Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

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Dilvish
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#31 Post by Dilvish »

Here's an alternate idea, triggered by another thread mentioning how there winds up too little benefit for Good environs over others. The basic idea is essentially to simply take all of the current tech bonuses and multiply them times 2/3, and let Planet Ecology be a +1/3 bonus.

As a bit of an additional, somewhat independent proposal, I'd suggest considering that the growth focus boosts, rather than being a flat +1 size for all environs, start that way for Good but then drop a third each environ tier (leaving them no help for hostile, which are populated by Cyborgs anyways). This, it turns out, has the unintended consequence of fortifying the 'unlocking paradigm', it seems, which some might view as good and some not. For me, they key thing was that it leave a more substantial difference in the end results for the different environs.

If you don't like fractions for this things, then you could simply multiply all the numbers by 3 and instead reduce all population-dependent boosts (which are essentially all decimals/fractions already).

So, corresponding to Sloth's chart above, here's what this one would be like:
planet_pops.png
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Sloth
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#32 Post by Sloth »

Dilvish wrote:Here's an alternate idea, triggered by another thread mentioning how there winds up too little benefit for Good environs over others. The basic idea is essentially to simply take all of the current tech bonuses and multiply them times 2/3, and let Planet Ecology be a +1/3 bonus.

As a bit of an additional, somewhat independent proposal, I'd suggest considering that the growth focus boosts, rather than being a flat +1 size for all environs, start that way for Good but then drop a third each environ tier (leaving them no help for hostile, which are populated by Cyborgs anyways). This, it turns out, has the unintended consequence of fortifying the 'unlocking paradigm', it seems, which some might view as good and some not. For me, they key thing was that it leave a more substantial difference in the end results for the different environs.
I agree that the distinction of the environments becomes too small in the end game, but i think you've modified the wrong techs to fix that.

A little history lesson:

Back in version 0.4.0 (released in Feb 2012):
Subterranean Habitation (called Subterranean Construction and being a not-so-early-game Construction tech) and N-Dimensional Structures only gave their population boni to Good Planets (Orbital Habitation didn't exist). The Growth techs were supposed to make bad planets habitable and the Construction techs were supposed to buff the good ones. You can find Bigjoes explanation here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3773&hilit=tech+tree

Version 0.4.1 (released in Aug 2012):
Orbital Habitation and N-Dimensional Structures were supposed to give their boni to habitable planets by introducing the "TargetPopulation low = 0" restriction (Subterranean Construction wasn't giving any pop bonus). I'm not sure it worked back then, but the word habitable was even in their description (albeit mistyped).

So in order to honor the ideas of Bigjoe, i would rather change it so that,

Subterranean Habitation, Orbital Habitation and N-Dimensional Structures increase the distinction between Good and Hostile.
The real Growth techs (Planetary Ecology - Cyborgs) decrease the distinction between Good and Hostile (what they already do).

Something like this:
popul.png
popul.png (16.51 KiB) Viewed 1700 times
Notice that i only changed Subterranean Habitation, Orbital Habitation and N-Dimensional Structures to a 100% (Good), 75%, 50%, 25% (Hostile) structure.
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em3
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#33 Post by em3 »

Sloth wrote:Subterranean Habitation, Orbital Habitation and N-Dimensional Structures increase the distinction between Good and Hostile.
The real Growth techs (Planetary Ecology - Cyborgs) decrease the distinction between Good and Hostile (what they already do).
I know realism isn't the decisive factor, but orbital habitation sounds like something that would provide housing irrelevant to the planet environment itself. Subterranean habitation, too.
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Dilvish
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#34 Post by Dilvish »

Sloth wrote:Something like this:
The idea and numbers look good to me.

I expect you had SubHab off to the right to keep the techs grouped by type, but I think it would help more to see it where it would nearly always actually be researched, between Planet Ecol and SymBio, even if that means you need to add an extra row beneath the titles to indicate if they are Growth vs Cons.
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MatGB
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#35 Post by MatGB »

Increasing populations a bit but decreasing bonuses would work for me, they're currently mostly 0.2 or a multiple thereof, making it 0.1 would be easier to explain/write up for most explanations.

As to the details, frankly, if others want to do the maths I'm good with that, I'll look through it for balance concerns etc.

One thing I'd like, if you're going to split out the construction versus biology techs, then the biology techs should frequently be metabolism specific, or have differing effects on differing metabolisms, sybiotic biology should do virtually nothing for, say, Cray, but we could have a production tech that's likely to unlock at the same time that gives them a bonus instead.

Don't need to go overboard with it, but it'd be nice to differentiate, and if some don't give anything at all to Self Sustaining it might do a bit to reduce the overpowered nature of that trait without having to nerf it in other ways.
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Dilvish
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Re: Should Planetary Ecology unlock Adequate planets?

#36 Post by Dilvish »

MatGB wrote:One thing I'd like, if you're going to split out the construction versus biology techs, then the biology techs should frequently be metabolism specific, or have differing effects on differing metabolisms, sybiotic biology should do virtually nothing for, say, Cray, but we could have a production tech that's likely to unlock at the same time that gives them a bonus instead.
I think the basic idea of metabolism lines is worth talking about more, but I even more strongly think that the current proposal of treating construction techs differently is quite distinct enough that we shouldn't hold this up while trying to sort out a much bigger change, so I split off a new thread to focus on that idea.

To make it just a bit easier to place with typical tech advancement, I've moved the SubHab column of Sloth's chart over to the left:
planet_pops_sloth.png
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