Nest eradication

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Tualha
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Nest eradication

#1 Post by Tualha »

I’ve implemented and tested a small modification that might be of interest to others; perhaps even to the developers.

I find controlled monster nests to be rather a nuisance. The resulting young monsters are not really useful except as decoys; even if they do eventually mature, they’re still not great. I prefer nice well-designed ships. So I always end up simply scrapping the monsters as soon as they appear. It becomes tedious.

Thus, the Nest Eradicator building. Research the new technology Mega-Fauna Ecology, build a Nest Eradicator on each planet with a nest, and voilà, the nests are gone for good. As with terraforming, the building destroys itself once its work is done.

The technology prerequisites are Terraforming (it’s a limited form of such), Nanotech Medicine (it takes sophisticated nanotechnology to get rid of a nest), and Mega-Fauna Endocrine Systems (a necessary prerequisite to understanding their lifecycles well enough to disrupt them). Both tech and building are moderately expensive, but not too overly so, given the stage of the game where you would have all the prerequisites.

It tests out well, works as expected, no surprises. Worked up an elementary icon for each new item. Developed it under 0.4.6 (my computer lacks one of the build prerequisites for 0.4.7 and I haven’t gotten round to building it).

I’ll put together a patch if anyone’s interested.

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Oberlus
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Re: Nest eradication

#2 Post by Oberlus »

Sounds great, I am a bit fond of krakens but I will eradicate snowflakes with little remorse. I'd like to see your development added to master (since I'm always testing last update). I hope developers see it and like it. Maybe you should commit it to the github repository?

dbenage-cx
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Re: Nest eradication

#3 Post by dbenage-cx »

L29ah has requested such as well, so I am sure others would appreciate the option (at least until someone finds motivation to progress them into a resource of some sort).

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MatGB
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Re: Nest eradication

#4 Post by MatGB »

My normal approach is to not research the tech so the nests never activate, if I'm playing organic hulls I find them useful as the matured versions are good big defensive beasts, if I'm not playing organics they're not useful so I don't go for the tech.

But yeah, we've had many ideas and even PRs put forward doing more with monsters but they've never really progressed, it's another on the long list of unfinished features that someone'll work on at some point.
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The Silent One
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Re: Nest eradication

#5 Post by The Silent One »

Tualha wrote:I’ll put together a patch if anyone’s interested.
Please do.
If I provided any images, code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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Vezzra
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Re: Nest eradication

#6 Post by Vezzra »

Hm, this proposal basically introduces a tech and a building that lean a bit toward being there mostly to avoid micromanagement. We usually want to avoid such things, and the domesticated monsters feature should be fixed in a better way. However, as a stop-gap solution until someone gets around to design and implement something better, I see no reason not to accept it.

So please, feel free to provide a patch (do so by creating a PR on github).

LGM-Doyle
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Re: Nest eradication

#7 Post by LGM-Doyle »

Should we add a building to domesticate monsters on this planet/asteroid belt? It would start the generation of domesticated baby monsters. It would be similar to the asteroid processing building and could be first step in creating an organic hull line resource. It would make monster domestication opt in and only require 1 building in locations where you want domesticated monsters, instead of a building at every nest that you want to remove.

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MatGB
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Re: Nest eradication

#8 Post by MatGB »

Sloth put up a PR doing similar, but it wouldn't stop normal creation, ages ago, I was going to do more work on it but it got sidelined during Fighters and I forgot about it until now. Having the nests require a building to start producing, but making the subsequent monsters a bit more useful, would possibly be a nice response, needing some sort of 'breeding pen' or 'training facility' would make sense and not be that much micro, it's a location specific thing that you don't have to do unless you want it, same as, for example, xenoresurrection, which I really like.
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Vezzra
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Re: Nest eradication

#9 Post by Vezzra »

LGM-Doyle wrote:It would make monster domestication opt in and only require 1 building in locations where you want domesticated monsters, instead of a building at every nest that you want to remove.
However, if I do want domesticated monsters, why wouldn't I want every nest I own to be productive? So usually you would end up producing that building at every nest, which just flips the situation around. This looks like an all or nothing choice to me, I can't imagine a situation where wanting only a few of your nests productive would be a viable choice...

So that approach does not make much sense to me wrt what's less micromanagy. However, the idea that you have to invest PP to actually get domesticated monsters out of a nest does make sense to me. If the building is sufficiently expensive so the player actually has to make a choice concerning the investment. And it offers to possibility to destroy such buildings to impair an empire's ability to produce monsters (once we introduce game mechanics/elements that allow targetting buildings that is) .

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Oberlus
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Re: Nest eradication

#10 Post by Oberlus »

Vezzra wrote:if I do want domesticated monsters, why wouldn't I want every nest I own to be productive? So usually you would end up producing that building at every nest, which just flips the situation around.
Nests will always be an small percentage of total planets. You will always be building more orbital drydocks, scan facilities, etc. than domestication buildings. I mean, the former isn't a problem, why would it be the latter? IMO it is way under the tolerable threshold of micromanagement. The amount of microing you'll need to get all your nests producing puppets will be less than 0,0...01% of the time you'll devote to the game, and certainly less than what you'll devote to scrap monsters you don't want.
Plus, as you said, it makes some sense to need some kind of effort (building) to actually domesticate the space monsters, not just getting an easy tech (that you was going to research most probably) and outposting the planet (that you were going to outpost anyway).
It makes more sense than having the monsters for free but requiring micromanagement to get rid of them (either monsters themselves of their nests).

LGM-Doyle
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Re: Nest eradication

#11 Post by LGM-Doyle »

Make the building have the empire wide effect of activating all empire owned monster nests.

Then it requires no micro management either way.

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Krikkitone
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Re: Nest eradication

#12 Post by Krikkitone »

LGM-Doyle wrote:Make the building have the empire wide effect of activating all empire owned monster nests.

Then it requires no micro management either way.
You could have two buildings

1. all nests in empire begin producing monsters for the empire ?10? turns after (nest becomes part of empire or building is complete)
[must be built on nest]

2. all nests in empire are eradicated ?10? turns after (nest becomes part of empire or building is complete) [built in capital]

So if you prefer not using monsters, you could use it to deny the enemy a monster nest (if you can capture and hold it for ?10? turns)

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Tualha
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Re: Nest eradication

#13 Post by Tualha »

Vezzra wrote:However, if I do want domesticated monsters, why wouldn't I want every nest I own to be productive? So usually you would end up producing that building at every nest, which just flips the situation around. This looks like an all or nothing choice to me, I can't imagine a situation where wanting only a few of your nests productive would be a viable choice...
Well, there could be a high cost to it. The cost of the building itself could be made arbitrarily high. Also, suppose there were a new focus? If you want a planet to produce more monsters, better monsters, or whatever, you have to set that planet’s focus to “breeding” and forego whatever industry or research it might produce. That would be a good reason to use only one. Similarly, I only set one planet to provide each growth special — I presume others do the same.

I’ve had some ideas that could build upon the Mega-Fauna Ecology technology. We could have another tech that makes monsters a little more likely to mature each turn. We could have something like a bioterror projector that resets the clocks of wild monsters over an area, making them less likely to mature, or even reduces their structure like mines — just enough to kill the weakest and with some probability of a clean miss, so you still need ships, but you don’t have to spend quite so much time chasing down every last monster.

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Tualha
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Re: Nest eradication

#14 Post by Tualha »

Progress on the PR:

I have made a local clone of the repository, made a new branch nest-erad, and added my new code, images, and English stringtable entries to it. I used one commit to add four files (tech script, building script, icon for each) and another commit to make all changes to the stringtable.

Only then did I read CONTRIBUTING.md. :oops: So I guess I should redo the stringtable commit, at least, adding one change at a time? Or at least one contiguous chunk at a time? One for the tech, one for the building, one for the building effects.

Is it necessary to redo the file additions? They’re all new files, won’t collide with anything else.

Thanks …

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Vezzra
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Re: Nest eradication

#15 Post by Vezzra »

Oberlus wrote:Nests will always be an small percentage of total planets. You will always be building more orbital drydocks, scan facilities, etc. than domestication buildings. I mean, the former isn't a problem, why would it be the latter? IMO it is way under the tolerable threshold of micromanagement.
I totally agree. I merely wanted to point out that what LGM-Oyle proposed (having a building that makes a nest produce domesticated monsters instead of having a building that removes nests) doesn't offer any improvement wrt what needs less effort to manage. If you need to produce a building to get domesticated monsters from a nest, anyone who decides to want that will want to be all the nests they own to produce monsters, hence produce the building on all their colonies with nests. If you need a building to get rid of nests, anyone who decides they don't want domesticated monsters will have to produce that building an all their colonies with a nest.

In each case, if you want the option which requires you to produce a building on the colonies with nests, you'll most likely will want to produce that building on all those colonies, not only a few. Hence no advantage of the domesticated monster producing building approach over the nest removing building approach - when talking about how much of them you're probably going to build.
The amount of microing you'll need to get all your nests producing puppets will be less than 0,0...01% of the time you'll devote to the game, and certainly less than what you'll devote to scrap monsters you don't want.
Well, sure, both approaches (monster producing building and nest removing building) are better than whet we have now (scrap each monster that emerges from one of the nests you own).
Plus, as you said, it makes some sense to need some kind of effort (building) to actually domesticate the space monsters, not just getting an easy tech (that you was going to research most probably) and outposting the planet (that you were going to outpost anyway).
Yes, which is why I think the monster producing building approach to be better, but that has nothing to do with what requires less micromanagement. It's a totally separate reason.

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