Bacon Mod

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970

Instead of colonizing gas or barren worlds, I would much rather have a terraforming building. Not true terraforming, but increasing the quality.

I've never made it to the top half of the tech tree in this game but I thought they already had some sort of terraforming building.

[Retreat1970]

There is but it only repairs a damaged planet faster than normal. It's useless imo.

[darkriot]

I believe there is a race event that raises the quality of a planet. Maybe that can be applied some how to the terraforming facility to make it relevant.

When it come to crashes did you try turning off race events? I find it causes alot of crashes when used with certain mods for some reason.

[Kothyxaan]

Yeh I agree. I used to think "ooo terraformer! great, I will build it and my planet will slowly be upgraded."
But nope. Would be nice if it did improve planet quality; even if only by a set amount.

@RogerBacon:
Well, i'm no computer expert, so the only thing I can think of that might be causing problems is something you have running on the computer, or hardware... yep, that covers all bases (unless it is something supernatural)
The game im playing right now (moo3) was crashing at the start of combat - graphical issue likely, i put in some files from another mod (graphic/sounds) and it worked! but later on it came back.
I think when i added the mods graphic/sound stuff it fixed one of my pew pew's but now another pew pew is doing it.
GRRRR.
Ah well, if i were you id try de-activating some of the stuff you have running (process of elimination - if you havent already done this off course; likely you will have), the hardware issue would be more problematic.
GL!

[RogerBacon]

Science ships...

In version 1.35 I added "Science ships". These were exploration ships with labs. They would pick a random researchable tech in their field (weapon, energy, hightech) and apply an amount of research to it every month as defined in the baconSettings.txt. It had some problems. Namely you could stack a bunch of labs on one ship, which would suck fuel like crazy, to get a lot of research. Overall, I didn't like the result.

In version 1.4 (current as of this writing) I made some changes. Labs no longer stacked so you only lab of each type per ship was needed. Also, a big improvement, the ship would continue working on the same research tech each month until it was researched. Still, the urge to spam science ships was too great. I once had 25 of them sitting around my home planet in a pre-warp game while waiting to research the first hyperjump tech. I envisioned science ships out doing what explorers do, not sitting around. I had created "science barges" instead of "science ships".

Scientific Data
In the upcoming version of the Bacon Mod I have an implementation that I think works really well.
A science ship will acquire points of "scientific data" from surveying planets and exploring ruins. Each month each lab will analyze one point of data (consuming it) and perform its research. If the ship does not have any scientific data then it performs no research. So there will be no advantage to spamming lots of science ships if they don't have any data to analyze.

Here is a ship with scientific data

[Nobody987]

Hi Mr. Bacon,

finally I managed to install mod, but on my first run I run into issue regarding gravity wells. They are blocking out jumps from the system, so that is fine. However, ships that are trying to go out of the system are actually plotting course straight to the target, meaning that in some cases they will go from one end of the gravity well to the other, wasting a lot of time.
Logical solution would be that they check when the order is given where is the nearest 'exit point' from gravity well, go to there and then perform a jump. Would this be possible to implement?

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Nobody987

Hi Mr. Bacon,

finally I managed to install mod, but on my first run I run into issue regarding gravity wells. They are blocking out jumps from the system, so that is fine. However, ships that are trying to go out of the system are actually plotting course straight to the target, meaning that in some cases they will go from one end of the gravity well to the other, wasting a lot of time.
Logical solution would be that they check when the order is given where is the nearest 'exit point' from gravity well, go to there and then perform a jump. Would this be possible to implement?

Yeah, I know. It bothers me too when I see ships going in a straight line towards their destination instead of moving to get out of the gravity well first. However, the movement system doesn't really support a waypoint approach, which is what would be needed to do what you describe. Just be reassured that at least the AI empires have the same poor decision making as your ship captains. At least for state-run ships you can manually tell them to move out where you want them and then give them the hyperjump order.

[Sabranan]

I was just thinking that another solution might be to have the gravity well delay jumps rather than prevent them entirely.

Even loaded up with maxed out Starburners it does take larger ships a long time to traverse a system.

[RogerBacon]

Since the new "Bacon Big" 2000 star map seems like the most popular thing according to the poll I took I've decided to make another size option. I call it "Cage Match". It will allow you to override the lowest star setting (100 stars) with a lower value ranging from 30-100. Here's a screenshot showing a map with just 30 stars. Throw some aggressive races in there, turn up aggression to max, and let the fighting commence.
[Edit]
Note that due to the fact that Bacon settings aren't read in until your game starts or is loaded, trying to create a galaxy with less thaan 100 starts will fail the first time. You will need to go back to the main menu and then create the game again after your settigns have loaded. Naturally this won't affect saved games, only new ones. Sorry about that.

Cage Match

[Kothyxaan]

I am continually amazed by what you are making this game do.
Keep up the good work!

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Kothyxaan

I am continually amazed by what you are making this game do.
Keep up the good work!

Thank you for the words of encouragement. It means A LOT. I was very frustrated and ready to trash the whole thing last night. tm.asp?m=4354234&mpage=1&key=&#4354234

[RogerBacon]

Terraforming

It has recently been brought to my attention that the terraforming facility in the facilities.txt file only repairs damage to a colony and does not actually raise the habitability rating above starting. In the next version of the Bacon Mod I will add terraforming so that this facility will raise the habitability rating. As always, this will be an optional feature implemented as follows:
In facilities.txt you have the terraforming facility (entry #9)
9, Terraforming Facility, 7, 0, 9, 20000.0, 2000.0, 200, 0, 0

The last two values after the repair rate (both zero) are unused. In the Bacon Mod they will be used for 'terraforming rate' and 'habitability cap'. The default values for the Bacon Mod will be 500 and 80

9, Terraforming Facility, 7, 0, 9, 20000.0, 2000.0, 200, 500, 80

This means that the habitability rating would improve up to a rating of 80, where it would stop. The improvement is semi-asymptotel, meaning that the rate of terraforming will be quicker when far from the limit and slow down as approaching the limit. It's not a true asymptote so you will eventually reach to limit.

For those not wishing to use this feature, simply don't make the changes to the terraforming facility.

[Sabranan]

That's an excellent addition Roger, I'll make sure my modding tool supports editing these values very shortly!

[Japhet]

I think this is my favourite mod change by far. Great work!

Btw, do you think it's possible to add resources to stars and black holes?

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Japhet

I think this is my favourite mod change by far. Great work!

Btw, do you think it's possible to add resources to stars and black holes?

I'm glad you like it. It seems there is an inverse relationship between the amount of work for a feature and people's reaction to it. The terraforming was almost trivial to do. The only hard part was coming up with a formula that I liked.

I don't think I'll be adding resources to stars or black holes though.

With the terraforming, players will be free to set whatever values they want. They could also make techs that improve the terraforming values the same way a tech can improve the values of weapons. So, an initial terraforming tech might have a habitability cap of 70 and a later one improves it to 80. It will be interesting to see what people come up with. The only reason I didn't do it is that I want to make as few dependencies on the text files as possible so that people can use the Bacon Mod with other mods fairly seamlessly.

[Japhet]

I understand. I was mostly asking from a modding perspective, like giving other modders the possibility to add resources to stars. In general, I would like to know what you are actually capable to mod since your work runs deeper than simply changing some text files.

[RogerBacon]

In the upcoming version of he Bacon Mod the filename for XML files for the BaconStats program will be changed to include the seed value of the game. That way you can have multiple games in progress without overriding the stats for each. So the filename will be something like:
SaveStatsEmpires_4332378.xml
SaveStatsPirates_4332378.xml

If you have a save game in progress the recommended procedure to keep you stats is as follows.
Load your saved game and let it run for one second to generate the new files.
Quit game and rename your existing SaveStatsEmpire.xml and SaveStatsPirates.xml to the new file names while deleting the new files.
Run game and enjoy as usual.

[RogerBacon]

Science Ships


In the next version of the Bacon Mod you will be able to assign specific research projects to your science ships. This is accomplished vai the new right click menu. Alt- > THEN Ctrl -> right click. You have to press and hold the alt before the ctrl otherwise you will get the default DWU right click menu.
If you don't select a research topic the ship will select one at random as it does in the current release.


Hold Position
This order will force a ship to remain where it is and not accept new orders until you clear it. This is useful for keeping a ship in orbit during an invasion for the +25% bonus. The ship will still fire in self-defense but it will do nothing else.

[StarLab]

Excellent! There is always tech I neglect because it's never a huge priority (advanced hab tech, etc). It'll be nice to get the science ships to help out with stuff like that while the main research focuses on better stuff.

Brilliant work, my friend! I look forward to seeing this mod evolve...

[RogerBacon]

Asteroid Colonies

Because... why not? OK, there's really no reason you would build these things other than because you can (now).
Since its not worth wasting an entire colony ship on one of these rocks, there will be a different way to form an asteroid colony from how regular colonies are formed.
When a colony ship reaches an asteroid that you want to colonize. use the new alt+ctrl+right click menu to deploy an asteroid colony. This will NOT consume the colony ship. Instead it will deduct an amount of money as configured in the BaconSettings.txt. The asteroid will then be colonized by 1000 people. Other than its tiny size and Zero habitability rating it will act just like any other colony. I suggest using the new terraform tech to raise the habitability rating because the max population for a typical asteroid is about 25k to 35k. Terraforming in this case can be thought of as adding domed habitats and tunneling out the inside of the rocks.
Allowing asteroid colonies will be a setting in the BaconSettings.txt file since some people won't want them.

picture for illustrative purposes only. Not included in game.