No problem!
All three of these are good ideas, but I'm not quite sure how to do any of them, I'm afraid.
That's alright. Keep them noted somewhere as possible future things to investigate in case you or I learn how to do it.
Assuming they're automated, you could un-automate them. If they're un-automated, don't do anything with them, keep them in your solar systems.
D'oh! Actually I'm not automating them! It goes against every bone in my body to have construction ships sitting around doing nothing because I know that for the sake of improving my chances to win it's better to build roads on useless tiles in my territory. It's not completely useless because when enemies invade sometimes they waste time pillaging those roads so it acts as somewhat of a buffer. Of course, it's also useful to increase your mobility near your borders where you need to keep fighting off barbs. Just like in BtS it can be wise to go around building extra farms outside of BFCs to attract pillaging in case of an attack (that way they're not pillaging your BFC tiles), when your workers have nothing to do. The difference is that in BtS it's pretty rare to have workers with nothing to do if you build the right number and keep expanding.
Perhaps it will just take me some adjustment getting used to the number of construction ships I need. I do admit that last game I was a bit slow getting starbases up so next time I'll get into that earlier.
The idea I'd had, which I don't think is a very good one really, is for construction ships to be able to sit in cities providing some sort of benefit like +1
or +1
(the commerce would be more balanced IMO).
A better idea. What about giving them the ability to speed up the repair of damaged ships? I don't think that would be overpowered. I'd recommend a bonus of probably 10% like an ordinary medic. This could diminish the usefulness of proper medics but at least in FF you can get the 20% medic with as little as 5xp on a scout. Make the bonuses not stack. That way you won't have construction ships completely replacing the role of combat medics but the construction ship medic would be useful in helping the destroyers cleaning up barbs for example. The easiest way to do this would be by simply giving the construction ship the medic 1 promotion (I'm forgetting the FF equivalent names!
). It's possible to do that, right?
That is a good point, though- at present, construction ships are good for three things: starbases, resources, and routes. Since cities don't work plots regular improvements which increase yields are useless. But we can add other types of weird improvements, like other kinds of space stations. Or maybe make certain resources require a different kind of improvement to harvest.
Another option could be a 3rd type of route. Maybe warp lanes could be toned down a bit and a 3rd type of route replace the role of the warp lane. I'd imagine this would require a fair bit of new graphics though and that's probably out of the question at this point.
This can be changed, but if I do, the regular mouseover for the list of buildings in a city will also be changed.
An easy solution is to make it say something like this:
I used food as an example since the FF influence icon isn't a CFC emoticon.
Yeah, as someone noted it does seem to only be for influence it gets it wrong. It doesn't bother me much - I mentioned it because I assumed it was a fairly straight forward bug.
What we could do is use the Oil button/icon but use the Coal graphic. I'll change this in the next version.
Neato.
I had also thought a better picture could be used for water. I don't think it would be hard to find or create a nice blue image of a tear drop shape that would be more fitting IMO. All of the images used for resources I'd get used to if playing the mod enough, of course. It's just that coming from playing BtS so much you just can't help but automatically think you're looking at silver and aluminum - not oxygen and water.
I don't know about that, but I know I can make the mouseover (that currently displays yields and the planet name) display required culture level.
But all you really have to do right now is see that the planet says "0/0" population under it... still, I guess the information would be useful.
Good point on the 0/0. I didn't really think of that. But a number for the influence level needed in the hover would be almost ideal actually.
There seems to be room for only 8 planets in that bottom corner, so I'm assuming it's illegal to have 9 planets in a star system. Anyway, I've never seen more than 7 planets so there's always room for at least 1 gap in that list. I would suggest finding a way to make that gap always separate the level 2 and level 3 planets but I'm not sure if that is even possible. I guess it would be in the python somewhere?
Hmm... not sure why. I'm guessing it's been disabled in the code somewhere but I don't know why it would be.
Not sure.
While we're on the topic of trade routes, I kinda felt during my last game that the buildings that gave +50% trade route modifier were fairly weak compared to all the other build options. Except for the civ that gets the bonus trade route per city, +50% trade route modifier looks like it will provide +1
at most for most of the game. A mag lev on a 3 pop planet seems an obvious better investment.
I'm not sure whether boosting the size of the trade modifier is a good idea either though. My thought is to go with an additional trade route with one of the middle game techs - perhaps one of the techs which is a bit weak at the moment, or one that makes the most sense realism wise (if realism is something you can talk about!).
I guess the cultural thresholds need changing, then...
I'd probably double them at least. It will probably take a more drastic change than that but it'd be a start.
Note I played normal speed in my game so I haven't tried doing any of the math for other speeds yet - I'm not sure if they'd all scale the same way.
We can add back specialists.
To be honest, I'd say keep specialists out of the game. It doesn't make much sense realism-wise and really I think I like the difference from BtS. For once, the commerce sliders actually mean a lot and you don't get a crapload of espionage or beakers when those sliders are on 0 like you can in BtS.
To this point I haven't commented much on the actual gameplay so I might do that quickly now.
I've enjoyed in particular the building decisions a lot more than in BtS. I especially love the fact there is no granary because in BtS it was pretty much always an optimal first or second build (ignoring unit builds). Some of it could be put down to me getting used to the strategy still but in general I think build decisions are very interesting in Final Frontier (Plus).
I also think promotions (part upgrades!
) are much more interesting. The first strike promotions seem more balanced than they are in BtS, for example. I like the fact that if you take a promotion like the +20% vs. light ships it's actually useful for the entire game because as units get more expensive and more powerful they are still in the same unit categories. Unlike in BtS where Cover and Shock become useless promotions before long.
The combat promos (i.e. upgraded weapons) seem well balanced because the defender modifiers can get pretty large. For example, if you use a destroyer to attack a planetary defense ship in a city, it might be around a 200% defense modifier. This means +10% strength is probably almost as good as +20% city attack. IMO this is going to reward those people who know how combat modifiers work, more than anything else, but I won't complain about that! That reminds me - putting in Advanced Combat Odds would be cool IMO... I might look into it if others are interested.
Of course, a lot of these things I like about FF are not necessarily your work so I'm not giving credit where it isn't due. I do want to mention these things though because I think they're important and strong parts of the Final Frontier gameplay that shouldn't be changed much if at all.
I have noticed the building hover text problem before. It seems to alter what is shown in the pop-up help for the build list icons based on how many you have already built, so if you have built none or 1 they appear correct, but if you have built 2 they show double, and if you have built 3 they show triple. Strangely, it seems that some properties are multiplied by the number of buildings that already exist and some are not - if I'm remembering right, the influence points are influenced (so to speak) by the number of buildings but +1
or +1
are not. So the hover help for the Sports Arena shows 1 influence and 1
if you have not built any or have built one, but 2 influence and 1
if you already have two. In fact, it might only be the reported influence value that changes with the number of buildings.
I have not added specialists, although I often consider adding in at least the citizen. I wasn't certain if excess population was actually being put into citizens - they do still appear down on the bottom row of the Domestic Advisor screen when you pick a city and it always shows a count of "0/0" and the "+" button does nothing. Currently excess population does nothing for you because the citizen is defined to produce no benefit (the settings are all set to 0 in CIV4SpecialistInfos.xml) - changing them from 0 may not directly do anything (my though would be to make them give +1
and +1
each) and would probably require altering the updatePlotYield to get the yields for the specialist and the count of specialists and apply the yield changes manually. Somewhere on the city screen some indicator of what the specialist does (as a mouse-over pop-up) and count of them would have to be added. With only one type, or even 2 or 3, there ought to be room to add it somewhere - a single row the hight of the icon and not very wide.
I think +1
and +1
sounds pretty reasonable for a default citizen specialist. I'm pretty sure I'd still pretty much ignore those and go for huge production bonuses through massive
accumulation but at least I'd know it's not
completely without consequence. By the time you're paying 700
for a factory you will be more likely to start thinking twice about whether you really need it anyway.