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

[clark]

Sorry for this slightly (well, okay, really really really...) offtopic idea, but I lacked a suitable place to bring this up, and seeing as this mod is about "balance", I had an idea that might bring some more balance to the game, or at the very least, open up new strategies.

Before I get to the meat of it though, what strikes me most about SEIV is that there isn't just ONE set strategy for weapons and ships and what not. You have options. You have counter measures upon counter measures upon counter measures. That's fun becuase you have to keep being flexible. Every game can be slightly different.

Well, one thing I have noticed, and one thing I have seen repeated is the short half-life of fighters in the game. Yeah, you can make them still work in late game, but really, you're just building fleets to get chewed up by those pesky Point Defense weapons.

So i ask you, what is the counter measure to overcome point defense?

Beam weapons.

But the answer is the problem. Beam weapons are your only real long term solution. So much so, people tend to neglect the Torpedo and Seeker techs. It's a dead end, right? So everyone is running around with beam weapons, not much variety there.

So here is what i was thinking, a new component.

Call it the "Shotgun whatever".

The idea behind this component would be that it shoots out a bunch of cheap seekers to overwhelm the enemies Point Defense, thereby allowing your fighters and more powerful torpedos to get through.

Now, in order to simulate the "overwhelming shotgun" effect of these, the size of the component should be small- maybe 1 - 5 Kt. So you could put dozens on a ship. Now the damage caused by these seekers would be negligible because they are little more than 'dumb rocks'. So maybe 1-3 points of damage, if any at all.

What this does is provide an enffective means to COUNTER point defense. (One need look at the Missle Defense argument to see what I am getting at).

Sorry for the intrusion. I will delete this post if any feel it neccessary. But it would be nice to get some feedback on this.

Does anyone think the AI coulb be modified to implement something like this?

Cheers.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

*sees no reason why it wouldn't work. good idea.*

on the other hand, what i know about ai modding could be fit on one page.

[ October 15, 2003, 20:41: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[PvK]

If you have the peace time and spare resources, drones can provide the shotgun. PD has problems with shielded ECM drones. Combine with fighters and/or seekers, and some nasty no-maintenance stuff will get through the PD. Drones which launch their own seekers are also good for generating a large swarm. However, PD is still very powerful and cost-effective in the unmodded game.

PvK

[PvK]

I just made a new Version 1.1 of PvK Balance Mod, for seamless use with SE4 Gold Version 1.91 (Gold Patch 4) which was just released.

There are no changes except to make it so no 1.91 changes will be undone by applying the Balance Mod.

See the link below my signature.

PvK

[Alneyan]

I happen to have a question about your mod PvK: why lowering Happiness give many points? According to the general consensus, lowering Happiness hardly hurts the Empire. (That is, according to many players in KOTH and the Newbie FAQ)

Unless the patch altered something, lowering Happiness shouldn't make your Empire more prone to suffer from riots. I played with average Happiness and with 50% happiness and my planets were rioting as fast in both cases, only troops and UPC would prevent these riots.

Beyond this small question, great work! I will have a closer look at your mod once I start a solitaire game, so that the enemy Empires will be both varied and still effective. (Playing against 19 Clones isn't exactly appealing, nor is playing against much weaker Empires)

[ February 29, 2004, 16:34: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[PvK]

It's only easy to counter if you lower it moderately, and I this mod only returns a fair number of points if you reduce it a lot, at which point it does become a disadvantage. As I write in the readme & web page:

PvK wrote:

Threshold lowered to one in order to reduce reward for lowering happiness
a small amount, since in the unmodded game a little unhappiness is easy
to counter with troops. A lot of unhappiness can be a problem however, so
the Negative Threshold cost was increased. Positive Threshold can be low,
because for the most part, a high value gives diminishing benefits which
can be accomplished by others using troops. Minimum setting of -50 gives
750 points (and would be hard to survive long enough to develop troops
before riots took over).

So I don't think you can abuse it as you can in the unmodded game. I'd say it's worth 750 points to have to endure the effects of -50 Happiness.

One can counter the effects of unhappiness when one has the technology and resources available, mainly using troops, but this requires the player to focus on this immediately, and throughout the game. The effect is worse for a typical low-tech single-planet start, than for high-tech start where you can deploy troops on turn one, but it will still waste your time and resources and lower your research and intel by at least a bit throughout the game. I'd say this is probably well worth 750 points for -50, even if you become expert at dealing with it. It might be a somewhat over-valued, or not - I'd be interested to hear more discussion.

At -50 happiness, for example:

* By turn 2, the homeworld happiness will drop from Happy to Indifferent (loss of 10% production bonus, or 20% compared to someone else's Jubilant planet).
* Usually, two turns after a planet is colonized, it drops from Happy to Indifferent.
* An average-research low-tech empire suffering from -50 happiness will take about 10 turns to get to Construction 1, and another 10-15 to get to Troops 1, even if those are the first techs they go for, which in itself is a disadvantage, since they will probably want to delay useful early-game research to do that first. If they get attacked while they don't have anything useful researched, it could be game over. If they do research other things, they're going to suffer a lot of unhappiness effects.
* Alternatively, a player can build some cheap ships and leave them in orbit to keep happiness up, but that too is a waste of time and resources.
* Even in a high-tech game or late-game, the need to worry about happiness on every new planet is a distraction and an expense.
* During major wars with large empires, a major setback (large fleet and/or planet loss) can cause many planets throughout a large empire to riot. The rate at which they recover gets multiplied by the number of planets they have, as does the cost of building even more troops for all of them.

(Note too that if you read this thread's history, we discussed this and most of the other values, and pretty much everyone agreed [or some slightly thought something should be higher, where others slightly thought it should be lower] on most of this. There may still be some things that can be abused here or there though, so do let me know if you have any other ideas.)

PvK

[Alneyan]

I might be a bit stubborn and what not, but do you have any formula highlighting how 50% happiness affect the happiness level on a given planet? Or rather, how does reducing the characteristic alter the happiness level? I had a look at the happiness.txt file, but saw nothing regarding this. (I am not speaking about increasing happiness, as this effect is known)

Here is the quote from the Newbie FAQ I was referring to:

1.2.4 Happiness: Every five percentage points you increase your happiness makes 0,1% people happier every turn. For example if you increase happiness 10% it's the same effect if you have one troop on your every planet. If you drop your happiness to 50%, it makes 1% of your population angry each turn. Natural decrease is 2% (neutral 5%). The result is 1% happy people each turn. (Asmala)

According to this calculation, it means natural decrease (or increase here) is higher than increasing happiness (or raising it here), and the only side effect would be if you were experiencing battle losses and other harmful events. There you would only gain a +10 each turn instead of +20 to help offsetting the happiness decrease due to these events. Or am I missing something obvious here? It is also possible the patch introduced a few changes to how happiness was handled, as I admit I am not yet familiar with the changes.

I read the whole thread before replying to check if the negative effects of lowering too much happiness have been discussed before, and it looks like it wasn't, unless I missed a page of course, as it wouldn't be unusual given my natural silliness.(Environmental Resistance was discussed, however.) My other questions were answered by reading the previous Posts, so I will not bug you about how to tweak AI files and the consequences of it or something along these lines.