I'm almost finished with the DL campaign. Only six more missions. Those have to wait, however, because I've got a nasty headache at the moment. Tomorrow is also a private holiday of mine (60th anniversary of Gojira, my favourite movie), so I'm not sure how much I'm going to do. Knowing me, I'm probably going to finish the remaining missions. The other two campaigns have to wait until Tuesday though.

You changed nearly all the GCtypes. Its crazy, the changes are mostly minor and that actually makes it more annoying because it screws my designs and changes something that didn't have any problems.

Its just work for me to modd out, and I absolutely vote to revert the weapons/defense/modules values to there regular working stats.

just playing the Drath noticing these typos in Drath_Techtree.xml

The Invisible hand helps the [YOURSHORTCIVNAME] to stay out of trouble and let others do the work for them.  When civilizations are at war, the [YOURSHORTCIVNAME]  now receive a small percentage of the income being put into war production. They also increaase their diplomacy abilty which allows them to negotiate shrewder deals for themselves.</Details>

Woa the Doomsday Generator is quite OP, esp. when you keep in mind additional luck+weapons-boni in that tree. There's a lot of stuff overpowered (basically all capitals) but I won't harp on that because there's logic behind it. Basically you've fastened up the game by generally decreasing technology & improvement-costs, lesser maint, and way more additional racial stats boni and powerful buildings. The net effect is that the game develops very speedy, and I think that's the right thing to do, Twilight was a lot slower than DA and if someone fires up the old game again it will feel fresh this way....

On the boni-improvement I mean for example the Temple of Righteousness or Hall of Empathy (lots more actually). You've added some bonus (pop growth, influence) but from the description it's not clear whether it is racial or planetary. Ok, this isn't different with most other buildings but the benefit of the old buildings is usually already known. I assume that most, if not all your newly introduced boni are racial, though I wasn't sure on some (eg +50% infl racial is heavy!)

Then there's the Dark Energy Lab, its description says it will boost "all our" military and production, is this civ-wide? Judging from the quote, I would say so yes, but is that even possible? AFAIK there's no racial production stat, but it should be true for the weapon-stat because there's no planetary weapon-stat either  ... And there's further a +10% econ, which is totally omitted in the description.... confusing^^

Why not simply put thing clear there in numbers, either *planetary*- or *civ-wide* boni?

Maybe also a good idea for the boni you get when making the ethical decision. Some of these boni are mentioned quite clearly (+25% trade increase) some not (eg loyality bonus etc pp). To add, the neutral description on their Purchase Now reduction is faulty, because this will reduce not only ship buy but also their upgrade costs, and reduce the bcs of planetary imrovements.

re: Constructor spam

I've made some tests on this a few months ago and am very inconclusive about this in general. I don't think that it will work, I believe that the game will produce ships simply randomised and not by observing the state of its own game, ie. it doesn't ask itself the question if it will even need more constructors" etc... I do not know if this is true in the code, I simply assume from what I could observe in test-game.

I wanted to reduce the constructor-spam as well, and I was further irritated that the AI lost so many imprtant resource mines because he spents a boatload of constructors to increase mining before thinking on +att or +def on them. So I harshly reduced the number of modules so he could only put stuff on that was important (just like now) but the effect was that there were a lot of overflow constructors sitting at planets. It was funny because whenever a resource became free everyone did send all his constructors after it, that's how I became initially aware of the problem because you saw them pinpointing from all around the galaxy to it, even 20 turns after the resource has been reclaimed (the AI usually doesn't re-alter ship-destination before it reaches its goal)....

On the weapons-stuff:

This is a large and difficult (but very important) field, so I'd have to write a wall, but I'm pretty sure you know the topic very good by yourself.

You've doubled the the early wepaons (except the theory) and these weapons are important for the early game, and even more in less-big games (because usually there you don't need to research high tier weapons).

Increased weapons will faster drain the hitpoints from a ship, which means that defense absorption cannot work as good as it should. Defense and hitpoints do boost each other strength, while weapon fire does the opposite.

The problem of defenses in a fleet battle is that all-attack ships will cumulate their weapons but defenses cannot do this because only one ship will be fired at at a time.

Now this is alot of assumptions made on my end but I can give you some maths to exemplify what I mean.

From the game yesterday I take one medium hull, and with my current level of miniaturization build an all-attack ship and an all-defense ship using the same techs/tiers. Because the all-defense must have an attack as well I give the attack ship a small defense as well to make it fair. I get these stats: (using Singularity Driver & Duranthium)

All-attack: +36att +4def +20hp 370MP cost

All-defense: +8att +68def +20hp 480MP cost

Note: the all-defense ship is 25% more expensive, seems to have higher stats and should be better actually.

Let us now simulate a 1on1 ship fight using average rolls (* more to this later), ie simulating with 0 luck

All-attack +18att +2def 

All-defense +4att +34def

Result: It very easy to see that the defense ship will totally absorb all damage and destroy the attack ship after 5 rounds of combat.

Now lets simulate a fleet battle, this time incorporating the build costs as well.

4 all-attack ships = (average) +72att +2def +80hp (1480 MP) vs

3 all-defense ships = (average) +12att +34def +60hp (1440 MP)

(some might say 4 vs 3 is unfair but the reality ingame will be exactly like this because you HAVE to take the cost into credit)

If you now calculate round per round you'll notice that the all-attack will totally drain the first target's armour, then its hitpoints destroying it, then draining their remaining fire in the second ships defenses.

The defense fleet will drain -10hp from their enemies. In the second round they're only 2 ships so they will drain only -6, giving the attackship still +4hp.

The attackfleet will again destroy one defender.

In the last 3rd round the last defender is killed while doing -2 damage, the attacker will barely survive with +2 hp.

Result: All defenders are destroyed, all attacker live.

The problem here is that the "invincible defense" is actually not really effective versus cumulative weapons-fire. I've done alot of calculating (actually since the time when I asked you guys about the fleet-module stuff a year or 2 ago) and the common consensus seems to be that defenses are NOT worthwhile at all when they cannot re-load during combat turns. In such a case hitpoint mods are always better.

(*) The ingame reality is even far more worse, because the game doesn't roll averagely but instead randomly, which is giving a huge bonus to the attackers but NOT the defenders. An attacker could roll high while the defender rolls low - in this case the defender is screwed. Butt the opposite scenario, defender rolls high defense & attacker rolls low attack nothing serious will happen, yes damage will be totally absorbed which IS actually already happening at ordinary average rolls. 

If we take up the 1on1 fight example the defender needs at least 3 turns to be successful, although this chance will be astronomically low because the defender has to roll 3 times max attack and the attacker has to roll 3 times lowest defense for this to be accomplished.

In opposition the defender only has to roll a single time around -10% of his defenses while the attacker is somewhere above 75% in order to oneshot the defender. And this can happen during the length of the fight. Before I used a +50% Luck my defense ships always lost mysteriously vs obviously lower ships simply because of these unlucky rolls.

You can see from this example also why Luck is so important in the defense-design. No more oneshots, and thinking further, if we would further increase the overall hitpoints vs weaponsfire correlation, this would give defenses even more time to work, to reload.

Not saying now that this would take care about the fleet-battle defense demise - actually it would mitigate it but still the attack ships would win. But increasing weapons while leaving hitpoints as they are is not right track.

Still, this is only a single example and other examples using other weapons/def/hulls etc might bring another conclusion etc. Although I have to say that I consistently get likewise results. Usually ingame defenses aren't that bad... because if they don't suffice you research another tier and at some point they do their job. And of course, a ship equipped with tier 5 defenses will totally outclass a ship with only tier 2 weapons.

That, and the fact that defenses can easily be researched, is the reason why you can't simply buff defenses up. Then, in a 1on1 scenario total absorbtion will be reached quite easily and be a I-win-button, and if all damage could be absorbed hitpoints will loose all importance, ie. you can use Cargo Hulls instead of Medium Hulls. I did this successful in the unmodded TotA for some time, until longer games required ever bigger fleets and thus, defenses became too weak.

I've also played 3 months with simply all hitpoints increased by 100%. Combat rounds are increased, firsthit advantage is reduced (sad for Arceans), even tiny hulls can benefit from a single +10% hitpoints boni, repair becomes important (this used to be an important stat in GalCiv1) but the general problem here was that the additional hitpoints received from level up were too excessive.

As of now, I believe increasing hitpoints to a 1.5 ratio as normal (cumulative through changes in the hull base points and some additional hipoints racial stats) while keeping highest tiered weapon and defenses out of the game is the right track, but I need more testing time in my personal mod.

So, goodnight^^

When I got to version 6B of the Space Weapons mod I did change the hull stats quite a bit.

Basically, I don't mind if light and heavy fighters blow up, because in my mind they should be expendable and you should not be trying to squeeze as many modules on there simply because they have a low HP value.  But capital ships should tend to be a bit tougher and have better survival odds in fleet combat.

However, one of the drawbacks of increasing capital ship HP is that you then need to scale up nearly everything else about them.  I did a bit of number juggling on the spreadsheet, take a look and see what you think.  I haven't gone too far with adding to HP/capacity/cost, and I've left the logistics values where they are for now.

Well, as I said, small and tiny hulls don't get a lot of hitpoints in the first place.  One is available without any research, and the other is available early on.  So what I did there was to bring the cost (and therefore the cost per hitpoint) down a little bit.  So if you lose them, you haven't lost as much production on building the hull.  This change reflects the relative ease in obtaining and using these hulls.

So then I increased the hitpoints and capacities for medium through huge.  On the one hand, this does mean that you can fit more modules, so you could create an attack ship with even more guns.  However that capacity can also fit a fair amount of defences.  Overall, the cost per capacity point increases with the size of the ship. but the cost of hitpoints decreases.  This means that although you will lose a little bit more invested production if a capital ship is destroyed, they are in the long run more economic to produce.  Especially if you consider their greater survivability in fleet combat.

Marvin, I think your design is fine except there's a huge gap between small & medium. If you look at the orig ship stats you'll notice that medium hulls already got a special treatment and scale better than everything else. For example, hitpoints usually increase by factor ~1.5, but medium hull hp increase by 2.5 (!). Medium size is doubled (2.0), while other hullsizes are increased from 1.5-1.9.

I think this is because of the cargo hull-dilemma. In Dreadlords you could even upgrade cargos to become medium hulls lol^^

You've compensated by reducing buildcosts by -5 or -10 MP, although these are negligable for the AI at higher diff. There, even normal planets at mixed slider setting will have +200 +300 +400 MP always and will release a Heavy Fighter every turn anyway regardless of these -5 -10 reduction. For a human player however this reduction can become very interesting though.

What would interest me how your changes actually influence the gameplay? What happens once medium hull is researched and say, you send a fleet of new ships versus an empire that still only uses Heavy Fighter. Do the mediums even loose any ships?

@Maiden666

re: Doomsday Generator

Yes, it is OP. The reasons for the change were threefold:
1. The AI can't use this GA "correctly".
2. The HP bonus makes no sense. I mean, when I hear words like "Unimaginable Destruction" and "Doomsday" I'm not thinking of turtling (giant, flying, fire-breathing turtles not withstanding).
3. Making the 50% HP bonus civ-wide, in order to fix the first issue, would be too powerful (plus, losing that bonus would be extremely crippling).

Marvin suggested the current bonuses, and I, as I had no better idea, used them. I'm still not happy with them though.

The Stellar Forge and the Hyperion Shipyard were in similar positions. Neither could be properly used by the AI, and the HS felt quite weak (basically a glorified Navigation Center). I made the HP bonus of the Forge work civ-wide, and removed the 25% ShipQualityBonus, while the HS got a 10% Military Production bonus instead of a +1 move bonus to ships built on the same planet. However, I'm thinking of reverting my changes to the Forge (AI-usability be damned), and replacing the MP bonus of the HS with a planetary HP and ShipQualityBonus (basically giving it the same bonuses as it had in GalCiv 1).

So basically the Forge would grant 25% to HP and ShipQuality again. The HS would get the same bonuses. For the Doomsday Generator I'm thinking of 33% to both. Would that be okay?

I'm also thinking of turning the DG into a SP. As it currently is, either the Altarians get it, or the Drath. One of them is then going to get stuck with a tech that does nothing for them. Or I could move the Weapons bonus from the Dark Energy Lab to the Unimaginable Destruction tech.

re: unclear bonuses

Okay, I really need to clean up some of those descriptions (especially the original ones). The Pop. Growth bonus of the Hall of Empathy is civ-wide, and the influence bonus of the Temples is planetary. Just keep the following rules in mind, and everything should be a bit clearer (until I fixed the descriptions):
1. Bonuses from regular improvements are always planetary. No exceptions.
2. Bonuses from TGs are always civ-wide. No exceptions.
3. TGs, SPs, and GAs, can only have one civ-wide bonus. Period.
4. Certain bonuses can only be planetary (manufacturing, planetary defense, ShipQuality, food, etc.)
5. If a SP or GA has two bonuses with the same name, then the lower one is civ-wide (e.g. Shrine of the Mithrilar: 55% morale, 20% Morale).

re: constructor spam

I was actually referring to the one on the player's side, not the AI one. The latter can't be fixed from our end.

re: weapons and defences

I'm well aware how the combat-mechanics work. However, there is a difference between knowing how something works, and knowing how it is affected by changes. So, thanks for reminding me. I really needed that.

Okay, this is turning into a big problem. So here is what I'm going to do:

1. I'm going to turn done the damage for all weapons again (more or less back to the original values). Including the ultimate weapons. Otherwise, the whole effort to make the damage values increase more linearly has been for naught.

2. Defences are going to get buffed. One defence will be slightly stronger than one weapon of the equivalent tier. The defences are also going to be half as big and cost slightly less than half as much the weapons.

Here are some comparison values:

Doom Ray
Cost: 115
Size: 6
Size-mod: 3%
Damage: 8

Ultimate Invulnerability
Cost: 50
Size: 3
Size-mod: 3%
Defense: 9

Nightmare Torpedo
Cost: 130
Size: 10
Size-mod: 2%
Damage: 14

Aereon Missile Defense
Cost: 60
Size: 5
Size-mod: 2%
Defense: 15

Black Hole Gun
Cost: 100
Size: 8
Size-mod: 3%
Damage: 11

Zero-Point Armor
Cost: 45
Size: 4
Size-mod: 3%
Defense: 12

You can look up the remaining values in the spreadsheet linked in the OP. Would this change be acceptable?

I would then also need to adjust the starbase defense and military-assist modules, but I was already going to do that anyhow.

re: cargo-abuse

I don't see this as a problem. If some people like to play this way, then so be it. Any attempt to "fix" this would also affect the AI and any player who doesn't do it. Plus, the only reliable way to prevent small hulls from being used for capacity modules, is to remove miniaturization. Which is too big of a change, in my opinion. I'd say, leave this to mods.

re: True Warrior

Damn it, I did it again! It happens way too often that I note a change in my changelog, but then forget to actually implement it.

Anyhow, here is the current progress, and plan for the rest of the week. I'm finished with the DL campaign, and am going to start with the DA one today. I also renamed the tech Space Superiority from the Thalan tech tree to Military Superiority. It caused troubles in the Scenario Editor, because the Terrans have a tech with an identical name. I also added Zero-Point Armor to the Arcean tech tree. I forgot to do so earlier. Once I'm done with the campaigns, I'm going to implement the discussed changes, and begin adjusting the starbase defense and military-assist modules.

Gaunathor, in CustomPlanets.xml are the Drengin asteroids named to the planet Kona, is this intentional? All other asteroid fields are attributed to their star-name....

edit:

hmmm, what's the function of this tag anyway? it doesn't seem to do anything in sandbox games, neither give a fixed amount of asteroids nor their name.....

But there's another bug you maybe like to do something against. Sometimes starting systems only have 4 planets (I suspect because an asteroid took his place), in this case it's always the last (5th) planet in CustomPlanets.xml that is missing. There are a few races who then will loose their second colonizable planet - Altarian, Yor & Iconian.

@Maiden666

re: Asteroids

That's the original name. I haven't changed it. Nor do I have a problem with it. Both the planet and the asteroids are named after Lord Kona, the ruler of the Drengin. All your base are belong to him, so to speak.

Naw, luck just increases your base combat role, instead of rolling 0-4 damage it would be 1-4 with 25% luck. That's why I think it would be more sifi if it were called accuracy.

Ya, I hear about courage alot, but can't seem to remember what the answer is. Do you mind telling, if you know Gaunathor?

I feel sick when I see some tech descriptions still, is it too late for me to come up with new ones for various techs?

Well, that depends on the tech. I like some of the descriptions as they are just fine. Though they all still need to be proofread (along with everything else).

As for Courage, I've already said all I know about it. It provides a bonus to the underdog in ship combat. The debug.err makes a note when somebody gets the bonus. Though how it all works is unknown to me.

Luck also increases your base defence roll, and not just the damage roll. Calling it "accuracy" doesn't make much sense to me with that in mind. Plus, there is a possibility that Luck increases your odds with random events, though I could never find definite prove of that. It's just a feeling I have.

Anyhow, I finished updating the DA campaign. Only the TotA one remains now, and that is the shortest one (both in number of missions, and in how much I need to do).

I'd still like to know what everyone thinks regarding the new weapons and defence values I proposed. Same for the changes to the Stellar Forge, Doomsday Generator, and Hyperion Shipyard.