PvK Balance Mod Version 1.1 posted (for SE4 Gold Version 1.91 - Patch 4)

[spoon]

Just some ideas - not really tested...

Double point costs for research, construction, and minerals.
Increase Maint Reduction to 200 per point.
Halve point costs for ground combat.

Let repair range from 50% to 200% - cost maybe 5 points per point of repair, with no increase in cost. (so 200% repair would cost you 500 pts, dropping to 50 would save you 250 pts) (it could probably cost less than that, but 5 is such a nice even number...)

Suggest maxing Defensiveness at 110%, allow aggressiveness to go to 120%.

Eliminate Bezerker, or give it more penalties (less consruction seems good). Ditto with Merchant (suggest more ship combat penalties)

Good luck!

[Krsqk]

Mentioned this in another thread, but changing racial costs will make AIs and EMP files obsolete. Are you (or someone else) going to provide AI_General.txt files with this as well, or will this just be for new empires?

[PvK]

Thanks Spoon.

Krsqk, that's a good point. I'll just do the mod for new empires first, and then hope some brilliant and eager people mod all the AI's. Mainly because it's a lot of time-consuming work to do it.

PvK

[geoschmo]

After thinking about this some more, what Fyron said about the tolerance could almost be applied to everything. The problem most people have with the characteristics isn't so much that they are too cheap or too expensive when raising them, it's that you get too many points back when reducing them and don't hurt your race enough to account for it. I think most of your changes could be made on the minus side of the charatcteristics.

And doing this would have the side effect of making your work in revising the AI easier, as few of the stock AI anyway have much in the way of reductions IIRC.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Both are good ideas, Geo, although the AIs often are set to pick the undervalued attributes, and the total point levels can't be changed, so I can't really change the scale without increasing the power level, which isn't the goal of the mod. (Probably not clear there. I mean, if I wanted to not break AI setups by keeping positive costs almost all the same, I think it would probably end up devaluing everything but the undervalued ones, which would probably end up making 2000-point empires as potent as pre-mod 5000-point empires, and since I can't change the starting point bracket values from 0/2000/3000/5000, that's probably not desired. Agree?)

So I think some of the popular ones are probably under-valued on the positive side:

maintenance reduction (maybe 200/point to +5, then 300/point to +20)

combat bonuses (maybe 100/point to +5, then 200/point to +25)

intelligence (maybe 75/point to +10, then 150/point to +25)

political savvy (perhaps twice as valuable as the production aptitudes)

and perhaps construction.

PvK

[oleg]

Emotionless is obviously way too expensive.
Organics may become overprized after 1.82 OA fix.

[Phoenix-D]

"Emotionless is obviously way too expensive"

Subtract 800 from the cost for Emotionless, since it lets you drop Happyness to 50%.

Phoenix-D