Kwok's next Mod

aegisx · #1 June 21st, 2007, 07:53 AM

Quote:

narf poit chez BOOM said:
Well, expansion is sort of the point of the game.

I agree, but I think establishing a new colony should be a decision, not a necessity. Grend posted an expansion guide on se.com, and I've seen him do it in several games. It is very effective and there is nothing to hold back the massive expansion. I just think there should be more expense to establishing a new colony.

Fyron · #2 June 21st, 2007, 11:41 AM

aegisx said:
"I agree, but I think establishing a new colony should be a decision, not a necessity."

It's not entirely clear to me why nerfing one of the Xs of a 4X game is a good thing. Civ4 did it, and it sucked; probably the worst part of the game. Establishing new colonies should always be beneficial, and thus not much of a decision.

aegisx · #3 June 21st, 2007, 12:18 PM

I should qualify this as more as a PBW/MP change.

It becomes a mad colony rush,. Check out http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/2782. This old guide outlines how to pump out 17 colonizers by turn 11. So all these ships will likely find planets to colonize, no real thought on having to support them resource wise.

How do you counter that type of expansion other then being forced to follow the same path?

Captain Kwok · #4 June 21st, 2007, 12:23 PM

There's two items I would modified to tone down expansion a bit:
- Slightly more expensive colony modules
- Reduced population modifiers below 100M

Regardless in any competitive PBW environment, you're going to have to expand as possible anyway.

aegisx · #5 June 21st, 2007, 12:30 PM

I agree expansion is necessary, but I would like to see some drawback to the rush strategy.

Captain Kwok · #6 June 21st, 2007, 12:33 PM

The main drawback is that most of the colonies are poorly defended and have minimal facilities, the player is running on the edge for resources, and is stuck with slow builds for most of their inner SYs. They are very vulnerable to an early attack.

aegisx · #7 June 21st, 2007, 12:41 PM

Early attacks are difficult to pull off. All he has to do is build a few WP's on a planet (1 turn) and it can defend pretty well against early ships. Also, If he already has a 2- 3 times colony advantage, the loss of a planet or 2 is insignificant as he can out-produce you.

As it should be, the empire with the most planets will tend to win the game. There are exceptions of course. Your changes should slow it some though.

How about this... Production level on planets are partly based on population right? Maybe this formula needs to be changed. Right now a newly colonized planet (10M people) can produce 2k I believe. This seems a bit high of a start, perhaps it should be more like 500. If a planet has 1000M, I could see it being closer to 2000.

Fyron · #8 June 22nd, 2007, 12:12 AM

A caveat: turning the mod into a population transport-fest isn't the best idea, IMO. Mods like Proportions and P&N PBW do this, making it require lots of pop to get decent colonies. In multiplayer, it generally just serves to slow the game way down, and make it drag on. Its fine for single player, where you can hit end turn like a champ, but multiplayer tends to bog down for a while at the start. Sure SE5's migration can mitigate it a little, but if you start requiring very high pop levels to get decent production, you will add the necessity to build a bunch of population transports in order to play effectively.

If you just set the base build rate to 500, and don't fiddle with the population modifiers, you effectively get a situation where you have low build rates, until you build a space yard. The SY will take quite a while to build (20 turns instead of 5), slowing down expansion, without adding the unnecessary micromanagement of extra population transports.