Modding

[UesugiKenshin]

From a wargame design perspective, I totally get that shortages of resources cause wars or blockades and embargoes cause wars. See Japan in the years leading up to WW2.

The issue is that a country not planets in a sector.

You want mechanisms to cause conflict and rivalry caused by jealousy over plenty of resources versus shortages.

It doesn't necessarily follow as there are real expenses and time involved to generate these. You can get to where you actually have X resource in your sector, but can't get to it as it takes some X resource to make a mine that generates that amount. That is just make work for the player as a logic puzzle.

Whereas who complains if they calculate they need a fleet of starships to be created and deployed to this sector coordinate? No one as players are thrilled to finally fight.

I just spent an hour finding 23 instances where I had resource routes that were not doing anything. It's so tedious finding them that the problems pile up.

[UesugiKenshin]

Standard scenario modding
Create the number of units from say WW2 to fight the Battle of Midway.

Standard campaign modding
Create the number of units from WW2 for the pertinent powers to either replay important battles or do "what if" scenarios and see how everything changes.

A major mod reduces micromanagement issues from the start. A great major mod has advanced save games so players can jump right in a fight within ten turns using advanced units. One could be at turn 200, 400, 600, or 800. Think of the time savings and vastly increasing enjoyment for the players.

A gifted artist, musician, and mod team could design all new major aliens where you have ten but select four to six. That would be wildly popular but is so much work.

[UesugiKenshin]

Unit composition

It would be fascinating if there were a rationale for making all five current levels of troops as they synergistically are stronger due to roles they play...just like genuine battles. They don't wage just tank wars, but they do have engagements where scores of tanks are using terrain and time of day and season and range and accuracy and AI and communications and various weapons.

It would be far more interesting if army ground force invasions were won based on army composition. Then BotE would sort of have RTS elements. There would be tactical reasons for various army composition ratios.

Like discovering that you need 5% artillery and 15% armored tanks and 20% mechanized infantry and 10% shock troops and 5 % helicopters and 5 % air to surface missiles by jets and 40% standard troops.

[UesugiKenshin]

You could have a whole navy division for O class worlds so you have multiple ship classes and air support and submarines and destroyers dropping depth charges and Seals demolition troops and Marines establishing a beachhead and Commandos attacking submerged cities.

Only making five levels of troops seems to be just about making the strongest. That is not how war is waged.

You would tailor army composition based on what the situation was as it might be an urban conflict, or underwater, or on the seas, or largely forested or on plains or in the desert.

[UesugiKenshin]

I think it would be very funny to have semi-intelligent species that coexist from rudimentary ones that are like talking dogs to smarter and more clever ones who have their own area but the terraforming and contact with your empire then can have effects.

"I'm hungry, are you hungry? How about my meal now, please?"

"Argh. You asked me that 30 minutes ago."

Or

"Man, I itch so baaad. Give me a break and scratch my ears."

Maybe you don't want to know what talking dogs think?

Semi-intelligent dog "There is no way I'm living in a den in the ground. Knock on the Omega colonists' homes and find one willing to "take us in".It's cleaner and the meals come regularly too."

From that to at the other extreme they steal tools and start emulating and so rapidly evolve and can be helpful or a nuisance of even become problematic for the colonists. They show up as special buildings and modifiers.

Ever hear of "cargo cults" where some tribesman see a plane and it becomes part of their religion and they make mock planes as part of their ritual? I could see amusing things happening.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

[UesugiKenshin]

What if there are intentionally cryptic empire specific projects that initially do nothing, but by completing them from reading forum posts, then ultimately cause modifiers? So you could have only forum documentation that pertain to a mod about a major race. It would be a form of RPG elements dealing with the mythos of BotE's species. I think the AI would be unlikely to do the "missions" as there is no immediate reward, so they are human player role playing elements.

They would have a forum post number and dealing with certain situations happening to the empire at set periods with vague descriptions in game, but details in the forum. So each would have tech levels and energy costs, but no immediate reward, but linked by levels, and ultimately paying off with both pluses and minuses to attributes.

Some might cause initial setbacks, then cause advancements, then a mixed response, setbacks, but ultimately pay off...just like real human history.

The AI doesn't read the "text" but chooses based on modifiers, so initially it's not worth the tech requirements and energy as it might result in negative modifiers.

They might even happen say beginning at level 15 so the research database says nothing, but finally causes a bonus. It's an ultimate reward for lengthy BotE turns that only shows up at in advanced save games or people playing for many hundred turns.

Why? Because life is mysterious and we can't always predict the future and we make false starts and then things work out, then plans are ruined, but in the end, it's worth it...and not how we imagined our future would be.

[UesugiKenshin]

It would end up being like a treasure hunt.

[UesugiKenshin]

Any encounters with semi-intelligent extraterrestrials on formation will be affected by contact with human beings and change their development. And likewise any contact with sentient extraterestrials will affect both the strangers and human beings. And it will not be predictable as life is rarely about 1950s flying cars that futurists predicted or living on the moon in colonies...that never panned out. Life is nothing like the Jetsons tv cartoon.

Life is strange like a pandemic that doesn't make humanity perish, but nearly collapsed the global economy and kids can't attend public and private school. Who would have predicted that? Who would have predicted President Trump in the USA? No one.

So if we mod based on real human existence, then some degree of unpredictability makes the mod...authentic...rather than contrived or logical.

Life is not logical. There is nothing logical about the Earth forming on a remote vague fragment of a spiral arm of the galaxy. Nothing makes sense about the formation of amino acids eventually developing simple cells with organelles including mitochondria which seem to come from bacteria which in fact then end up routinely inhabiting human beings.

I'm not an absurdist or a nihilist, but life does have nihilist and absurdist qualities, but it also has spiritual and emotional elements too. And modding BotE has to incorporate such randomness.

[UesugiKenshin]

Life is so random that this then in physics ends up being the fifth dimension. Such a paradigm predicts that a multiverse would exist in which every infinite random choice would then create infinite versions of the Earth.

And a sixth dimensional being would not only travel through space and time, but also could also travel through the multiverse, just like we can travel north or down.

Think outside the box.

[UesugiKenshin]

One of my first BotE discoveries is that at least one minor alien race can leave their home sector ie the Xiborg. Which means even when you conquer their home sector, as their fleet survived, then the minor alien race is not dead, but like Battlestar Galactica...but homeless. So they can't make more infrastructure or ships nor troops.

Now this poses the question, "What if a minor alien race has colony ships? Will they then colonize a sector?"

The Andromeda minor alien race does in fact have colony ships, but will the AI do anything with such a fleet, in such a situation, or will they sit motionless and be a potential threat or never move at all? It's a mystery.

Those are the rare times I have seen that in about a thousand hours of playing BotE.

[UesugiKenshin]

You want to maximize efficiency in 4 factories as at some point, you want rapid building of starships. It's immensely frustrating that it take so long even though all the research is done, as the player has to slowly understand the economy and exploit this price manipulation versus an entirely too low amount of mining sales.

Rushing production is incredibly expensive, yet think about it. You have BILLIONS focusing on making a single building. It shouldn't be that expensive as you have an immense number of laborers available and you would only need thousands. It shouldn't be expensive at all since you end up with a massive GLUT of ore/crystals. If you have all those immense numbers of workers and you have a massive amount of all the raw materials, and you have all the technology, then why is it so expensive???

This point is why I elected to change my overall economic strategy and alter the manager setting so routinely mining by types are at 100% and at maxed out industrialization as that removes the need to rush production. Now to get the total credit surplus high enough, I will try interior starbase scrapping which accomplishes higher credits and recovers iridium, I believe.

[UesugiKenshin]

If you have ever used cheats in a game, realize that those cheats actually had useful purposes for beta testing, and that is generally why they exist.

But when players discover them by looking through the hex addresses, then play using them, they generally ruin any excitement. Human beings are wired to expect failure and the rare success then pleases them. If they win all the time, it rings false as they know real life is not that way.

In any 4X game, after enormous struggle, then typically through research and manipulating the economy, coupled with tactics and strategy, the best players consistently win because they put the time in and are rewarded for it.

You mod to facilitate that, not to make the game easier. You minimize micromanagement as that bores players, but it'sbalanced as the AI is also helped and so both the human player and the AI players can engage in war more often. In other words, more struggle happens and with some rewards. And this modding increases the frequency of war, not alters the outcome in the human's favor.

In game design in the wargaming 4X genre, then grindy battles accomplish this for seasoned intelligent players, often veterans or amateur military historians or both.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_games)
It especially appeals to 4X games with RTS elements as well role play (as just choosing an empire is role play) because superior tacticians understand how to use combat formations and tactics and terrain to win very often. Battles are not won by numbers and attributes but by tactics, morale, and command leadership.

Weaker players operate by using numbers don't like grindy battles as they have a false sense of actually winning a battle and successfully winning a war.

If a commander can relax his/her guard on the battlefield, something is seriously amiss. That is how soldiers get killed. That is when an confident officer gets taken out by a sniper.

[UesugiKenshin]

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=575&start=15
You see at one time, the save game information had both the ASCII planet names on the right side and hex addresses on the left for planet class. Thus you could look at the save game file and not only derive a fully uncovered map, but could alter the hex address so now it would be something else.

That is extremely useful for modders to start the game and immediately save it. Then that snapshot of the galaxy could be carefully altered in the uninhabited systems. Then a fantastically open galaxy would be available that would never show up by random assortment.

An ideal map would be terrific for players.

I'm of the opinion that while terraforming is great to improve relationships between the minor races and the major empires, it would be challenging to make the minor races very strong and difficult to conquer.

It would be far more interesting to play the minor races as having clues that would be uncovered by careful clever players through diplomatic negotiation as hidden elements hidden in the dialogue would reveal the story. Or it would reveal secret technology by now dead races that can be rebuilt on certain planets.

And it isn't necessarily a superweapon. It could lead to being incredibly persuasive, or a new faster mining process, or ends famines, or a new type of victory by a defensive shield.

Victory isn't just conquering but could be evolving beyond the other empires so they cannot stop your advancement, thus they pose no threat. Maybe it leads to a cooperation victory?

You could have the Xibren say that before they were artificially enhanced lifeforms, there were rumors of systems comprised of all R class planets. And on that now forgotten system, a technology exists that makes the hunger for credits unnecessary. So you terraform it and maybe in level 20 it unlocks this tech and now you have endless credits or free energy.

Or a system is one sought by the Catare in their backstory and helps them accomplish their goals. So you then are able to help them and diplomatically then your empire has perfect relations and they won't attack you anymore.

You go the utopia route by such modding. You could have a completely peaceful victory. Alternative victories through storytelling would have as great an appeal to some niche audiences as total conquest where you could create a vast empire on a maxed out map.

You could have a weighted scoring system where the goal is not eradication, but to conquer all the originally uninhabited systems, and preserve the rest, even the minor races. So say a minor race is subjugated, you emancipate them from another empire.

This is what I often discuss regarding the "ease" of hex editing save game data. Why is the save game data seemingly encrypted? Why have the ASCII text files been removed? This is logically how we create advanced save games in hours versus hundreds of hours

[UesugiKenshin]

Just for the sake of completeness and to avoid confusion, the actual distance from Earth to the real Rigel is 864.3 light years.
...
40 sectors times 20 light years is 800 light years on the x axis. If we make a right triangle and x^2 is equal to 640,000 light years and do the same for y^2 so 640,000 and using the Pythagorean theorem then add these together (640,000 + 640,000) and take the square root of 1,280,000 is 1131.4 light years is the maximum distance on a 40x40 galaxy map.

Now we have a working scale and know the maximum distance.

Using this simple math, then say a scout ship is at the edge of the galaxy and travels diagonally and can always advance one sector per turn. That means that IF the lowly scout had no range limitation (which they will), then otherwise could traverse in 56.57 turns. It's the peril of minor alien race fleets and navigation changes due to rare astronomy phenomena and the later danger of stronger major race ships that makes this take up to 700 turns in the sandbox game. It can theoretically happen by say turn 450 by altering the rate of expansion in the regular game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_cycle

In practical physics, you have a "duty cycle" in engineering. Take an engine. It can run up to a certain maximum rate of speed under ideal situations (but altered by terrain and load and weather conditions). But that is never long term and is unwise as it leads mechanical failure if sustained.

So the maximum speed of a starship is never flown continually as you would damage it and be stuck literally anywhere. The starship would have bursts of speed to a duty cycle range and then necessitate a shutdown and likely maintenance issues.

When exploring the galaxy, you have bursts and sometime halt on a turn to survey and so the total range traveled in a turn is often a fraction. Why? The galaxy is initially unexplored.

Later in a regular game, it's dangerous for low and even mid level ships to go by themselves or else be ambushed. Theoreticaly two or more ships can intersect, but keep going and conflict may not occur. Similarly alwhile exploring, you can speed through minor race sectors and based on your speed, pass harmlessly through. Kind of risky though.

So however you configure the speed for starships shows this wide gap as above. Don't think merely that faster ships can traverse the galaxy faster. It's other factors that limit safe travel.

[UesugiKenshin]

So in practical terms, if you want to severely hamper the enemies' starship operations by range, you successfully attack their starbases so reduce their long range area of effect. Or you take their colonies with spacedocks as those also increase their range. Speed is a lesser issue.