Modding and Colony Development

[Rosbjerg]

So I'm close to releasing my first mod (woop woop) - but in play testing I've found a few irregularities I just can't hammer out. And I was wondering if it's a vanilla problem maybe. Or you guys might know what's up and where I went wrong.

Certain civilizations development of their homeworld are unusually high at the start of the game, in the 80-100% range and will rise over 100% within the first 30 min or so in the game. I've checked the race abilities, starting government, resource effects, characters - everything I can think of. And nothing seems to give them this edge.

The other civs are around 30-50% and new colonies are around 4-10% (which I also think is pretty low?).

[fruitgnome]

Did you setup your empire like an old empire or with a higher tech level in the galaxy setup?

[Rosbjerg]

That was my initial thought too, but I've even tried giving them a less advanced start and less favorable system - and they still develop much faster.

But I'm trying right now to see if I can correct it by messing with the resource bonuses. Maybe +5% kicks them off a lot stronger than I'm thinking... As I didn't factor in that they start with a reserve of basically all resources.

[Rosbjerg]

I got it - I vastly underestimated the effect especially happiness had on development.

[fruitgnome]

When will you publish your mod?

[Rosbjerg]

Well - it's playable now except for some balancing issues (as above), it just needs some tweaking, so probably within the week.

[fruitgnome]

Cool. May we know what a mod it will be? A total conversation?

[Rosbjerg]

I'll make a big post about it, with descriptions, pictures, the works when I release. But yeah it's a total conversion set in a universe with very few alien species and no intelligent ones. Earth was abandoned almost 4000 years before the story starts (depending on your starting age of course) and now ~20 human cultures are spreading throughout the universe - a sort of analogy for the 20th century's war of ideologies.

There's almost 300 new character portraits, new planets pictures, new techs, new wonders, new governments and obviously completely new races (for a preview you have the Iwi, the Aeta and the Elleda for instance) - named and shaped after real world cultures. The overall speed is slowed a bit to make war and strategy a bit harder. But we'll see whether that succeeds or not.

[mordachai]

Sounds fascinating!

[Rosbjerg]

All right -a tiny bit frustrating to make a huge post, ready to launch and then get a "you can't post pictures or links until 7 days after your 10th post" and then see all I just wrote disappear..

So yeah, screw you forum structure - and see you guys in 7 days when I can release my mod.

[fruitgnome]

Perhaps try ModDB.

[Rosbjerg]

Yeah, I'm doing that now - and using dropbox as it's an almost 400mb zip file. (high quality pngs ftw)
But I want to post pictures here along with the release, with explanations etc, it just makes for a better presentation. And besides I can't even post the link to the ModDB Site, it blocks the post if I try.

[fruitgnome]

Write something like ww*w.google.de

[Rosbjerg]

Nah, I'll just wait 6 days - that way I can actually do a post with pictures and the works without any work arounds.