|MOD| -rks- Alternative Experience for Beta 5.2

from GalCiv3 Forums

A mod that makes expanding harder, has some misc balancing and improves the artstyle all around. Includes an optional custom splash screen.

Features:
- Each faction starts around a sun of the same color as the faction theme.
- Refined UI color schemes. Includes all factions, neutral theme and techtree.
- Homeworlds have full thematic schemes to match everything else.
- Basic ship's range reduced from 12 to 6.
- Every "Life Support" component now grants more or less half the original range.
- Map sizes doesn't buff ship's range anymore.
- Factions starts with a scout ship only.
- Colony ships can be built after researching "Interstellar Transport Specialization".
- Home planet initial population changed to 7.
- Factions starts with 500 gold.
- "Prolific" ability gives 2 extra population to the new colonized planet instead of double the population inside a colony ship.
- Reduced gold cost to rush planetary improvements to 8 times the manufacture cost.
- Ship's basic maintenance cost is double the original value. (Internal components still have the same cost.

Upcoming features:
- Thematic planets in homeworld's solar systems.
- Fine tune ship's colors.
- Further refinement of UI schemes.
- Increased production decay if far away from shipyard.


Curiosity: If you don't take faction bonuses into consideration, the scout ship you start with will have 10 units range, if you travel along the borders of the range limit around your home star system it will left no space unexplored between the max range area and the homeworld. Most habitable planets should be a little outside this radius. At the point you discover how to colonize planets, the maximum range should be 14, that's exactly the area the scout has checked out (10 movement range + 4 sensor range.)

Advise: You may need to build starbases in order to travel at some maps or under certain situations.

Warning: In order to make custom factions start with the scout ship only, it's necessary to create them from the start (copy-paste don't work.)

Notes: This mod is suspended until there are fewer vanilla updates. Installation guide inside; not necessary to overwrite any original file of the game.

Download: Suspended.

Previews:

25,566 views 12 replies
Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Ooo, I like mods. Ill have to give it a whirl and report back..

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Great ideas so far. 

Limiting colony module to a certain tech, same as the ships range brings game much more into 'eXplore and eXpand' then before. 

Looking forward to get Workshop integration for mods, as I do not like to have total conversation of the game by installing a single mod.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well, you can actually switch between the mod and the vanilla game in the options menu. It's not necessary to overwrite game's files since they go to the "Mods" folder.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Ah, ok, thx the notice. 

 

BTW, regarding custom races...do they break the mod, or do they just have head-start by getting the usual starting ships? Would be quite cool to determin it like this by choice in later versions. 

 

Update: Yes, custom races are playable and you get the head-start with colonizer and survey ship. Very nice!

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yes, even if i set the custom faction definitions to start with a scout ship only, it just starts with the regular 3. Not a game-breaking problem indeed.


Updated the release information to clarify this things.

=]

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Update: If you form a custom civ when this mod is installed, it works as specified. You start with one scout only. 

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

That's very good to know, when i tested this by creating a new faction i just copy-pasted an older custom faction i had but that seems to not work out... And are you enjoying the little changes the mod brings? Have you encounter any conflict with AI, for example?

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yeah, your mod is a great improovement to the...sad to say so, but boring current GC3 version. It is bringing back a feeling of eXploring and eXpanding. Thx for this!

 

In most cases my setup tends toward max extreme worlds to prevent catch-as-catch-can scenarios. AI is still spreading like hell, so I guess there is still a long road for the devs.

 

Current games I started, I used beginner level for AI, so they seem quite calm...except the Yor which are OP in my eyes by option to colonize every single ball of dust in space. I cutted them out in the next attempts as neighbouring Yor leads to earliest war ever, no doubt. Wars on beginner level are just easy, while I more concentrated on the other aspects, like economy, gameplay with lower expansion rates aso. Some of my earlier custom races (before mod) offer a quite interesting micro-balancing as they do get the head-start as well. Probably you might consider an option to switch empires on/off head-start, if this could be done.

I think you are in a overall good direction with your balancing and the research patterns as requirement for certain ship modules. Would like to see more of this, as it starts to bring research-ressources-production chains that bring much more flavor. Some 'unique' techs, probably bound toward the 5-6 different tech-trees so it matches custom races design, would be great idea. 

 

Edit: Patch 5.3 breaks the mod, also the new races are limited to one scout even in un-modded game. 

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well, unfortunately the mod will break with every vanilla update, and as they are just way too constant at the moment, i am suspending the project for now; it's too much work to handle every week. In the future, when the game settles, i will definitely get into changing the techtree and implementing some other concepts i've in mind.

 

I guess the bug when creating custom factions also works the other way around (when you create a faction while mod is active it keeps the 1 scout only when changing back to vanilla.)

 

Thanks for the support, if you got other ideas feel free to share them.

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Just wondering...do you continue?