[MOD] Relativity - a balance and content mod

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OK, so following the release of the hotfix I ws able to get a good 70 years of gametime in last night and begin getting to grips with things. A few notes on what I'm seeing so far; if anyone has any comment, feel free to chip in.

1. The influence curve is pretty bad, especially since it's really heavily reliant on RNG. Too much is dependent on tech you may or may not receive.
2. The same is basically true of minerals and energy creds, to a lesser extent. A few unlucky hands of tech cards and you're crippled. I think some additional buildings (and maybe a few tweaks to the building outputs) might be handy here. I'm also quite tempted to abolish building maintenance costs.
3. Rare resources... well, 'rare' is definitely the operative word here! After 70 years, I've only revealed 2 types, and have found only 2 places which produce any (both of the same one). This could bear some serious adjustment.
4. High level buildings.... levels 4+ seem to be attached to the same techs for some reason. These could do with separating out.
5. Society tech is where 90% of the cherries are. The other two tech lines are pretty meh in most cases.
6. AI personalities exhibit some oddities. Extreme capitalists who refuse to trade things with anyone but allies. Diplo generally seems a bit flaky, tbh. Nice system, wrong inputs.

I think I want the player to be basically in a position where he's producing plenty of minerals by about turn 25, plenty of energy by 50, plenty of influence by 75 and then focusing on creating special resources for more powerful ships and structures. That means looking at a few things a bit differently.

1) rather than the present situation where special resource X can be converted by building Y to produce mineral/energy, I would rather see building Y refining energy or minerals to produce special resource X.
2) Only basic, low-end hip equipment should be made with minerals or energy. Higher-end equipment with require refined resources to make and maintain.
3) I'd like to move away from the ruthless hard-capping of outposts and influence maintenance cots for permanent structures. They can cost a ton of energy or minerals to keep, but I want to separate influence off from the physics materials and use it mostly for edicts and policies. These should be highly beneficial but you should struggle to keep lots of them going at once.

I'd also like to have a poke at the various options you have for interacting with factions, which are presently a bit boring.

Will add more thoughts as I come up with them. I'm hoping for initial release on Sunday.
 
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All chimes exactly with my experience so far (and explains some things I'd chalked down to me being bad at the game!)

I definitely feel like the influence mechanics are by far the 'gameyist', least immersive and worst balanced in the game (while the rest seem basically pretty solid and mainly just in need of balancing and a little tweaking round the edges)

Removing building maintenance I'd definitely enjoy also, and I suspect it should help the AI and sector AI as well?
 
When removing building maintenance, I'll likely substantially increase it for the different levels of colony capital - and then use energy as an input for the higher-tier rares. That will mean a colony remains a burden on the empire as a whole until it's got several buildings and pops on it, rather than just in the early stage, but also reduces the microing a bit by allowing you to queue up without worrying about spending creds on empty buildings
 
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My suggestion for building maintenance would be to eliminate it for earlier buildings but then leave it in for later buildings - Your idea of a Minerals+Energy for special resource is a great idea though.

I would really like to see frontier outposts made cheaper, eliminating the influence maintenance and reducing the influence cost would go a long way to doing that.

Will you increase the cost of station maintenance to provide an energy credit sink? or increase Fleet + Army maint?

Armies I think could also do with being more expensive, so that they are fewer, more important, and attachments become more important subsequently.

Perhaps increasing base influence gain a bit will soften the curve and then reducing influence cost of frontier outposts will then mean you have more ability to use edicts.
 
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Some further thoughts and observations - and I'm kind of thinking aloud here, so apologies if any of this is wrong or obvious. Probably much of it you've already figured, but it doesn't hurt to spell it all out in detail:

In the early game, you need loads and loads of minerals. So you have to build loads of mining stations and/or mines. These cost energy in upkeep, so suddenly you have a huge demand for energy in order to feed your mine-building. Energy resource locations seem to pop up at most at the same frequency as mineral deposits (in my experience actually significantly less often, but possibly that's just Sod's Law), all of the mines cost you upkeep in energy, and you only need the energy for that upkeep whereas you need minerals in order to build any of the mines, and all of that together seems to mean that unless you're either very clever or very lucky, in the early-mid game, you'll be desparately struggling to break-even in energy as you amass a steadily growing surplus of minerals.

Eventually you'll have built all the mineral mining stations possible and gotten a fair amount of planetary infrastructure, so unless you go on a big fleet-building exercise (which to my mind is what you do with your profits, rather than part of your standard overhead) your need for energy credits will stabilise, and finally at this point, if your colonisation/territorial expansion has gone well, you'll be able to gradually achieve a decent energy income. In my experience this is mainly through spamming power plants on my colonies, which should have grown nicely by now. Unfortunately, because you at first seem to have such a desparate and insatiable need for more energy, and because there's often a significant lag between ordering capacity and having it come online, it won't be long before you suddenly have far more energy than you know what to do with.

And until you unlock terraforming in the mid-late game, you have pretty much nothing to spend it on, besides indulgent diplomatic deals, but even then it can be a struggle to dispose of your surplus. At this stage it seems extremely easy to reach your energy cap. Making extensive use of robots can help, but sometimes that isn't enough, and some civs won't even have access to them.

You now have plenty of (or too much) energy, you can support a large fleet maintenance cost, so now you want to start churning out fleets and want more minerals. But you've already built all the mining stations you can, so your only options are conquest and fine-tuning your ratio of power plants to mines on your planets. In my experience, in large empires, your credit income can start to swing quite wildly at this point depending on what your sectors are doing - the sector AI seems pretty erratic to me, but maybe I'm just not microing enough (although doesn't that defeat the purpose of the sector AI?). It also seems unbalanced the way that temporarily going over your cap (e.g. to nurse a new colony before handing it over to the sector governor), can have a dramatic effect on your income, swinging you sometimes from a huge surplus into deficit - only avoidable by wasting influence doing micro-intensive gymnastics swapping things back and forth into and out of sectors.


Now possibly my experience or my playstyle aren't typical, but if they are...that's looking to me like a fairly dysfunctional economic system - lurching desparately from one scarcity to another and then suddenly to a superabundance you can't even make any use of, and then back to mineral scarcity with few options to resolve it.

Honestly, my worry is that the flaw's a fundamental one rather than a question of tweaking the balancing, and to do with the very fact that you have one resource which is all fixed costs with no variable (besides terraforming which is lategame-ish and extortionately expensive (plus, as you noted, the strategic resources for it can be impossible to find)) and the other being all variable and no fixed costs. Unfortunately I think that's as far as my intuition can go without having to do some equations or draw a diagram or something. I also worry that the conflation of 'energy' as a resource, and the 'energy credit' as a unit of currency is causing a huge conceptual, thematic and economic mess.


Phew...that ended up a lot longer than I'd planned. Hope I'm not barking up the wrong tree with all of this!



The other thought I had, which is somewhat tangential to all that, and which I'm not certain where directly to go with, but: is one of the issues the fact that mining station output seems pretty much fixed, and afaik isn't modified either by any tech or by any of the ideological/governmental/racial bonuses? Was coming up a lot in another thread about ethic/government/trait balance ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...uide-to-ethics-traits-and-governments.926557/ ). Not certain if there's an easy answer to that which avoids causing more problems than it solves, but it's probably worth thinking about.


Sorry for the wall of text. Hope some of it is helpful! Didn't add anything about influence because probably all the issues with it are all just too plain and obvious.
 
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The other thought I had, which is somewhat tangential to all that, and which I'm not certain where directly to go with, but: is one of the issues the fact that mining station output seems pretty much fixed, and afaik isn't modified either by any tech or by any of the ideological/governmental/racial bonuses? Was coming up a lot in another thread about ethic/government/trait balance ( https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...uide-to-ethics-traits-and-governments.926557/ ). Not certain if there's an easy answer to that which avoids causing more problems than it solves, but it's probably worth thinking about.

Sorry for the wall of text. Hope some of it is helpful! Didn't add anything about influence because probably all the issues with it are just too obvious.

Techs that increase mining station and research station output would be very good.

Regarding your experience early game - Stations are the lesser option unless it is a +3 mineral station when compared to upgrading your homeworld.
 
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Techs that increase mining station and research station output would be very good.

Regarding your experience early game - Stations are the lesser option unless it is a +3 mineral station when compared to upgrading your homeworld.
In my experience the limiting factor there is population growth, which unless you've picked relevant traits, is just too slow to meet the demand. And any significant slowdown early on ends up affecting you exponentially because of the way snowballing works in these games. Although I suppose one way to look at it would be that early-game-rush-snowballing is undesirable (especially since the AI's almost invariably worse at it than the player), so actually the problem here isn't that rapid expansion is too awkward, but that actually it's not awkward enough! That early-game rushing is really an exploit that shouldn't work if things are properly balanced. Will have to try going much more slowly next time, see if the economy flows more naturally.


Will you increase the cost of station maintenance to provide an energy credit sink? or increase Fleet + Army maint?

Armies I think could also do with being more expensive, so that they are fewer, more important, and attachments become more important subsequently.
Definitely agree with this. Army spam/inflation was tedious and unfun in Distant Worlds, and I'm confident it's the same here. Fewer, higher maintenance armies is definitely better. Just as long as the AI can be persuaded not to bankrupt itself trying to buy the same amount as before!

I also feel like higher fleet maintenance wouldn't be amiss. Maybe adding direct energy costs to military ship purchases even (training for the crew, etc)
 
Too much is dependent on tech you may or may not receive.
This is also true for colonization technology. If you don't research them as soon as they're available, then you've pretty much lost the exploration and expansion phase.

Do you have any long-term plans on making research less random to address bottlenecks like these, e.g. missing critical technology cripples empires?
 
My suggestion for building maintenance would be to eliminate it for earlier buildings but then leave it in for later buildings - Your idea of a Minerals+Energy for special resource is a great idea though.

I would really like to see frontier outposts made cheaper, eliminating the influence maintenance and reducing the influence cost would go a long way to doing that.

Will you increase the cost of station maintenance to provide an energy credit sink? or increase Fleet + Army maint?

Armies I think could also do with being more expensive, so that they are fewer, more important, and attachments become more important subsequently.

Perhaps increasing base influence gain a bit will soften the curve and then reducing influence cost of frontier outposts will then mean you have more ability to use edicts.

Answering separately to avoid a hyper-long post; sorry if this means multiple double-posts.

I'm thinking the main bulk of the planet-side maintenance costs will be the capital building and then rare resource production. The rare resources will then be the maintenance for higher-tier buildings. I want to avoid a situation where you're being punished for developing a world more; it's usually a bad idea to charge the player maintenance per-building because it encourages him to under-develop planets and just colonize more of them (GC3 or NuMOO are good examples of this problem).

In space, frontier outposts will be energy-expensive to maintain rather than influence-dependent, but I'd let you buy quite a lot more of them than the arbitrary 4 per empire.

And yes, fleet and army maintenance can probably stand to be buffed a lot once the land stuff is no longer draining most of the credits.

Influence will then be dedicated purely to political interactions with your people - working with factions (I intend to make more 'positive' factions rather than just dissenters, and allow you to use influence to try and push people into the 'right' ones), edicts, maybe some price for uplifts etc.
 
Some further thoughts and observations ...
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No, I agree with the general gist of most of that.


The other thought I had, which is somewhat tangential to all that, and which I'm not certain where directly to go with, but: is one of the issues the fact that mining station output seems pretty much fixed, and afaik isn't modified either by any tech or by any of the ideological/governmental/racial bonuses?

Yeah, this needs to change. I kinda want the majority of the mineral income in the game to be coming from space stations, tbh. It makes sense for civs to start moving away from ground mining once they can outsource the grotty mining business to the asteroid belts.
 
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This is also true for colonization technology. If you don't research them as soon as they're available, then you've pretty much lost the exploration and expansion phase.

Do you have any long-term plans on making research less random to address bottlenecks like these, e.g. missing critical technology cripples empires?

Nothing solid as yet; need more time to poke at the tech system and figure out what can be done. But yes, I do very much want to try and control the tech draw a bit more - possibly by setting more pre-requisites if at all possible.
 
Naselus if you have time would you do a play test of my mod and give me feedback.
 
Unrelated to the above, but I'd also think about removing the requirement for an upgraded colony ship/capital and/or reducing/eliminating the influence cost for resettlement (for extreme collectivists or xenophobes at least). I presume that enslavement is meant to be a roughly parallel system to robotics - get some serfs to do your mining, fighting, and settling dangerous worlds - but at the moment enslaving and resettling seems not remotely worth the effort until late-game when you're swimming in influence, have capitals everywhere, and can gene-tailor to your heart's content, by which point you probably don't need to anyway. Whereas robots, on the other hand, are absolutely swell from early-midgame onwards (if you have any energy credits to spare, that is!)
 
I saw some people here talking about increasing star limits. I'm currently working on an AAR for my 2600 Stellaris campaign, so word of warning. You need more star names.

The game doesn't ship with a whole lot, and a lot of stars in my game have blank names, which is really sad and really unfortunate. There is a mod on the workhop that adds new galaxy sizes up to 2000 stars as well as a star namelist. The author of the mod says that the game doesn't actually generate more than 8000 stars no matter how high you set it.
 
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It appears to me as if it would be relatively easy to create production chains - it doesn't look like strategic resources have to actually figure in deposits, and the building code looks like it can easily support creation of resources that only exist as output there.
As for deep economy... since diplomatic actions are hard-coded, I was thinking that the Situation Log would be a good placeholder for faux-econdiplo actions. If one empire has managed to create a rare synthetic material that opens some building options that are closed for everyone else, it could appear in every other empire's situation log, where you could prompt an event window that asks if you want to buy ship parts, maybe try to sabotage their supply, etc etc, all of this could also be controlled with an extreme amount of ai_weight. Manufacturing ships for other empires might be able to work if it's possible to transfer ownership of fleets. I haven't researched this yet, but if the other Clausewitz games are any kind of good example, then this could be possible.
 
I saw some people here talking about increasing star limits. I'm currently working on an AAR for my 2600 Stellaris campaign, so word of warning. You need more star names.
This might be solvable by borrowing from Distant Worlds and its own modding community. I know that there are Distant Worlds mods that add a couple thousand system names, so it's conceivable that the base Stellaris system names, the base Distant Worlds system names, and various mods can be glued together to make a list in the mid-thousands.

From there, various Greek letters, Greek mythological figures, and various prefixes and suffixes, e.g. Alpha Sagittarius, Sagittarius Prime, Sagittarius Minor, etc. Do the same with other cultures and languages.

Easier said than done, but it's doable with enough time and a decent word processor to prune duplicates.
 
I saw some people here talking about increasing star limits. I'm currently working on an AAR for my 2600 Stellaris campaign, so word of warning. You need more star names.

The game doesn't ship with a whole lot, and a lot of stars in my game have blank names, which is really sad and really unfortunate. There is a mod on the workhop that adds new galaxy sizes up to 2000 stars as well as a star namelist. The author of the mod says that the game doesn't actually generate more than 8000 stars no matter how high you set it.

More names isn't a big problem. And 8k sound more than enough, tbh.

Need to see if I can scale some things by galaxy size, though... controlling 5 planets from 8000 stars sounds kinda crappy...
 
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