FreeOrion

Could you elaborate on that? Is this a problem for players or just for content scripters?

I don't think there was any discussion about what foci to include. As far as I know, Bigjoe5 just made a bunch of foci when adding some species, probably trying a few different ways to set them up to make things interesting and possibly to test that the engine was working as it should.

I suspect we'll eventually setting on a simpler focus system, with fewer options that are mostly consistent between species. Probably having later content make focus settings better, rather than unlocking new foci, would be better?

Pretty much this. Most of those foci are just placeholders until there's a better way of doing it (i.e. player-controlled activation of buildings, espionage, etc.).

Any balancing to be done between species can just deal with the main foci - farming, mining (and heavy mining), research and industry. When there's some use for trade, that focus will also presumably have some species-specific bonuses.

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Well, my main problem with the focus system is from a player's standpoint.
But for imperial species, i also have a longer-term concern that any customization of a species foci stuff will have to be thrown away when we get a real pick system. If a player is going to create custom species via a GUI then IMHO there will have to be a layer of abstraction between the definition of a species and the scripts that contains all the little details.



As far as i know, all imperial species have the same focus calculations. As of my commit of a few minutes ago, minor species now have the normal population calculations, and the 4 main foci -- except in a few cases where the species concept excluded the ability to get some resource.

I don't necessarily dislike the idea of research uncovering new foci -- in reasonable moderation.

That's good to know.


Note Tiny<->Huge planets have backwards the originally intended relationships between industry and mining bonus/malus.
I think the idea was the low gravity of smaller worlds made industry easier, while the size of larger worlds supplied more minerals. However it currently works the opposite.

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My reasoning behind this was that the size dependency of Industry on planet size didn't make much sense, since it's largely counteracted by the increased population of larger worlds anyway, so I got rid of that and just made Industry population-dependent, which means larger worlds are good for industry. Mining on the other hand, was something that I thought made sense to make largely population-independent (the concept of a "mining outpost" making much more sense in my mind that that of "industry outpost"), so I made it population independent and made it dependent on a planet's size, with smaller planets having lower gravity, thus being easier to extract minerals from. Gameplay-wise, it gives a definite incentive to allocate smaller planets to mining and research, and larger planets to industry and farming, whereas this incentive was vague at best when industry was conflictingly dependent on both planet size and population.

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I noticed that in a system that contains imperial and minor species planets, the system label on the galaxy map only shows the color for the Empire. It would be nice if such systems got the divided color text that was planned and IIRC implemented for systems that multiple Empires own planets in.

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More about focus later...

I messed around with mobile space monsters for the first time tonight. It really adds something to the game. I'm not sure how much it was play-tested, but the balance seems pretty good, at least with my settings, they were a real threat, but not overwhelming.

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That was implemented, but some other changes broke it, and now it doesn't happen at all. Systems with multiple empires show up as white, like a system containing only non-player populated planets. An alternative would be to have some empire flags / icons below the system name, with the species icon used for non-imperial populated planets.
There was no play-testing to speak of... I just made a few monsters with reasonable-seeming strength bodies / hulls and the same weapons that can appear on player ships. Edit: Although I did playtest combat with player ships a bit before adding monsters, including things like how many rounds of combat per turn seemed to work well. /Edit

The strong body monsters won't move into systems that contain player-owned planets, to prevent them from wiping out players with no defense against them. Edit: Although monsters can't actually capture planets regardless, having one camping your homeworld would be a problem... Particularly as there's a food distribution bug at the moment where planets can't feed themselves if they are blockaded. /Edit

What would be good to add now, IMO, is some benefit to players to having the monsters around. This could be similar to bonuses for killing barbarians in Civ games, but perhaps something more interesting could be arranged.

Ways to manipulate the monsters would also be nice.

I'm hoping to get bigJoe's reaction to pd's post here, and my immediate reply, since he IIRC has most recently done significant work on the tech tree.

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IIRC, everything that's currently in the tech tree does do something, with the exception of theories. Of course, there are things that are a bit extraneous, like distinctions between different weapon types that don't really affect gameplay right now, and stuff like that. The ships tree, for example. could be simplified greatly to include a simple progression of 2 or 3 each of SR weapons, shields, ship hulls, and stealth and detection technology, with a few techs for planetary shield and defense, (perhaps a single tech that increases both). Similar things could presumably be done to compress the other trees.

Though to be honest, I'm not sure of the need for that (except that some pruning of the ship tree probably would improve playability). It's unlikely to be a move towards the game's finished state, and as it is now, there are enough techs, all of which actually do something, to keep the player occupied for a fairly long game, which I think is probably a good thing. Additionally, the structure of each category is quite simple, and there aren't a lot of complex interdependencies.

The biggest problem with the concept of FO's tech tree, IMO, is theories, period. I'm currently working on a tech tree that doesn't do anything to express several ideas about the tech tree structure, as well as brainstorming about future additions to FO, but that has very little bearing on current playability...

I think I tried that once, and Geoff was all like "Nuh-uh!". But I didn't really pursue the matter, so I don't know if he would have ultimately agreed to it, or if it was really a good idea (I really don't like techs that don't actually give you anything).

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The current structure of the tree - with lots of theories that do nothing directly - is a very old design decision from probably before I was involved with FreeOrion. The idea was to make it like Hearts of Iron or (I think) Europa Universalis.

I actually like the idea of totally restructuring the tech tree to make it more like Civ games, where every tech is directly useful to players. If nothing else, it removes an extra un-fun step for players in the chain of

Research Theory -> Research Application -> Produce Thing -> Actually Get To Use Thing

or

Research Theory -> Research Application -> Produce Thing Needed To Unlock Other Thing -> Produce Other Thing -> Actually Get To Use Something

If we do this though, it should be decided explicitly to do so, rather than doing it partly and without awareness of why the existing tree is organized as it is.

The existing tech categories can also be renamed and reorganized. I've never liked "Learning" as a category, for instance, and various other things could be more usefully reorganized into a different set of categories. There are probably various threads on the subject, and it's probably not a good idea to put an extensive discussion about it into this thread.

On the topic of tech tree - please put the 9999 RP / 9999 turns stuff like Death Ray or Spectral Shielding at the end of the tree...

I second the suggestion of making every tech (or every two techs) directly useful.

BTW do you take suggestions for new techs?

If by "suggestions" you mean a working script for a new tech that can be inserted into techs.txt immediately, with an explanation for why it would be good to add, or a set of related similar changes, then there's a decent chance it could be used.

If you just want to post ideas, go ahead, but they're not likely to get used any time soon, if ever.

This tech is near the bottom of "techs.txt", so i wonder why it is often listed near the top. Is it because it has no prerequisite?

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There's probably / possibly no simple reason for why a tech appears where it does. The layout code for the tech tree is a bit complicated.

I'm assuming that capturing monsters and breeding them to make starships will be something that people will want to do.