Proportions mod: So confusing!

[Puke]

hmm, thats right. why do smartbombs do 200 points of damage, then? does that need to be changed if the damage to kill a population unit is increased?

[Sinapus]

Originally posted by Puke:
hmm, thats right. why do smartbombs do 200 points of damage, then? does that need to be changed if the damage to kill a population unit is increased?

IIRC, it doesn't. It also looks like one hit, regardless of damage, will kill at least one population unit. Though that was Last tested over a year ago, pre-Gold. Dunno if it's been changed or not.

Also, I think damage for neutron bombs is something the game reads to figure out how many people it kills per hit. Haven't really tested that, though.

[ September 10, 2002, 20:42: Message edited by: Sinapus ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by Mylon:
I'll email you those save files latter today. Meanwhile, a few suggestions for Proportions:

Cultural centers. I'd like to see them at least halved in price. It _should_ be reasonable that a homeworld could actually build 18 of them within a reasonable time before developing useful space flight. Yes, they may be massive in size, and 50 years may make sense for their size, but that is also 500 turns.

18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that.

Also note that you can build a colony that is more productive than a cultural center, and produces exactly what you want it to, in far less time than it takes to build a cultural center. It won't be as compact and it won't have the exact same bonuses, but that's the difference between building heaps of infrastructure, and actually developing a culture. Or, at least, Proportions' representation of that difference in SE4 terms.

I do think though that I will probably, eventually, adjust the abilities and cost of the "Colony World Cultural Center" facility. Maybe even before anyone succeeds in actually building one in a game...

Along the same vein, perhaps population production bonuses should be increased significantly. Most colonies with about 100 M population can produce almost half of what a homeworld can. I would think a homeworld would be more productive. Also, the population growth should be bonus significantly increased in cost. A +10 bonus to population growth is fairly cheap and is actually added directly on despite other modifiers (bad planet conditions, angry, ect), thus allowing a population to double in say 4-5 years rather than 15.

I've considered this sort of idea before. Originally, cultural centers did have a construction ability, but that meant you could never build more than one on a planet, or replace one on a homeworld. It also resulted in the ability to produce very expensive items in a very short time, because of the single planetary build queue. There are rationalizations for how a homeworld should in fact be able to snap together a capital ship in one turn, but on reflection, I kind of like the existing system, in part because you can't build hugely expensive things in a short time.

What you can do (and most humans and AI seem to do this) is actually build a bunch of construction yards in space over a homeworld. This has a number of advantages (from a design/interestingness perspective) over giving a homeworld a huge construction ability. The advantages, as I see them, are:

* You can build as much as your actual infrastructure investment (in BSY's) lets you.
* You are still limited to long build times for expensive items.
* You have to consider the cost and maintenance cost of your production facilities.
* The enemy can raid your orbital bases without having to battle your homeworld to the death.
* If enemy blockaders can't get close enough to destroy your homeworld BSY's, they can still produce defense forces even if enemy blockade and/or ground troops are causing your homeworld to riot.

Another thing I would like to see would be enhanced cities based on other tech advances. This would probably be a pain to impliment, as there could easily be 81 or so combinations for each level of city. The idea is that a level of applied research would not only improve the quality of research centers, but the research bonus given by cities as well. Likewise for organics extraction, mineral extraction, ect. If this is followed through, I would suggest removing the current upgrade-chains in the current city lineup to make this a bit easier to handle. Likewise, without the city chain cities should be made somewhat cheaper (where a metropolis used to cost 65k (minor city + upgrade), they would now cost 100k! Upgrading the cultural centers on the homeworld would probably never happen unless there is a dramatic reduction in cost (or production in bonus), but it would be nice to add upgraded Versions for other well developed planets.

Not a bad idea, although I wish I had the time/energy to design and mod 81 city variants, not to mention the other stuff I would rather do first. Of course, what you can do is use the existing rate-modifying facilities already in the game to gain multipliers to standard facility abilities. See Robot Factory, Mineral Scanner, etc.

Considering how most other techs double in usefulness with the second level of research, it would make sense that this would apply to starliner modules as well. And I keep buging you because paying for the life support, bridge, engines, and solar collectors (They don't go very far without them!) gets expensive if you have to pay for 20 rather than 10.

Hehe. Of course you can feel free to do so for your own enjoyment. Another idea would be to halve population mass to 500kT, if you just want faster development. However the point of having these hardships in Proportions is of course to make it the Herculean task it actually would be (actually, I think it's pretty easy compared to "reality") to move many millions of colonists to inhospitable alien worlds and turn them into self-supportive and productive colonies. Another reason starliner modules don't double at tech level 2 is because of my imagination of how difficult it would be to overcome the basic and very enormous physical requirements of moving a million folks and keeping them alive on board and shipped with enough stuff to allow them to do anything but fight for survival (and probably lose) at their destination.

If I were to implement this suggestion, it would probably be by calling the current level I, "level II", and then defining a level I that was twice as lame as the current level I.

PvK

[PvK]

To be clear, Mylon, I'm not saying any of your suggestions aren't good or wouldn't make the mod more fun for many people. And, thanks extremely much for the suggestions and feedback - I love to hear what people think and their experiences with the mod. The feedback is what's inspired me to keep developing the mod.

I'm sure that some severe lightening up of some of my scales could make the game more appealing to many players. And, I invite you or anyone to do variants to suit their own tastes. It's just not quite what I've been trying to do with my Version of it.

PvK

[Mylon]

Sure, it took Earth twice as long to build less than 18 cultural centers, but also consider Earth's population (the 6-7 billion mark we're at now is a pretty recent thing. It wasn't always like that!), our technology level (I assume a world that can build economical space ships would be able to produce more), and the fact that our planet is hardly a single entity of people like the united force a player controls in SEIV. Imagine what we could do if we stopped blowing each other up and built stuff together for a mere two centuries. I'd imagine we'd build those 18 cultural centers pretty quickly. I don't really expect homeworlds to build dreadnauts in one turn, but I would like to see production bonuses for larger populations increased to some degree to make facility building a little faster.

As for population transport... Why not make it more expensive to research level one and level two? The idea is that it still should be cheaper than building a battleship sized population transport in terms of research costs. A counter to the ease of population transport, as I've already suggested, is to decrease population reproduction and likewise increase the point cost of faster reproduction. This way an empire can spread faster, but not necessarily develop faster.

The main reason I like cities is because of their compactness. One idea of making the city variants with much less hassle would be to only make 3 levels or so for each city. Instead of discovering a new city type each time you research applied research, mineral producion, applied intelligence, ect, given a new level of city when one level of every field is researched. Thus, the Metropolis Level 2 wouldn't appear until level 2 was reached in mineral production, applied research, applied intelligence, radioactives extraction, organics exctraction, and possily political science (on the grounds that urban pacification might help a little). Under this system, it might be wise to tone down the level 1 cities a little.

Another idea would be to make a space yard-city combination in addition to the cultural world center that could possibly replace the space-cities that have a resupply depot built into them. This way one can bypass the 1-production limit by having one special production center and the rest of the buildings as other urban-type structures.

[Mylon]

Just a clarification for my enhanced cities idea, since even to me it seems a little confusing the way I said it:

Instead of having a hundred or so city varients that reflect each individual advances, cities could instead reflect these individual advances but at less frequent intervals. These invervals could be marked based on levels in every area. When one level of every applicable field is researched, only then does a new level of a city become available. Thus, to uncover metropolis level two, one must research one level of applied research, one level of all three extractions, one level of applied intelligence _and_ perhaps some other appropriate techs (applied political science?). Thus, the advancement of cities based on other technology could be modelled without designing a hundred or so variants of each city to reflect smaller advancements in the individual areas. It isn't perfect, but it's a nice approximation. I'd also like to see easier upgrading in certain manners (upgrading metropolis level 1 to metropolis level 2 should be much faster than the current 1/2 of the time of building a new one, for example), but this area isn't necessarily a mod issue. I just think SEIV wasn't really designed to handle expensive facilities this way.

[nitey]

Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.