[MoO] Whats the most unbalanced custom race you've ever made (MOO2)?

[neilkaz]

Here's some "simple" math to explain how housing works.

http://masteroforion2.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_masteroforion2_archive.html#109477303478650321

It depends on the race, planet size, and construction improvements, but often when housing I notice that my pop growth slows down somewhat once the second worker is born. Of course, I move the newborn quickly to another world where he can do something else and just keep housing with 1 pop.

Usually with a nicely built up UR planet I want it to make warships, but sometimes when really wanting to grow my pop and having enough ships or being at peace, I've used all its pop for housing. I recall getting more than 1.4/turn with Orion and all 4 construction buildings as UniTol.

You might find it interesting to move people off Monkar II and see the effects on housing.

The best efficiency for your empire is achieved by housing with 1 pop and sending newborns to other worlds (hopefully in the same system or nearby) so they quickly can do things.

Yes, if your planets in a system aren't needed to do anything special and just growing normally, best growth is when they are at half max pop and sometimes you can balance them out.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[scratchthepitch]

I don't keep planets at 1 pop, but grow them to full capacity instead. A 1 pop planet is useless for making anything besides pop. With only making 1 pop per 4-5 turns, that's not a very effective pop producer compared to built up planets who can produce a new pop at a 1 per turn rate - in terms of my game strategies, anyway.

In the early game, most of my colonies can't build infrastructure fast enough to delay the build up by having them house. By mid game I can afford to buy their infrastructure and then have more options in what I do with them. One example of this would be a newly colonized planet once I have established a productive empire. I can go about it 2 ways. Either put the new colony on housing or set it to produce infrastructure. I usually go with the latter, since I want the planet able to build things asap. I build up its pop by sending pop TO IT from other more built up planets that have either enough pop to be strong industrial producers or who reached max pop capacity. Meanwhile I will buy the new colony its buildings at first till it can build them itself in short times. Once the new colony has built up its infrastructure enough to produce, I will put it on housing if there is nothing else I don't need it to build.

With abundant and lower rated planets, I will initially send them 1 or 2 pop and then help them out by buying their infrastructure. The speed of this build up depends on what I can afford to buy per turn. With the rich plus planets, I may send 10 or more pop to them initially. Like with Orion, as soon as I colonize it, I'll send that many and then it can build itself up at a quick pace. Most rich plus planets can build up quickly on their own once they have a couple of production buildings and 3-4 pop.

Another way I use housing is on fully built up planets sitting idle who are already at max capacity. I will send 1 pop elsewhere, then put the planet on housing to grow it back more quickly. That's more of later game tactic since usually my planets have stuff to build in the earlier part of the game. In the earlier part of the game, I'll have the planets export their last pop to new colonies and just let the pop grow back naturally while the planet builds other things that are needed. It usually takes about 6-7 turns for these planets to regrow that last pop naturally.

 

[Martin Alvito]

vmxa refers to a teleblitz race "Telepathic, Warlord, Trans Dimensional, Omniscient, RHW, Feudal, Repulsive"
and gives an example game in this thread http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=282108

Was that race Cal Tech's conclusion as well?

It was something very similar. I don't recall if they ran with Trans Dimensional or not; I want to say that they didn't, but I also want to say that they were optimizing around standard settings rather than pre-warp. I've got text files around here on a CD somewhere that I preserved before the site went down.

Demolith (as it is called now) is great once it gets rolling but vulnerable to early attack due to poorer production and can't REX like UniTolProd+1

Pure gamble, that. If you drop the Guardian before 120 (I've done it before 110 with a good start and some brutal micro), it's real hard to lose. Even against humans. UniTol struggles mightily to build a fleet that can crack a Star Base and a researcher's modest defensive fleet before the Guardian goes down, but you're toast if a blitzer finds you early.

IIRC, UniTol/LHW/RHW is frequently more effective than +1 Prod due to the vastly stronger early game. Spamming Colony Ships faster means earlier secondary systems and the attendant housing colonies (faster initial Colony Bases don't hurt either), and it's hard for the +1 Prod race to keep up. This does assume that you exploit everything to the hilt (Trade Goods overflow, max efficiency rush buys, and so on).

UniAquaProd+2 is also very strong but I somewhat prefer UniTol.

Another race for gamblers. The map might make it vastly better than UniTol, and it might suck relatively speaking.

I disproportionately like Aqua. It makes terraforming cheaper, and it allows an easy way to 'max out' populations efficiently after conquest (i.e., drop a few of my own citizens in after conquering a planet, taking up the extra 'gaia' room that their planets will have.)

If I have population with AquaTol's bonuses, I'm a real big fan of genocide. And overbuilding freighters for shipping colonists. A half dozen of my people with a couple of housing colonies becomes a functional system in a hurry, and assimilation takes soooo loooong.

I'm not sure their advice on housing is completely correct. What I have found is that pop increases are greatest when the planet is approximately half full of its current pop maximum. So you don't get your largest increases when a planet only has 1 pop.

Right, but you're not making things when you're rocking the Housing. The idea with the Housing colony is to have one truly functional planet in the system and fill it up as rapidly as possible. As the game wears on it does make sense to start slamming out Housing in a lot of places with half-full planets, but during the period when the game is not yet decided you need to produce real outputs in addition to citizens.

Where things get interesting is the decision-making process to resolve when and how many citizens to take off Housing/proper production and put on building AFs, Robo-Miners, Research Labs and Supercomputers in the housing colonies. Like many strategy games of its era, MOO2 is a micro beast.

 

[scratchthepitch]

Right, but you're not making things when you're rocking the Housing. The idea with the Housing colony is to have one truly functional planet in the system and fill it up as rapidly as possible. As the game wears on it does make sense to start slamming out Housing in a lot of places with half-full planets, but during the period when the game is not yet decided you need to produce real outputs in addition to citizens.

I hadn't thought of using newly colonized planets in a system to make housing for the best colony in that system. In the early expansion stage of the game, I'm usually spamming colony ships. Once one colony in a system is created, I go on to the next system. I try to get the best planets in the best systems first, or pick ones that will get these within range. In systems with more than one choice planets, I may colonize both before moving on to the next. Especially if AI are nearby. Once I have gotten those systems I want, I then go back and colonize the rest of the planets in the systems I colonized at a much more leisurely pace. By the time I start filling in, the original colonies are fairly well established and I will use them to help populate the newer colonies in their systems. The strategy being first to get as large a territory as possible before the AI moves in, then get enough planets productive so I can build a fleet to counter any repulsive AI that might be near (I've been wiped out a couple of times by an early game AI blitz from a nearby repulsive). Quite the opposite of using the young colonies to populate the older colonies. I may try the 1 pop housing tactic in my next game to compare.

In the current game I've been playing, I took a different tack and fully colonized my home system before building colony ships. This was because I thought the only system within range was a monster system. The others appeared to be out of range. So I built up the home system in order to build up a fleet of ships capable of capturing the monster system, so I could get to the out of range systems. Once I got all 4 home system planets going, I built my first ship and discovered that several of the systems I had thought were beyond range were actually within range. I then changed plans and switched builds from warships to colony ships and started spamming. Having 4 planets able to build colony ships at the same time was great and I quickly expanded and caught up with the AI, some of which already had 4-5 systems under their control. I was lucky in that my home system contained 4 good planets, 2 rich ones and 2 abundant ones, and was able to make them all productive quickly.

 

[neilkaz]

For those who like to play as creative the following race is really OP but proved to be an easy fun game since I could make anything I wanted to.

UniCreativeLRHWProd+1 for the +20 and the usual -10 of Repulsive-10GC-Def

45 Production on HW but pollution reduces it to 26 at the start. Soon you can get to the pollution processor/merc missle tech and cut that pollution down considerably and have some power production.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't really like Uni for Creative, because the morale bonuses are not available, and they end up being a really important component of the later game. Morale boosts everything, and creative gives you a number of 'free' morale boosts

 

[scratchthepitch]

I don't really like Uni for Creative, because the morale bonuses are not available, and they end up being a really important component of the later game. Morale boosts everything, and creative gives you a number of 'free' morale boosts

I had wondered about the cancellation of morale effects by uni and if that meant losing out on the +60% boosts those buildings provide. That boost is in all outputs too. The +50% in ind/food give uni a strong start, but later in the game the other government types get the morale boosts. Feudal and dict eventually get +40% and dem gets +60%. These effectively cancel out uni's advantages over the rest of the governments in the later part of the game.

I guess the designers didn't fully think that part through when developing the game. A 10% morale boost per building, instead of the 20% boost would have been better, as it would have allowed uni to keep its advantages in ind/food over the other government types throughout the game. I wish I knew how to mod that kind of a change.

 

[neilkaz]

Moral benefits really do rock since they improve everything, but it takes a while to get them going. The Holo Simulator is a nice reasonably early building, but in general non-creatives can't really afford to not get Supercomps instead.

You can get up to 80% moral. +20 for Holo Sim, +20 as an achievement (no building and automatic) for Virtual Reality Network (I take that rather than Gal Cyber Net unless Uni) and 30% for building Pleasure Domes. The added 10% comes from Psyonics.

I have a game to soon wrap up using DictCreLithRHW and things went fine and now that I am well over 200 turns into the game, Moral is building up. However, the game is allready basically won as most enemies are eliminated. I still somewhat prefer Unification with Creative since the 50% gains for production and farming help from turn 1, getting the civ out of the starting get and ramping it up more quickly from where it can continue expanding. One of the drawbacks for Dictatorships is needing a Marine Barracks to cancel out -20% moral. Advanced Govt eliminates that need, but for Adv Govt for Unification, you get +75% farming and production rather than +50%. Anyhow, almost any game vs the AI's (Impossible 8 races) is basically won if you can survive and tech that much anyhow.

My game as UniCreProd+1LRHW went somewhat better than my game as UniCreArtiLRHW noting that for most of the game I was using my home world for production rather than research so I didn't get much more than an early research boost from Arti, whereas +1 prod helped all over. Still both games were easy wins as expected with these OP races.

As allready discussed, UniSubAqua is a great combo giving large planets and Uni's farming advantage stacks with Aqua's on nice worlds. The home world's farmers produce 4.5F/turn freeing up 6 workers at the start. I played two games as this, and was somewhat stronger when my other 3 picks were used for LRHW rather than Prod+1 giving me a tremendous pop 28 rich homeworld which was useful all game.

Changing to a race that can use moral I played the OP LithoTol last night (all 20 negs, 10 each so govt is Dict). This is an easy race to play with no farming and no pollution so you can move your workers from task to task as needed with no wasted production.
Initially you can start with 8 workers producing a total of 24pp/turn. When you want to research you get 24 rp/turn with those 8 helping prewarp research a bit. Since you're Tolerant, you won't be suffering to very low pop junk planets nearby and since you're Lithovore, you don't need to worry about feeding people on those normally lousy planets in your home system, saving on freighters and keeping everyone working or researching.

This was my first game with LithoVore and now past 230 turns it has long been won as only the dieing Psilons remain. As usual with these OP civs, my house rules require me to conquer every enemy planet with transports, rather than bombing them all to death. LithoVore was stronger than I expected, although I think I am maybe 20 turns behind a typical UniTol game. Of course, once I go conquering I have to worry about food and pollution, but that is OK. Moral is now +60% on the best planets which is rocking. I'd have +80% but never found where I could steal Holo Sims.

One slightly bothersome issue with Dict vs Uni is that agents only start at +10 rather than +15 and in those games I noticed more early techs stolen.


.. neilkaz ..

 

[scratchthepitch]

I had forgotten about Pleasure Dome boosting morale 30%, not 20% and about the psionics and adv. government boosts (for uni.). Thanks for the correction. Still, it leaves uni a little behind the others late in the game, especially if creative is used. In my mod I had uni costing 6 picks, dem 5 and feud a -4, with dict remaining at 0. I think now I'll lower uni to 4 picks instead of the 6. It's still a powerful boost early in the game, but not quite as good as dem, since it doesn't maintain that edge throughout the game and the other government types catch up and even surpass it late game. Uni is especially good for AI races without creative since they would be unlikely to get all the morale boosters. Players, on the other hand are much more likely to get all the morale techs. If not through creative, then by trading the AI.

 

[neilkaz]

My opinion of Uni is that I prefer it to Demo since strength in the beginning to early/mid game is lots more important to what happens in the late game. This is because, production gains allow you to start growing exponentially and also allow you to conquer/defend. Research advantages are nice, but super-production races can more easily do the bulk of their research with buildings.

In vanilla with Demo being +7 I think Uni should be +8 rather than +6 so for your mod with Demo at +5 (I am OK with that) I'd just leave Uni alone at +6.

On a normal HW, Uni gives +1.5 production and +1 farming and on rich aquatic worlds these gains increase further. Note that +1 prod costs 3 picks and +1 food 4 picks (too expensive)

Moral gains are very nice and creative will get them all eventually, but note that this is late in the game and if you get that far, you've usually got an easy win anyhow. Creative does cost 8 picks so I don't think it unbalanced for it to easily get the moral techs, the majority of which are rather late in the tech tree.

Just my opinion .. neilkaz ..

 

[scratchthepitch]

neilkaz

I had mostly played this game using creative, so anything that boosted research I considered most desirable. If not besieged by repulsives, I relied upon research to build up a technical edge in the first part of the game, then I would use that to quickly catch up. There were a few times where that strategy of expand and research failed when I got attacked by a race early on who had built up a fleet instead. Experimenting, a couple times I reloaded a much earlier save and changed tactics to building a fleet instead. I built up a bunch of warships, missile/interceptor destroyers, since that was all I could in decent time, and found these were usually more than enough to deal with the weak early AI battleships and cruisers that these repulsives sent over. That lead to successfully trying them out on planet monsters later.

Since I've been modding the game, I've been playing all sorts, and have found that without creative, that early production is more powerful than research. In earlier mod versions, I had put dem and uni at the same cost, 5 picks, but later bumped uni up a point to 6 due to realizing that production was probably stronger than research overall in this game. I think you are right, reducing uni would not be a good idea, even if the benefit is mostly early in the game. What I think I'll do is put both governments at 6. At 5, I think that is too low for dem, anyway. I am somewhat undecided about which government is the better, both of these governments seem to have an equal plus and minus about them, considering the whole course of a game. 6 is the most picks any trait costs in the mod since I wanted to allow more traits per race than in the stock game.

 

[Aroddo]

Here's some "simple" math to explain how housing works.

http://masteroforion2.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_masteroforion2_archive.html#109477303478650321

It depends on the race, planet size, and construction improvements, but often when housing I notice that my pop growth slows down somewhat once the second worker is born. Of course, I move the newborn quickly to another world where he can do something else and just keep housing with 1 pop.
...

Regarding houseing: Here's a practical example:

A population growth of +600 is nice. Of course, by this time it doesn't really matter anymore.

 

[neilkaz]

re: housing, if you transfer that 2nd colonist elsewhere, you may even find slightly higher growth with just 1 colonist housing. Of course this also depend on how much production you have, noting it takes a decent ammount for +600k/turn. My point is that growth with 1 guy housing won't be much worse if at all, so that "spare" colonist can be put to work on another planet at no loss to housing.

I've played a couple games as DemoLithArti and don't have the full start up optimized yet. From what I tested and also did the math for, it hardly matters whether you go Labs first and then Factories or Factories/Lab but I ended up a bit better Labs first. Then you build colony bases. After that I am unsure whether to go for colony ships or to Supercomps and then RoboMiners first or just to RoboMiners and then colony ships.
(Of course with other races I am building colony ships once I have Factories..unless I am needing war ships)

In game 1 I went Supercomps/Robos and then colony ships and things went well, but my starting point was more alone. In Game 2 I went for colony ships quicker and things didn't go as well noting that there were 4 races jammed into my corner of the galaxy. I had to switch over the second colony ship to a MIRV nuke BB, necessitating that research rather than comps/robos.

WOW that -10% agent penalty is nasty and even with Neural Scanner you still have 0% defensive spies. My research efforts seemed to be for everyone and then I met the Darloks who made matters worse. Alkari has stolen two of the techs I got from Orion.

Just me and a near runaway Alkari left in game two after about 285 turns (clearly longer than it took me to conquer all in game 1) I'll win it for sure and will have some fun using Quantum Detonator on enemy fighters and missiles. They have fighter garrisons and many ships with fighters. I'll use frigates with just aug engines and quantum det. They also may be able to raid the starbase before I explode them.

I noticed no +10 moral from Psionics for my democracy but perhaps I missmoused to the wrong tech.

Oops..re Unification Adv Govt..it gives +100% farming and production from what I've read, clearly outstripping moral for those two.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[El_Machinae]

What I noticed about morale in my games was that the -20 dictatorship penalty (without barracks) disappeared after I got advanced government, but the barracks still gave 20% morale. So, advanced government essentially gave a +20% morale bonus. That, plus psionics, gave 30% more than was available to other governments.

 

[vmxa]

I was trying to decide what game to play tonight and the screen shot made up my mind, thanks. Moo2 it is today.

 

[Aroddo]

I was trying to decide what game to play tonight and the screen shot made up my mind, thanks. Moo2 it is today.

That +600k pop growth planet had tolerant bulrathi controlled by unification race with auto factory and robo factory, though. AND it was Ultra Rich.

Could still be worthwhile making a breeder planet, though.

 

[scratchthepitch]

WOW that -10% agent penalty is nasty and even with Neural Scanner you still have 0% defensive spies. My research efforts seemed to be for everyone and then I met the Darloks who made matters worse. Alkari has stolen two of the techs I got from Orion.

Just look at it as a way of giving the AI a chance. I'm sure the coders did.

I'll win it for sure and will have some fun using Quantum Detonator on enemy fighters and missiles. They have fighter garrisons and many ships with fighters. I'll use frigates with just aug engines and quantum det. They also may be able to raid the starbase before I explode them.

You found a use for QD. I never did. In a recent game I got lucky and captured the first raiding Antaran frigate. I thought YEAH, I'll scrap it and get either x armor or particle beams and be generations ahead of the rest of the guys. Scrapped it and got quantum detonator.

I noticed no +10 moral from Psionics for my democracy but perhaps I missmoused to the wrong tech.

The description for it in the info section of the game says psionics only gives that 10% morale boost to dictatorship governments.

Oops..re Unification Adv Govt..it gives +100% farming and production from what I've read, clearly outstripping moral for those two.

That makes better sense. I've been playing the game for about a decade, but since I now "know" how to play it, I never think about checking the info section any more.

What I noticed about morale in my games was that the -20 dictatorship penalty (without barracks) disappeared after I got advanced government, but the barracks still gave 20% morale. So, advanced government essentially gave a +20% morale bonus. That, plus psionics, gave 30% more than was available to other governments.

Thanks. Very useful, since the info section only credits adv. gov. for dict. gov. only giving that 20% bonus for defensive spies. The final morale bonus totals by government type should therefore be +100% dict., +70% dem. and +70% feud.

Could still be worthwhile making a breeder planet, though.

I try to populate rich and u-rich planets up to max as fast as possible so I can use them as production powerhouses. Using the smaller v-poor planets to house pop might be worthwhile, since they are not very productive otherwise.

 

[neilkaz]

Re: Psionics 10% moral boost. I'm pretty sure it improves Feudal as well. Strategy Wiki says that it improves all but Unified and that game docs are wrong so perhaps I missmoused as Democracy noting that I seem to recall it helping democracy as well. I'll see if I can easily test this from some old save.

Re: QD my idea was reasonably sucessful however, I couldn't do enough damage even with several exploding frigates to completely destroy enemy large ships. It is an easy way to bring down shields for EMG missiles to finish the job.

QD is also a good tech to trade to the remaining civs if they'll take it r just give it to them for relations. I honestly want AI enemies to have QD installed since I've seen some chain reaction explosions caused by it. One game Psilons asked me for QD and gave me High Energy Focus . But still, just about anything from the Guardian is better than QD.

I often 1 pop house on R/UR planets since it is quicker. This enables me to build up other planets and my overall population while researching etc. When it is time to build something on my housing planet(s) I can easily shift over a few workers from other planets in that system and then shift them back and 1 pop house again. Once it is time to use that R/UR planet as a shipyard I can switch many workers back to it and crank out ships.

 

[aliptay]

sorry to post whimsical stuff on this thread but...

omg, so I'm like spending countless hours recently on Moo2, wishing someone would update the graphics and gameplay and re-release it.

Just had to say hi since obviously I'm not the only one spending time on this game in 2011!!!

 

[scratchthepitch]

Re: Psionics 10% moral boost. I'm pretty sure it improves Feudal as well. Strategy Wiki says that it improves all but Unified and that game docs are wrong so perhaps I missmoused as Democracy noting that I seem to recall it helping democracy as well. I'll see if I can easily test this from some old save.

Probably is out of date documentation. El_Machinae found a similar example up thread. Last night when I was updating the info text in the HELP.lbx file to match new changes I made in my mod, I noticed the ion pulse cannon info still listed it as having heavy mounts. The last patch did away with those, but they never changed the weapon description to reflect that. There is probably some other examples.

Re: QD my idea was reasonably sucessful however, I couldn't do enough damage even with several exploding frigates to completely destroy enemy large ships. It is an easy way to bring down shields for EMG missiles to finish the job.

QD is also a good tech to trade to the remaining civs if they'll take it r just give it to them for relations. I honestly want AI enemies to have QD installed since I've seen some chain reaction explosions caused by it. One game Psilons asked me for QD and gave me High Energy Focus . But still, just about anything from the Guardian is better than QD.

The collateral damage is probably scaled to the size of the ship the QD is on. I think the program uses it much like a engine core bang and I think I've noticed that the larger ships damage others more than the smaller ones when they go out that way. The core explosions do a nice number on the shields of large nearby ships, and sometimes destroy the smaller ships. Sometimes you can cause a chain reaction where one ship blows up, which then causes its neighbor to do the same and down the line. Had that happen to a group of my destroyers once that couldn't have come at a worse time.

I often 1 pop house on R/UR planets since it is quicker. This enables me to build up other planets and my overall population while researching etc. When it is time to build something on my housing planet(s) I can easily shift over a few workers from other planets in that system and then shift them back and 1 pop house again. Once it is time to use that R/UR planet as a shipyard I can switch many workers back to it and crank out ships.

I usually have enough pop transfers from planets at max pop capacity to not need specific housing planets. It keeps "full" planets from wasting their potential pop growth, and usually one less pop doesn't have much impact of what they are working on, unless they are borderline productive. In the early part of the game, I need everyone building stuff to expand or build up planet infrastructure instead of building housing. There are exceptions where I build pop to build up specific planet fast, like a nice monster system planet, but I will also ship people there from other planets. Keeping track of who has been transferred where is also a pain. I used to transfer whole populations of alien captures to suitable planets, but that's a lot of work. There were times when the game said the max number of transfers has been reached in those games. Spent most of my time trying to coordinate these pop exchanges. Now I don't bother. I'll transfer many pop to some juicy planets I want to build up, but mostly, I just transfer the 1 pop who fills a planet to whichever planet looks the best recipient.

sorry to post whimsical stuff on this thread but...

omg, so I'm like spending countless hours recently on Moo2, wishing someone would update the graphics and gameplay and re-release it.

Just had to say hi since obviously I'm not the only one spending time on this game in 2011!!!

Not many MOO addicts still around any more, welcome to the forum.