No Maintainence a Feature?!?!

JLXC · #1 February 21st, 2001, 09:17 PM

I posted this once before the patch, but I see it wasn't fixed?? If you take +20 percent maintainence reduction and merchant you pay NO upkeep at all for ships. If this is a game feature it's unbalanced, as whoever does it can literally pump out new ships every single turn without limits ever! How can you keep up with that in a normal 1 planet start? I have had 300 ships by turn 30-40..... if you were in a multi-player game the guy who does this wins every time, no hope. I can only hope that people either outlow it in multiplay, or it gets patched out.

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I'm an Idiot? Well if that's not the kettle smelling the pot's back!

Talenn · #2 February 21st, 2001, 09:26 PM

Just go into the Settings file and crank up the cost of the Maintenance Trait. That would alleviate the problem in a multiplayer game.

Unfortunately, it can screw up the various AIs 'General' file as they will be spending too many points if their races has the trait. The obvious solution there is to go in and alter their files by the correct ratio of the change that you made. For example, if you doubled the cost of the trait, cut their amount of reduction in their race file by half. If you quadruple the cost of Maint Reduction, simply quarter their ability in the race file.

That will take care of the problem in both Single and Multiplayer games.

Hope it helps!
Talenn

Hydraa · #3 February 21st, 2001, 09:33 PM

Also realize that to use this unbalancing feature, you need to spend 2500 racial points + take a specific culture which gives you -% in combat, intel and research. So there is a cost associated with this. Also if the ship limit is working and is set to a low number it may not be as worthwhile to go free maintainence. However with the new limits on colonizable worlds it may increase the usefulness of having low maintainence.

Emperor Zodd · #4 February 21st, 2001, 09:43 PM

This is a good example why using no more than 2000 racial points is warranted.

Sinapus · #5 February 21st, 2001, 10:02 PM

Or, you could go into settings.txt and change the basic maintenance percent to something above 25.

dmm · #6 February 22nd, 2001, 12:57 AM

Wow, hadn't noticed that before, JLXC! I'll have to use it against my kids.

(I'm REALLY bad.)

JLXC · #7 February 22nd, 2001, 02:26 AM

Wait a sec? You folks really think that I should have to mod it? What about MM? Don't you think this is an error and not a feature? 2000 racial points and I can still do this and flood the galaxy. A few - here and you can have this (what I thought was obvious) error and wreak untold havok in just a few turns.

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I'm an Idiot? Well if that's not the kettle smelling the pot's back!

Puke · #8 February 22nd, 2001, 02:37 AM

quote:
Originally posted by JLXC:
Wait a sec? You folks really think that I should have to mod it? What about MM? Don't you think this is an error and not a feature? 2000 racial points and I can still do this and flood the galaxy. A few - here and you can have this (what I thought was obvious) error and wreak untold havok in just a few turns.

hardly, first you have to have the resources to build all the stuff, and the tech to build decent stuff. you will most likely have neither since you blew all your racial points on zero maintnance, so you wont have very fast research, you wont have a high resource production, you wont have a high shipyard bonus, and you will probably suck in combat.

the big limiter to the flood-the-galaxy abilitiy (if you started in a low-population large galaxy where you had time to build up in the first place) is the recently fixed ship / unit limits. so no, i dont really think this is a bug. its actually kinda neat that you can choose to sacrifice everything else and not pay maintnance.

Drake · #9 February 22nd, 2001, 03:06 AM

I pretty much agree with Puke. That being said, I think the default culture modifiers should probably be tweaked a little for the merchants and engineers. When maintenance was changed, those two cultures weren't and have a significantly higher benefit than they originally did. (not monsterous or anything, just significant

)

I also wish they'd fix the worker culture. It's still not adding in the 5% production bonus.

[This message has been edited by Drake (edited 22 February 2001).]

Puke · #10 February 22nd, 2001, 03:13 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Drake:
I also wish they'd fix the worker culture. It's still not adding in the 5% production bonus.

gawd darn it, and i keep choosing that culture type too.