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/?
Opportunity costs.
Starbase spam becomes much more important with the nerf to higher tier buildings.
You'll also have to reduce the power of starbase manufacturing modules to bring it in line. Also, are you sure you want to keep the "build everything in 1 turn" possibility?
The problem is the initial factory gives too big of a boost. A better idea would be to nerf factories downwards to 10%, with each upgrade +5% (the last one in the tree providing +15%) AND dramatically increase all production costs of higher tier ships and ship components/weapons.
That way getting overpowered higher tier ships that can destroy lots of low tiered ships becomes much more difficult. This opens the possibility of "rushing" (building a bunch of lower tiered ships and take out an enemy who is teching to higher tier). It opens up many more strategical choices.
The problem right now is that with the current mechanics the best strategy is to research and build NO MILITARY for an extended period of time. The game can get very boring during that time. The period of being able to "rush" an enemy is so short that it's pointless (because once your economy is up, you can build and/or tech everything in 1 turn).
Also, your mod does include Vid's changes to the AI, correct?
I usually play on medium size map with 4-5 opponents. is this mod suited to such a setup?
Most likely, yes.
I don't want to, but I cannot prevent at least some worlds from managing this without crippling the AI. If you have a class 30 planet with all top-level factories and 100+ population set to 100% industry, 100% military, then it's pretty much going to make anything in 1 turn. If I prevent that by making the possible constructs more expensive, then the AI will still try to build them with it's wealth-specced planets on 40-50% industry spending and 60% military output.
Again, possibly correct. But I want to see feedback from players after a decent number of games first. For starters, nerfing the base factories too much will massively slow down the early game, which is something I'm trying to speed up a bit atm. For seconds, I'm still not sold on your assumption that never researching higher-tier buildings is worthwhile. 10 factories giving 30% production bonus is a fairly big increase on 10 factories giving 25%, let alone the higher-tier stuff which is upto twice as powerful.
This is simply untrue, tbh; I know because I followed pretty much that exact strategy last night and by around turn 100 I found myself surrounded by larger enemy empires, each of which was militarily far in advance of my own, and I was going bankrupt while . You're probably right if you're discussing the base game, but not so much with the mechanics now in the mod. It makes the economy far more dependent on population rather than having lots of colony capitals (like vanilla) that the potential rush period is actually quite large, while sitting around not researching or building military vessels.
In fact, I found that all the general aspects of the 'optimal' exploit-heavy vanilla strategy were now pretty much awful. Colony spam plunges you into a crippling recession once you hit 15-20 planets, simply because there's not enough production that can be pushed into wealth to pay for it until several wealth-dedicated planets have large populations. Ignoring your military leads to falling way behind and getting dragged into wars before you've finished trying to expand (and the AI is very good at getting to and then mass-producing large hulls now). Ignoring research early is less effective than actually doing research, since building more colonies is just going to bankrupt you while you need higher-level building bonuses to remain competitive and grow.
Not exactly the same changes, but very, very similar ones. I've fixed the same stuff he has, but my version is again tailored to the larger maps, so ranges and distances are correspondingly larger.
Dunno. Give it a try. I've primarily tested it and balanced it for insane maps with 30+ players, but tbh I've no idea how it would be on smaller map sizes. Try it out and tell me how it goes
In the latest I chose the Krynn tech for obvious reasons.
Wealth + Colonizer. Colony spam is still doable... up to a certain point.
Key is getting accelerated growth +0.1 pop with Growth trait bonus so all colonies gain +0.3/turn. Playing suicidal btw, though I gave myself two initial techs at the beginning and changed colony modules back to normal size.
Some of the AI are on 5 colonies by turn 31 on God-like difficulty
The AI should be aggressively building colony ships in the early game until the number of colonies + number of colony ships = 40. In other words, the other strategies shouldn't kick in until this happens.
After hitting that trigger, THEN go into build-up mode followed by another wave of colonization.
Diminishing returns for colonization only starts to kick in around the 40th colony.
The strategy is to get 50 colonies ASAP, and get accelerated growth for +0.2 and sometimes +0.3/pop per planet. The dramatic increase in population will eventually pay for the colony costs. Use the initial money for deficit spending.
Actually this is working out quite well. Managed 60 colonies, economy running -500 deficit on 100% research despite Krynn maintenance temples and -20% maintenance buff. Keeping afloat economically by trading for money from the AI. Currently have 14 turns of non-bankruptcy. Turn 40-50 or something like that.
The AI is expanding slowly. Average of 15 colonies each. I'd like to expand more but I'm not sure I want to. AI needs to value money more in the early game. Make it harder for me to trade for money.
Teching Age 2 techs in an average of 5 turns thanks to the benevolence research line (+150% research on each planet).
Mind you: the ideological trees are still borked. The benevolence research line remains pretty much mandatory.
Also, improve Krynn coordination temples. Those things are almost completely useless. A marketplace surrounded by 3 marketplace produces +40% economy (if you include all of the coordination bonuses and the base bonus of the marketplace). Put a coordination temple there and it only increases economy by 30%.
As ever, I don't care whatsoever about performance on Godlike. The AI is not coded to take advantage of bonuses, and will continue not to be coded to take advantage of them.
Diminishing returns for colonization only starts to kick in around the 40th colony. The strategy is to get 50 colonies ASAP, and get accelerated growth for +0.2 and sometimes +0.3/pop per planet. The dramatic increase in population will eventually pay for the colony costs. Use the initial money for deficit spending.
Again, as I've stated before, there's no such trigger. I cannot tell the AI to check how many colonies it has, or how it's budget looks, or anything like that. The only triggers are 'are you at war', 'what turn is it', 'which tech age are are you in', 'what victory conditions are active' and 'what personality do you have'. Stop asking for anything that cannot be determined using those exact triggers, because anything outside that isn't possible. And do note that, aside from 'are you at war', none of them bear any relevance to events in the game. It's not reactive at all. The AI plays how it does because of rough guesses at what it ought to be doing at given turn numbers, largely based on what I had it doing over the previous 10-20 turns - so if it spent the last 10 turns spamming colony ships, it's likely to spend the next ten turns going heavy social to try and make those planets productive.
Besides which, until a few versions ago I actually did code most AIs to grow as rapidly as they could... and found that they were being routinely thrashed by AIs which didn't do that. A couple of versions ago, I noticed that the AIs which were doing best were Xenophobes - an AI I'd told to spend the first 20 turns concentrating on research and social development, and didn't really go about intensively expanding til turn 30 or 40. These AIs grew to become vastly more powerful than the expanders by turn 70-80 - with like 10 times the score, enormously larger fleets, vastly bigger manufacturing and research output, and generally similar sized empires.
The AI needs to be scripted with a very careful eye on it's limitations - particularly the inability to specialize on a local level. Rapid expansion isn't hugely problematic for the player, because you can build up a few wealth worlds and set them to 100% econ and pay for the various deficit planets. The AI cannot do that, and so giving it strategies which rely on that simply gimp it on a fair playing field. It needs to grow slowly but steadily, with breaks to build up the planets it's acquired.
Also, quick note to say I'm out of town til Sunday night or so now, so might be a little unresponsive - keep the feedback coming though.
The AI is actually doing ok. Noticing the 5 planet AI is expanding, now the average number is 12-15.
Still, I'm on 62 planets....
Of course I specifically designed my race so it can expand a lot. With a more "normal" race I'd probably be on 40 planets.
Make Durantium refineries/Thullium Archives and those other special buildings a lot cheaper (change them to cost of a factory) AND encourage the AI to build them.
I've noticed the AI loves getting mining starbases early on. Unfortunately those starbases are totally useless for most of the game. Consequently, by making the refineries and special buildings cheaper, it would leverage what the AI does anyways.
In other words, instead of fitting the AI to the game, fit the game to the AI.
Personally I'd significantly weaken the basic buildings, and significantly improve the special buildings making them cheaper and more powerful. This makes mining starbases A LOT more important in the early game and encourages thinking: "should I build a constructor or a colony ship?"
A significant part of early game expansion should be the conquest and utilization of space resources. This would add a lot more depth to the game than "build colony ships, build marketplaces, build more colony ships and marketplaces, etc etc."
The problem right now is that Durantium refineries and Thullium data archives and Promethean whatever are too expensive to build and not worth it. If you make them the cost of the basic buildings (like a factory) this would make the game more fun (and improve the AI in the process).
Ascension crystal bonuses too large for non-ascension victory games.
Change bonus down to 2% like everything else.
The AI already builds them. I've set them up as hub buildings and the AI likes them a lot; it also allows me to put them later in the build queue so it doesn't build them immediately.
I will make them cheaper, because the vanilla price is ridiculous, but I think I'll set them at around the same price as the other hubs rather than the basic factories.
As to ascension crystals, I want them to be more powerful than the other items. Partially because they're rarer, and partly because I can tell the AI to go for them specifically (unlike most of the other stuff). 10% is probably too high, but I still want them to be very potent - we'll try 5%.
Ascension crystals affect RAW production making them vastly more powerful than the other types. I'd argue 3% at the most.
The problem is I can stack the xeno archeology modules on them, meaning that a single ascension crystal even at 5% bonus can provide +20% to RAW production.
Yeah, ok. I hadn't thought about the later archaeology modules. 2% will do.
Hi Naselus,
In my current game, playing as the Terrans, the Odair Conclave and Krynn Consulate are unwilling to make peace at all. Both civilizations declared war, naturally, when they were significantly more powerful than I was, although over time I was able to build up a military fleet capable of taking on the Odair (the Krynn are too far away to prosecute any sort of war with me). So far, the I have conquered 5 Odair planets, while they only took one (faraway and newly established). Several of these worlds were given to my allies in the Kaxx Collective because they are too far away, or go through too much non-Terran space, to effectively control. The Odair's military has been dealt catastrophic blows and they have gone from a great power in the galaxy to a middle power, ranked 6th or so (although any let-up on their navy would probably see them establish rapid growth).
The war with the Odair has resulted in a significant victory for me; conquering any more worlds would be a waste of time for me since they appear to have enough to defend their remaining worlds against me. Their faction power has gone down somewhat, then stagnated, while mine has grown extremely fast. Why haven't the Odair sued for peace yet?
Hiya Naselus,
Just wanted to thank you for all your hard and diligent work on the IAB Mod. I have been playing it since the first version and look forward regularly to your updates.
I see real improvement with each new version, only down side (if there is one) is that I cannot help but begin a new game with each iteration…
Keep up the good work Friend!Cheers
Not sure tbh. The AI should be willing to throw in the towel when they have <85% of your power rating.
Thanks
Sneak Peak at 1.0 changelog:
1.0
* Fixed the Awe 3 cultural trait, which was taking 25% health off of the owner's ships rather than the enemy.* Colony Capitals switched to Social Manufacturing (from generic Manufacturing).* Ascenscion crystal bonus reduced to 2%* Resource building manufacturing costs reduced to cost 50 (except for the antimatter powerplant)* Greed trait 1 now gives flat 0.5 income to every colony (instead of a 10% multiplier, which is basically nothing)* Buffed Negotiator 4 (now causes a 3-point penalty).* Nerfed Negotiator 1 (now 20 turns of peace rather than 50)* Enlightenment 5 now gives 25% research boost (rather than 100%) in line with the manufacturing boost from evil.* Enlightenment 2 now gives the homeworld a flat 10 research, in line with the manufacturing bonus from evil.* Awe 2 now gives 100% influence bonus to the empire capital rather than a bonus to minor race trades (since minor races no longer exist).* Building Level bonuses severely nerfed (now most offer just 1% increase).* Weapon Specialization 1 now adds range to beams, cooldown to missiles and accuracy to kinetics (since adding accuracy to beams is largely useless).* Molecular fab and industrial replicator now give production point bonuses.* Approval Race Trait now brought into scale with other approval mechanisms* Tourism Race Trait now brought into scale with other tourism mechanisms* Speed-based Race traits now give a % bonus rather than a flat bonus* Colonizer now gives +100% social production rather than a free improvement.* Prototype weapons now unlock on the relevant tree root (so elerium prototype on Beam Weapons etc)* All resource-using weapons now unlock on the same tech as normal weapons (as opposed to augments).* Added Elerium Beam* Added Drivers and Rockets as bottom-level (weapon systems tech) kinetic and missile weapon options.* Added 4 brand-new, higher-level beam weapons that use Elerium.* Weapons rebalanced pretty much completely: *All weapon types now have a (DPS*range)/Mass ratio of 0.1 per tier (so every 10 points of mass you spend is roughly 1DPS, adjusted to compensate for range). *Weapon mass now fixed despite tier, so most ships will do a straight swap. *Resource-using weapons now do 50% more damage than the same-tier normal weapon (as opposed to like 500% more) *Most weapon masses and damage outputs sizeably reduced (mostly to allow me to do more cool stuff with blueprints)
Coming this weekend.
Oh shi-.
I don't like you. You're not my friend anymore.
I CAN STILL DO ANOMALY CHEESE.
Colonizer is still too powerful. Change it to +40%.
As it stands now, Colonizer doubles the productive power of your early game colonies. And it's a PERMANENT BUFF.
Or keep colonizer as it is but make it so it can't rush buy shipyards.
Only for building buildings It means colonizer's very good for building up your colony quickly, but not so good for much else. The doubled colony hub will churn out a factory in 3 turns, but will take 15 to build a shipyard... and the military output without some buildings will see you producing about 0.5 manu per turn to the shipyard once it's built. I look forward to seeing how you figure a way round it, tbh.
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