For example, the simple change of increasing research costs and adjusting LEP so that it is -0.2 MONEY per planet instead of -0.2 Morale per planet makes a HUGE difference in the expansion phase.
With 50 colonies, almost a third (or more) of my colonies have to be Money Generating Colonies to keep up with maintenance, meaning that only about 35 colonies are actually productive in terms of research and manufacturing. And this is with Thalan Tech and Hives on every planet. It also makes it pretty much impossible to expand for a while beyond that because new colonies will cost so much maintenance that they're a big net LOSS.
Naselus's adjustments work.
As a result, the game becomes MUCH more fun when it comes to managing economy. Finding the right balance becomes an art. The game is no longer linear and one-dimensional (spam as many colony ships, then spam constructors and starbases). The constraint of running out of money makes the game a lot more FUN.
Furthermore, this NEW LEP SYSTEM won't affect people who play on smaller maps. With fewer planets, the LEP is no big deal. It's only for the hard core fans, the ones that want to play with massive empires that it becomes a big deal.
Once again, I believe the developers should take a look at Naselus's mods and make some of his ideas OFFICIAL.
Yes. So test it out. I still haven't gotten to a proper war yet (sigh) but I have noticed the AI expanding A LOT MORE. The mod does make the early game expansion A LOT MORE FUN because on one hand you want to expand as quickly as possible and on the other hand you don't want your econ to crash.
I'm not arguing that - Im absolutely certain his mod makes the game much better than it is now. I'm simply debating that his design approach is not the best approach. Nevertheless, I applaud his efforts, and i'm happy to know you have built your first economy building and the game is more challenging and fun for you.
However another challenge for you would be to not use traits and tech trees that are without a doubt OP in the current state of the game. I happened to start GC3 with stock terrans, and have just continued to stick with them. I know I could make it easier for myself, but I have recognized the faults in the game balance, and have chosen not to exploit them. You may call that "lack of strategy", I call it ethics.
Ethics? What does the word mean? I do not understand.
EDIT: But yes, I too am happy I built my first market center a few days ago. I have yet to build a morale building, however.
Plenty of people in other threads have stated they dont have a problem with approval, so you arent speaking for the entire GC3 community, by any means. You have your opinion, as I have mine. But I've seen the dev opinions as well, and morale based LEP is simply not going away. It was introduced to GC3, and they want to make it work. Does it need tweaking, HELL YES. Just wait to see their plan.
Well, their first plan is to add a stacking research cost from expansion. Which is, straight away, adding a second, separate mechanic to limit expansion, tantamount to an admission that approval-based LEP doesn't actually penalize expansion effectively at all. It also makes LEP rather superfluous, since the really big cost to expanding will be the research cost increase. In fact, it's basically just using maintenance, only placing it on research rather than money (somewhat ludicrously, given that money is too plentiful and doesn't do much).
This is combined with 'fixing' LEP, though tbh in spite of what Paul said on that webcast I don't actually think it's bugged at all - the same additives-before-multipliers calculation is used for more or less everything else (aside from maintenance, which is rather telling tbh). It also works just fine once you remove LEP. If you move the LEP effect to the end of the equation, but keep the remaining additives before the multiplier, then you're basically adding a brand new stat (negative approval), and then coding in a meta-calculation like Net Income currently does. The problem is (and you can see this with maintenance already), the penalty becomes meaninglessly small fairly quickly in the face of multiplied positives, unless it's set so punitively high that it once again makes approval obsolete sooner rather than later. Also, the fact that this requires an entire new stat to be defined and the entire calculation to be reworked to include it is another reason why the 'oh, that's a bug' story doesn't really play out - it's a bad design decision, not a programming error.
I'd say the majority of the forum community is anti-LEP - especially those who tend to play on bigger maps - and even those who profess to like it believe that it is presently broken and should be changed significantly, even if they don't see the mechanic itself as bad. And I do rather suspect that, eventually, morale-based LEP will go away. It'll either be removed entirely (as many modders seem only too happy to do already, myself included), or it'll be augmented with something much more effective at limiting expansion and will become basically an irrelevant side-effect.
Like i said earlier i don;t think there's any intrinsic issue with making LEp work as a concept subject to suitable modifications to the functioning and approval benefits.
Your stance on the research aspect is showing that your managing to completely miss the point of LEP. LEP isn't there to stop you building a super large empire, it's there to stop you doing so quickly.
The research penalty is there to deal with the fact that once you do get a large empire you can basically ignore research because everything becomes so super fast to research. It's not meant to stop you getting a large empire, it's meant to make the benefit of larger empires on research less linear.
Like i said earlier i'd need to sit down with a spreadsheet to work numbers to get a clear idea of exact numbers, but here's a rough idea of one possible way to do it:
Increase approval effects significantly, (i won't state numbers or methodology, not the point here).
Remove LEP from individual Colony Approval
Change the way Global Approval is calculated; Global Morale is now = (global pop + LEP)/Global Morale
No colony can have an approval greater than the Global Value
You probably could get away with a linear LEP this way, (percentage of class would probably be best but i'd have to spreadsheet it to be sure), and the LEP genuinely does limit your expansion by tanking all your worlds approval when your empire becomes overpopulated or over large, or both, but LEP no longer impacts individual colony morale.
It also makes LEP actually grow with your empire size rather than faster than it.
So... you're saying approval-based LEP works fine, provided you completely change how approval works, and completely change how LEP works.
And this is the stance of the people who LIKE the mechanic...
The fundamental issue with LEP as implemented now is that no matter how you setup the penalty from taking one more planet only hurts new worlds hard unless it's allready hurting your empire hard. For it to work as an empire expansion slower it needs to whack your empire as a whole so that your whole empire slows down from LEP. hat requires that LEP apply in a non-colony specific way.
Such as, for example, changing LEP to -0.2 MONEY.
This little change (and VERY easy to implement) does everything you want.
Except you don't want top just hit the money. You want to slow the whole thing down. Which means you need to hit manufacturing influence, grwoth, and research too.
Currently flat research, (mostly from acencion crystals), can give quite significant amounts of research even if you throw everything to wealth.
Manufacturing a bit better off in that it is more directly effected as theirs very few flat sources of it. But if one of your worlds has enough raw, well yeah.
Culture dosen't give a damm, and neithier does Growth, the later of which is espcially important to hit hard, otherwise an unstopable death spiral can develop before you realise it, and that's especially bad for the AI since it's much weorse at forward planning.
Finially by using wealth your applying an artifical cap on military size that means growing your empire curtails your military, and that's just bad period.
If you have to sink all of your points into money, your research/manufacturing/etc gets hit too. Try his mod on insane abundant/abundant. It works much better than any system you've hypothesized.
Also, what you don't understand is that in the late game, the LEP penalty from -0.2 Money/planet is effectively nothing. One specialized planet with 50 pop generating income can pay for 50 other planets.
However, the LEP from -0.2 Morale/Planet is a PERMANENT debuff that hurts you even more as you grow your pop larger. The problem with using morale to limit expansion is that it punishes TALL empires significantly- a lot more than WIDE empires.
So, you've just admitted that the more planets you have, and more opportunity to specialize, that your version of LEP being money based can be completely nullified by late game?
Praytell, whats wrong with a PERMANENT debuff? There are numerous ways approval LEP can be changed to lessen the impact to tall empires and more greatly punish wide ones. With the current penalty and approval/rawproduction curve, no.
Because it makes the game not fun, and turns it into micro management hell.
Also, LEP as money IS a permanent debuff. After the initial expansion phase, as you conquer more worlds your maintenance costs increase EXPONENTIALLY. You'll need to create more and more specialized worlds for raising cash. Getting your 50th world will increase your maintenance costs by 20. The 150th world will increase maintenance costs by 60(!). However, dealing with this debuff is MUCH EASIER (create a few specialized worlds) than dealing with a morale debuff which forces you to constructor spam approval bases EVERYWHERE.
To quote another poster in another thread:
"I think this would probably be for the best. Money is really, really easy right now, and even with the nerfs in 1.1, I can set my faction to -2 Traders and -2 Income and pretty much not even feel it. I'll have so much money that I don't even remember to set up trade routes. Money is never tight. I get everything I need from basic Tourism and maybe 1-2 income planets.
The major problem with using Morale as the LEP is that you have to manage Morale on every world as a case-by-case basis. This makes it a nightmare of micromanagement, as the bigger you get, you not only have to manage our new worlds, you have to fix your old worlds as well. There is no solution that can nudge your whole empire in the right direction, and worse, the best method of improving Morale involves Constructor spam and using Orbital Resorts. With money as the LEP, however, there ARE simple solutions that make it much more lucrative to pursue peaceful relationships with others, which, incidentally, is the strong point of Pragmatism in this game, and lends mechanical credibility to that line of thinking."
Double post, ignore. Read the one above.
If you want set it and forget it methodology giving most efficient results, I suggest you buy the Ronco Stainless Steel Rotisserie. At $120, it is indeed more expensive than GC3, but is guaranteed to take care of all of your paltry needs.
EDIT: sorry, i meant poultry
$120 for chicken? Are you out of your mind?
But it lets you easily do the same exact thing, over and over and over and over, with delicious results.
Oh, as in something to MAKE chicken food.
Nah, eating chicken is against my religion.
It can work with veggies too! Hence it will take care of all your rubbish needs.
EDIT: Damnit, another auto correct fail - I meant roughage
Right, few points now it's not 1am on a work night:
Which it does not do. At all. And never will. All LEP does, in it's current mechanical form, is punish the maximum extent of the empire, without in any way effecting the rate that you get there.
Yes. It does the same thing as LEP. Only it does it better. So LEP is basically made superfluous.
As noted, this is basically saying you think approval-based LEP works, provided they completely change how both LEP and approval work. I do not regard this as a defense of LEP, frankly; you're actually declaring LEP to be profoundly, mechanically broken, just like we are. Also:
Is circular math, and makes no sense whatsoever. The result of the sum is attained by dividing something by the result of the sum. Your spreadsheet might have a few issues with trying to calculate that one.
Exactly correct, which is why approval was a terrible choice of mechanic to use. They chose to punish a global phenomenon using a local-only resource, so it's not like your existing worlds can take up the slack. Once again, your position is "approval-based LEP works, provided they completely change how both LEP and approval work"...
No, it doesn't. You might have to sacrifice some military early on for the sake of grabbing more worlds, but once the planets are developed they can comfortably pay for themselves.
Applying LEP to wealth rather than morale limits the rate of expansion, but does not limit maximum expansion. Approval-based LEP does exactly the inverse - it creates a set limit beyond which approval will always be zero, but has no impact on how swiftly you get there. That's the entire point. It is not fit for the purpose in it's current form, and your impassioned defense is entirely hinged on admitting completely that it's not fit for purpose.
Any links to where they said that? All I heard was that the devs want to adjust the research cost based on the total amount of habitable planets on the map.
Paul mentioned it on one of the dev streams.
I only remember Paul talking about adjusting the research cost based on total habitable planet count in the dev streams, not a stacking research cost from expansion.
Once again flat sources of research mean that beyond a certain point you don't have to dedicate any of your economy to research to still get a useful research output.
Again it fails to address growth or influence allowing you to continue hardcore culture spam (which could result in you picking up more worlds when you can't afford them), and doesn't hit growth, (which could result in approval drops you can't afford), and once again affecting monetary income intrinsically affects the maximum number of ships you can support in a negative way at a time when you want that value to be growing.
Hitting wealth isn't a cure all, sure it might limit your ability to expand and produce, but it does little beyond a certain point for your research, (it intrinsically cannot), and has inherent additional undesirable penalties to military as well as two death spiral inducing conditions and a lack of negative effect on another key attribute.
I'm sure it affects production nicely and discourages growth bey9nd a certain point but it does it in a completely undesirable way because of all the things it doesn;t do that it should and all the additional side mechanical affects that it creates that are highly undesirable.
There's a difference between something being a solution, and something being a good solution.
@Naselus: you'll get no argument from me that current LEP fails to do it's intended purpose but again your looking at the research change all wrong.
LEP is there to force limits on how fast your empire can grow wide. It's not intended to make a wide empire less powerful or advantageous. It's merely intended to limit how quickly you can achieve a wide empire. It limits the rate of growth but not the power provided by that growth.
The research change is explicitly intended to make going wide less advantageous. It limits the power provided by growth but not the rate of growth.
Compare the two bolded statements and the two italacised statments. They are not saying the same thing or anything close to the same thing. LEP limits the rate of growth, Empire Research Penalty, (lets call it REP?), is intended to make that growth less powerful.
It all comes back to the fact that no matter what you do you cannot prevent a wide empire from developing it's worlds as well as a tall empire. So going tall has no advantage to it as is now except in that a tall empire can develop those worlds more rapidly. This makes the talls advantage very transitory. An empire wide research penalty doesn't really change that in the long term, but it forces the wide empire to come much closer to the tall in overall development level to exceed it. It decreases the degree of advantage a wide empire has in research as it's the research advantage that really feeds back into a logarithmic cycle for wide empires, they get the better techs sooner increasing their empire wide output more sooner and very quickly start out-developing the tall empire via superior item access.
As for the military, that's really a two pronged issue. On the one hand there's actually quite an issue for at least warships with modules providing more power per maintenance and manufacturing point cost, and that absolutely makes large militaris cheaper to build and maintain, (especially the latter), than they should be. The AI's terrible military capabilities don't help, you just don;t need as many fleets as you should.
At the same time the moment at or just before you expand is exactly the moment the military needs to expand to cover the new growth adequately, creating a situation where someone is forced to expand before they have the military to protect it isn't good game design as your deliberately asking them to sit asses swinging in the wind begging the other guy to come hit them just to grow more powerful. Taking that kind of risk should be a choice not an enforced reality.
Surely ancient is outrageously OP in this mod...
Once again, LEP does not, in any way, limit the rate of growth. It acts solely as an absolute limit on growth. That's all. It has no impact on how quickly you can expand. And it will NEVER impact on how rapidly you expand unless it is completely reworked, in such a way that there was no reason to use approval for it in the first place.
The argument that having to divert lots of production away from research into wealth doesn't impact on research is ridiculous. It is essentially basing your argument on the idea that putting any production into research is unnecessary. If that is ever the case, then the mechanics which allow you to put nothing into research and still get lots of tech should be changed.
Your military argument is equally preposterous. The entire point of the mechanic is to force you to think about whether you can support and defend a new colony; to make mindlessly spamming colony ships into a sub-optimal strategy. It is about making the player make interesting choices, which Sid Meier once famously declared to be the entire point of a 4X. You have somehow managed to completely fail to understand that, and believe that making expansion always better is offering more choices than making a player genuinely think about whether he can support a new planet. It is also completely contradicted by your own stance on, well, everything else. The research penalty will force me to put more resources into research, reducing my ability to produce wealth and hurting my military. The productivity penalty from low approval not only directly reduces my cash output, but also reduces my ability to produce ships. According to your own logic, this means that using approval is worse than using maintenance. You are attempting to argue that using stacking maintenance is simultaneously too easy and too hard, which makes your entire position logically inconsistent.
The idea it doesn't effect culture is rubbish; aside from the fact that having to use more cash-generating structures directly reduces the primary source of culture (and, in fact, does far more than the tiny penalty from approval, since it attacks the base culture growth rather than only applying a % modifier), it also prevents you from just settling hundreds of unsupported planets and spamming cultural festivals.
And while you cannot prevent the wide empire from eventually developing its worlds to an equal standard as the tall empire, you can make that development slower and make the final result less effective. If the Wide empire must dedicate 50% of its planets to producing cash to pay it's maintenance, then it is not able to leverage its growth. This is achieved through the implementation of real, global negative effect, so that poorer worlds must be supported by larger worlds. Approval, as a local effect, cannot do this. This is why your own solution to LEP requires converting it into a global effect; because local effects do not work on a global scale by definition.
It's really not that hard. Approval, as a local effect which impacts on 1 build queue, is good for preventing too much power being concentrated on that one build queue. Wealth, as a global effect, is very good for preventing the proliferation of build queues. The two are not very effective at doing the other's job, without being massively reworked - at which point, they become less and less useful for doing their own. This is very, very basic game theory. It is not controversial. It has been done time and time again across dozens and dozens of games. I have not done anything particularly original by bringing it to GC3, and tbh the very idea that there's this much resistance to it is bizarre, particularly when the suggested improvements to approval-LEP require such enormous contortions to try and make it workable.
Finally, it really boils down to this: I've actually made the mod and played with both systems, and the maintenance-based system leads to a more interesting and challenging game - and not even by a small margin. Even before I implemented the AI changes, it was a better system. You have only played with an LEP system that you have outright stated should be completely redesigned from the ground up, and are simply attempting to hypothesize why a maintenance-based system wouldn't work; and most of the reasons you're coming out with are basically ridiculous. Your own proposal for replacing LEP is literally logically impossible, and you think that it's better than the present system, yet you cannot appear to grep the idea that a tried-and-proven method might be.
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