Modding Vanilla - altering Costs for Pacing

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AlexMcpherson79
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Modding Vanilla - altering Costs for Pacing

Post by AlexMcpherson79 »

As things stand, as you go higher in tech, you end up putting so much into construction when you're doing no science or intel, that the top end ships get built quickly... you can pretty much create a fleet quickly. Consequently so can the AI... but lower techs building those higher end takes forever, and if you have a crap tonne of upgrades (planet modding for higher pop) you tend to hit certain bugs. I have at least.

In vanilla, you also need to sacrifice certain stuff just to build, which is bad when you want to get anywhere with science or intel at the same time. Unless you decide to starve your systems, but... yeahno.

my idea is that, ships are relatively expensive... you absoluately need a hefty industry for ship-building systems... But you DONT for otherwise... colony structures of all types are much cheaper, comparatively.
Even high end systems with the population to support, for one-turn building the most expensive ships, you need a LOT of population to support around 30 or so industry.

As you go through the tech levels, though... it reflects the idea that colony sizes start *small* and only reach higher numbers when you've built sufficient AND are a decent way through those upgrades. so a Tech 8 empire's new colony... very low tech buildings get done quickly enough, upgrades slow it down some but then, the ratio between a systems' possible industry capacity to the cost of those items gets larger.

I'm thinking of where, for a Level 1 system, only a handful of turns to build farms and energy structures, a turn or two more for intel, while industry costs double, plus a handful more on science, universities would be the most expensive of the five core buildings, as will be all science modifier buildings like Daystrom etc.) you can get by on the initial first 10 or so turns without allocating anything to industry (just the *5* you get is sufficient for getting a handful of buildings, and by then if you've not built any farms, the next pop slot goes straight to the one industry you have anyway.

Say:

Ford System
Pop: 21
Max Pop: 70
Max Pop with all planets: 420

Planets
Fiesta, Small, Unterraformed. Max Pop: 20
Contour, Small, Unterraformed. Max Pop: 30
Focus, Small, Terraformed. Max Pop: 40
Escort, Small, Terraformed. Max Pop: 30
Taurus, Medium, unterraformed. Max Pop: 80
Crown Victoria, Large, unterraformed. Max Pop: 120
Mustang, Large, unterraformed. Max Pop: 100

at a full 420, this is a *large pop* system, and good for a ship-building system. at tech 9, give it 30 mass replicators powered and it'll complete Galaxy-Xs and Sovereigns in a handful of turns... Also, should it need to replace some sabotaged, so long as it's got 20 left powered, it can then one-turn complete replacements. The other 12 pop slots then spread between Farms and energy.

Fully upgraded but with just Focus and Escort terraformed, at 70 pop, one farm and one energy, rest into industry... it'll take a while to build anything... and longer for ships, worth it to instead throw that into intel, until the system's got more planets terraformed. Or science.

The colony/ upgrade path would be best served by having platues when it'll be time to terraform, and when it'll be preferable to upgrade THEN build more...

thinking of industry here, but for one-turn building one replicator, as you go up through the levels you need more and more of them. at Tech 1, just *3* would one-turn the rest. You'd need atleast 15 of them to build ships at that level (science/colony/transport are all expensive to that bracket.)

Each level costs more and more, percent wise, than the last... so while T2 is 1.56 times more expenceisve than T1, T3 is 1.6 of the T2, 1.7 T3-4, so on.

Though I am thinking, no more than 2k for the T9. I'm just trying to find that happy medium where cost of upgrading isn't so high initially, so yeah, y ou could plot the price increase and see the cost increase as a curve that starts slow, then rapidly shoots up...

I'll be doing the "ships dont auto upgrade" thing, while keeping it set so older models do disappear from the lists... Light Cruiser II's would be, at higher tech levels, cheaper for smaller systems to produce, while the larger ones would best be served for large pop systems.



Now the reason I posted:

I'm looking for some numbers... Costs, and associate outputs for the buildings.
I'm also thinking about Adding higher tech level buildings, though that's something you guys figured out since I last visited, a few years ago, and wwith the kinda exponential increase in prices, I'd need to rethink percentage increases between each level so that really high levels aren't so... ridiculous and crash-worthy (35 industry on the example, upgrading to top level would have an enormous cost! high enough to bug out the game methinks)
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adi
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Re: Modding Vanilla - altering Costs for Pacing

Post by adi »

i changed a lot the economy in my installation of the game; lately i like what i ended up with so i am not changing it so much; here is how it looks in my game:

1. first of all, bringing new colonies to the current tech level was annoying for me so for quick main buildings, i set the price of the main buildings the same for every level. The upgrade cost is the cost difference between the levels times how many of those buildings you have so zero*buildings_number, i.e zero and it always takes one turn to complete :); that way the new colonies can get to the proper level faster. And you can keep more farms for faster pop growth without a heavy upgrade cost. Also prevents the AI from getting stuck upgrading all thos unused buildings it did not scrap.
the change is very simple to make; 5 values in UE, see my post in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2568
also i gave the BunkerNetwork a +1 local morale for streamline conquest with the feds

2. sytems population population: terran - 140-200 from small to large, jungle and oceanic - 55->95; the rest 15->40
this way i end up with most systems around 300 pop with some above 400 and a few lucky ones up to 500; minors and major home system may have more since their generation is a bit different. Homes systems are around 500.

3. main building costs 15 for farms and energy, 20 for universities, 25 for intel 30 for factories; industry output starts around 10 and tops at 60-sh for level 9; races have small output differences. more research for Feds, more intel for rom and cards etc.
top industry output: 5k for 40 industries at max level with 190-sh morale; most of my systems though have up to 20-25 factories so up to 2.5k output at level 9.
end game ships cost > 30k; with dreadnoughts maxed out at 65k and destroyers cheaper maybe 20k; so ship building is slow but then by that time i have >50 systems. so i get maybe 3-5 ships ready a turn.
bonus buildings in the 2.5k->6k cost;

4. research output would take me from level 1 to max level in about 170-200 turns depending on bonuses i get from minors. Here you can alter the research output and the research levels thresholds to get faster or slower pace you want.

5. all these changes are piggybacking on Thunderchereo's UDM3.0.1dc mod; i highly recomand it; besides what anyone can change from UE, it is very stable, it has the large galaxy version and you can put MPR++ on top of it. vanilla has too many bugs and crashes in it for my taste;

P.S. whenever you are considering ship production, dilithium, morale or maintenance cost, don't worry about the AI; the bastard cheats on all of these. As long as it can build shipyards, it will expand.
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