Bacon Mod

[BlindOne]

Can I make a few suggestions?

> The option for ''None'' independent life at startup galaxy creation screen.
> The option to always start in your own race's homesystem. Nothing annoys me more than seeing a bunch of pretenders in my race named homesystem that I didn't start on.
> The option to increase or modify troop suppression effectiveness. It's bloody annoying when you conquer an enemy homeworld and all you're doing is parking your entire army of elite troops on them to keep them peaceful and occupied.[:-] I just wanted to enslave them and make them PAY PAY PAY for my upkeep costs. I didn't conquer them to babysit them and make them happy. I want to exterminate and tax them to death. Why do I have to pay for the wall? [:'(] Let them pay for it![8|] I seriously find myself paying more money to occupy them than it would have netted me if I just got rid of them completely somehow[:'(]

(Maybe I'm asking for too much with the troops though, I often play Securan and can run up to 80-90% tax rates and suck/balance the private sector dry of money[:'(] so when I conquer another homeworld I find myself disappointed that I have to run on extremely low taxes with those guys even though I've set them to exterminate or enslave[:D] and parked ''peacekeeping troops'' there...)

So now that's out of the way. Let me praise you my friend.

> Being able to terraform...holy cow...why wasn't this implemented in the real game? Feels like such a missed oppertunity![&o]
> Up to 10 guns on my freighters! Hell yeah! I can finally run a merchant marine as a corporate nationalist and kick everyone's ass with freighters. Bring it!
> Nukem...truly the galaxy feels squeeky clean with all those graveyards gone. No more annoyingly have to worry about some other race getting their hands on some desolation moon or super battleship when I want a fresh fair game.
> The new weapon ranges also looks insanely good![&o]

[&o][&o][&o] You deserve it [&o][&o][&o]

Edit: P.S Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure but can you have reputation damage slowly subside over time? Love the change to war weariness too! much more realistic.

[boomshankaaaa]

Hello, was wondering if this great mod will work with Unleashed Extended II

[BlindOne]

I'm not sure since I've only run a few AI games but it seems that the AI loves making asteroid colonies, no problem there, but are they supposed to go independent this much? [X(] I see tonnes of independent asteroid colonies filled to the brim with militia soldiers making it as hard to invade as a homeworld [:'(] Like dozens and dozens of militia troops piled up on those tiny rocks.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: BlindOne

Can I make a few suggestions?

> The option for ''None'' independent life at startup galaxy creation screen.
> The option to always start in your own race's homesystem. Nothing annoys me more than seeing a bunch of pretenders in my race named homesystem that I didn't start on.
> The option to increase or modify troop suppression effectiveness. It's bloody annoying when you conquer an enemy homeworld and all you're doing is parking your entire army of elite troops on them to keep them peaceful and occupied.[:-] I just wanted to enslave them and make them PAY PAY PAY for my upkeep costs. I didn't conquer them to babysit them and make them happy. I want to exterminate and tax them to death. Why do I have to pay for the wall? [:'(] Let them pay for it![8|] I seriously find myself paying more money to occupy them than it would have netted me if I just got rid of them completely somehow[:'(]

Edit: P.S Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure but can you have reputation damage slowly subside over time? Love the change to war weariness too! much more realistic.

I'm not sure since I've only run a few AI games but it seems that the AI loves making asteroid colonies, no problem there, but are they supposed to go independent this much? I see tonnes of independent asteroid colonies filled to the brim with militia soldiers making it as hard to invade as a homeworld Like dozens and dozens of militia troops piled up on those tiny rocks.

All good ideas. I'm not sure how doable any of them are however.
I think the game needs an independent. I'm not sure what happens of all independent planets get wiped out. Has anyone had this happen? If so then maybe it could be doable. There are a lot of things that are dependent on independent colonies though ,such as pirate activity.

I've never noticed starting colony system names. Are the race names always created as a system somewhere? If I name my rance "Bugkiller" will there be a bugkillers system generated somewhere? What about mods?

I never though about troop suppression. Do troops even do that or is revolt purely a factor of happiness. I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about that.

The AI is building too many asteroid colonies. I had a bug in an earlier version that prevented the Ai from building any. I made a change and it produces too many now. I'll expose a variable that lets players choose how prevalent they want AI colonies. Regardless of that setting, an AI empire should never have more asteroid colonies than real colonies.
Related to that are independent asteroid colonies. If happiness is really low they can revolt and go independent. That's probably what is happening. There's nothing I can do about that in the short run. I'll need to understand it better but I would like to somehow give asteroid colonies something to boost their happiness. I have a little side project that I'm going to release in the next couple of days that has this problem.

[BlindOne]

I think the game needs an independent. I'm not sure what happens of all independent planets get wiped out. Has anyone had this happen? If so then maybe it could be doable. There are a lot of things that are dependent on independent colonies though ,such as pirate activity.

I love to play without pirates, so not having any independents feels more ''clean'' to me. I don't need mysterious alien life on foreign planets when I want to imagine everyone just starting off...How can there be independent human colony out there if my race has never went to the stars before?

As far as I am aware you can delete them without any negative side effects, ofcourse if you play with pirates on then the pirates will have an incredibly hard time doing anything because they have no independents to feed on and sustain themselves.

Also independents are generated depending on the starting empires. They are always generated based on the races you have selected as potential empires and no others. So if you play with only 3 empires, for example, Humans, Zenox and Mortalen, then all independants will be of those 3 races. Often this will result in those independents getting spawned on the planets Sol, Zenox and Mortalu if none of the original empires spawned there...real original...[8|]

I've never noticed starting colony system names. Are the race names always created as a system somewhere? If I name my race "Bugkiller" will there be a bugkillers system generated somewhere? What about mods?

No, it is specified in the races subfolder for each race specifically under the ancient homesystem name line. Most races have their homesystem named after their own race with the exception of the Humans who have ''Sol'' as their ancient home system. Independents take the name of the system they are spawned in so if an independent spawns in their ancient home system you'll find them taking that name. Empires you select at startup also often take the name of the race so it is easy to end up with duplicate names in the list because independents tend to ALWAYS spawn on the original ancient homesystem. If an independent spawns in a different system they'll take that name. I have for example the Shandar Paradise who started in Shandar and the Romulus Empire who are also Shandar but started in you guessed it....Romulus system. I myself played as Humans called ''The Union'' but the independents two solar systems over that way started in Sol and they call themselves the ''Sol Confederacy''...

As for the asteroid colonies, they tend to ALWAYS eventually revolt in my personal experience of observing my galaxy over 100 years with 13 different empires. I've seen nothing but independent asteroid colonies all filled to the brim with dozens and dozens of militia troops. They always go independent because there's not enough happiness on their 0% habitable underdeveloped rocks and once they are independent they start hitting the spam Militia button like crazy...and just sit there waiting and sucking up resources that go nowhere and do nothing. What exactly is the point of asteroid colonies? They don't really do anything...they have a pitiful 20k population at best who produce no income at all. The asteroid colony only serves as resource gathering node and you can build facilities on them (lmao) that are absolutely useless. You might as well just put a mine there or a star base and simulate it that way. I always imagined a starbase or mine being the same as an asteroid colony. No real point in making it a colonizable thing. It's more realistic to allow barren rock planets to be colonized and terraformed than to allow asteroid colonies. Granted I think it's a novel idea but it is entirely pointless and contrary to game experience imho. Still I admit it kinda looks cool on the map...just sucks they are all unhappy independents filled with half a billion troops each and serve no real purpose other than eye candy.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: BlindOne


As for the asteroid colonies, they tend to ALWAYS eventually revolt in my personal experience of observing my galaxy over 100 years with 13 different empires. I've seen nothing but independent asteroid colonies all filled to the brim with dozens and dozens of militia troops. They always go independent because there's not enough happiness on their 0% habitable underdeveloped rocks and once they are independent they start hitting the spam Militia button like crazy...and just sit there waiting and sucking up resources that go nowhere and do nothing. What exactly is the point of asteroid colonies? They don't really do anything...they have a pitiful 20k population at best who produce no income at all. The asteroid colony only serves as resource gathering node and you can build facilities on them (lmao) that are absolutely useless. You might as well just put a mine there or a star base and simulate it that way. I always imagined a starbase or mine being the same as an asteroid colony. No real point in making it a colonizable thing. It's more realistic to allow barren rock planets to be colonized and terraformed than to allow asteroid colonies. Granted I think it's a novel idea but it is entirely pointless and contrary to game experience imho. Still I admit it kinda looks cool on the map...just sucks they are all unhappy independents filled with half a billion troops each and serve no real purpose other than eye candy.

I put asteroid colonies in the game because someone asked me to. That's pretty much it. Yeah, they are MOSTLY useless but not game breaking so it doesn't really hurt. Still, they are not where I want them.
To that end, I will be making a couple of changes in the next version of the mod.

1 Each asteroid colony will start with two infantry units. Hopefully this will keep them from revolting. I have a better long-term solution but I don't know if it is doable or not.
2 I will export a value to the settigns file (asteroidColonyPrevalenceDivisor) that lets users adjust how feequently the AI will try to make an asteroid colony.

[RedArrow91]

Hello RogerBacon, first - great job

Is it possible and can you do something about font issues in game? Smallest of the font in particular

Thanks in advance.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: RedArrow91

Hello RogerBacon, first - great job

Is it possible and can you do something about font issues in game? Smallest of the font in particular

Thanks in advance.

Hi and thanks.

I did what little I could on the font issue. Removing the drop shadow on the info panel and changing some background colors on the diplomacy screen helped somewhat. Beyond that there is not much I can do. I tried a few things but the text was all messed up or overlapped or stuff like that.
However, I did just watch Larry Monte's last episode of his Distant Worlds playthrough on a 55" TV and the font's never been more readable.

[RogerBacon]

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Version 1.55 Released.


Weapon Range Circles: !rangecircles toggles this on and off. With it on, the current selected ship will have circles around it showing the range of its weapons. Since enemy weapon range is displayed in vanilla DW, the range circles work for enemy ships as well.

Reload Ship Templates – Normally ship templates for AI empires are only loaded on game start (or when a new empire is created). Now you can make changes to the templates and have the game reload them to take effect in your current game. The command for this is !loadtemplates.

No Independents - A new setting in the Baconsettings.txt file allows you to override the loswest setting of the “independent life slider bar” on galaxy creation. The lowest setting corresponds to a value of 150. You can lower it as low as 1 to get rid of independents. Do not set it to zero as it is used as a divisor in some places and will crash. You may still see some independents but they are probably pirates. Also, if you try to load a saved game that used a different value you MAY get a failure to load. This has not been extensively tested and should be considered experimental. Like the “low stars” setting, it is not initialized until after a game starts so if you want to see the affects you must either start or load a game and THEN go back to the main menu and start your actual game.

Improved mining cap with tech increase – Value 2 (which is zero in vanilla DW) is now used to override the mining rate cap. In unmodded DW the mining rate cap is 10 for mining and luxury mining and 40 for gas mining. You can now change that with tech advanced. See the entries in research.txt for

Asteroid colony improvements. Asteroid colonies will start with two infantry to prevent instant rebellion and will start with 250 of each strategic resource. The recommend cost of colonies has gone up from 25000 to 35000.

[edit]
Forgot one more. The weight for the chance for the AI to make an asteroid colony is now exported as a value in baconSettings.txt
asteroidColonyPrevalenceDivisor=100

[Sabranan]

That's brilliant Roger!

I'll get right to work making my modding tool work with the new Value 2 changes, I'm assuming if value 2 is set to 0 as vanilla would be that it simply uses the default values?

Gonna love the ability to change design templates on the fly as well, not being able to do that has been a real annoyance for me recently.

Thanks so much for this!

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: Sabranan

That's brilliant Roger!

I'll get right to work making my modding tool work with the new Value 2 changes, I'm assuming if value 2 is set to 0 as vanilla would be that it simply uses the default values?

Gonna love the ability to change design templates on the fly as well, not being able to do that has been a real annoyance for me recently.

Thanks so much for this!

Correct. If the value is 0 then it uses the default values.

[titus1]

Hello,
As a side note from the mining company thread, research ships do work, but it's confusing as you only get a message when they finish a project, not when they start on something. Maybe it would be possible to announce.

I like the gravity wells, however I think this makes the jump interdiction tech tree not so useful. Any experience so far?
However, the ships don't respond 100% correct to it. For example I've seen many ships with hyperdrives be in a system and want to refuel but decide to go outside the influence area and hyper jump to the gas station, even if they were close to it and it would make sense to use sublight. Manually giving the order works(most of the time).
Thanks!

[Beyondfubar]

Good to see you're still at it Roger! I saw someone claim to have an error with Starfall 1.12 corrected, I want to say I got over that in previous versions with a image copy to the Ships, though with the upgrade from baconMod 1.4 to 1.55 I now have a new error (forgive me for not getting a Shot of it, if you would like one let me know) I however solved it by clearing the design Templates. Will do a small play through to see what I broke to get an easy fix there..

EDIT:

I also used to have a small error that we discussed, whereby removing shadows removed *all* text from my selected unit UI card. That seems to be fixed! Awesome for those of us with 40+ inch 4K screens. With 20/20 vision, squinting is for chumps.

[RogerBacon]

The next update is a long way away but I just wanted to let everyone know up front that , while it won't BREAK saved games, you can expect about a 3-5 minute load time the first time you load an existing save game. Once you re-save with the new version everything will be fine. This happened once before when I added crew experience levels and no one even noticed so its really no big deal.

[fruitgnome]

Hi, great mod, will play it in some days.
Do you think you could change this slavery problem? tm.asp?m=3716289&mpage=1&key=�
Could you also raise the 15 x 15 sector limit? The universe feels bigger then.

[Kingah]

Hi, I know this has nothing to do with your mod, but as you know how to edit the .exe, would it be possible for you to extract the main-meny background for the Legend expansion. I've been wanting it for a wallpaper and would be forever thankful.

[RogerBacon]

ORIGINAL: fruitgnome

Hi, great mod, will play it in some days.
Do you think you could change this slavery problem? tm.asp?m=3716289&mpage=1&key=?
Could you also raise the 15 x 15 sector limit? The universe feels bigger then.

I don't know (yet) how to change happiness. When I figure it out I'll certainly consider a slavery adjustment.

We can't raise the sector size from 15x15 because there are a lot of places where the boundaries are used and it would certainly cause crashes if we tried. You can simulate a bigger galaxy with slower warp speeds. There is a global variable you cna set in the settings file to change all warp speeds so no need to edit them individually in the tech tree.

ORIGINAL: Kingah

Hi, I know this has nothing to do with your mod, but as you know how to edit the .exe, would it be possible for you to extract the main-meny background for the Legend expansion. I've been wanting it for a wallpaper and would be forever thankful.

What screen is that? Where does it display in the game?

[Kingah]

It's the main meny image for the Legends exe if you own it.

[fruitgnome]

Global Warp Speed Setting nice, thx 4 information.
Which other mods do you recommend to play with your mod?

@community: Which mods du you use with this mod?

[KarayaMan]

I use this mod together with mordachai's Unleashed Extended II + Retreat1970's AI research orders.
Works very well for me.