I was only playing on tough (genius AI) on a gigantic map and had 70 planets at end game after I annexed a load with enticing ideology towards the end. Most of the game I had about 45 and I was stomping through research way before this. I do think there were a few too many planets for my taste so will probably reduce habitability on future games.

Regardless, when my homeworld alone is generating 3x the most expensive tech cost per turn there is something wrong. I could have cut my research levels to a sad 1/30 of what they were and still got a tech per turn. What I then would have done with the extra money or manufacturing is anyone's guess, I already had too much of those.

Saruboy,

I'll take a look at the math and I think I'll give your script a try once I finish ironing out some of the bugs I found in my last game I can't play without trying to find solutions for them!

I'm also not sure they have any inclination to change to the vanilla research costs even though I think they are absurd LOL. I think this is a mod community area.

Ok over the past few days I've been making some fixes to the current bugs in my game. I've also been investigating the research cost inflation mechanic the game uses. I've now been able to make some modification to address some of the issues in my opening post and have made the following changes:

• Increased Technology Inflation
  I've increased how much technologies cost in the game, currently they are inflated each time you unlock a tech, but it didn't seem high enough so I've modified the values to slow down research. It should take about 2-3 times longer with my current settings, factor in the increased need for money and games should progress slower.
• Research Cloisters, Quantum Research Foundation, Ascension Gate
  These now give a global colony bonus similar to the Omega Research Facility instead of multiplying your entire factions research production.
• Tourism Buildings
  I've reduced the maintenance cost of these so that building them (especially the early ones) actually results in a profit not a net loss. I think they still may need buffing however to make them viable over an income building.
• Colony Maintenance
  Improvement maintenance on colonies has been increased by a factor of 4. Each colony capital itself costs 1bc maintenance (4 after modifier).
• Ship Maintenance
  Ship maintenance costs increased by factor 4
• Starbase Maintenance
  Base maintenance of 1bc left as is, however each module now built on a starbase costs an additional 1bc. Super starbases now cost money (as they should!)

While dipping into the xml is fun I think it's time for me to actually play the game for a bit and test these out to see how they are affecting gameplay and the AI.

Always thought it strange how the early Tourism buildings don't even pay for themselves in the vast majority of cases.  Presently, even with what I'd say are non-trivial Tourism planet bonuses, you're usually better off dropping in a basic Market than a Tourism structure.

FWIW, I've lowered the 'Total Manufacturing' on Colony Capitals from 5 to 2 and on the Civilization Capital from 10 to 5. This has made the early game decision making a bit more interesting since you don't always have that pool of production to get everything rolling so quickly.

It always bothered me that you could send a minimal population to a colony (1 or 1.5) and still be able to get the basic buildings built in 2-3 turns anyways (also making 'Colonizer' a weak trait IMO). But now if you send out spams of tiny amounts of colonists you will have a higher 'start-up time'. Also, stripping your homeworld of population has a more severe impact on your early production/research as well.

So far in two games I've really enjoyed the early trade-off decisions a lot more and AIs on Gifted+ haven't seen overly impacted yet.

That's been my view on it too. Tourism does have the advantage of not needing population allocation to generate income so having tourism buildings can co-exist with a planet specializing in something else - but its far too dependent on one-off buildings to even be tried on multiple worlds really.

I suspect Tourism was once meant to interact with Culture far stronger, to project influence to worlds where the tourists came from, but it never got fully developed.

I will also throw in that I think manu is also too high in general. Its too easy to crank out the biggest ships from a manu world in a single turn.

However, you have already nerfed the starting manu numbers for the colony so that may be a good place to start.

Quoting rspiccaver,

reply 15

I don't really want to boost the global tourism income. The goal is to make money more important. From what I understand tourism in beta was generating a staggering amount of income and was reduced significantly. I believe the tourism buildings were balanced with that in mind. After they reduced global tourism income I don't think they considered that it would make the tourism buildings uneconomical. I want to make them worthwhile for the tile they occupy, especially since they are unique colony buildings. I've now removed all maintenance costs from them and doubled their base and level bonuses. They still shouldn't be able to compete with a market on wealth focused colonies but hopefully it should make them worth building in some situations.

I don't want to touch manufacturing right now, it is being indirectly affected by the need to increase your income and I need to get that balance right first. Right now you NEED to generate income and every research/manu improvement, let alone colony costs you. Not to mention, turning out a ship every turn will also cost you with ship maintenance.

I'm about to make some changes to how I've applied the maintenance increases, right now it's compounding the maintenance reduction the AI receive on higher difficulties. This isn't too much of a problem, because who doesn't want more of a challenge? However right now the Iridiums are wiping the floor with everyone when combined with their "Handy" racial trait.

The main problem I've encountered through adding colonial maintenance is that the AI still needs about 100 turns to get going - after around turn 100, it can really kick off the colony spam properly, but prior to that it's pretty slow. I've been tweaking the AIstrategydefs xml, and the first option in there - 'startingstrategy' - appears to define how the AI acts early; I've pushed it to favour manufacturing more and make more colony ships and that appears to help. As near as I can tell, the AI will never, ever let itself run out of cash, so the it will increase the cash side of the wheel to at least break even. This may mean that maintenance acts as a speed bump for the AI as well, and that it can't handle it as well as a human. That said, testing on normal, by turn 120ish myself and the two top AI players (Iridium and Krynn) all have around 60 worlds; mine are better developed and of course specialized, but they're actually coping quite well now.

I worry somewhat about increasing the tech inflation though. Without specialized worlds, the AI really struggles with it and seems to average about 10 turns per tech.

I'm modding the AI strategies pretty extensively atm, so I'm not really using anything over normal - I've no objection to handicap bonuses, but they do make it tricky to figure out whether the strategy is improving their performance or if it's just the handicap.

lol, there's 1600 habitables and about 40 factions on my present map. I want to see the game scale properly to even the biggest settings.

Yeah, I'm seeing similar results; I'm holding a tech rate of about 5 turns per tech and have nearly half my planets focused on economy, but I'm noticing that even the big AI players are falling behind me in tech at around turn 150. Ironically, this actually seems to be more due to the AI spending too much on research early on - it will often throw 60-70% at research from turn 30ish, without spending enough on production to build research facilities. I might switch the starting strategy so that the AI just goes all-out production for the first 30-odd turns to build up it's research and manufacturing base and spam colony ships.

Quoting rspiccaver,

reply 19

Would love to see what you come up with keep us all informed

Right now I don't want to mod too heavily. My main goals are quite simple. 1) slow down late game research rates and 2) make income more essential to the economy (which should indirectly slow research and production also).

My concern right now is whether I've made income too necessary. I can afford the ships I'm about to build (Yor and Altarans have planetary invasion, Altarans just declared on Iridiums) but I'm not sure I can afford to upgrade to Tier 2 production/research buildings. My trade routes are about to be established so that will help and I'm starting the road to tourism.

I've found removing maintenance from buildings but just adding a stacking maintenance cost from number of colonies does the trick here tbh - I don't want to punish people for actually developing a world, I want to punish them for not doing so.

As to the AI edits - the AI's strategy files are quite illuminating tbh. It has a number of strategies which I believe are decided with a weighted random array and last X number of turns. These then include weights for ships, spending priorities etc. And some of these are, well, a bit rubbish; the AI will likely churn out a freighter before turn 30, for example, and is only really locked into the initial 'expansion mode' for 30 turns (during which it spends 60% on military and 50% on industry, so it may not even get that many colony ships built - it's forced to build 2 first of all, but after that reverts to weights). Tweaking this strategy alone (making it last longer and upping the manufacturing output at he expense of research) has made the normal AI considerably more competitive early on - I'm interested to see what the higher-handicapped AIs will manage with their enormous production bonuses.

I thought that was just the chance of having bonus techs at the start of the game.

As far as I can tell, their big advantages in tech spending on higher difficulty comes more from their higher initial cash level and their reduced maintenance - the AI seems to always be trying to break even on it's budget. It will rush-buy, but not deficit spend. So it'll sink a ton of that initial start-up cash on rush-buying buildings during it's initial start-up stage (it's set to rush-buy freely until it hits 500 creds), and won't waste cash on maintenance, allowing it to keep most of it's spending on research for longer.

Hmm that's possible!

Should be testable in a Soak.

I'm convinced there must be more to it than plain tech development, because the multiplier AI get is still just 0.25 on Godlike, same as gifted - but they tech way faster. I don't believe they actually make more research buildings, so there's got to be more base research coming from somewhere, even when they just have a few planets they shoot ahead. Not needing to invest much of anything in to cash, while also needing to allocate less to manufacturing (6x multiplier after all) might be all there is to it!