The Silent One wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 4:08 pmOther than that, while sometimes advantages and disadvantages even each other out decently well (say +0.1 research per pop at a price of -0.1 production per pop), other times there is just some stealth malus which seems unbalanced. My general feeling here is to:
The bonuses/maluses are supposed to be geared towards the strategies associated with the ideal they belong to and against opposing ideals. IE: why Centralization policies get a supply and stealth malus. However this is really a first draft so I am open to suggestions.
1) reduce the number of policies significantly
That seems to be a general agreement, the question is where and how?
2) give the remaining policies a strong positive against a strong negative effect E. g.: colonisation speed halfed, growth bonus at the cost of reduced max population.
I agree that if we do have fewer policies the effects should be stronger. However I don't know that we can do the specific example you give here.
3) keep the involved mechanics simple. "x jumps from the next industrial center/capital/whatever" is neither supported by the UI, nor KISS. No area effects. Defense policies should probably look like "shields +100% vs. defense -50%" or similar.
I was thinking about ways to make the buildings more strategic. However I can see how this could be overly complicated. I may try to re-work some of them to be empire-wide, but they are good candidates for elimination.
Also to consider: refinements that slighty shift the policy effects towards the positive effect, or just increase the effect's strength.
This is an idea I like, and have thought about on my own. I like the idea of technologies that improve policies, as it would allow for more flexibility with fewer policies.
To group policies into ideals sounds like a fair idea to me. But 12 is too much for sure, I'd say maybe 6 at maximum.
Thought I think I am reiterating myself, I will explain my thoughts on the 12 ideals in more detail here:
The ideals are groups into two triads and three pairs of opposing ideals. Each ideal has a corresponding policy slot. Each ideal of a triad gives a different slot, and each ideal of a pair gives the same policy slot. They give a policy slot by having 4 (up for debate) policies of the ideal active for 50 (up for debate) turns. The slots given by opposing ideals do not stack, limiting the number of slots given this way. One thought I have is that each triad or pair of ideals will be at least loosely tied to a tech-tree theme. That way you aren't locked into just one ideal with a technology theme if we go with big themes.
The fist triad is Centralization witch gives an economic slot, Decentralization which gives a social slot, and Secrecy which gives a military slot, and they are also supposed to correspond to tall, wide and stealthy strategies. The second triad is Authoritarian which gives a military slot, Egalitarian which gives a social policy slot, and Meritocratic which gives an economic policy slot, and they are supposed to also correspond to the conquest, diplomacy and technology victory strategies respectively. The first pair are Capitalist and Socialist which both give economic slots and correspond to fast-growth supply-connected strategy and a slow-growth disconnected stockpiling strategy respectively. The second pair are Federated and Imperialist which both give military slots and correspond to a peaceful and defensive strategy vs. an aggressive and offensive strategy respectively. The last pair are Gestalt and Individualist and is supposed to correspond to generalist vs. specialist strategies respectively, but is honestly mostly telepathic vs. non-telepathic.
Now if we really want to reduce the number of ideals I'd ask which ones you would get rid of?
All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.