "irrelevant/harmful" and "this system rocks!" At the very least, I agree that this should be more dynamic. If I colonize a one-planet small system, it should not take 30 turns for that system to stop leeching resources when all I needed it for was, e.g., strategic placement (and it could be flipped in two turns anyway).

But I do like the distinction.



What about if over the 30 turns the system go's though a 0-100% change on it's bonuses and penalty?



So every turn it is closer, before the official decoration of colonyhood?