Modding

[UesugiKenshin]

If you add new tech levels and new construction, which is inevitable for modders, and so create new units and ships, those will be expensive in some larger sense, and so it has to tempt the player to cause them to keep playing so they see that dream realized.

It actually insults the player to be stingy when to see that dream come to fruition took 800+ turns, right?

[UesugiKenshin]

The Catare get two great troops, but all major races should get aircraft squadrons. This is straight forward as the starships are stuck in orbit (unlike Star Trek where the Enterprise versions could enter the atmosphere).

Heck, you could even have an amphibious craft like AAVs as O class worlds are aquatic.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qi5W8ejYccc

You could have some fantastic air/sea/land tank that is a behemoth: a fearsome beast that inspires terror in the poor ordinary ground troops that have to face it.

The opening scene from Terminator 1 and 2 should jog your memory about what the future holds for ground invasions.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RLtlTV-VQDs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mg7qKstnPk
Every player would love that.

[UesugiKenshin]

Imagine what a superaircraft could do some thousand years from now and what that would do to annihilate ground forces. A single one would end wars as it crushed the opposition but might be hugely expensive. But players would be thrilled to make one and deploy it. It would have massive offensive and defensive attributes.

And with the "balance of power" principle, if the Catare have one, the Omega want one, and the Khaoran will make a better one. Likely this justifies a supertransport designed to shuttle these things around.

Or think of the Alien 2 clip where the Colonial Marines enter orbit with a "dropship" which is a super advanced combination bomber/attack chopper that can deliver a lethal mechanized infantry carrier, some super IFV (infantry fighting vehicle).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn45pl8yXzk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VujXQzCjcnQ

[UesugiKenshin]

It makes sense that due to the immense risk of your soldiers in a transport that only has shields and heavy hull integrity, that some alien race would be the first to weaponize it with a basic complement. That would help reduce the need for an "escort" or if they get in trouble while building an outpost, and a starbase, then after 15 tech levels on turn 800+, you have a hybrid vehicle platform.

And so that transforms as it's scrapped in the conversion to a new level of starbase level 4.

[UesugiKenshin]

At turn 640+, the Omega can crank out a robotic infantry unit every single turn, so they need MORE. If you can make the best, and since this isn't an RTS game where the players issue orders and use tactics, then why make a level 4 unit when a level 5 unit can be made in a single turn?

Ideally you have unit composition and send a mixed brigade strength (3,000) soldiers or better and synergy happens.

A sector is an immense region of space/time and so of course each sector can generate immense levels of military units per turn as the Omega can make freaking all powerful battleships every 3 turns. Imagine what 55 billion people could generate in a single turn in terms of armaments while still doing standard work too.

[UesugiKenshin]

With so much money in those later turns, since a wise player or modder has vastly improved the economy and industrialized an entire sector, then it's a waste NOT to build some more to add to the overall arsenal.

At some point, as income is now 60,000 per turn, it may get to where cash just accumulates until you conquer a sector and rebuild them likewise. As that happens, then resources are just accumulating (to a max per resource type of 125,000 per sector, so often 4-5 times that amount as there are multiple resources), then I can see titanium going to 10,000 per 100 units.

What happens in some wargames is so many credits are gained that players can just bribe cities and in this case sectors, and just take them outright without firing a shot.

[UesugiKenshin]

I have such a sound galactic economy, that were I not rushing infrastructure building, I would have amassed 100 million credits easily. So when it gets like that, one could plausibly just buy off some minor alien race as they might have a 100% acceptance rate and never have to invade as I'm rich and benevolent and the sole galactic power. Not every alien race would fight to stay autonomous.

In Civ 2 and Civ 3, you get a demographic report, and one aspect is what percentage are serving in the military and for how many years on average.

Well imagine the quadrillion souls in my empire versus the small percentage serving in the military. It's not really worth it to resist as it's not like being either crushed as the Borg or the Terran Empire or the Cardassians.It's pretty cushy.

A large percentage of the galactic empire are extremely happy with many being fanatical as I am intentionally generous. The people lack for nothing even energy is abundant and in some cases there are surpluses in hundreds of units. It could be a utopia.

[UesugiKenshin]

I even intentionally build prison labor camps which have a penalty to morale in a sector, yet still many are fanatical. At some point I could even eliminate them down as unnecessary. Maybe after generating a massive galactic war machine?

The Cartare have them as do the Khaoran in the techtree. For the Omega Alliance, they are internment camps.

Rather than have many irritated minor alien races, I have placated them with gifts so much than many offer me cooperation or alliances. Yet they began as enemies because my scouts flew into their orbits. Now those scouts are sometimes frigates. If I wanted to, I could have long since explored the entire galaxy, but instead I have rather high experienced fleets (trained by two special combat projects) instead with over 10,000+ in experience. As long as there are not ships in orbit, you can scout actively. I just felt having a highly experienced fleet was more valuable than faster exploration.

One can explore an entire 40x40 galaxy with 95% minor alien races in about 720 turns with just 5 scout ships. A small percentage have large fleets and so those will be the genuine test for my Omega maxed out advanced fleets and transports loaded with robotic heavy infantry.

[UesugiKenshin]

The very first buildings you want to add to the techtree that would best benefit the game and the players are buildings that increase trade/resource routes and add alternative deritium sources. Here's why.

The point of BotE may be to build an empire, but no empire can grow if you have at least one major alien race opponent, and you lack resource routes and enough deritium to build starships to protect colonies and build colony ships and build transports that can either become outposts nor starbases as well as send troops where they are needed.

BotE is still playable as a sandbox game, albeit in turns 660+ or so very irritating. After spending millions on infrastructure, the process of building a useful amount of starships is as slow as molasses.

The pinch points are the ordinary sectors can only have 2-3 resource routes with some having 4 and rarely larger ones with 7 or 9. This is a function of population so you have to populate these as fast as possible by sending lots of colony ships. But to do so,you need deritium and resource routes to upgrade all your infrastructure.

So the priority is to mod buildings so upon creation they add resource routes as a normal aspect of the game much earlier on, and as tech levels improve, create alternative deritium sourcing.

Now, there is a workaround. When you colonize a planet and especially when sending 3 colony ships to extensively terraform the new sector, your first turn,you build stardocks and then since you extensively mined and upgraded and have resources in storage, you sell off a chunk and that nets you millions in profit. In my test, I routinely was getting 3 million in a turn, but last turn it was more than 5 million.

Ordinarily when doing this, you want to sell down the value to 500 per 100 units for each resource, but no lower. Why? If you sell the value down too low, it takes too long for the prices to recover as you dumped massive amounts of resources and depressed the price. You induced deflation.

But an alternative strategy since you lack enough resource routes, you sell to 300. Now the next turn after creating a spacedock at your newly colonized sector, you buy ore at depressed prices so a cache exists at the new colony. This is bizarre as you have by turn 640+ a GLUT of ore and crystals just no way to deliver them as there are insufficient resource routes available.

So this is highly wasteful as you should be able to deliver your own ore and crystals to the new colony, but since you lack resource routes, you buy a little at a depressed price, then when this drives up the price, you then sell off some of your ore/crystals. Bizarre, right? You are deflating your own commodities and inflating your own commodities to net millions in profit and so able torapidly upgrade infrastructure, all so you can finally build the best starships.

That is why additional resource routes are sorely needed...almost required on large to maximum sized galaxy maps. Think about it. A 10x10 or even a 20x20 map is not a galaxy but a region of space-time. The map honestly needs to be 40x40 just to be large enough to have 4 major alien races let alone the maximum.

Next you create a mechanism so deritium can be locally mined when the players learn some entire level of technology (all six aspects within a level of tech). Say level 10 minimum but certainly level 15 which would be an entirely new level.

Here's why. You will have several great sectors with fully maxed out mining and storage and which are routinely being used for resource routes...but they lack deritium. That is crazy. How did warp capable starships ever become a phenomena if deritium is so rare? They wouldn't.

You want to help the players in the techtree by rewarding them investing in tech and routinely building cashflow and infrastructure, not twart their efforts.It's confounding why it's configured this way.

The whole point is not spending 600 hours micromanaging but engaging in war,otherwise BotE is a peculiar oddity as it's a space based economic simulation.

[UesugiKenshin]

By all indications and upon analysis, BotE's ships were designed for 20x20 galaxies which is entirely too small to reflect any actual galaxy from real life with any sense of normal scale.

Galaxies are HUGE. so starships have to be somewhat fast and at some point traverse large regions of space-time. Otherwise hard science science fiction writers pointed out that too much time wouldtake place on their home worlds, and so those starships actions would take place in a seemingly normal amount of time for the captains and crew, but on the homeworld, hudreds of years would pass. See the problems?

Even the lowest initial warp 4 capable (so not the standard speed even but the maximum speed) NX-01 Enterprise needs to be able to travel hundreds of light years in a week, or else it's months and months for simple colonizing missions and for scouting. As hundreds of years passed on say the Earth, then far more advanced starships would be created and might even drive by and pass the aging first starships before they ever arrived! It makes early starships irrelevant.

[UesugiKenshin]

So for accurate modding, you want a 40x40 galaxy so the players could if they wanted have six major alien races with 1-4 recommended. Then also have 25-95% minor alien races. In testing,the best result is at 95%.

So all the starships need faster speeds in a mod and likely doubled. The best basic ships likely go even faster.

Reward the players who research Level 15 and above with many more kinds of units and starships with the former being very strong and realistically filling niches of usage, and the latter being incredibly fast and strong and manueverable with long range and mighty weaponry.

Otherwise BotE is nothing like any science fiction books, tv shows, or films. It's scaled entirely too low.

The original plans on solardates in the documentation indicate that at the maximum that weeks per turn is the time scale. If that is so, the best starships after turn 640+ and after all the research is completed at level 14 should be able to 10 or more spaces and probably 15 on a 40x40 map. Even that is likely too slow and not anywhere close to say Star Trek Voyager level but more like Star Trek the Next Generation.

[UesugiKenshin]

To make a starship that can travel from the Gamma quadrant means either stable wormholes (which we cannot do as we lack a campaign editor) or what I detailed.

If you watched Star Trek Voyager, the crew was thrown so far away that from the start they knew the situation was hopeless and their grandchildren might get back home. So the writers intentionally set up a situation where the captain made morally questionable choices by using Borg technology to get home.

That makes it extremely difficult to mod as those speeds are so fast that you need a cheat to get the crew able to zip along and violate standard warp technology. So for modding you would create a superproject with many requirements and some ships then able to go 20-25 spaces in a turn on a huge map as the endgame. What you really would need is a larger than 40x40 map, probably a 60x60 map.

Doing so means defending borderlands is difficult as starships would be so fast they would zip through sectors and suddenly appear halfway or more across the galaxy. I doubt the AI could cope. Only the best players could wage war effectively and likely in a multiplayer game.

Or you would carefully rescale everything starting in turn 1000+.

[UesugiKenshin]

At high levels, then range becomes irrelevent as the way ships are designed in BotE, earlier ones are obsolete and you make far better ones. That is partially done to limit what units are available to the AI as otherwise the AI might sometimes build a cheap starship but with horrible short range.

To do a Voyager style mod, you could have most ships have short and medium range with the very best being long, and thus scale everything down even though it's at higher levels of technology.

[UesugiKenshin]

By turn 650+, then most ships can entirely traverse 90% of a 40x40 galaxy map. There are some scouts still inching along in the extreme northeast and can't quite go all the way. Because so many minor alien races have fleets, they would perish if they just haphazardly explored. And the ships are very slow so limited in how many sectors they can travel per turn.

I think there are about 15 large potential fleet battles to do, so all of those minor alien races have yet to be encountered and dealt with through diplomacy.

If the next revision of BotE had a hailing system or long range scans would end up having new races show up in the diplomacy screen, that would solve many issues. Some might refuse to communicate or just declare war.

To me it's poor design to automatically have the AI declare war. Why limit their options? A smart AI minor alien race with fleets would diplomatically toy with major alien races and try to extort money and tech from them as a threat. And then having suckered them by lying, then declare war anyway.

[UesugiKenshin]

A player might extensively place starbases and have explored a giant galaxy faster, but never hold those starbases as with even 2 major alien races, such large numbers of starbases would pose a threat to the spheres of influence as such a race with such long range could attack at any time.

That would be an intolerable threat.