[MoO] ICEMOD: mod design, race design, strategies

[Rocco.40]

Not sure we wanna be throwing THAT argument around in this particular game.

Black Hole Generator is pretty realistic noh?

Do you guys think AF should be un-nerfed? Or half-nerfed?

Am really of opinion that 3x shots at +50% was too powerful.. Dukinsons +75% suggestion could be a good alternative though.

edit: thing is that i don't see a.i.'s making good use of the AF mod, while we can make ultra efficient ships with that mod.

edit2: "I wonder if it would be possible to lessen the Autofire penalty to -10?" The offset for that -20 penalty has not been found yet.

 

[Markus Ramikin]

thing is that i don't see a.i.'s making good use of the AF mod, while we can make ultra efficient ships with that mod.

You say that like it's a bad thing. That's part of the fun of Moo2. Let the AI be content with the humongous racial and difficulty-level-based advantages it has. Let the player enjoy designing awesome ships, especially in late game.

I mean... you already nerfed Analyzer, what next, nerf HEF to 25% and make Hyper-X take 40% ships space? There's gotta be a limit to how much we're willing to hold the computer's hand at the expense of nothing being awesome any more.

Edit:
To be clear: I am in favor of unnerfing pretty much as a matter of principle, but in terms of objective game balance, I don't think a "good" solution exists either way, as long as the computer doesn't know how to tech and pretty much never builds high BD ships. It's either going to get screwed over by powerful player-built Autofire ships, or it's going to screw itself over by building Autofire ships which then miss against the player's high BD. Well, maybe that latter possibility is more common with me, since I play early beam/stabilizer ships often, and I get the impression most people don't do that...

If you could find that offset, I think your nerf PLUS changing the penalty to -10 would be fine, though.

Edit2:
I am reminded of Sulla's review of Civilisation V:

The game balance is marginally better after the patch, but it was achieved by relentlessly attacking player strategies that proved to be effective. It works, sort of, but is it fun? Not really.

This is kinda our situation here. The underlying problem is that the AI doesn't know how to play this game. You simply cannot truly fix Moo2, no matter what you do to the balance, without fine control over what the AI does, especially how it techs, the kind of control I imagine we won't have unless the code gets released. The path to making the game easier for the Ai inevitably involves nerfing into the ground every fun and awesome strategy the player has at his disposal. And I don't think it's worth it.

 

[Markus Ramikin]

Another thing. The reason I think we have had these discussions earlier about Nukes being supposedly OP (hah!), and the "what to do after Nukes go obsolete if you aren't Creative" thing, is that military techs are in the same fields as vital economic/expansion techs. So that researching cells/pollution/armors will always give you powerful Nukes. And if you are Tolerant, you'll get Merculite, but otherwise you probably won't, unless you have the time and breathing space to tech to Atmo and don't mind the extra pollution. If you're taking Iridium, you might take Tritanium and then Zeons instead of Zortium, but honestly, all this is a pain.

I wonder if this is really a design flaw, and this game would have been better if military techs competed with military techs. If you had a "weapons" field like in Moo1, and non-Creative empires had to choose between missiles/earlybeams, and then torpedoes/latebeams. And the big decisions involved whether you want to have beam ships or missile/torpedo ships or fighter/bomber ships etc.

I am not sure.

(Of course even in this hypothetical tech tree the AI would still be lost, as it would research beams and then not get Hyper-X or HEF, or missiles/torpedoes without Sensors, or heavy fighters without good bombs etc).

 

[Rocco.40]

I wonder if this is really a design flaw, and this game would have been better if military techs competed with military techs. If you had a "weapons" field like in Moo1, and non-Creative empires had to choose between missiles/earlybeams, and then torpedoes/latebeams.

Good point you raise here and I have a couple of completely overhauled techtrees on the drawingboard that aim to do exactly this, but have never made them in full working games. Am not sure as well. Not someting for ice, but perhaps we could make such experiment in a seperate mod one day, just for the fun of it.

That's part of the fun of Moo2.

wholeheartedly agree here and hope ice is still fun. that is after all, why we play it.
with ice I am really in the finetuning phase and i belief that most possible big ticket items are in.
(btw, anyone already tried the new 'lucky'?)

wishlist of big items is-
- improve autobuild option (but the location in the code remains a mystery for now)
- improve a.i. research path (more in force fields, sociology, biology)
- and I would like to decipher diplomacy items as currently it is pretty much a black box.

 

[Markus Ramikin]

Not someting for ice

Unless the experiment goes really well

 

[Rocco.40]

good read by Sulla and he has something to say about MOO too:
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/MOO/mooeditorial.html

 

[Markus Ramikin]

Interesting. I saw him praise Moo1 in passing (specifically: the way ships were stacked into groups) in the Civ5 review, and it was about the only thing I disagreed with.

Here I think he's overpraising the simplicity of Moo1. A bit of complexity is fun, though Civ4 sure does have too much. Though he's right, of course, that complexity doesn't always mean depth, and his overall point is very good. It's just the details...

Spoiler :

The sliders - I wasn't in love with them. I hated that they occupied such a small area of the screen, so that getting exactly what I wanted amounted to pixel-hunting. Even the less/more buttons were relatively unhelpful. I hated the way overflow was handled - I much prefer the Moo2 local storage of production to Moo1's global reserve, or worse, to building a ton of extra missile bases I never wanted in the first place just because I am finishing a missile upgrade or planetary shield this turn - unless I'm willing to micromanage that. Having cash as the "global production reserve", with its own possible bonuses from Democracy, FT, Tax and buildings, worked great for me.

Maybe in principle sliders can be good, but Moo1's didn't endear themselves to me. (And don't get me started on the technology sliders.)

Planetary micro is a bit of a pain in Moo2 if you have many planets, but I'd like to give it another go with such improvements as:
* being able to script the autobuilder in-game
* being able to script and select a few building templates (think Tactics in Dragon Age)
* better use of screenspace, with a queue that isn't limited to 8 items.

The randomness of the tech tree was supposed to be a good thing? In Moo1 I always cursed the inability to control whether I'll get Robotic Controls III or IV or not - and that bit of randomness made for quite a difference in my early economic strength, obviously!

Whatever problems I have with Moo2's tech tree, at least I can plan with it. I can plan out a path that includes, say, Heavy Fighters+Anti-Matter Bomb+some decent beams, and pick those things up even if I'm non-Creative.

Stacking ships by type does make battles simpler, but with only 6 possible ship designs (and that includes colony ships!) which you have to scrap if you want to make a new one, along with existing ships, that system sucked. Sure, in principle you can make a game that has more ship designs, and with a larger battle area (like Moo2 had) and longer beam ranges (like Moo2 had) that might be a system worth trying.

But Moo2 was fine too; the difference between the smallest and largest ship size in Moo2 is much, much less than the same difference in Moo1 (Remember those stacks of hundreds or thousands of tiny ships?), so fleet sizes stay reasonable. Sure, in endgame it's possible to have large battles that require more micro. But I liked those epic armadas facing off each other, and if I didn't, I'd play smaller maps.

I do NOT think it would be an improvement, compared to facing 3 rows full of Doom Stars and lesser ships (with my comparably tiny group of 6 Doom Stars of Awesome), if instead I had to look at 4-6 icons with large abstract numbers next to them, and 1 icon with a number 6 on my side.

Basically, Moo1's system advantage is that it scales smoothly no matter how high you go; Moo2 didn't have that. But it achieves that by being abstract in a way that I don't find appealing. Is 50 ships a lot? 100? 1000? It's just a number next to an icon.

(Spoilered to compress, 'casue this isn't really the right place for reviewing Moo1)

 

[Markus Ramikin]

Upon reflection, I find myself impressed by an upside of the autofire nerf: now Maulers aren't the obviously inferior option.

 

[Dukinson]

The only retreat scenarios I've ever seen. I don't believe they are retreating though as there is not supposed to be any such thing. It's why I called it "repulsion".

Next time you see this, I would appreciate if you can share a savegame.

Here it is. I couldn't figure out how to post attachments at the nebula forums.

You can move the fleet and the defense may still repel the ships. Move them to different locations until the random seed changes enough and you'll see it for sure even with no ships at garrison.

 

[Rocco.40]

thanks for save. i can see the issue
have you seen this in classic moo too?

I can only guess at this point: (battle at Galos II)
- perhaps it has something to do with the large sakkra fleet, their numbers exceeding the number of available mines from the artemis net.
- the sakkra fleet was successful at taking down all planetary defenses except the artemis net.
perhaps because the net was still up, the planetary bombardment phase was not initiated.

EDIT:
have been able to replicate problem in hotseat and also in classic.
when fleet attacks systems with artemis net it is not able to take down the net, causing the retreat
strategic bombing phase is therefore not initiated.
I would consider this a quite serious bug, as the artemis net makes you 'invincible'
should the Net be deleted from Strategic?

 

[Dukinson]

Here's the thing, sometimes they do indeed destroy the net. It's about 50/50 or maybe a little better than 50/50 in favor of defense. The defenses will always be destroyed if they have sufficient fleet size to win but are "repelled".

Is it a bug? I would say so. I've exploited this many times. The game I showed you, I won. I couldn't defeat their fleet so I avoided it. With nets and interdictors, it was impossible to destroy me faster than I could destroy them.

 

[Rocco.40]

strange phenomenon.
in the hotseat tests i did, fleets were always "repelled".
any idea why sometimes the net can be destroyed?

 

[Dukinson]

Absolutely none. A massive fleet seems just as likely to win as a fleet that is sufficiently large to win the battle. Also I misspoke, the net isn't destroyed. It can be captured with the colony.

If the test you did kept giving the same result, the seed must not have been changed enough. I've had my net overwhelmed many times.

 

[Dukinson]

I was curious if there is a minimum amount of time for a lucky effect to take place. For instance, I've never seen rich homeworld on the second turn.

 

[Rocco.40]

Lucky is part of the random events code and they can happen from T50 onwards.

 

[Orionnut]

Hey guys, I want to download the Moo2 workshop to have a look what this editor is about but the website where it was hosted, was down, could anyone help me and send me a new link and a copy of it?

Also I wish to mod the Fighters, Bombers and Heavy Fighters stats so more could be pack into a ship, does any one know how could this be done? Which lbx file to extract and etc? I just need some hints to make a start.

 

[Rocco.40]

yeah its down, hadn't checked it in a while.. maybe temporary?
for modding fighters etc. you can use the OCL_Improved tool.
it can change many values of the game.
follow this link:
moo2.nirran.com/

 

[Orionnut]

Hi, thank you very much for your reply! However the website seems to be still down and maybe permanent, if you have a copy of the M002 Workshop, could you or someone please send it to me via E-mail? Please send it to masteroforion2222@gmail.com ? Thank you again for the information on the editing.

 

[Rocco.40]

Made the package downloadable from my site as a temp solution:

moo2mod.com/MOO2_workshop.zip

 

[Orionnut]

Thank you again, much appreciated! I would like to ask another question if anyone could help me. Now I am trying to use the OCL improved, the lack of instruction is a bit frustrating at understanding how it works. In the "settings", there is a "text data file name". Do you mean to create a blank .txt file? Or use the "my_rules_vdcreg.txt" default? Or you create your own?

When I experiment the program and create my own .txt, it has errors like "2nd comma not found line 1". When I tried used the "Extract Game Information and Load Data files"

The lack of references is frustrating again at trying to understand what the error was.

Again, do you create your own .txt and you used the "Extract Game Information and Load Data files" to load the lbx files?

Is there a template .txt you load from? At one point the program crashed with 12 GB loaded.

I am just kind of scratching my head here. Also I am using the Win version of Moo2, I guess you load the Win .exe version of Moo2?