(re: Improvements Editor)
Improvement ArtificialSlaveCenter (Artificial Slave Center) promises +20 Military Production. But there is no Bonus defined for the tech. I could fix it because I know what the bonus is supposed to be. (Or is there another consideration here?)
Improvement GalacticExhibition (Galactic Bazaar) promises a 50% increase in something trade related. But there is no Bonus defined for the tech. Further, from the description I can't tell what the bonus is supposed to be.
These haven't changed from 2.04, btw.
What's the deal?
The bonuses for the Artificial Slave Center and the Galactic Bazaar are hardcoded and linked directly to the InternalName of both improvements. The strength of the bonus can be adjusted via the Ability Factor.
In other words, both improvements are working correctly.
As for what the Galactic Bazaar does, it increases the value of all your items during a trade with another race by 50%. For example, if you offer 100bc to the other race, then it will give you goods worth 150bc in return.
Whew, thanks.
Here's another question. Two different techs may have the same internal name. E.g. most tech trees have a Space Militarization (SM) node. Thalan tree has a node called Defense Industries (DI). Internal name of both is 'SpaceMilitarization'.
N.b. that the bonuses from DI and SM are different.
Now suppose that the Thalan trades for another race's SM. Won't his DI node become 'known tech' and his Space Weapons/Defenses nodes become unlocked, just as if he had acquired DI? Won't the bonuses from SM be applied, not those from DI?
In other words, will the SM tech 'mask' the DI tech?
Yes. DI is SM, for all intents and purpose.
In your example, no, the bonuses of DI will be applied. However, this seems to be different depending on who initiated the trade. For example, if the other race had initiated the trade, then the bonus of SM would get applied. I don't know why that is the case.
I tried this with a similar tech pair. I initiated a trade for Planetary Improvements (PI) which masks Stellar Production (SP) (both PlanetaryImprovements). SP offers +10 Econ; PI offers +10 MP, SP, RP. I received +10 MP, SP, RP, no Econ. Unlock worked as expected and SP disappeared from my available tech and from the full tree display, replaced by PI.
I think I did a quick test with SM and DI and saw the equivalent result. [multi-tasking causes brain damage]
Larger question: I realize that some tech effects are hard-coded based on the internal name. But most aren't? In other words, why not create a brand new Stellar Production node with a different internal name? Won't the various parameters specify its behavior well enough?
Different topic, sort of. I'm using the TechEditor to examine the trees. What I'm seeing does not correspond to what I see in the game display. E.g. Thalan Xeno Biology (ID = 'Xeno Biology') has no Civ. Ability defined, yet is displayed (and apparently does have) a +10 PopG ability in the game. (Game display shows Xeno Bio as already known at startup, which I understand is unique to the 2.20 Thalan tree.)
Am I looking at the tree that the game is actually using? The file I've opened in the editor is ...\Stardock\GalCiv2.20\Twilight\Data\English\TechTrees\Thalan_TechTree.xml. This is supposed to be the one that the game uses, is it not?
Or is this another case of a hard-coded bonus?
Yeah, that is weird. There really seems to be no consistency in how the game applies the bonuses. One time, it works as you expect, and the next time, it's completely different, even under the same circumstances. Baffling, to say the least.
That's how it originally was. It got changed in order to reduce the effects of a "bug" with the minor races.
The minor races lose access to techs that are declared unique to a major race. For example, the Arceans don't have access to any of the standard propulsion techs beyond Hyperdrive. In a 1vs1 match between them and the Drengin, those techs will be declared unique to the Drengin (because they are the only major race with access to them). All the minor races on the map will not be able to research those techs.
This "bug" is the effect of a mechanic Stardock added during the beta for TotA in order to address the concerns a lot of players had with the minor races having access to race-specific techs. Once the minors got their own tech tree, the mechanic was no longer necessary, but remained in place for some reason. Probably because Stardock forgot about it.
In any case, in my mod, Autumn Twilight, I changed Stellar Production and Xeno Slavery (Drengin/Korath) back to be independent techs again. I'm also currently working on a new version, where I did that with all of the affected techs.
Are you sure? I just had a look and Xeno Biology clearly showed PopulationGrowth (10) under Civ. Ability Bonuses.
No, that was always the case in TotA.
Yes, that's the right file.
No, all of the ability bonuses are set in the TechTree.xml, and can be freely changed. Some of the race-specific tech trees have modifications to those values, like it is the case with Planetary Improvements (Stellar Production) and Space Militarization (Defense Industries) for the Thalan.
Just double-checked it again. No Civ. Ability on Xeno Bio.
Is there something in the file that is unique to the CU-based 2.20 update that I can check?
It's ok as long as you don't save. (it'll ask you if you exist everytime...) because the TechEditor will create new lines of code which will affect techtrade and some idiotic placeholder remarks even when you do nothing but click on a tech to seep through it....
there is a 100% consistency of how the game works, (short of random number generators which are nowhere near techtrading) because the code is 100% the same.
if a tech is researched & traded, no matter who initiated that trade, its bonuses will be applies.
a tech that is overwritten will never have its bonuses applied.
this is very logical because why should you get the bonuses of a tech when you never researched it?
however, depending on who initiated the trade, this is not correctly displayed, which is perhaps the reason for your false assumption.
thus, the homogenization of the techtree in the CU just created more bugs, and although they are just graphical, still add to the confusing of even old players.
I'm also baffled that, just because of the Minors, major Stock Races got nerfed. Esp since this could have been remedied much clean & easy, without causing more bugs.
Nope, never have saved in the editor, at least in 2.20.
I'm used to editing the xml directly so I know how, but the editor would be so much easier. Are you saying that one can't save at all in the Tech Editor and get a usable result? That would blow. Any of the other editors f*d up?
Or to be more precise, "why should anyone get the bonus of a tech that was never researched at all"? Obviously, the traded-for tech was not researched by you but by someone, while the masked tech was not. So the behavior is logical.
It occurs to me that there is a missing facility that unique techs all need: the converse of the "not tradeable to anyone" facility: the facility to declare that a race may not acquire a specific tech or tech group.
Currently, you can set the Arcaean propulsion techs as Not Tradeable and that keeps them out of the hands of the other races. Yet the Arcaean can acquire through trade the non-Arcaean propulsion techs. Likewise the problem with the slow-growers and robots obtaining Fertility Acceleration.
One supposes that this might require a programming change, but a rather minor one. Eh?
I find using Notepad++ much easier. You can't even copy+paste techs in the editor. Every new tech you make needs to be done from scratch. Even if it is an iteration of a previous tech.
I just tried it (opening a copy of one of my tech trees and immediately saving it), because I haven't actively used the Tech Editor since TotA came out. The result was that the editor removed all of the comments in the file, added the DisplayName tag to all techs, using the base TechTree.xml as a reference point (so some techs are now called "TODO: display name"), removed a few Requires tags, and added a Alignment and Requires tag to a tech that had neither before (and also has neither in the base game). So, yeah, I wouldn't recommend using the Tech Editor.
Well, the Improvement Editor currently has a bug. However, that's due to the CU, and not the editor itself. The CU added a couple improvements with identical InternalNames, which the editor can't handle. It shows the correct number of improvements, but if you try to make any changes, then they will only apply to the first entry of the building. For example, if you want to edit all of the Entertainment Networks, then the changes only apply to the Terran version (because it's the first entry in the file). The Arcean, Korx, and Minor Race version remain unchanged.
Yeah, I often wished the game had that.
No idea. I'm not a programmer. In any case, we don't have access to the source-code, so we can't do this ourselves (at least not legally). I also doubt that Stardock is willing to spend programming-time to add that feature in.
Notepad++ is very good. I also use Eclipse if I have it open.
The programming comment was more for Stardock's benefit. [hint, hint, Brad]
Thanks for the pointers on the editors. It occurs to me that I should go look at thalantree.xml to see if the Civ. Ability is actually defined in the file...
In techtree.xml the Civ. Ability is stated correctly:
<PopulationGrowthAbility>10</PopulationGrowthAbility>
But the editor doesn't show it. Xeno Medicine is identical in form and it shows correctly in the editor.
Since the editor won't even display techtree.xml (at least mine won't), and munges what it can edit, then this is a worthless pursuit. I'll just ignore it.
BTW, there's still a number of typos and mis-spellings in the distributed techtree.xml. Anyone interested in a corrected version?
I think most -if not all- already got corrected in the version that's been recently sent to SD, just hold on for a final update
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