Modding

[UesugiKenshin]

The way BotE's economy is configured, players are very limited in how much they can sell at higher that 640+ turns. Why? Sure the price might go to 3,000+ per 100 units, but you have so MUCH ore and crystals that you can't sell them and get a decent price as each sale drops the value so much.

Then, you have to maintain artiicially high resources in storage and use those for resource routing to the frontier where new colonies exist.

You have to have enormous patience to deal with extremely excessive micromanagement in BotE. Most players won't tolerate that. They just will quit in frustration and move on to another game.

[UesugiKenshin]

In my opinion, as it takes so much effort, I'm unwilling to sell resources for less than 300 per 100 units. That is 3 a unit! Come on! I generally sell down to 500 per 100 units. The price rises up to 3000 per 100 units. That sounds like a lot and millions are made, but that is only 30 a unit. That is very very low....for unbelievable amounts of trouble.

A lot more people would play if resource routing were eliminated and you just had mining income show up each turn and did not require all this ridiculous micromanaging.

Most 4x systems have a report each turn on farm income, trade income, mining income, etc. There is no ensuring adequate resources are mined. When you create certain buildings, you can create certain starships and troops. Simple. Easy to configure. Faster. More fun.

It's make work with no payoff.

Some older game like GalCiv 2 was 5% of the micromanagement and you had powerful ships early on.

[UesugiKenshin]

In GalCiv 2 you created freighters and they were configured one time and then kept making income. But they were vulnerable. And so you created starships and explored and monitored sectors so they didn't get attacked by pirates. So straight away you were makingincome with little.micromanagement and routinely having battles due to piracy.

So you could harrass the enemy and place your starships on freighter routes and so annoy them until they attacked you.

That is so much easier and more fun for the player. The player does not get excited by how more ore they are generating. They play to fight battles.

[UesugiKenshin]

All great modding is about creating fun for the player by unique battles and all great modding reduces micromanaging. You can make it complex, but the joy must be appropriately high based upon the level of complexity.

It's like dating a beautiful lady. A guy is willing to jump through more hoops IF the reward is sufficiently high. If it takes 640 hours just to talk to her, why bother?

[UesugiKenshin]

If you type "birth of the empires" in google chrome, it autoatically populates with "mods" as well. So straight away there has been a LOT of interest in mods for BotE. The primary complaint has been about sabotage in anotherwise enjoyable game.

This means the next priority is reconfiguring the intelligence agencies. Now thesearemostly in the six intelligence agency version for the six major races,but also in specialized projects for those races. Then some of the major race projects have security protection to repel or foil espionage and sabotage attempts.

Then although you cannot do intel operations on the minor races and they cannot do intel operations on you (because they are stuck in their sectors), they still have various special projects as the game designer intended that some would become members of empires and so add their abilities in a synergetic manner to major race intel operations.

This means to genuinely mod all espionage and all sabotage to a rational logical plausible way so that such forms of black ops can be waged, you have to ensure you got them all and modulated them appropriately.

Then in advanced games where say at least level 18 or so is achieved in all six areas, then plausible intel operations would have fast enough ships to deliver agents to sabotage or manage local opposition parties to wage guerilla attacks. Even at turn 640+, the speed rate is so slow.

That would make it possible for all six empires to appear on the map, yet only in maybe turn 900+ would these begin to take place. Why? Because they are too powerful. It honestly os better to wage purely intel black ops as they trash the enemies' economy, ruijs special rojects, steal entire starships, ruin troops, poison populations,etc.

It's very morally reprehensible warfare. Of course some some localized planet intel ops would happen,but canyou ever see a battleship starship stolen?NO WAY! One spy or even ten can't overpowerthe hundreds or thousands in the crew.

One spy should be able to foil some ops locally as that is the entire theory of WW2 commando operations by famous Max Manus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Manus

He was a supremely brave Norweigian commando, trained in the UK, and risked his life blowing up ships in the harbor with demolitions. It's plausible that with poor security that a spy or commando could get in and ruin a starship literally worth billions.

But we are talking about 40 sabotage attacks at the Max Manus level in a single turn in turn 400+. That is insane.And that might be from one major alien empire like the Cartare. But imagine 240 attacks. 40-240 sabatoage attacks is NOT fun but ruinous. It's just poorly configured. You would expect 1 by say turn 600 at the earliest. But in my opinion, it so unbalances the game, that I wouldn't have any until after turn 800+.

Why because there would be no likely way to sent agents all across the galaxy on opposite ends and doing forty if these.

The most logical use would be against the minor alien races not the major as the minor racesgenerally don't have sabotage protection. The way it'scurrently configured, a few minor alien races with the "sneaky" attribute orthat are isolationist and scribed as paranoid have these racial abilities.

Make sure it's horrible expensive and with a low incremental rate of success...so it makes sense.

If you only fixed that through modding, then immediately the game is enjoyable.

[UesugiKenshin]

All other modding would be emulating an existing science fiction mythos or adding on ships or troops to more suitably have a smooth rise in needed areas to wage war. Or created to deal with advanced tech above Level 14. Or to allow for 1000 turns or more.

Doing so would mean comparably seeing the slow NX-01 class all the way to Borg Cube class ships where all major races would eventually become at least as powerful as the Borg.

Be creative and make the existing BotE mythos come alive. If you read the backstory, it is as interesting as any other science fiction mythos.

If would be great to have alternative races. I can't ever imagine anyone being excited to play the Heyoun.

A really wild game would be adjusting the NPC minor alien races, especially those with fleets, and letting them.leave their sectors. You can't attack them with intel ops and they canbe just as powerful as major alien races, and they are unplayable. So they could be even more dangerous than the Khaoran or Cartare.

If you don't modulate their strong initial power, than all six major race empires will be fighting them and not each other.

A great modder would adjust the game such that true alliances would happen where they would hold between major races and jointly do operations against another major race or even two major races jointly attacking two other major races. Then you would have massive fleet battles.

[UesugiKenshin]

You would expect in an entire galaxy to see powerful major races who were not necessarily empire builders. They want to be left alone but it would be a mistake to attack them.

You would expect an ancient major race that since it was the first to develop warp drives to be so far above in tech that its ships could crush everyone else, but not do so. They would think it beneath their dignity as that is bullying a potentially important species. It would be like killing monkeys to them.

You would expect some major race to become extremely powerful and help new young major races. That is what the Vulcans and even Andorians ended up doing. They become strong but not conquering.

You would expect a major race to be benevolent and help minor alien races and not necessarily to exploit them through membership.

You would expect some major alien races to just fight for the joy of it to test their soldiers as they admire militarism. War is not personal to them. Their culture is just pugnacious.

You would expect eradicators who see themselves as the true people and all else as parasites of the galaxy.

So modders could do all that and more for BotE. The players would love you as any of those would be a great 8th slot. (The 7th slot is used to control the minor alien races).

Just because you create say 4 new major alien races, that doesn't mean six original major races are playing. Your mod could merely suggest players choose four and not use the existing ones, or play with six, but mixed up and testing 2 of yours.

The more major races playing, the slower BotE will be on turn times. That is bad modding.

Now on a very fast desktop computer (not a tablet), you might be able to have ten major races and minor alien races who leave their sectors to create new colonies on a 40x40 map. Go for it and those who own great desktop gaming computers would love you.

[UesugiKenshin]

You would entirely expect to find major alien races who are very fincky and explorers and they have very very fast manueverable ships. They look for juicy sectors with all the resources and only colonize them as ordinary sectors are for weaklings or inferior people. They are snobs and would irritate their neighbors as they take the best spots. But then they are so FAST that it's hard to engage them in battles.

You would have major alien races who make all their ships long range as it irritates them not to go the maximum distance.

These kinds of attributes affect their buildings and priorities on technology and their soldiering, etc. It affects how they engage in diplomacy and some may never ever have diplomatic relations as they see it as interference or think the gap in their knowledge is so great that each would have nothing in common and nothing to talk about.

Some alien races might want to have communication, but they are NOT bipedal symmetrical beings with our narrow range in senses on the electromagnetic spectrum. They communicate in unique ways at very short wavelengths or extremely long ones. So no diplomacy is possible until better tech is received and so are always misunderstood.

Some major or minor alien races might be 5th dimensional beings and so they can see us, but we only vaguely see them as they pass through our dimension. They end up interfering just by communicating as they seem largely invisible and cause myths to happen as aliens perceive them as gods. So after that happens over and over, they become sadly reclusive.

[UesugiKenshin]

A feature of GalCiv2 was no communication was possible until the unversal translator was learned. One could mod where levels of communication tech allow communication with groups of major or minor races, so naturally initial encounters would be frustrating and sometimes almost cause war or actually cause war.

See the film Arrival.

[UesugiKenshin]

It's not absoluterly essential, but it would be beneficial if the transformation from transports to outposts to starbases was much more expensive in light of them being so overpowered.

Yes, they are helpful as lack of range severely limits the boundaries (the sphere of influence) of budding empires. Yes, that increase in range then dramatically allows more exploration. Yes, the starbases especialy allow strong protection of sectors.

But they are unrealistically inexpensive and not slowly increasing from level 1 outposts to level 2 outposts to level 3 outposts, but based upon what tech you have researched, then jump to starbases. One could place level 1 outposts, then wait until level 3 starbases are researched and LEAP forward to level 3 starbases. That isn't fair or plausible.

You could mod when such outpost and starbase levels are achieved, but this will be wildly unpopular as they are a gift in BotE and they are exploited as scrapping them has STRONG economic benefits.

It would improve the game though.

What you should do is both and. Spread out the tech level increments and all along improve the economy realistically with more income. The real issue for a new game is the 10,000 credits is woefully too small. It should be 50,000 especially on a 40x40 galaxy with 95% minor races and at least 1 major race opponent because so many sectors and planets are already colonized. That transates to far more scouting exploration as you have exponentially more competition and whatever sectors you find need lots of terraforming. The minor races with fleet especially get very powerful for the most part.

Now imagine six major empires beig turned on and all scouting for sectors to colonize. The competition will be fierce and likely cause wars. Well...that's what players want.

Meanwhile other minor races are very neglected and resist membership when it actualy makes no sense as they can't even feed themselves.

The 1st thing in turns 1-300 when getting a new member is ensuring that famine is not an issue.

Good modders would scrutinize the starting characteristics of all the minor and major races especially with all the changes I propose. Why? Because the AI is heavily dependent on sabotage, and if that becomes an "endgame tactic" versus a midgame tactic as it is now, they likely will have to build a better military with more ships and more troops and more defenses as starbases may appear much later.

I think all these things would ultimately improve BotE, not make them harder or easier, but make playing the game morefun, be realistic, amd be more challenging in a very populated galaxy of normal size.

[UesugiKenshin]

Even if you mod all of that, I suggest you add several saved game starts at say turn 200, turn 400, turn 600, turn 800 and with a variety of opponents in one on one games. Like the Terrans versus the Cartare. or the Rotharians versus the Khaoran.

This is extremely helpful for busy players who play on breaks and weekends. They want brief campaigns or scenarios as they don't have 1000 hours to start a new game.

Multiplayers would really like that as it's hard to find another player let alone six to play in a weekend blitz.

If we ever get a multiplayer version, or better a campaign editor, you generally can come up with standard infrastructure and clone them to several sectors and so rapidly create what would take 700 hours to do.

I bet that there are some programmers who could take the source code and engineer a campaign editor. This frequently happens in modding 4X games. They lack the ability to create an all new 4Xgame, but can either create a save game editor, a map editor, a campaign editor, etc.

I bet some programmer can add attributes for flagships and that would totally change the game as flagships would level up and then be like like master commanders and crews and true admirals. Then tactics would be gained and alter the outcome of fleet battles.

I bet a programmer could change the source code slightly and have random events where the crew of ships gained specialized experience and could even do missions that would improve diplomatic relations with minor races. That would add a roleplaying element to BotE.

You can't expect for the very busy past programmers to issue further versions as this is open source and free.

I bet there are artists who would love to see their art be in the game as minor or major alien races or as buildings or as tech or as troops. We could have an art repository on the forum, and modders would have art resources.

I bet we have some musicians who have made files, and we could at least include collections so people could change up the music in VLC player or similar. That dramatically changes the experience.

Everything I have suggested are standard things modders do for 4x games to enhance the experience. Some mod communities are vibrant and a creative outlet. People who are fans have a few hors or a week and commit to that as a gift back to the community so a game stays relevent when it's as great as BotE has the potential to be.

[UesugiKenshin]

If we had multiplayer and six people who would play but intentionally not attack, but just build their economies and infrastructure, then save it, then that right there would be an awesome save game that would help thousands.

That is not that big a time commitment so that saves one modder from doing the work of six.

Imagine a created populated giant galaxy with six fully built up empires, all ready to go, so thousands of multiplayers could start in turn 600.

[UesugiKenshin]

If we understood the hex edits on the save game files ie understood what number coresponded to what part of the map, and what portion corresponded to troops, resources, ships, etc, then that would be the fastest way to create advanced saved games.

Why? Then it is not issuing commands in turns, and for every major race, but just plugging in the number to populate the galaxy map and data.

A programmer might just study the saved game data and figure out the system. That would be hugely helpful.

The save game data is not easy to read and seems to be encrypted. But if every sector could be easily interpreted and changed, then enormous amounts of mod time would be eliminated.

[UesugiKenshin]

A saved game editor would then assign the number of the experience points of a fleet at this galaxy map coordinate points. Think of the time savings! It takes forever to mod that.

A saved game editor would change all the gas giants to colonizable planet types. That would be terrific.

[UesugiKenshin]

Say we knew the proper hex address and protocol for stable wormholes. A mapper could place stable wormholes at the correct map coordinate points and so now have a mechanism for repeatable travel destinations and alien races would use that knowledge and guard that wormhole entrance and exit.

Somone reading this might be able to figure it out...because they have a little programming knowledge.