1. Sure, with an additional s cost (like for tech-transfer) of course. Though this mechanic would be of questionable utility, since the s-rich party could just refine themselves, then send a D/E specialist to build refined items.
4. Would foreign trade routes still generate e for their owners?
5. There is obvious bias on my part. But while their concept is wonky, I feel getting rid of them will add even more upkeep/fees on top of already quite a bit of upkeep/fees. Multi-system polities don't deserve to get beaten down so harshly imo.
6. Yeah.
7. Trade route e upkeep seems pretty close to irrelevant next to v upkeep. Lowering e upkeep would be a pretty marginal change is my point.
9. Yeah.
10. I personally disagree with Symph on the matter of ships being too expensive, /especially/ e-wise. If anything, they cost too much resource-wise compared to their e-costs, particularly so with the current shipping mechanics.
Refined ships already have resource costs as their dominating factor; cutting the e cost, even by ~25%, won't chance much.
5. There is obvious bias on my part. But while their concept is wonky, I feel getting rid of them will add even more upkeep/fees on top of already quite a bit of upkeep/fees. Multi-system polities don't deserve to get beaten down so harshly imo.
Whats that? Do the opposite of what you advocate after saying you're biased? Don't mind if I do!
Your ships cost to much resource wise because you insist on making ludicrous designs to chase crazy min-maxing rather than acknowledge some components have high primary resource costs as an intended constraint .
So some changes I was thinking of making to the game model:
1) Societies can now contribute s to other societies doing refinements. This will be done by the contributor having an appropriate specialist in the others university. The refinement will be the sole property of the university own. Specialist type will vary by the thing being refined.
2) Some new buildings to fill gaps in the economy model. Should enable more ways to make e as currently only the megacity version is competitive. Going to change how non-renewable power plants work.
3) Increasing the costs of hydroponics; before the costs rose linearly whilst the output was multiplicative, now the costs will rise non-linearly as well.
4) Reducing foreign trade route costs from 4e per lot to 3e.
5) Get rid of supply routes altogether as being counter intuitive and badly represented, everything goes by trade routes now.
6) Reorganisation of trade routes is no longer free and instant action. Instead it will happen during the ship movement phase (so you can't set up a trade route and move stuff along it in the same turn). There will be a cost in both e and s proportional to the size of the trade route being set up. Polities with traits and social choices that are good for trade will get discounts to these costs via a new policy row.
7) Said policy row will also modify the e upkeep of merchant shipping (the s upkeep will remain tied to the fleet s upkeep modifier)
8) I'm going to set up an automated image display to show peoples own trade routes.
9) The things that effect the foo of interstellar trade types are going to be reweighted.
10) Ship base e cost is going to stay the same, but refined e cost is going to be reduced (probably to .33 from its current .45) and the cost of refining a ship is going to be reweighted to more s and less e, and take the form A+[cost]*B2 rather than [cost]*B1 where B2<<B1 (translation, small ships will cost more to refine than current but medium and big ships will cost much less).
1. Makes sense. I didn't know you couldn't have done that before.
2. Yeah, this would be really useful. You've heard me complain all the time about how I was forced to build a megacity even though an ecumenopolis looks cool. How exactly would you change the non-renewable power plants?
3. I assume you're trying to make importing food more cost-effective by increasing the costs of hydroponics? It's a good idea but difficult considering how much it would cost to ship food around in sufficient quantities to make up for hydroponics. maybe increase the number of f per cargo tonnage and the like?
5. I've never used supply routes because I found them odd and looked like something noob would use to cut costs.
6. I don't particularly like this. It makes things much more complicated and reduces our ability to react to situations. And we all know the pace of the NES is fast enough as it is... The e and s cost modifier makes sense though how large the e and s costs would be is something I would like to find out more before making an opinion.
7. Why not separate merchant shipping s upkeep from fleet s upkeep?
8. Sounds good.
9. Explain how they'll be reweighted. How badly will you nerf iggy/me/noob?
10. Let me get back to you.
The only major complaint that I have is that doing away with supply routes costs me money. It makes sense that shipping between your own bases should be cheaper.
So some changes I was thinking of making to the game model:
1) Societies can now contribute s to other societies doing refinements. This will be done by the contributor having an appropriate specialist in the others university. The refinement will be the sole property of the university own. Specialist type will vary by the thing being refined.
2) Some new buildings to fill gaps in the economy model. Should enable more ways to make e as currently only the megacity version is competitive. Going to change how non-renewable power plants work.
3) Increasing the costs of hydroponics; before the costs rose linearly whilst the output was multiplicative, now the costs will rise non-linearly as well.
4) Reducing foreign trade route costs from 4e per lot to 3e.
5) Get rid of supply routes altogether as being counter intuitive and badly represented, everything goes by trade routes now.
6) Reorganisation of trade routes is no longer free and instant action. Instead it will happen during the ship movement phase (so you can't set up a trade route and move stuff along it in the same turn). There will be a cost in both e and s proportional to the size of the trade route being set up. Polities with traits and social choices that are good for trade will get discounts to these costs via a new policy row.
7) Said policy row will also modify the e upkeep of merchant shipping (the s upkeep will remain tied to the fleet s upkeep modifier)
8) I'm going to set up an automated image display to show peoples own trade routes.
9) The things that effect the foo of interstellar trade types are going to be reweighted.
10) Ship base e cost is going to stay the same, but refined e cost is going to be reduced (probably to .33 from its current .45) and the cost of refining a ship is going to be reweighted to more s and less e, and take the form A+[cost]*B2 rather than [cost]*B1 where B2<<B1 (translation, small ships will cost more to refine than current but medium and big ships will cost much less).
1. Cool.
2. Sounds interesting, not that I am aware enough to know what you mean by a megacity model.
3. Oh noooooooooo! :0 My food security!
4. Oh noooooooooo! :0 My precious cashflow! Unless this is simply removing the 1e waste that's inherent in the trading system.
5. Oh noooooooooo! :0 Actually, this sounds fine, I never fully understood why there was a difference between domestic trade routes and supply routes anyway.
6. On the positive side, now I have a justifiable reason to not reshuffle my trade routes every turn. On the negative side, now I will have to calculate a whole new set of costs every time I want to take a shot at optimizing my trade routes.
7. In which direction? Downwards, I'd presume, but I think it's wise not to presume too much.
8. And how much of the capacity is used?
9. I don't know how they're going to be reweighted and what effect that will have, so no judgement yet.
10. That sounds good.
An essential clarification to the new trade costs needs to be whether shifting tonnage between pre-existing routes (as opposed to creating new ones) will cost money.
@Iggy: re point 4: yes the owner of the foreign route will still get 1e.
@Thlayli: duh, obviously. It will be proportional to the changes you make, shifting 30 from trade route A to B is the same as making a new 30 bandwidth route.
So some changes I was thinking of making to the game model:
1) Societies can now contribute s to other societies doing refinements. This will be done by the contributor having an appropriate specialist in the others university. The refinement will be the sole property of the university own. Specialist type will vary by the thing being refined.
2) Some new buildings to fill gaps in the economy model. Should enable more ways to make e as currently only the megacity version is competitive. Going to change how non-renewable power plants work.
3) Increasing the costs of hydroponics; before the costs rose linearly whilst the output was multiplicative, now the costs will rise non-linearly as well.
4) Reducing foreign trade route costs from 4e per lot to 3e.
5) Get rid of supply routes altogether as being counter intuitive and badly represented, everything goes by trade routes now.
6) Reorganisation of trade routes is no longer free and instant action. Instead it will happen during the ship movement phase (so you can't set up a trade route and move stuff along it in the same turn). There will be a cost in both e and s proportional to the size of the trade route being set up. Polities with traits and social choices that are good for trade will get discounts to these costs via a new policy row.
7) Said policy row will also modify the e upkeep of merchant shipping (the s upkeep will remain tied to the fleet s upkeep modifier)
8) I'm going to set up an automated image display to show peoples own trade routes.
9) The things that effect the foo of interstellar trade types are going to be reweighted.
10) Ship base e cost is going to stay the same, but refined e cost is going to be reduced (probably to .33 from its current .45) and the cost of refining a ship is going to be reweighted to more s and less e, and take the form A+[cost]*B2 rather than [cost]*B1 where B2<<B1 (translation, small ships will cost more to refine than current but medium and big ships will cost much less).
1. Good, allows for another application for s translating to e (teaching and refining, not totally convinced on many people yet seeing the benefits of buying terraformers., though they should!)
2. Ahhh a great change, I'll need to see the buildings but this I suspect will allow the great diversity of societies to actually succeed. Power plant changes should be interesting although I'm not sure what sort of changes you want to put in place?
3. Not sure if this will change much, to me the main benefit of hydroponics vs farms is that hydroponics can be built anywhere and operated by overseers. If a higher cost is needed to balance this, so be it.
4. A good thing on reflection, allows me to sell resources to other societies. Previously the main concern was the cost of shipping, this might make it more manageable...
5. A shame, as they were cheaper. As one of the few with a real distributed society probably hits me the hardest, makes expanding out of the core systems more expensive. Not sure if thats a good thing yet.
6&7. Interesting. I'll wait until I see the indepth rules before I comment.
8. Sounds interesting, is this going to be easy to put togeher?
9. Maybe a good thing?
10. hmm Interesting. Seems like a good thing, basically allows more people to have fleets without crippling their econ in trying to get them.
Personally I like all of the proposed changes except 5. I don't think supply routes are counter-intuitive and need to go, and they seemed to be one of the few things helping multi-system polities, as was earlier mentioned.
Frank said:
10. I personally disagree with Symph on the matter of ships being too expensive, /especially/ e-wise. If anything, they cost too much resource-wise compared to their e-costs, particularly so with the current shipping mechanics. Refined ships already have resource costs as their dominating factor; cutting the e cost, even by ~25%, won't chance much.
So basically I had the idea that there would be several paths to strong e production, that would form 'poles of attraction' whereby you'd have bonuses for going closer to a pole and receive inefficiencies try to compromise. Obviously no one is going to get a 'pure' version of any of them, and it will be mix and match to some extent. Also staying in the same group over the course of the game isn't necessary either.
Note these archetypes are only for e production, societies will also vary on other axes, and have other modifier to their preferences.
1a) The Spread (Atmosphere Version - The Settlers)
In this model, where population is located is pretty invariant to its e production wrt density and buildings. Spread wants as many regions as possible to increase population growth and bring in more resource extraction sites. Since number of p is the main thing high population growth is desirable, and social policies to increase development rates are crucial. Policies that provide percentage bonuses to population e production are also useful. Whilst high primary resource value sites are valuable, low value sites are still usable.
1b) The Spread (Non-Atmosphere Version - The Skyjacks)
Similar to the Settlers, but with population growth sacrificed for a wider environmental tolerance. Thus lots of small marginal worlds are still desirable, but they can reach for much worse world and airless rocks and moons.
2a) The Megacity (Minimal Env Stress Version - The Metropolis)
In this model, population receives considerable synergy from other population, making it desirable to concentrate it all on one site/as few sites as feasible. Various buildings which provide percentage bonuses to pop activities are at their most efficient here. Resource sites are run by specialists or subcontracted out altogether, and thus having as few as possible highest value sites are wanted. Stacking up the social stress reduction effects is very important. This subversion aims to have as little environmental stress as possible in the core region, having a nice core regions as possible and maxing out terraforming is crucial, sometimes even forgoing production buildings if the gains from having more people in the region from reduced stress are greater than the lost modifier.
2b) The Megacity (Limited Building Env Stress Version - The Halo)
Rather than taking elaborate efforts to remove env stress, this version skips a lot of it altogether by locating the megacity in a place where building env stress is not a factor (space, airless world, etc), thus meaning production multiplying buildings can be used without issue. These environments increase activity stress which means a smaller total population, so maxing out social stress reduction is less important. The best of these Megacities is build in an area with high natural power production (close to a hot star, in orbit of an energetic gas giant).
3a) The Industrial Node (The Forge)
In this model instead of bonuses to the population you have bonuses to buildings; their construction, functions and resource uses. Due to the compromises to achieve these, you want to be constantly building, hence having lots of medium size cities. Since there isn't much population synergy, trying to reduce stress isn't that important, just let your cities fill up to a cheap stress equilibrium and start constructing a new one. Due to settlements not being as cheap as they are for Spread civilisations, you want to prioritise the best resource nodes/natural energy sources, though you can also use medium level ones quite happily.
3b) The Industrial Node (Extremophile edition - The Deepers)
Deepers act much like the Forge, but exchange some of the latter's bonuses for greater environmental tolerance. The Deeper's end goal is to build settlements in and on giant planets and energy collectors in extreme locales to get very high e production from the environment.
4a) The Service Provider (Gaining Market Share - The Trader)
The Trader exchanges skill at one of the other e producing model for better abilities to make trade routes and secure market share, and gains e from that manner (Though a Industrial Node/Trader is concievably, I think most traders will be cross classing with either spread or megacity model)
4b) The Service Provider (Selling stuff - The Consultant)
The Consultant exchanges skill at producing raw e via one of the other methods for better ability to produce other things (terraforming, designs, teaching, primary production etc) which they can then sell to other polities in exchange for e.
SO ANYWAY GIVEN THAT here are some questions
a) Can you easily identify which archetype you and other societies fall into?
b) Which archetypes do you feel are poorly supported by game mechanics with the current revealed stuff? Which are over powered?
c) If you have opinions on (b), what do you think would enable better support for those models.
OOC:
a) Yes, I can easily identify which archetype societies fall into. I wish I could have a different archetype now.
b) 4b actually, there's been a lack of sufficient wealth for people to be buying their services.
OOC:
a) Yes, I can easily identify which archetype societies fall into. I wish I could have a different archetype now.
b) 4b actually, there's been a lack of sufficient wealth for people to be buying their services.
I'm pretty obviously 1a, if nothing else because you pretty much informed me as much during one of our early talks on Standard design philosophy.
Low civilian upkeep and lack of capital bonii makes horizontal expansion into as many regions as possible a priority for the Standards, as well as the ability to extract small amounts of e from regions that'd be unproductive for others. Due to the synergy of e with e and lots of math I don't understand, this is apparently worse than concentrating all the good stuff in a single high e dev region. Also apparently having multiple good regions is a bad thing for me, don't ask me why.
A type of building that generates bonus system e from multiple world regions (commercial coordinator? air traffic controller?) would obviously be the biggest way to help me, or one that somehow creates synergy and positive effects from the decentralized development model I'm forced to pursue. Not nerfing supply routes would be nice as well.
2b is probably most overpowered. Css'erians.
4a (der Hankish) suffering from environmental crises as we speak and trying the potential long-term transition to 2a. Zerans would probably like to be 2a in the long term as well.
I guess the Corans are another 2b society.
Praxzen are obviously tryharding to be 4b. Potentially Knights long-term as well.
Willing to guess the Ilosians are 3b and the Delugers are 3a.
B.
Spread seems in general too weak. Consultant seems too weak, most likely due to the current situation. Metropolis is strong, though it has a hard limit due to environmental stress; Halo seems the strongest option currently, though I'm utterly unfamiliar and unwilling to inform myself at this particular moment about their env stress problems. Honorary mention for overly strong goes to The Forge, because it's hard to tell just how much of that is due to Kal's over-competence.
C.
I'd say that an m-producer is a completely different beast from an s-producer, in case they were both supposed to fall under Consultant.
Having environmental stress negatively affect development is a nice nerf to Metropolis and a bit of a balancing act for Spread. One option is to buff development growth for ~unitary development and low stress, but harshen up some scaling factors so the buff doesn't change much for high development or high stress.
Another thing might be lowering general s even more than you already have.
A) Yes. For example, I'm a 2a with 4a and 4b coming online. (Everyone calling me a 4b is being really silly.)
B) I think that 1a/b seem underpowered compared to others simply because the factions most geared toward them don't have the startup capital necessary to spread in the way it's built to work off of. Basically those methods are a "cold start" that takes time to reach a critical mass and until then is desperately poor and wretched (see: Standards).
I think 2a is the most broken for reasons that have as much to do with how pop move around as the model itself. It's really easy to create a demographics trap that encourages a 2a to form, and then if you plonk the right buildings on to it it becomes a massive engine of growth. This is effectively how I've wound up with Labyrinth and the Yan turned The Glades into a powerhouse. The 2a produces immediate payoffs that can then be immediately parlayed into expansion or diversification.
C) I do also think that although you're correct that not only will no one arrive at "pure" versions of these poles, no one should want to either. This is most pronounced for 2a itself, since you can only concentrate on a single region (and increase its dev) for so long, before needing to go found another megacity elsewhere and (painfully) build it up, while 1a/b and 3a/b are much more flexible since they're always growing. This induces a 2a/b to sort of inherently seek 4a/b diversification since it can effectively ride its economic engine to depletion before being in position to construct a new copy of itself. It's similar to East Asian economies not diversifying after maxing out export-driven growth and stalling out. This need for diversity is probable the one major drawback to 2a/b and is the offset for its fast-out-of-the-gate capabilities, it seems; 1a/b and 3a/b don't really need it.
4a by itself seem sort of weak conceptually but the Corans provide a fine counterexample, so they seem fine. 4b is primarily based on other people wanting things, which requires them to be rational informed actors, etc.; its strength is entirely dependent on ability to provide and the intelligence/foresight of the buyers to want.
3a/b doesn't really seem to have been developed enough to comment.
1a/b as stated earlier just seems to be lacking in the initial resources to get up and go quickly. Once it builds momentum it seems it'd be hard to take it away though, so I'm not sure that it's actually "weak," just slow to start.
So basically I had the idea that there would be several paths to strong e production, that would form 'poles of attraction' whereby you'd have bonuses for going closer to a pole and receive inefficiencies try to compromise. Obviously no one is going to get a 'pure' version of any of them, and it will be mix and match to some extent. Also staying in the same group over the course of the game isn't necessary either.
Note these archetypes are only for e production, societies will also vary on other axes, and have other modifier to their preferences.
1a) The Spread (Atmosphere Version - The Settlers)
In this model, where population is located is pretty invariant to its e production wrt density and buildings. Spread wants as many regions as possible to increase population growth and bring in more resource extraction sites. Since number of p is the main thing high population growth is desirable, and social policies to increase development rates are crucial. Policies that provide percentage bonuses to population e production are also useful. Whilst high primary resource value sites are valuable, low value sites are still usable.
1b) The Spread (Non-Atmosphere Version - The Skyjacks)
Similar to the Settlers, but with population growth sacrificed for a wider environmental tolerance. Thus lots of small marginal worlds are still desirable, but they can reach for much worse world and airless rocks and moons.
2a) The Megacity (Minimal Env Stress Version - The Metropolis)
In this model, population receives considerable synergy from other population, making it desirable to concentrate it all on one site/as few sites as feasible. Various buildings which provide percentage bonuses to pop activities are at their most efficient here. Resource sites are run by specialists or subcontracted out altogether, and thus having as few as possible highest value sites are wanted. Stacking up the social stress reduction effects is very important. This subversion aims to have as little environmental stress as possible in the core region, having a nice core regions as possible and maxing out terraforming is crucial, sometimes even forgoing production buildings if the gains from having more people in the region from reduced stress are greater than the lost modifier.
2b) The Megacity (Limited Building Env Stress Version - The Halo)
Rather than taking elaborate efforts to remove env stress, this version skips a lot of it altogether by locating the megacity in a place where building env stress is not a factor (space, airless world, etc), thus meaning production multiplying buildings can be used without issue. These environments increase activity stress which means a smaller total population, so maxing out social stress reduction is less important. The best of these Megacities is build in an area with high natural power production (close to a hot star, in orbit of an energetic gas giant).
3a) The Industrial Node (The Forge)
In this model instead of bonuses to the population you have bonuses to buildings; their construction, functions and resource uses. Due to the compromises to achieve these, you want to be constantly building, hence having lots of medium size cities. Since there isn't much population synergy, trying to reduce stress isn't that important, just let your cities fill up to a cheap stress equilibrium and start constructing a new one. Due to settlements not being as cheap as they are for Spread civilisations, you want to prioritise the best resource nodes/natural energy sources, though you can also use medium level ones quite happily.
3b) The Industrial Node (Extremophile edition - The Deepers)
Deepers act much like the Forge, but exchange some of the latter's bonuses for greater environmental tolerance. The Deeper's end goal is to build settlements in and on giant planets and energy collectors in extreme locales to get very high e production from the environment.
4a) The Service Provider (Gaining Market Share - The Trader)
The Trader exchanges skill at one of the other e producing model for better abilities to make trade routes and secure market share, and gains e from that manner (Though a Industrial Node/Trader is concievably, I think most traders will be cross classing with either spread or megacity model)
4b) The Service Provider (Selling stuff - The Consultant)
The Consultant exchanges skill at producing raw e via one of the other methods for better ability to produce other things (terraforming, designs, teaching, primary production etc) which they can then sell to other polities in exchange for e.
SO ANYWAY GIVEN THAT here are some questions
a) Can you easily identify which archetype you and other societies fall into?
b) Which archetypes do you feel are poorly supported by game mechanics with the current revealed stuff? Which are over powered?
c) If you have opinions on (b), what do you think would enable better support for those models.
Well there is a difference between what I am now, and what I was looking to do, but lets try this for everyone.
This is what I think the societies SHOULD be, not what they currently are:
Hankish: 2a, 4a/4b Good fit currently. Although Mining Engineers?!?
Dardareo: 3a, (2b from their history). But these guys are definitly into factories and building stuff...Wether that is forgeHabs in space or otherwise? *shrug*
Quasi: 1b (a bit at odds with the faction story though!)
Corans: 2a, 4a/b
Zera: ? I don't know. The current set up is not great though.
Cssersians: 2a, 4a
Standards: 1a, potentially 4b (selling of f, for the natural farmers..)
Seffassians: 2a
Leeni: 2a
Praxzen: 2a, 4a/b
Ilosians: 4b, 3b
Delugers: 2a, high growth rate almost makes them 1a, but their desire for water worlds...very specific. 4b. Poor factory bonus sort of excludes them from 3a
Yanii: 2a, 4b (selling s services). This is obvious for a culture who spent most of its time as lab assistants! The current trade track is weird...although probably influenced by the current game set-up.
Knights: 1a? 4b. Much like the standards I guess...
B/C.
In order of power: Trade, MegaCity (many have it, but it doesn't work for everyone), Forge, Spread.
Trade works, and it works well. If you have a need someone can supply it to you, if you have the e. If your good on the markets that's an easy way to gain e.
Megacities and Forge are current linked: so the issue is that pop synergy with productive factories is very good. If you don't have a good factory value, megacities won't work for you. If factories work for you but you have low pop density you concentrate it all into one place to make it work for you.
Spread: Absolutely no support for gaining e with a spread out population. Heck, I got productive resource extraction points nerfed! (that bit was by accident, it was meant to nerf the overly good industrial plants)
A final note: Megacities are also good because of two other factor: s production. If you want it, you need to concentrate your talents to one point. Development values, its easier for a megacity, that multiplicative bonus applies to everything, whilst a spread out polity will often have underdeveloped value simply because they are new builds or similar.
So to solve: make pop density not feed into everything. (i.e. Trade, works well because it doesn't depend on this). Solving this will allow for pop synergy with itself to work better and decouple the Megacity-Forge link, Building Synergy with itself will make the Forge work better. Spread will work by having a synergy of low pop densities with buildings.
@Sym: I think one of the issues with spread styles as used so far is that none of them have really managed to get governments and economies sorted out to remove the development caps.
@Kal, I thing you are pretty off wrt to current society assignments lol.
Industrial parks are explicitly meant to support the Industrial Node playstyle, not spread-styles. If you think they were then you're missing the point entirely .
I'm not sure what you mean when you say factories are crucial to the Megacity style? Several people are getting quite strong e results without them.
@Sym: I think one of the issues with spread styles as used so far is that none of them have really managed to get governments and economies sorted out to remove the development caps.
That and if it's coupled with a high growth/high pop setup like you'd want, transitioning takes time. Again, it could just be slow as opposed to weak, it's hard to say.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the societal/government transitions slow down Spread economies even further when completed (due to increased resource requirements, which disproportionately affect high p and high region societies) before the development levels begin to slowly rise.
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