Make pro/res tech increases 0.1 or 0.2 (huge nerf)

[labgnome]

Don't worry, guys, my shiny spreadsheets will get the right values. Get a room you too and stop polluting the thread.

All hail Oberlus' shiny spreadsheets! Sorry about the thread.

[Oberlus]

Regarding Temporal Anomaly, ThinkSome is right, from the huge population malus it really needs to have a huge research bonus to really give any bonus at all. Otherwise the meaning of that special would be "don't bother colonizing this planet".

Regarding Hyperspatial Dam, the population reduction is relatively small and affecting negatively only without Xeno. Gen. AND with a majority of colonies being poor. It is far more more bearable with the rebalanced exobots, and given that that tech is relatively cheap to get it shall get a bonus smaller than Black Hole Generator (that's gonna get 0.2). So 0.15. That would be equivalente to down it to 0.75 down from 1.0 with current numbers.

[Oberlus]

New PR#2943 addressing only pop-based bonuses from buildings and techs. Specials are something else.

[Oberlus]

With the PR linked above, the total output from population is reduced considerably (for example, first techs like Rob. Prod. and Fusion give +25% and +50% of the initial output, instead of +50% and 100%, and late game techs give +100% instead of +250%, again measured with respect the initial output). This makes flat bonuses like Nascent AI (+2 RP) and Adaptive Automation (+5 PP) much more important, specifically early game. If those techs were a must ASAP, now they are even more important. If they are no-brainers, they must be close to it. That's an issue for research strategy variety.
Another issue with the flat bonuses techs is that they become irrelevant mid to late game, when populations grow enough. That's been alleviated with the mentioned PR, but it's still an issue for wide vs tall strategies.

In order to solve those two issues (no-brainer to get them soon, irrelevance late game), I propose to divide those techs into several (i.e. get them refinements), with increasing research cost and bonuses. The first levels would give smaller flat bonuses (smaller than now) and the later levels would cost much more RP but give increasing bonuses:

Nascent AI

Level	RP cost	Turns	Bonus
1	40	4	+1 RP
2	150	5	+3 RP
3	600	6	+6 RP

Adaptive Automation

Level	RP cost	Turns	Bonus
1	200	4	+2 PP
2	500	5	+5 PP
3	1200	6	+10 PP

In both cases, bonuses per level are totals (including the bonuses from previous levels) and research costs are considering the default tech cost multiplier of 2.0.


Thoughts?

[Magnate]

Just wanted to pop by and make a plea in defence of Tall strategies. In several years of playing FO, I have never seen anyone use Terraforming or Gaia formation unless they have nothing better to do with their PP and RP. The power of Nascent AI and Adaptive Automation, and the importance of supply and planetary defences make more small colonies way more effective than fewer big ones.

So while I don't disagree at all with this aspiration to smooth out the spikes in PP and RP and prevent snowballing, I think it is important to nerf AA in particular (and NAI a bit), and to make terraforming cheaper and more attractive for Tall empires. Maybe make terraforming costs proportional to how many planets of that environment you own, or something?

[ThinkSome]

What if NAI and AA bonuses were scaled by planet size? That and make res/ind growth depend on population. The latter would nerf "many small colonies are better than few densely populated for the same population"

[Oberlus]

Just wanted to pop by and make a plea in defence of Tall strategies. In several years of playing FO, I have never seen anyone use Terraforming or Gaia formation unless they have nothing better to do with their PP and RP. The power of Nascent AI and Adaptive Automation, and the importance of supply and planetary defences make more small colonies way more effective than fewer big ones.

So while I don't disagree at all with this aspiration to smooth out the spikes in PP and RP and prevent snowballing, I think it is important to nerf AA in particular (and NAI a bit), and to make terraforming cheaper and more attractive for Tall empires. Maybe make terraforming costs proportional to how many planets of that environment you own, or something?

I agree, AA and NAI are quite powerful by the time you can get them. That's the main reason of the proposal for nerfing the (first level of) those two techs (the addition of refinements for those techs is to make them still important late game).

The Tall vs Wide issue is also relevant, and not tackled by any of the proposals in this thread.
I think that working only on terraforming is not the way to go. I mean, terraforming needs love to make it valuable, indeed, but just making it cheaper or whatever is not enough.

In this thread you can check out the maximum pop*size of each environment. With the three specials or self-sustaining, plus the all the 3 non-environment-dependent techs (Sub. Hab., Orb. Hab. and N-Dim. Str.), you get

Environment	Good	Adeq.	Poor	Host.
Pop*HabSize	11	10	9	8

Add Gaia and you get 14 for Good env.

This means that the gain from terraforming from one env. to the next is really small late game: +12.5% host->poor, +11.1% poor->adeq., +10% adeq.->good, +27% good->gaia. Total +75% host.->gaia.
Making terraforming cost less makes sense, obviously, but you still need to get the techs that increase pop. to be able to colonize and do the terraforming on bad env. planets.
I think making the differences between environments more sharp late game is a good idea.
That could be done by making the three non-environment-dependent techs be actually dependent of env.:

Environment	Good	Adeq.	Poor	Host.
Sub. Hab.	+2	+1	+1	+1
Orb. Hab.	+3	+2	+1	+1
N-Dim. Str.	+3	+3	+2	+1
Subtotals	+8	+6	+4	+2

(Current subtotals for these three techs are 4/4/4/4.)

That would get us to the following late game maximums (Gaia and specials/self-sustaining included, subtract 3 from each to remove specials/self-sustaining):

Environment	Good	Adeq.	Poor	Host.
Pop*HabSize	19	12	9	7

This would make the gain from terraforming more interesting: +28.6% host->poor, +33.3% poor->adeq., +33.3% adeq.->good, +18.75% good->gaia. Total +171.4% host.->gaia.
It would also make more interesting, when you have several adeq./good planets, to focus on the Orb. Hab. and N-Dim. Str. to make your empire taller.

[Oberlus]

What if NAI and AA bonuses were scaled by planet size? That and make res/ind growth depend on population. The latter would nerf "many small colonies are better than few densely populated for the same population"

That has been rejected.

[ThinkSome]

That has been rejected.

"So they probably should neither be based on population nor on planet size." is not a rejection.

[Oberlus]

That has been rejected.

"So they probably should neither be based on population nor on planet size." is not a rejection.

IIRC, in other threads it has been commented as well, by core devs.
Flat bonuses must be flat bonuses, not tied to the same variables that influence population, or they would no longer be flat bonuses.

[Ophiuchus]

That has been rejected.

"So they probably should neither be based on population nor on planet size." is not a rejection.

Yes, that was my rejection formulated as appeal to common sense. And of course it has to read in the context of the linked post/thread, where I explain why I come to this conclusion.

[labgnome]

Thoughts?

I think that this is a good idea. I think that maybe going +1, +3, +7 totals for Nascent Artificial Intelligence, so that it's +1, +2, +4 for the base bonuses.

[Ophiuchus]

I think making the differences between environments more sharp late game is a good idea.
That could be done by making the three non-environment-dependent techs be actually dependent of env.:
...
That would get us to the following late game maximums (Gaia and specials/self-sustaining included, subtract 3 from each to remove specials/self-sustaining):

Environment	Good	Adeq.	Poor	Host.
Pop*HabSize	19	12	9	7

+1 give environment besides good more meaning

+1 also for nerfing the flat bonus. while i do not like adding extra tech for that too much it gives an easy way to balance, IMHO go ahead

[Oberlus]

New PR #2963 with the rebalance of flat bonuses and the inclusion of one refinement for each of NAI and AA.

[LienRag]

What I can say is that as a new player it took a long time for me to understand how little focus mattered compared to the pop-dependant boni (most of them being focus-dependant of course).

So indeed making the basic population production matter more and the population-dependant a bit lower may be a good recalibration.

The only problem I see is that by nerfing production and research bonus it makes them much less relevant compared to their research cost, so going full military early rather than trying to build a research/production base risk to be the only viable strategy.

Remember that at early game, the population numbers are not very high, so the bonus that each tech gives is usually very small.

And the snowballing effect is a problem at late game, but what makes the game fun early - depending on the direction you're going, you snowball in different directions, which makes the choices you've made have immediately visible consequences.
Having nearly the same production whether one managed to get a Blue-starred Solar Orbital Generator or just went for higher level military technologies is not making the game neither diverse nor fun.