Racial abilities

[Fyron]

The characteristics system was scrapped because some short-sighted people complained about it being imbalanced, and therefore inherently flawed.

[Kana]

Fyron said:
The characteristics system was scrapped because some short-sighted people complained about it being imbalanced, and therefore inherently flawed.

Well you could always add in the characteristics as racial point choices. Can you take one racial category more than once? If so, you just set a low point value, and just pick as many as you want to give you the correct characteristic amount. If not then yeah it sucks bad.

[Fyron]

Do you want a list of 200 traits to scroll through?

[Ed Kolis]

Use powers of 2 and make it reasonably granular and you won't have 200 traits... nobody needs zillion +10/20/30/40/50/60/70 to mining traits when you can have just +10%, +20%, and +40%, and with those you can make any combination up to +70% with a granularity of 10%. And if you want to allow negative traits, you don't need +10, +20, +40, -10, -20, -40: you can just have -80, +10, +20, +40, giving you a range of -80 to +70. I know those traits need to be repeated for each thing (mining, farming, research, morale, etc.) that you want, but I'm just offering suggestions on how to optimize things!

[BlueTemplar]

That's a great idea! There is also the problem that IIRC in SE4, the more points you would add, the more they woud cost. It won't be easy to simulate.

[Fyron]

See, there are a bunch of stats to tweak, which leads to ridiculously high numbers of traits with such setups. At a minimum we are looking at 44 traits to scroll through... Given the gigantic size of each trait entry, it might as well be 200. Even the stock set of 22 such traits is annoyingly long...

Increasing point costs are trivial to simulate; just make the bigger stat bonuses cost more per bonus point than the cheaper ones. The math will get kind of weird with the -80/+10 set, but its still doable.