I can barely read that with the yellow background!

But yes, I agree, good picks should cost you.

Hmm.   I see your point,  Mabus.   The old values do (mostly!) makes sense if you look at it from the perspective of diminishing returns.   But that's a design choice,  not a rule -- though in real life that does seem to be a rule of thumb. 

That said,  it's a choice I can get behind,  because it will make players agonize over specialization.  Instead of automatically sinking as many points as they can into X,Y,and Z,  the mental conversation will be "well,  too much of Z is too expensive,  do I *really* need 30%?  Maybe I can do with 20% and throw in some %Q or %P instead".   We'll drive min-maxxers insane.  That's a good thing.

With that in mind,  we have to make sure that the returns don't diminish too quickly,  because that isn't interesting either -- you don't want to provide frustrating non-choices.   It's a fine line.

Here's my counter-suggestions,  diminishing returns-style,  making some of the transitions smoother and giving more choice on the low end for some abilities (1-2-4 instead of 1-3-5).

Which was precicely what I was going for

I like your values, the drop of in %PP isn't as sharp but it's still big enough that a player will have to think about their choices. I say we have a winner. I'll implement the new diminishing values returns in Beta 1B so we can have a look how it feels when applied in the game. That will be tomorrow though, tonight I'm taking a breather.

Cheers,

M

Repair - leave just one option, 1 cost for 40% because seriously, who picks it anyway? Anyone with the right mind will pick any other bonus if it costs 3.

I gave Thalan another shot, tell me what you think.

<Culture ID="InterGov">
<DisplayName>Artificial Governments</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to begin researching advanced types of governments.</Description>
<Details>Each culture has its own government system, and we want to research each government so we can learn and grow in our knowledge and understanding of other races. But while some races depend more on group insight on how to govern a whole Empire, we do not understand how can it be an improvement over power held by just one person.||If we want to know what makes others tick, we can run computer simulations and analyze them.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarRep">
<DisplayName>Republic Simulation</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to transform to an artificial republic.</Description>
<Details>Even with first alpha build of artificial republic finished, we determined that, in fact, involving people in our decision making will help us with management of our colonies.||Our citizens can now vote to determine which of the simulated parties they want to be in charge of planetary management. Keeping people happy will ensure they choose the party we selected as our basic framework for the government, and therefore keep us out of trouble.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarDem">
<DisplayName>Democracy Simulation</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to transform to an artificial democracy.</Description>
<Details>The plus side of running dozens of government simulations is that we can pick the best working ones without having to evolve them one by one over hundreds of years of cultural changes. That's what primitive species of this space-time do. We utilize our superior computing power and apply randomly generated changes to the system which are predicted to ameliorate them.||We noticed that some of the simulations evolve more akin to democracy then already developed republic. Though slow, transformation is clearly visible and we decided to give it a spin, by designing a full democratic simulation with all the parties involved. According to our early analysis, it is a definite improvement over the republic, even as a beta build.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarFed">
<DisplayName>Federation Simulation</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to transform to a artificial federation.</Description>
<Details>Getting rid of the bugs like incorrect or missing AI values, broken algorithms and optimization of data should be done some time before, but we where so busy lately we somehow missed some of them in our recent build. Now that everything is fixed, we can proudly call it a Federation Simulation.||We don't see any way it can be improved upon, so we tried to run it in the most advanced of the probability generating programs to see what happens. It crashed with blue screen of death.||So yeah, this is it, enjoy!</Details>

Last one was meant to be an inside joke :>

Exactly my thoughts, I already begun to write edit of my previous post but I'll post it here instead:

In vanilla, Research, Diplomacy and Influence all started at 5% for 1 point and capped at 30-35% compared to Social and Military Prod (10% and 50% respectively). All three of them help you achieve a victory sooner;

Faster research at the beginning = faster pop growth, better improvements, economy and diplomacy techs. Plus technology victory.

Diplomacy helps with not being attacked and making others go to war. Also helps with getting better deals in tech trade. It's not so strong but there must be a reason why you couldn't pick 50% and only 30%.

50% bonus to Influence is op and can easily flip other races - just pick Torian as your race, 50% bonus Influence, get a small or medium map with drengi, korath, iconians and even yor. Colonize as much as you can, which is easy with central mines production. Run your empire at 100% approval. Build Temple of Memories on every planet. Wait couple of dozen turns. Flip everyone - profit. Which reminds me of how often Torians just flip their neighbours right from the start. 

I would rather see all three of them with slower and costlier progression:

1 10% 10PP

2 15% 7.5PP

4 25% 6.3PP 

8 35% 5PP

Social and Military can reach as high as 50% because one doesn't support another directly. Indirectly, yes, +Social = factories quicker = quicker ships, but this is indirect. If you pick one of them, you need to carefully manage the sliders and focusing. I think that's the only reason devs allowed 50% bonus in the first place.

Population doesn't play such an important role after hundred or two turns have passed, so I agree it can stay on 40%.

Any reductions to Inluence, Research and Diplo will make it a better game. I think it's best if we keep them at 30% max, but whatever you decide, it's still better then 50%. I'm glad not only I saw a problem with it, I though maybe something was wrong with me lol.

Not a huge fan of that -- I kind of liked the 10 point system better.   But its a minor quibble more rooted in laziness than anything else,  lets see how it works out.

Sounds good to me.

Your second take on the Thalan techs feels spot-on, OShee.  So now its time for the native-english-filter!  Though really the Thalan seem a bit more serious than the other races -- I'll try to make the humor a little more subtle.  

<Culture ID="InterGov">
<DisplayName>Artificial Governments</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to begin researching advanced types of governments.</Description>
<Details>Every species we have encountered in this reality governs themselves differently.   Although we have made many adjustments to living in this dimension,  we have not yet examined our own structures in this area.   We now have the computing power to run governing simulations.   As a starting point we shall simulate the attitudes and priorities of the most common alien political groups.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarRep">
<DisplayName>Virtual Republic</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to implement an artificial republic.</Description>
<Details>Alpha builds of our simulated republic have suggested that discrete, generalized external input is essential for optimal  performance.   With this in mind,  we have opened the project up to the general public,  who can now vote to determine which of the simulated parties they want to be in charge of planetary management.  Our project scientists know best,  of course,  but the feedback from the whole will be invaluable.  The simulation does have some interesting negative performance cases if disagreement reaches critical levels,  but this is unlikely to happen.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarDem">
<DisplayName>Virtual Democracy</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to implement an artificial democracy.</Description>
<Details>The Republic Simulation has been an unqualified success.   Though the primitive species of this space-time have evolved their systems over many generations of trial and error,  adjusting slowly to cultural and external changes,  we are limited only by computing power.   Never satisfied,  our scientists have been running  more simulations,  including those with more varied external feedback parameters,  inspired by other species' so-called "Democracies".   One of these has shown enough promise to take into beta,  so we have upgraded the live project and trained the general populace with the new usage parameters.   Early results seem promising.</Details>

<Culture ID="StarFed">
<DisplayName>Virtual Federation</DisplayName>
<Description>Allows us to implement an artificial federation.</Description>
<Details>Refining the Democracy Simulation has proven to be a bigger task than we anticipated.   Our scientists have postulated  a theoretical upper performance limit in this space-time,  and that we shall soon reach a point where attempting to fix errors in the system will,  on average,  cause more.   One of our scientists purchased a "hyper advanced probability generating matrix" from a Terran trader,  who claimed it was so advanced it could simulate our simulations,  but it crashed.   So it seems we are at the end of this road.||Pleasingly,  the Terran system was not a total loss.  The crashed system emits a lovely blue glow,  so we donated it to an artisan.  He had it encased in glassteel panels and framed in beveled titanium.  Quite pretty.  He calls the piece "Windows",  a clever reference to the enclosed light and inverted dimensionality.||The few Terrans that have seen the piece find it uproariously amusing,  which is puzzling.  Hyperdimensional humor is usually lost on other species.</Details>

Descriptions are in. 100 point ability system is in.

Beta 1B is a go.

Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oktap6s5msfmd29/Community%20Update%20V5%20-%20Beta%20%201B.zip?dl=0

I have been playing Gal Civ 2 for 6 years now and I have to say its one of the best games ever developed. What's even better is the dedication of the community and Stardock staff to such an old game. I wish to give my hearty thanks to all you have done and continue to do for this title. This update sounds awesome and I can't wait to try it. Again THANK YOU all!

Also, can't wait for Gal Civ 3 to be finished and released.

Cheers to all and Happy Holidays.

Wow OShee,  I have no idea where to start with those numbers.  I'm not a good enough GalCiv player to comment on most of the points you made.   It sounds like you're trying to address only the worst imbalances,   which I think is wise.

So I thought I'd hate the 100 point system,  but I started up a few games with different races and I actually don't mind it at all.   Sometimes I have 5 points left over,  but there's always been somewhere useful to put them -- Mabus,  I don't know if you made Influence,  Pop Growth, or Research have 5 point options with this in mind,  but at least one of those will be useful to almost all setups so I think we're good here.

Off to play!

We could exchange the diplo for an influence penalty. But I don't know. Being bad at diplo seems to fit them.

I can't really comment on the Torians. -5% research makes little impact at that start but becomes a bigger influence as their research climbs. The CoL changes seem reasonable.

They get cheaper hull and invasion techs and no longer suffer from over expensive government tech. That should cover them.

I'll see how that works out. Thanks for the feedback.

Okey my bad. 20% pop-growth was added to it later and it also grants tiles. I'm removing the pop-bonus. It's overkill.

They get +morale a an inherit racial ability and little to no soldering techs. I'm a bit hesitant to mess around with these guys as they very astonishingly powerful in V3.

Changes for Beta 1C so far:

 TechTree.

Dark Energy
- 10% weapons, not 30.

Unimaginable Destruction
- 0 weapons, down from 10.

Offensive Meditation:
- Gives 0 weapons, not 20

DefensiveMeditation:
- Gives 0 defense.

SuperiorEspionage:
- Removed 5% Research

UltimateEspionage:
- Removed 5% Research

EfficiencyStudies3
- Cost 400 to 600
- Economy from 10 to 15

EfficiencyStudies4
- Cost 600 to 1500
- Economy from 10 to 15

EfficiencyStudies4
- Cost 800 to 3000
- Economy from 15 to 20

Improvements:

Super Spy Training Center
- Removed espionage bonus
- 5% Research Civ wide

Temple of Espionage
- Removed espionage bonus
- 10% Research Civ wide.

Biosphere Modulator
- Removed 20% Population Increase. Just gives tiles.

Oracle of Krynn
- Morale from 50 to 25

City of Learning
- Lowered TP from 10 to 8

University
- Cost from 50 to 70

RaceConfig.

Torians
- Lowered Social from 10 to 0
- Removed research penalty

Yor
- Socian to from 15 to 20
- Military from 15 to 20
- Removed diplo penalty

Yor TechTree
- Removed Tidal Disruption.

The Altarians make up for their weapon penalty by researching Dark Energy Research but they can lose 10% by losing the Dark Energy lab. That seems fair. I also don't like bonuses on techs the AI has no business researching.

The Krynn get a larger research penalty and need two structures to get out of it but I think OShea's suggestion, to increase the TP costs of their research strucutres has merit as well. 

I've increased the economy bonus on EfficiencyStudues 3 to 15 because it's the last cheap tech they get.