Insane Abundant Balance Mod
A mod designed around balancing the game for large maps with many planets.
Features:
* Massive AI work, to make the AI more competitive even on normal difficulty.
* Replaces Large Empire Penalty with stacking maintenance costs.
* Reworks the balance between 'wide' and 'tall' empires to make planet-grabbing less important, smaller empires more capable of competing with large ones.
* Fixes sensor stacking and engine stacking.
* Includes dozens of bug fixes
* Trade and Tourism more valuable
* Diplomacy less exploitable
* Ship blueprints improved
Install Instructions:
Just extract the .zip file to your My documents\my games\galcvi3\mods folder, then start the game. Activate mods by going into the Options meun, selecting the Gameplay tab, and turning on the 'Enable Mods' checkbox, then restart your game. To check it's working, just start a new game. If the minor races are listed as playable factions, then the mod is working.
Current Version:
1.7.1 for GC3 1.7
Latest version download link available at:
http://www.nexusmods.com/galacticcivilizations3/mods/13/?
Hi Naselus,
I suggest that you dramatically reduce traveling ranges in order to make starbase-guided routes of travel more viable. It would be a good idea to keep the galaxy more empty so that there's always more colonizing to do. Furthermore, starbases and shipyards ought to have extremely high maintenance costs, on the order of 10 bc per turn base, due to the immense value that starbases would provide in navigation.
Expansion requires a significant capital investment and ought to follow a linear rather than logistic pattern. It should continue throughout the game.
Hmmm. I kinda like this - though maybe not quite so harsh. But it does sound like it may increase the Starbase Spam side of the game, which (while I don't mind it myself) some people really dislike. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Is there a way to change starbase bonuses and make them less important, while making adjacency bonuses on planets more important?
An economic starbase increases RAW PRODUCTION by 10%. That's HUGE and a large reason behind why people spam starbases.
In the meantime, increase the maintenance costs of starbases DRAMATICALLY so people will have to think whether they should a starbase or not.
Finally, increase the manufacturing costs of buildings AND increase the adjacency bonuses that higher tier buildings give. That way players have an incentive to build both the lower tier buildings and the higher tier buildings on a planet.
I'll nerf the starbase bonuses, some; it's been on my list for a while. But level bonuses are staying low. The AI's no good at it, and frankly I don't see a factory being 25% more efficient just because it's next to one other factory. Adjacency bonuses should be a nice bonus, but not something to actually care much about.
I want the focus to be on production rather than on the buildings, so I'm not overly concerned about 10% tbh. As for starbases... I do want to add a maintenance cost to the modules, but I'm not sure the AI will have the slightest clue what's going on.
I'm kind of tempted to expand the starbase range to 10, and put the exclusion to 12. That'll pretty much kill stacking, and should reduce spam a fair bit at a stroke.
The 5% upgrade for higher versions of the same building remains a huge nerf on the AI since only the AI is dumb enough to upgrade those things before filling up their worlds with the level 1 buildings.
The progression should be +10% initially, with a +10% boost on each upgrade. Slows the game down early on but that's fine. No one plays Insane maps unless they're prepared for a long stay.
The initial colony phase expansion is fun. The problem is the part afterwards.
Great work Naselus. Thank you.
would the ai be able to use this, otherwise it would cripple it's abilities.
Additional maintenance to starbases would be nice, on it's modules to hinder the put.everything.on.everything thing. Like, if i really have to make a decision, is the starbasemarket really making enough profit to justify it's maintenance, oh and i have to put defence on it etc pp.
- Universal Soil Adapter is mispelt as Universal Soil Adapter_Name. Furthermore it allows to terraform EVERY hex on the entire planet, not just once, but until the whole planet is terraformed, resulting in ridiculous planets. Was this intentional?
- Having exact amount of ideology points for an upgrade does not allow it until you have 1 point more. So if you have 40 points and next upgrade is 40 points you cant spend them till you have 41
- Colony cost drain initially is still much too severe. Even with dedicated money worlds the player has to essentially rush money production and research early on just to be able to expand. This result in a very linear and inflexible strategy compared to vanilla
Actually, vanilla is much more inflexible since all you should be doing is to build colony ships.
Now you actually have to think whether or not you should expand.
It's intentional, yes. It's an end-game tech. They are powerful by definition. There are other end-game techs which hand out +100% research to all planets.
EDIT: Holy crap, it's THERE in the tree? OK, that's getting changed, thanks for reporting
That would probably be something that's present in vanilla too. It's certainly not something we can affect with modding.
It's really not. There's an exponential increase in cost per world, but your ability to bear it increases even more. All it really does is limit your ability to spam colonies early on; by mid-game, a single cash planet can still comfortably support an empire of 25 planets. It just needs to have enough population to do so. You even have access to cash buildings from the start of the game to make it easier (aside from the Yor, who work very differently from everyone else). If you're finding cash drain too high, it means you're colonizing too quickly for your economy to support it. Slow down.
It's not like vanilla. In vanilla, you can largely just spam colony ships until the planets run out, with 0.1 population on each, and surf on a wave of free production from colony capitals. Adding a colony requires no thought, because no matter how bad it is, it is always better to have a colony than not. This is an old problem in 4X games; it's referred to as 'Infinite City Sprawl' in reference to the optimal strategy in Civ 1 being to have as many cities as tightly packed as possible. This led to multiplayer games that were largely just a race to settle as many cities as possible in the shortest space of time, with no real effort to build them up - which is also what we can see in GC3 MP presently. Mad colony rushing can basically defeat any other strategy.
Civ4 (and this mod) combated ICS by using a maintenance system. While maintenance doesn't actually stop more cities being better than few in the late-game, it makes every new city a net loss to the empire until it's built up a bit. I changes a new addition to the empire from an immediate pay-out to an investment, which will be useful later but is initially a cost.
You have 5000 credits to start; don't spend all of it on rush-buying. You can spend some, but the more of it you spend now, the less time you have to get some real cash generation online. Rush buying is much, much cheaper than vanilla, so you can get away with doing more... but just remember, you're eating into your runway. Expect to lose money for the first 50 turns or so; you can afford to, and it's not something to panic about. The question is more about how much you can afford to lose per turn. You must actually take some time to think about how you are running your empire's economy, rather than leaving it to run itself.
The number of cash generating planets you decide to use is debatable. The more you have, the faster you can expand, but the slower your research and production will be. Later on, they'll all produce absolute buckets of cash (one late-game cash world can probably support an empire of 50 planets on it's own, though fleets are by far the biggest expense by that point). If you find yourself needing more cash, it means you're expanding faster than your population can really support.
Population is vitally important. Like, really. Waaaaaaaay more so than vanilla. You don't want to be sending out colony ships which are less than half full early on; you REALLY don't want to be sending them out with 0.1 population. The colonies they produce will take anything upto 100 turns before they can even pay for themselves, let alone offer a surplus. Do not be afraid to stop colonizing, or just park colony ships in orbit, until there is sufficient population to fill them up. Oh, and seriously, specialize them per planet. Colony capitals can build most improvements by themselves in about 6 turns, so feel free to put everyone into whatever they're going to be eventually doing immediately.
Oh, and finally - fewer high-pop, highly developed planets are often much more powerful than more low-pop undeveloped planets. Population can grow to be enormous, and as you noted it's possible to unlock every hex on the planet eventually, so the difference between a mature world and an immature one is colossal. The largest empire is not automatically the most powerful now - it has the most potential, but is unlikely to be as strong in the short term as a smaller empire.
It really boils down to this: In this mod, there are times when it is better not to take a planet. It is up to the player to judge when those times are. Early settling pays off later, but hurts in the short-term; late colonizing makes life a lot easier early on, but means you may miss the best planets and the empires which DID expand early might be stronger than you in the mid-game.
It's really not. There's an exponential increase in cost per world, but your ability to bear it increases even more. All it really does is limit your ability to spam colonies early on; by mid-game, a single cash planet can still comfortably support an empire of 25 planets. It just needs to have enough population to do so. You even have access to cash buildings from the start of the game to make it easier (aside from the Yor, who work very differently from everyone else). If you're finding cash drain too high, it means you're colonizing too quickly for your economy to support it. Slow down. It's not like vanilla. In vanilla, you can largely just spam colony ships until the planets run out, with 0.1 population on each, and surf on a wave of free production from colony capitals. Adding a colony requires no thought, because no matter how bad it is, it is always better to have a colony than not. This is an old problem in 4X games; it's referred to as 'Infinite City Sprawl' in reference to the optimal strategy in Civ 1 being to have as many cities as tightly packed as possible. This led to multiplayer games that were largely just a race to settle as many cities as possible in the shortest space of time, with no real effort to build them up - which is also what we can see in GC3 MP presently. Mad colony rushing can basically defeat any other strategy. Civ4 (and this mod) combated ICS by using a maintenance system. While maintenance doesn't actually stop more cities being better than few in the late-game, it makes every new city a net loss to the empire until it's built up a bit. I changes a new addition to the empire from an immediate pay-out to an investment, which will be useful later but is initially a cost. You have 5000 credits to start; don't spend all of it on rush-buying. You can spend some, but the more of it you spend now, the less time you have to get some real cash generation online. Rush buying is much, much cheaper than vanilla, so you can get away with doing more... but just remember, you're eating into your runway. Expect to lose money for the first 50 turns or so; you can afford to, and it's not something to panic about. The question is more about how much you can afford to lose per turn. You must actually take some time to think about how you are running your empire's economy, rather than leaving it to run itself. The number of cash generating planets you decide to use is debatable. The more you have, the faster you can expand, but the slower your research and production will be. Later on, they'll all produce absolute buckets of cash (one late-game cash world can probably support an empire of 50 planets on it's own, though fleets are by far the biggest expense by that point). If you find yourself needing more cash, it means you're expanding faster than your population can really support. Population is vitally important. Like, really. Waaaaaaaay more so than vanilla. You don't want to be sending out colony ships which are less than half full early on; you REALLY don't want to be sending them out with 0.1 population. The colonies they produce will take anything upto 100 turns before they can even pay for themselves, let alone offer a surplus. Do not be afraid to stop colonizing, or just park colony ships in orbit, until there is sufficient population to fill them up. Oh, and seriously, specialize them per planet. Colony capitals can build most improvements by themselves in about 6 turns, so feel free to put everyone into whatever they're going to be eventually doing immediately. Oh, and finally - fewer high-pop, highly developed planets are often much more powerful than more low-pop undeveloped planets. Population can grow to be enormous, and as you noted it's possible to unlock every hex on the planet eventually, so the difference between a mature world and an immature one is colossal. The largest empire is not automatically the most powerful now - it has the most potential, but is unlikely to be as strong in the short term as a smaller empire. It really boils down to this: In this mod, there are times when it is better not to take a planet. It is up to the player to judge when those times are. Early settling pays off later, but hurts in the short-term; late colonizing makes life a lot easier early on, but means you may miss the best planets and the empires which DID expand early might be stronger than you in the mid-game.
I have to agree with Annekynn. Take the yor for example. In reducing the output from factories, even with the drop from 101 to 30 on assembly it locks them into a bizarre pattern while simultaneously significantly nerfing one of their racial abilities. Where in vanilla those two allow the yor to reach a point where they can affordably build both buildings/ships and assemble their nonbreeding population while in iab I had the same experience that Annekynn reports. it's normal for yor worlds to go through periods of hibernation buoiling up followed by explosive colony ship spam/pop growth/specialized output. planet quality is less important to them simply because their pop cap isn't tied to it(20+ mil yor on a class5 world with a couple eco tiles & no entertainment at 100% happy?... sure!)
Pretty much in multiple tries with yor in the iab mod that sort of behhavior was verboten & limited to:
the end result is that the yor are pretty much forced to play like a nonsynthetic race with the handicap of not breeding without assembly
The Yor are something of a special case, because they work differently from everyone else. You don't need to build approval buildings or farms, and Assembly is much more powerful than growth - the base social manufacturing from the colony capital get gives you 1 pop every 6 turns, compared to 1 per 10 for other races. When not building buildings, they have a faster growth rate than other races.
I will say that the Yor probably need more approval bonuses, though. The early game is tougher for them than it should be, until they can get Power Matrix. Approval stings a lot more, so they can't take full advantage of being able to build pop quickly; you get -1% production for every -2% approval you have, so from the get-go they're running a 10% penalty to production and have no means of removing it. I may give them an extra Power Matrix building that they can get from the start to ease that a bit.
getting free pop just showing up would be a mess for yor. when I'm playing vanilla, it's not unusual for me to send colony ships with .x mil yor out en masse because it simply doesn't matter for them like nonsynthetetic races. In my iab mod games, aside from iconia (till I send out some colony ships), they are at ~100% on most every world simply by virtue of having like 1-2mil or les pop with a pop 15-20 cap, but they still felt hamstrung.
approval bonus for yor generally isn't an issue, xeno entertainment buildings only get unlocked due to being in the way of tourism & pretty much never need building as long as they take supportive population on the way. not always needing to fill a tile with a hospital/power matrix is one of their distinctions that makes them able to really make use of low class planets. setting their factories back to default levels might improve things, moving a synthetic pop cap bump from somewhere late in the chain to early on so iconia is happy from the getgo might help too.
Yor always (even in vanilla) have a somewhat precarious start until they reach the point of explosive growth fueled by a mix of tourism on crazy pop low quality worlds & outright weapons dealing of manufactured ships, lowering factory output indirectly hits one of their biggest strengths/racial bonus and amplifies a related weaknesses og being synthetic at the same time.
Yeah, I think I agree on the factory thing. Interestingly, they're the only race which does have the factory settings Marigoldran suggests everyone should have... and their painfully slow to get started as a result. Gonna buff them up to match the other races.
1.2.2 preview, ETA Tuesday/Wednesday:
1.2.2 changelog
* Massively simplified AI tech weighting. This should make future adjustment easier. The AI is not presently more likely to pick the right tech, but IS more likely not to pick the wrong ones.* Universal Soil Adaptation changed to 60% land mass (from 0).* 4 new buildings, attached to governance techs, which upgrade from the colony capital and provide production bonuses.* Direct production bonuses removed from the governance line of techs.* Yor given new T0 power matrix - Charging Stalks.* Yor Approval techs removed* Yor given +10 global approval on Propagation tech.* Yor low-level factories buffed. Still not quite as good as others, but much better than previously.* Yor factories given higher level bonus.* Changed the favoured tech weights for all the main races.* Adjusted tech weighting on some strategies a little. More to come on this.
I've spent much of the last 48 hours staring at the tech AI, which is frankly hell on earth, but it does seem to make somewhat better choices already. Basically, the AI now only has 1-2 weights on a given tech - say, fortification and science for artifact boosts, growth for factory upgrade, military and exploration for speed increases. Everything else is weighted 0 on it, so that the AI won't decide to pick a bad tech for a given situation. In vanilla, the weights made it more likely the AI would pick a good tech... but didn't prevent it from plumping for, say, upgraded farms in the middle of a war. I'm hoping this will reverse that to some extent, so it's less likely to pick something stupid even though it's also less likely to pick key techs - it will presently pick more or less at random from the military techs if it needs military, rather than picking from all techs but having higher weight on certain military ones. This should also be far, far easier to work with in future.
I've made it so the races tend toward more in-character technology choices (i.e., mil for the Drengin and Altarians, wealth for the Iridium), and I'm gonna begin properly tweaking the strategy script tech modifiers, which should allow me to more or less guide the AI to picking sensible technology path for the early game. The Yor are also looking somewhat healthier in the early game; they were winning one of my soaks fairly comfortably. Gonna run a bunch more test games and see how it's doing, then will release once I'm happy with the tech choices.
It's not the factory that slows them down. It's the bad factory WITH the fact their population can't grow normally.
Just wondering if this mod is compatible with Gauntlet's Race Mod
Is it realistic for me to be 92 turns into a new game and the Thalan's have 45 colonies??
marigoldran has reached through the intrawebs and has taken over the Thalan on your computer!
Run! Run while you still can!!!
The Marigold strategy for God-like AI WORKS.
Turn 43 and I'm on 33 colonies. The top AI (Turian Hierarchy) has 34 colonies. The Reapers and Collectors are both in the high 20-ish colony territory and in 2nd and 3rd place. I'm in 12th place (middle of the pack).
The Colonizer Nerf really hurt.
Yeah. This might actually start becoming a challenge. Now if only later game AI could be competent. Not that I've had any experience with it, but I've heard later-game AI isn't as good.
marigoldran has reached through the intrawebs and has taken over the Thalan on your computer! Run! Run while you still can!!!
If it was me I'd be on at least 70 colonies by turn 90.
It's not my fault if game mechanics prioritize expansion.
Should be.
It's possible. If you're playing on normal then it doesn't cheat. The expansionist AI expands about as rapidly as I can get away with, though it may have some budget issues if it's grown that fast.
It only works if those AI don'the run into cash problems. Even on Godlike there's a pretty good chance they won't be able to keep up with their maintenance costs growing that quickly.
I think the AI gets free money every 10 turns on god-like. They also get these weird bonuses like credits per turn bonus multiplier 2x.
Which ironically enough might backfire horribly, now that I think about it. Still, as long as they build 2 marketplaces on every colony, they should be fine with all of their massive bonuses.
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