Echoes of Earth: A total conversion for BERT

As mentioned on Steam, I've had some issues.

Started a new game on Mercury (or whatever is below Vostok) and the game has gone from being incredibly hard to being rather easy in regards to the other factions.

I still feel that the main issue is that with so many things needing energy, you get caught in a loop where you can't afford to build production improvements because it creates too much unhealth which then offsets any production benefit.

Also I still believe that tech is advancing too fast compared to build times.

That being said, I do like how different affinities mean something now. Still, the basic issue of Rising Tide is that it's almost impossible to not be a Hybrid. It seems to me that being a hybrid should be a choice with issues.

The only major problem I have is something which I don't believe is the mod but RT itself. The AI is stupid. By this I mean that many of the Factions will build a LOT of units (how they're paying for them, I don't know) but then they'll not use them!

In my current game, the Slavs had like 6 patrol boats surrounding a sea monster. Not attacking it, just surrounding it. This during a time where they were at war! I've seen this behavior from the AI a lot. It's almost as bad as Civ 5 where a Civ will ignore you when you attack them to go pound on an allied City State of yours.

Again, I think there needs to be something regarding building stuff that's easier. I would like to point out that with 3D printing, it is likely in the future that building stuff would be quick but people (until cloning tech) still need the 20 years to crank out. So perhaps buildings should be cheaper than units?

The "Wonders of the New World" update has been released! You can see pictures of all the new Wonders at the official guide. There is a detailed design breakdown on the blog.

This large update introduces a complete revamp of Wonders. Every Wonder has had its effect changed. Wonder effects are highly variable depending on local conditions. Each Wonder works best in certain kinds of cities with specific needs or abilities. Not every Wonder will be valuable in every city. You'll need to pick your spots wisely.

Another big changes for Wonders is that they all now provide one-time lump sums of Affinity points upon completion. This is part of the mod's ongoing process of moving the Affinity point economy away from "quest & tech" to something that has more options.

So I'm going to try the new version and see how it goes.

However, I'd like to reiterate something I've been discussion with Gaia in regard to another major change mod.

I know Civ:BE is not Alpha Centauri (unfortunately) but one element missing from BE from SMAC I think really needs to be added back in: the Alien Counter.

Right now aliens seem a problem for a brief time and then with the right virtues and agreements, they simply become "gold coins" to ring up bonuses. The AI disproportionately attacks aliens in lieu of dealing with other issues and the aliens sort of just peter out.

Worse, there is no real penalty (other than energy use) for terraforming. This means there is little penalty for going Purity AND doesn't give much incentive for Harmony.

Now if a global alien counter (which related to your factions own alien counter) was added, then we could see aliens spawn more often, spawning perhaps new and more deadly aliens. Also, I think having xeno-fungus again (whether as a terrain or an "improvement" which destroys whatever was on the tile prior to it growing) would be nice.

Playing SMAC (which I occasionally still do or the Planetfall mod for Civ IV) shows that going the anti-Planet route isn't something you do without planing as now you have other factions AND the entire planet to fight. Likewise, while going Harmony is a risk early on, the benefits later in the game (especially if other factions piss off Planet) can be a game winner.

I mean when I first played BE, I thought Seige Worms would be some huge thing which would rarely showed up but when they did, it was all hands on deck panic. So sad to find them a slow moving target which rarely did more than trash an occasional scout or improvement. Hell Krakens are more of a threat, especially now in Rising Tide.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Not sure but I'm not seeing anything in the Victory conditions regarding a Contact victory even though it's flagged. However I ended up winning the game via a time victory which I always turn off so maybe I flagged Time instead of Contact. Will check during next game.

After a play through on Mercury level, I have these thoughts.

Energy: It's still too way too much of a problem. The issue, however, I think can be fixed with buildings. Civ:BE is set in the future yet for the most part, everything is wind powered? What no hydroponic dams? No oil or coal (if they exist on Planet) or nuclear power plants? The game has all these amazing Wonders but we still don't have Mr. Fusion(tm)? Does planet have a thermocline layer? (My FIL's house is heated/cooled this way for cheap!) So it seems odd players have to rely totally on generators.

Not to mention solar which I think the type of planet option would matter. If you are playing on a wet, fungal world, the denser cloud cover might make energy base costs for buildings higher because their build in solar panels aren't getting the juice they might on a frigid but arid planet.

Plus if they can get to Planet, then get satellites in orbit, why can't factions build orbital platforms that stay up? Sheesh? Snag an asteroid or comet and park it in the L-5 point. Hell even SMAC had Space Elevators and the like! Still can't believe Civ:BE doesn't even have airlift capability unless you use a mod for it!

Also, the direct drain of energy makes most Agreements useless. I've found that I can't afford not to take the generators make more energy + military units cost less maintenance traits. So almost all of my possible game-play options are useless because I don't have the watts to pay for it.

Wonders: I think forcing Wonders to be dependent on geothermal isn't workable in that there isn't enough of it and it really forces you into the oceans which, IMHO, the AI does too much already. At least this mod makes sea cities a lot less defensible than vanilla RT given how it seem with all the various buildings, on top of the normal defensive buildings, a sea ARC city was stronger than a land city which just doesn't make sense.

However, I was thinking that instead of geothermal, how about every Wonder require a different strategic resource (like 1) AND 1-2 Affinity resources. So perhaps the Panopticon requires 1 silica (for a lens or something like that. Then it needs 1-2 affinity resources linked to the Affinity boost the Wonder gives. So if it gives a Harmony/Purity boost, you need to put in a xenofungus and floatstone resource.

This way the different Wonders won't suck dry one resource AND make the player have to choose whether they want a wonder or the units those Affinity resources afford.

Affinity: The above directly affect the AI. In my current game, I'm at 17S,9P,6H and the closest to that is one of that factions has 9S. The other Factions haven't even reached level 6 and so are running around with basic units. So if I wasn't intentionally delaying the game to see it play out, I could just conquest my way to victory with my level III units against Level I units.

Given the energy problem, everyone's armies are small...even though the AI seems able to still spam out patrol boats like they were free. Another indication of the AI's fixation on water. This means it only takes a few Level III tanks and an arty unit or two to wipe them out.

Idea: Towards the end of the game, explorers are useless. However, given how I pointed out above, sometimes some factions are higher in tech than others. Plus even though Civ:BE makes everyone pretty much have similar units, each Faction does customize their units. So perhaps any time a Level II or III unit dies, there is a small chance of a hull/wreck being created. Explorers could then salvage these. The rewards could be small amounts of tech, production boast or maybe even a chance that all units the player has which are of the same type (rover for example) as the hull/ruin would get an XP boast. I mean it's all well and good to spy on Factions but why ignore all this tech scattered over battlefield or sunk under the sea? Perhaps a unit might be completely salvaged but then would be like leased aliens in that they would never get XP or upgrade.

Sea vs. Land: I play on a Dwarf map AND I add another Faction to the mix and yet by the end of the game, there are often huge swaths of land which lay fallow and yet the ocean is cluttered up with cities! Personally I think this game needs a variant of Sukritact's Event's and Decisions Mod so sea and coast cities could get hit with hurricanes and lose population and have lots of tiles damaged.

Anyway, the point is after Rising Tide came out, the AI seems to ignore the land. And often, why not? With canyons and mountain tiles which are useless, a sea city can maximize all it's tiles. And why are mountain tiles useless? Plus this is a frickin' future game! We've been getting through mountains for over a century! Plus are all those mountain tiles made of inert material which can't be mined? None of them have water flowing down which could be dammed to provide power? And with all the hover tech later in the game, canyons still remain unreachable to exploitation? It doesn't make any sense.

Also, not a big thing but sort of like how an older Civ IV mod have, it seems to me that you can build cheap roads which don't cost much energy, then you can quickly upgrade to high-speed rail for more energy and faster travel and then get the mag-lev later for even speedier travel. Again, it seems the game wants us to go from some really basic tech right to the Sci-Fi option without intermediate steps we have access to RIGHT NOW!

Okay...I'll stop now.

Playing another game and things are better but you might want to consider pointing out that certain Factions are affected by mods more than others. Given the conflicts, I'm using very few mods with this one. One however, is one I've been using for awhile being a Civ:BE clone of a Civ V mod: Greatest Cities.

The problem with this mod and any others which give energy bonuses is that if the ARC faction gets any serious amounts of energy going, then they rapidly avoid the biggest hurdle this mod throws at them: energy use.

That being said, given the issues with energy, ARC's sponsor power is really powerful and makes ones like the Slavs look like you'd have to be an idiot to pick them over the ARC.

Also, so far I'm still noticing that most Factions lag in Affinity. In my current game I'm at 7S,2P,0H on turn 221. Out of the other four factions, only Kozlov is at 4H, 2S,0P, Chengu is at 4P, and the other two are both at 3 affinity only. (one in S, the other in H with no other affinities)

So is it just because as the Human player I can go after more quests? In this game, I've even been unlucky that while I have the "I see artifacts" trait, I've yet to get a free affinity boost from any explorer missions and yet I'm still 4 affinity points in the lead over most of my rivals.

Sad to say, the game seems better when you play on a primordial map with only large lakes for water even though the AI still seems fixated on killing aliens.

arkham4269 said:

Not sure but I'm not seeing anything in the Victory conditions regarding a Contact victory even though it's flagged.

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You're not doing anything wrong. Contact Victory is disabled by Echoes of Earth.

arkham4269 said:

Also, so far I'm still noticing that most Factions lag in Affinity.
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So is it just because as the Human player I can go after more quests?

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That is part of it. AI players don't get the Affinity quests that humans do. It is one of the reasons I want to phase out the Affinity quests completely (after I add in enough replacement sources of Affinity points).

Other factors that tend to result in the AI being behind on Affinity is that it often picks fights with the Aliens which makes it have trouble getting expeditions. The AI's tech selection likely* doesn't incorporate technology based Affinity points the way a human player does.

*This is an educated guess based on how technologies were evaluated in Civ5 and what inputs are shown in BE. Without access to the BE source code I can't say for sure how the AI chooses which technology to research.

There are now pictures of all the new Wonders available on the official guide. There is also a detailed design breakdown of the new Wonders on the blog.

The next update won't be as large in scope. It will focus on an expansion of the mechanics of the Signal. Along with some quality of life UI enhancements. Due to its smaller scope I'm targeting a week or two before release.
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arkham4269 said:

Worse, there is no real penalty (other than energy use) for terraforming. This means there is little penalty for going Purity AND doesn't give much incentive for Harmony.

Now if a global alien counter...

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This touches on a broad mechanic I had sketched out but I'm not sure I will have time to fully incorporate. I had considered a kind of "ecological disruption" factor that would be part pollution, part terraforming and part alien hostility. It would generally be a drawback tied to things a player did to develop their cities or territory.

At the start everyone would accumulate a bit of it and deal with a bit of alien hostility. However, as the game went on each Affinity would branch off. Harmony would get access to means of development that didn't have "ecological disruption". Supremacy would continue to accumulate some and keep having to bat off the aliens. But Purity, on account of its terraforming, would accumulate tons. Purity would have to commit to dealing with lots and lots of aliens attacks over the whole course of the game.
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Another broad mechanic I also sketched out but likely won't have time to incorporate was a robotic population system. Broadly it was suppose to be how many semi-autonomous quasi-human robots are in society. They would tie into food and energy needs as well as Health. Depending on how a player developed they could have only a few in their cities or much more.

Supremacy would eventually seek to have the majority of their population as robots and the proportion of humans to robots would determine which paths were effective. For example, "robot slavery social policy" would be great if cities only have a few robots, but disastrous if robots outnumber humans. Supremacy's victory could even have incorporated elements of a planet wide robot uprising.
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I was attracted to both of these ideas because they felt distinctly sci-fiction. They were things that could be explored in Beyond Earth but never in a historical Civilization game. I don't really think I'll be able to incorporate either of them into Echoes of Earth but maybe down the road if there is a Beyond Earth 2 I'll be able to pull them out of the file drawer.

Have played a few different games and I'm not as freaking out over the energy issues. I really think that this mod has a steep learning curve as you have to unlearn so many strategies which did well in vanilla BE.

I think the biggest is cranking out improvements everywhere you can because you're used to them not costing anything.

One thing though that has been bugging me is probably something which can't be changed or not easily. Here is a quick list.
The First: There seems very little in the way of denouncements or other ways the AI can show it's angry with you. In my current game, I'd have an AI ask to get a better relationships, some times cooperation and then next turn go to war!

The Second: Related to the first, the AI goes to war with you when angry even though you TOTALLY outgun them. Even in a game playing Brasilia, I'm not much of a combat player. Yet I keep winning via conquest because the AI keeps attacking me when I'm strong and they are not. This caused me to wipe out the Slavs, Al Falah and the Kavithans in about 10 turns of each other because they kept going to war with me when I have around 12 cities (many conquered due to earlier wars) and they having around 2 apiece, often weak ocean cities.

The Third: Not only does the AI spam patrol boats, but I constantly see big groups of them on both sides attacking an ocean city, taking it, losing it, taking it, losing it and so forth. Net result? Something like 10 units get wiped out for almost no gain.

Also, in regards to your comments about an alien counter, one of the things I think need to be taken into account is that Purity types SHOULD be dinged because if they work it right, they can get agreements and virtues which make killing aliens really profitable. Conversely other than the very real advantage of your explorers and traders being unmolested, there isn't a lot of bonus for NOT killing aliens. I mean you lose those kill benefits, lose more chances to get artifacts and often have aliens cluttering up your area making travel difficult.

So I think there needs to be a reason you want to forego attacking the aliens to get some benefit you can't get anywhere else. Hell, maybe occasionally aliens will "leave" an artifact randomly in a quest sort of way where you have to send a unit or explorer to pick it up.

Still finding that the AI really lags in Affinity so hopefully your upcoming changes help that.

Oh, I'm finding that some of the virtues don't work. I took the one where you get orbital coverage of stations at Level III but it didn't work...or at least it wouldn't show when I went to the orbital view.

Anything related to the Diplomatic "Decisions" the AI makes is unfortunately pretty impossible to mod, because it's hardcoded. I don't think it's possible to solve the first issue because it's two systems working somewhat independent from one-another. the Fear-/Respect-System is completely independent from the actual Diplomatic AI, but it forces the AI to propose or accept changes to Diplomatic Relationships - while the actual Diplo-AI may already have decided that it wants to backstab you.

For the second point though I've been thinking about a possible solution for my own mod - basically just forcing a positive Diplomatic Reaction on an AI that is extremely weak and has a low opinion of you, making them "plea for mercy" and pushing your standings with them back up to a neutral level. That would at least get rid of the suicidal "I have one city, and you have it surrounded with units, let's go to WAR!"-AIs.

Maybe that's something to think about for this mod as well.

I watched this video yesterday about 6 concerns about Civ VI and from what the guy was saying and comments he had gotten from the designers and the like, I'm worried that Civ:BE is the beta version of a lot of things we'll see in Civ VI.

In this I mean the whole, "if you do X, a civ will like you; do Y and they attack you" because if this is true, then my concerns for Civ VI just went up a notch and not just because of the crappy, cartoony look.

One question though, is there anyway to get the ability to trade cities? It irritates me that you have only three options with cities: raze, puppet or annex. In Civ, it's part of my strategy to take cities and then give them to either weak player I want to keep in the game (because they're a buffer or a trading partner) or to stronger factions I'm hoping will then get attacked later by the player I'm at war at to retrieve their lost cities.

That and it's too bad that stations aren't more like City-States. I always thought it would be nice if instead of puppeting a city, you could designate it to become a new City-State. I guess, if possible, maybe a city could be recreated as a station with it's tier level being determined by it's population prior to capture.

Frankly I wonder if Firaxis ditched City-States because they can't seem to keep the AI from attacking them? I mean I can't tell you how many times I'm whaling on some Civ and yet they send most of their units to attack a weak but allied City State of mine...even as my armies are marching towards their capital.

arkham4269 said:

Oh, I'm finding that some of the virtues don't work. I took the one where you get orbital coverage of stations at Level III but it didn't work...or at least it wouldn't show when I went to the orbital view.

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I assume you're referring to the Diplomatic Traits? Thanks for the heads up. I'll confirm the behavior and see if it can be fixed.

arkham4269 said:

Have played a few different games and I'm not as freaking out over the energy issues. I really think that this mod has a steep learning curve as you have to unlearn so many strategies which did well in vanilla BE.

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Is there any advice you would give folks new to the mod so they can get a feel for it faster? Anything you wish your past self had paid more attention too now that you're wiser?

arkham4269 said:

Still finding that the AI really lags in Affinity so hopefully your upcoming changes help that.

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Some of the new features I'm working on will provide additional ways to earn Affinity points that the AI will also have access too.

I want to expand the Signal mechanics. One of the new features will be that certain Satellites will provide Affinity points while the Signal is active.

A larger feature that will come a bit later is the process of re-contacting and saving Earth. This multi-stage process will be different for each Affinity (each Affinity has a different view on "how" Earth should be saved) and will provide a source of Affinity points during the mid-game.

The mission to save Earth will give the mid game some "milestones" (as Ryika mentioned earlier in the thread) to help make it feel less listless.

I think the biggest piece of advice requires a little micromanagement. Either flag a city for no growth or just keep track of the size compared to how many tile enhancements you have.

I mean in vanilla Civ and BE, you want your workers to improve everything you can even if your city can't support all the tiles. That strategy will kill you in this mod. So by keeping track of how many plots your city is/can work allows you to decide when to build. Of course you could just spam out generators but even that bumps up your total tile cost per turn.

While I did mentioned it seemed the game leans towards benefits to killing aliens, by keeping a good rapport with them means you can get energy via trade routes. This is especially important given how there is no longer the panacea of "aliens ignore trade routes" - so in this mod, blue tinted aliens = energy.

I also think that people really need to look at which buildings give which potential benefits especially in regards to titanium, geothermal and oil. Again, I still think Wonders should require different resources and perhaps floatstone/firaxcite/xenostuff, the reality is you are often without a lot of those 3 basic elements and building quests will get you more. Even with that wonders rarely are built. I'm in turn 202 in my current game and I'm not sure one wonder has been built and if it has, I think only the xenodrome was built.

I also think the AI is still very much in the grip of Rising Tides in that it will spam ships more than units. Thus the threat from an AI is often more from the naval side than the land side. That and often the AI will attack via ground only with 3-4 units which, if you're prepared, are easier to deal with given those units are often damaged by miasma before getting to your territory. Not so with the naval units.

Energy permitting, I think it's important to really keep an eye out for how big the AI's armies are. Now that factions will go to war simply because they don't like your policy, you can't afford not to have a decent fighting force. That and defensive buildings are really important now that cities are weaker, ESPECIALLY ocean cities.

Personally I think one of the best ways to get ahead of the AI (gaming the system as it were) is to take the topographical sensors AND take the tech which allows for explorers so your first build action is to get an explorer out. Then, either build labs for the +1 expedition, use your first 3 virtues to get more expeditions AND try not to anger the aliens and you can get a lot of stuff before the AI can even build explorers to say nothing of getting a jump at finding marvels if you have them flagged.

The "Messages from Home" update has been released! This smaller update includes expanded Signal mechanics, UI improvements and minor bug fixes. The most important new additional is a new way to generate Affinity points in the early game with certain Satellites. You can read more about the update here.

I was wondering, is there any way there can be a sort of If/Then GoTo function added to the AI's build preference?

The reason I ask this is carrier spam. In my last game (not with your mod however) Hutuma had around 20 (!!!) carriers and maybe 3 fighters in their entire military with only 2 of them being on carriers.

So I was thinking, if in any way possible, it would be great if somehow if the AI built a carrier, it would be prevented from building another carrier till all the fighter slots in existing carriers were filled. That way instead of 20 carriers with 1-2 fighters, we'd see 8 carriers with fighters or later in the game (depending on upgrades) only 4 carriers with 3 jets a piece.

Quite frankly I find the base carrier to be useless because this game is in the future. We've known for decades (and especially shown in the Falklands War) that you need enough fighters to do offensive and defensive missions. So a base carrier should have 2 slots so you can have one attack jet while keeping another for CAP missions to defend the fleet. Having to build two carriers to do this in the early game is just dumb; why not build bigger carriers? Plus with jump jets, the carriers wouldn't have to be Nimitz monsters.

Also, not a big deal but just an idea. Any way to seed crashed satellites, landers and spaceships throughout the game? It seems a bit odd that all of those crashed items happen prior to the initial player landing. You'd expect mostly only alien/primogenitor sites at first and then more crashed space craft, landers and satellites as the game goes on as more potential factions come in and crash.

It would, sadly to say, help keep the human player from totally trying to gain all the survey sites as I mentioned in my comments above as more sites would be created throughout the game.

Why is there even a signal quest?

Now I admit to be playing on Soyuz but I've done almost nothing except work towards getting a lasercom satellite to the point of using 4 artifacts to get science bonuses and I'm yet the closest I've gotten is turn 93 I can build lasercom satellites.

Even if I had built the Stellar Complex (which didn't work because I had to research clear miasma to get enough geothermal) it wouldn't have matter.

So I don't see why you have the quest if there is no way to accomplish it baring playing on REALLY low difficulty levels.

Also, just so you don't think I'm just dinging your awesome mod, I was playing Gaia's mod recently and she made it such that only taking the one military virtue gave you any bonus vs. aliens. So none of the agreements allowed for bonus for killing. I think this is great because it gives WAY too much incentive to do nothing but go for the combat option. It also acts as an enabler for the AI who sometimes seems to do nothing but attack one player relentlessly along with going out of their way to kill aliens.

I've notice in quite a few games that at some point (200+ turns) the whole "get coverage for stations" stops functioning. In one game I was able to cancel the agreement which gave me this, get that deal again and it started working again. Yet in another game, this didn't work. If you get this as a function of a one of the tiered options, once it stopped working, it just stopped working which is a pain given it's a Level III option.

I've not seen anything which I can tell causes it because it invariably is quite awhile before I notice it so whatever might be triggering this glitch goes unnoticed.

BTW, in talking with Gaia about Ultrasonic Fences, I pointed out how they don't seem to repel marine life and when aliens "go blue" they seem to just ignore them as well. She mentioned that it seems to be a game function and not a mod function; would you agree with this?

Plus I've noticed that the turn aliens go from green to blue, they have a tendency to actually get aggressive for a turn. That and once they go blue they seem almost attracted to your territory, ultrasonic fences or not.

arkham4269 said:

I've notice in quite a few games that at some point (200+ turns) the whole "get coverage for stations" stops functioning.

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I've been investigating some of the current Diplomatic Traits and Agreements. Some effects don't work properly. It sounds like this is one of them.

For example, one issue I'm aware of is that Diplomatic Traits/Agreements that provide Strategic Resources don't reduce a player's Resource count when the Trait upgrades or the Agreement ends or changes due to friendliness.

These issues mean I need to do a pretty big redesign of the Diplomatic Traits. I'm working on fitting it into the schedule. The next big four things I want to do (in no particular order) are:

1. Reconnecting & Saving Earth
2. Overhaul the benefits for grabbing resource pods & expeditions
3. Virtues overhaul
4. Redesigning Diplomatic Traits & Agreements

arkham4269 said:

Ultrasonic Fences, I pointed out how they don't seem to repel marine life and when aliens "go blue" they seem to just ignore them as well. She mentioned that it seems to be a game function and not a mod function; would you agree with this?

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Low level Alien behavior is controlled by a chunk of the code modders can't see. It is also bears little similarity to Civ5's Barbarian AI. My statements on Alien AI should be taken as educated guesses.

I believe once aliens "go blue" they will not attack you or block working tiles, so they may be allowed to ignore Ultrasonic Fences. Angry aliens are less effected by Ultrasonic Fences so alien disposition is an input into how Ultrasonic Fences interact.
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arkham4269 said:

Why is there even a signal quest?

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I'm looking at ways to increase its relevance. There are some changes in other systems I want to use to make it more viable to get a LaserComm Sat. One idea had been for Progenitor Artifact Rewards to provide a free one.
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arkham4269 said:

Any way to seed crashed satellites, landers and spaceships throughout the game?

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There is. I've been looking at a few ways to add things for Explorers to do outside the early game.

Machiavelli24 said:

For example, one issue I'm aware of is that Diplomatic Traits/Agreements that provide Strategic Resources don't reduce a player's Resource count when the Trait upgrades or the Agreement ends or changes due to friendliness.

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Can't quite tell from this whether you're aware of the cause or not, I assume you are, but in case you're not: It's because Resources granted via PlayerPerks are not removed when the PlayerPerk is removed. A general problem not only affecting Diplomatic Traits.

About the Ultrasonic Fence:
There is an option in the global defines - ALIEN_REPEL_DEFAULT_STRENGTH - that seems to govern how much Aliens are repelled with the fence in place. Setting it to something like 100 seems to make the Ultrasonic Fence work soooomewhat reasonable, but doesn't entirely keep them away, even on neutral stance. Unless I was just imagining things it does make quite a difference though.

There's also ALIEN_REPEL_DEFAULT_TOLERANCE, but no sure what exactly that does (other than what the name implies). Didn't notice any change in behavior when I played around with it.

After playing this mod for awhile, I switch to Gaia's big mod to test out updates.

I rapidly found I really miss how EoE buildings often have little purpose other than upping certain terrain improvements and the like. At first, I didn't like that because it meant a lot of buildings were "worthless" to build in most cities.

However I know like how you're just not building every building in every city simply to get more bonuses as while most cities have many similar things, terrain and weather plays a big part and EoE reflects that.

One thing I found was terrascapes are lot better in EoE when Terran Vaults exploit them. In most BERT games, the 5 energy cost isn't generally worth it.

Still with there was a "hybrid forest" option for the Harmony types. But then again, still with for a SMAC type Alien counter so there you go.

Anyone else having issues with how the 'weather controller' units are working? In their tooltips it states they provide +%50 food to covered cities however it seems to only be providing +0.5 food. (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=749277683) (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=749277596)