Why don't the government colony limits simply scale...

from GalCiv3 Forums

Was this discussed in alpha or beta of this game at all? (You loyal old timers know?).

Wouldn't it be nice if the colony limits for government were something like:

Colonialism: 2 + 0.5(the total number of initial habitable planets in the galaxy +/- a random amount about 20% of that total so you never know the exact habitable count.)  So if there were 100 habitable planets, you would get 2 + 0.05(100 + (rnd-20 to 20)) or  6 to 8 as the initial setting in your game depending on the RND.

Initial Imperial could be 0.07 x the rest... which would be 8 to 10

And of course singularity or whatever that one is could still be unlimited...

Wouldn't something like this solve the scaling problem? Although I could see this being an optional thing for those who just want to factor out limits like this entirely (I'm not one of those).

I wonder if I could insert the math into a XML, if those enums are defined (total habitable planets, etc.?

65,419 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I don't own the DLC (whichever it is) that introduced governments, so I can't speak of personal experience. That said, I like the suggestion, in general, to tie a mechanism or percentage to the size of the galaxy or number of (whatever) available in the current galaxy. There are way too many mechanisms in the game that scale poorly with galaxy size and settings. At the moment I feel forced to adjust all my settings to the galaxy size because otherwise it just doesn't work out the way I intended.

If there aren't already variables for this that can be referenced in the XML, they should be introduced, and used.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Well I have been modding the game heavily lately and hear you. Tell me more of the mechanisms that you find not scaling well, I'd like to know. I'm looking to improve the game in a few ways, at least for my own personal play.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

This has been asked for by numerous people and numerous times. I play synthetic so this doesn’t bother me but I feel for you meatbags and your moral.

If you made a mod that allowed synthetics to build the administration center that gives +1 administrator I would download it and it would be my first mod. Playing on larger maps without it difficult.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting ForgottenSlayer, reply 3

This has been asked for by numerous people and numerous times. I play synthetic so this doesn’t bother me but I feel for you meatbags and your moral.

If you made a mod that allowed synthetics to build the administration center that gives +1 administrator I would download it and it would be my first mod. Playing on larger maps without it difficult.

Check out the Administrator Training Institute mod on nexusmods.com.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Dearmad, reply 2

Well I have been modding the game heavily lately and hear you. Tell me more of the mechanisms that you find not scaling well, I'd like to know. I'm looking to improve the game in a few ways, at least for my own personal play.

Research, Tourism (because it's tied to ZoI which can get quite large in big galaxies), administrators and special resources all don't scale well with galaxy size. (That said, resources don't scale well at any size, IMHO ;-) )

I'm sure there's more, but those are the most obvious candidates I can think of.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

So it seems to me that:

Admins should scale per planets or something about the size of your own Empire.

Resource extraction to the number of initial empires on the map.

Tourism to a proportion of the entire civilized population of the map (after all those are the potential tourists) minus any races which do not participate in tourism if there are any.

 

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

@admins: removing the admin cost for colony ships would help - colonization is already limited by pop growth anyway. Of course, then the Colonizers trait and Admin Center must be removed or changed. Alternately make the Admin center available for everyone (easily done: just remove the perclusion section). If possible, scaling the admin bonus from citizens (slightly) with galaxy size divided by numbr of players could help, but I suspect once colonization is fixed, that's not as much of an issue any more.

@resources: I don't know how the scaling is right now, but it seems that, currently, when you leave the galaxy settings for resources alone, and only change galaxy size, the relative abundance of resources does not scale linearly with galaxy size. IMHO it should, but I have no idea whether it's possible to handle this via XML. That said, the greater issue is that the amount of resources needed, especially for some late game modules and buildings, is too high. Also some of the resource types are used for too many different purposes at once. I may have felt it more than other players because I play synthetic: in very large galaxies they can't keep up with other races pop growth due to lack of durantium and prometium needed for pop assembly. And then there's no resources left for the many other uses. Just to make a point: in my current game at around turn 100 I spent a lot of effort to build or trade for all durantium mining starbases. But even with ~18 Durantium and ~15 Prometium per turn, that's still not a lot of growth I can achieve for 100+ planets.

Maybe it would help if synthetic and silicon races could unlock advanced methods of pop assembly later in the game, that require less resources per unit of pop.

@tourism: the problem is it's linear scaling with ZoI which grows too much in large galaxies. Tying it to number of planets would be better, or maybe making the relation to ZoI sublinear (e.g. square root?).

@research: should be scaled with #planets divided by #players

@citizens: empire wide bonus should scale by #players / #planets, otherwise there would be no point assigning them to a planet.