labgnome wrote: ↑Sat May 18, 2019 6:05 pm
Ophiuchus wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 8:22 pmThe species are still very unevenly distributed between planet types. Most of the good_weapon species have the same preference.
Your statement is half-true. ... IMO the solution is not to use planet classes as some kind of awkward, opaque and counter-intuitive balancing mechanism but to design more native species to better fill in the gaps that we have. The native species have gotten a bit more sparse since some of them were made into playable species.
You should NOT design (game-relevant values of) species in isolation.
If you have a spreadsheet of all the species, the distribution mechanism is neither opaque nor counter-intuitive.
And IMO it is also not awkward. It is one way how you can diversify environments and use it for balancing of species. A species needs a buff? Move it into a sparser populated environment.
Not using this tool and making every environment the same is a waste.
I would not mind making exobots the only radiation-preferring species.
A player mostly works with the content in the current game, so the player does not really need to know about the mechanism (similar to starlane creation - just use what you find). If you are gaming on a level that you need to know probabilities, knowing "all" the species is not a strange requirement.
The problem here is probably "Viele-Köche-verderben-den-Brei". There is rather the need for a design decision (if environments are considered integral part of balancing) and communicating the vision.
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Look, ma... four combat bouts!