Advanced Ground Troop Pod

[Sloth]

Bump!

[Dilvish]

I think this had gotten held up so I could write an AI adaptation for it, but I'm not sure when I'll get to that I hate to see this held indefinitely. If other folks are happy with it then it could go in and someday down the road the AI will get adapted for it.

[Sloth]

I've created a pull request for this patch. (and this time it's 100% tab free)

[MatGB]

See, I still can't find the tabs in the first one, definitely not apparent from the web interface. Going through it now, definitely like some of what you've done but not 100% sold on the overall balance or of the tech tree positions, so I'm going to play a test game with it to see how it plays myself.

All I have to do is figure out how to get your fork onto my machine for testing. Hmm, learning Git is, um, fun?

[Vezzra]

All I have to do is figure out how to get your fork onto my machine for testing.

https://github.com/Deepsloth/freeorion/ ... 9d065.diff

Hmm, learning Git is, um, fun?

[Geoff the Medio]

See, I still can't find the tabs in the first one, definitely not apparent from the web interface.

At the least, on these lines

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	EffectsGroup	// Destroy cultural library when the species is no longer present
	    scope = Source

[Dilvish]

All I have to do is figure out how to get your fork onto my machine for testing.

https://github.com/Deepsloth/freeorion/ ... 9d065.diff

Hmm, learning Git is, um, fun?

Since we currently have what I think is a reasonably small set of contributing collaborators, I am planning to approach this in what I think is a more git-like approach-- adding more peoples forks to my working machine repo remotes, and then rather than downloading and applying a patch, if you had a remote for sloth added then something like this could be done via a command like

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git pull sloth

or if Sloth had made a 'troops' branch for this, then

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git pull sloth/troops

I think I had previously seen a guide that talked about a slightly better way still, where the command also makes a new local branch for you corresponding to the remote branch, but I'm having a hard time finding that reference. Also, although I have the general idea that using fetch in this command versus using pull would make it more tentative (not merging into my current branch), I'd need more experience to really be able to well decide when to use each & how to best use fetch.

Here is the one guide I located just now that talks about this, the "Using git for collaboration" section of https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm ... orial.html. If someone has a better guide on this topic please post it.

[Vezzra]

I think I had previously seen a guide that talked about a slightly better way still, where the command also makes a new local branch for you corresponding to the remote branch, but I'm having a hard time finding that reference.

AFAIK, after you added the new remote, do:

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git fetch <remote>

to fetch the refs for the remote branches. The command that makes a new local branch, set this branch to track a remote branch and checks out the branch should be:

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git checkout -b <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

If I understood the man page correctly, you can omit "-b <branch>", which will create a local branch with the same name as the remote branch.

HTH

[labgnome]

The quality of troops (from species) should set the number of troops in a troop pod.

• 0 - No Troops - cannot build troop pods
  1 - Bad (-50%)
  2 - Normal
  3 - Good (+150%)
  4 - Great (+200%)
  6 - Ultimate (+300%)

Then having 2 troops in a pod makes sense, so that bad troops are still 1 per pod. Advanced Troop pods would add +2 to this, so that the type of troop becomes less important as technology advances.

I'd like to point out that when you capture Setinon planets - who have 'No Troops' they then get some troops for you, due to homeworld bonus and troop enhancing technologies.

As it stands invading planets is just a formality that happens after you have destroyed the fleets and reduced the defences to zero. You see how many troops you need and you build the correct number of pods and send them in - job done.
I really think some random element would help to make it more fun. A bit of uncertainty would be better. Have a few turns of combat and give each trooper a 50% chance of causing a casualty each round, until someone runs out of troops. Maybe an effect based on the habitability of the planet for the species of the troops (on both sides) would also be good. On an adequate world 40%, poor world 25%, hostile 10%, uninhabitable 0%. But for outposts just a straight 50% - since the fight would be indoors. Then invading natives who favour very different types of world would be really hard in the early game.

All of these sound interesting. I do like the idea of troop quality also influencing your troop pods. I also think planet quality should influence troop effectiveness, it just makes sense to me, though I'm not sure I like the idea of a system that seem likely to make planetary combat protracted and drawn-out. Maybe something along the lines of your troops count at 100% strength on good planets (and probably outposts), 75% on adequate planets, 50% on poor quality planets, and 25% hostile planets. Perhaps some of the environment-specific growth techs could influence this, or even troop-pod specific technologies.

Rather than buffing garrison techs, it seems cleaner to de-buff the initial troop pod, taking it down to a more intuitive troop value of 1. and generally does the same thing with smaller numbers. Cost remains unchanged This would make take-over of native planets less trivial too, which i think is desirable.

• Then we have an advanced troop pod with 2, (2x cost) and
  a mid/late game troop pod with 5 (5x cost)

I've wondered about both troop pods and colony pods in this area. Why are troop pods 2? Why do colony pods go from population 1 to population 3? Especially when most techs, weapons, armor, detection and others all have four levels. So maybe something like Troop Pod 1, Troop Pod 2, Troop Pod 3 and Troop Pod 4. An intermediate level colony pod might not be a bad idea either. Considering a population of 3 is sufficient to make a new colony I'm not sure about a population 4 colony pod.

It seems that capturing native planets during the early stages of a game, and thereby getting access to a variety of species, is too easy, to the degree that starting species isn't especially important. If it was necessary to specifically choose to enhance your empire's troop capabilities in order to be able to cost-effectively invade already-populated planets, that could make ground invasions more strategically relevant.

Honestly the fact that you can build a sort of "federation" of many species, fairly early on, and that bombing them to bits isn't the "default" option is something I actually like about the game, I'd rather not see it nerfed too much. I certainly don't want to see it made more difficult before we have a way to acquire them peacefully (which is supposedly happening sometime).

Something to consider though might be to make some species better federation/empire builders than others, which honestly I'd push as a way to balance the Egassem I.E.: make them good at acquiring other species, to offset their maluses. Xenophobic species should probably get some kind of malus, since their whole thing is not playing nice with others. It might also be a good idea to balance it against environmental tolerance, so that species with broad environmental tolerances have a harder time conquering, to offset their ease of colonizing, and narrow tolerance species can more easily conquer species to offset their difficulty at colonizing.

[Sloth]

I just want to point out that this patch has been pending since Jul 21, 2013 (without any functional changes).

[MatGB]

Yeah, I'm away from home on the travel laptop (which won't run the game), when I get back I need to check a few things then I'll almost certainly commit, there are some changes I think we can make moving forward but I do think it's an improvement.

I'm wondering if it's worth rethinking Good/Bad ground troops so that rather than being a %age bonus/malus, it's a population based effect, that might be more interesting and balanced, but that can be something to plan for not needed for this.

[Vezzra]

I just want to point out that this patch has been pending since Jul 21, 2013 (without any functional changes).

There's another patch of yours, which is still pending in my queue, that tops even that:

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7253

I still like the idea, but never get far enough when digging through my piles to actually get to that. The oldest items on my todo list date back as far as 2012.

[Dilvish]

At various points in this thread there was some discussion of buffing the Garrison Techs. They have been made more population dependent since then, but they still seem pretty underwhelming to me-- for example Garrison 3 costs 100 RP for 5 more troops, which might not even force an extra troopship be needed. There was also talk about letting some of the defense techs buff the troop regen rate, which I think the consensus was in favor of and which I strongly favor. I'm hoping someone will be interested in taking on some adjustments here...

[MatGB]

I approve this suggestion, either by a lot more techs with incremental boosts or boosting the current techs a bit, and also their research costs, they're currently dead cheap.

[Vezzra]

Definitely agree here - in addition to give the existing garrison techs a considerable(!!) boost, I also want to suggest to introduce another line of defensive techs that give ground troop boni based on pop instead of flat boni. I would then further distinguish these two lines of ground troop techs by only applying the species pick troop bonus to the pop based techs.

Rationale: Think of the "garrison" techs as exactly that - they apply to troops which can be seen as "imperial troops", kind of "empire specific" and "species independent", hence the troop bonus/malus of the local species is irrelevant.

The pop based troop techs apply to "militia troops", which are recruited from the local population, hence their troop bonus/malus applies.