Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: moonraker

Can this be used with other mods ? Just wondering as I'd like to try it in Beyond Extended. Which files would I need to transfer please ? as I've never mixed mods before

Unfortunately, DW is not very friendly when it comes to mixing mods, and, unless the mods affect completely different areas of the game, they usually cannot be easily combined. To make my mod work with Beyond Extended, you'd need not only to pick the right files to combine, but many of the individual files would need to have their contents changed.

So the short answer is that this mod won't work with Beyond Extended, and in general cannot be expected to work with other mods. As you have no doubt seen from the front page, it does incorporate three other mods.

Osito

Ok Osito thanks. I have downloaded so I'll give it a try

Well I have to say that this is very good indeed. Even with few pirates the ones that are there make a nuisance of themselves [:D]

Lol why didnt i try this before..this looks really solid. Quick question...this doesnt work with the galaxy map? I saw something about it not liking mods.

Unfortunately nothing works with the 'Galaxy Map'

I tried to get them to work together, but couldn't do it.

Osito

Ah oh well.

is this mod compatible with Distant Worlds: Universe ?

is this mod compatible with Distant Worlds: Universe ?

Yes.

Hey Osito, I realize you're probably very busy but I thought I'd ask just in case, you wouldn't have any desire in making a Research Unleashed-lite version that doesn't include the super weapons and extremely powerful stuff but just to add balance and variety?

ORIGINAL: Shogouki

Hey Osito, I realize you're probably very busy but I thought I'd ask just in case, you wouldn't have any desire in making a Research Unleashed-lite version that doesn't include the super weapons and extremely powerful stuff but just to add balance and variety?

That's an interesting thought. I originally came at this mod from the perspective of trying to increase the power of the techs, but I ended up trying to straighten out some of the quirks in the structure of the tree, and I can see that there is some merit in just doing the latter.

However, the problem with actually doing this is two-fold:
1. It is a royal pita to make any significant changes to the tech tree.
2. DW2 is (I hope) on the way, which has somewhat reduced my interest in making any significant changes to my own mod for DW1.

So I do not think I have enough desire to make any significant changes at this point, but I appreciate the suggestion.

Osito

Thanks for the reply, just thought I'd check.

Hey Osito, could you tell me what the basic differences are between your tech tree and the one in the starfall mod? Apart from your endgame supertechs that is.

Unfortunately, I can't, because I never played the Starfall mod. I'm not even certain whether or not Starfall has end game supertechs. I get the impression that Starfall is a somewhat bigger mod with many more techs, so if you're looking for even more techs it might be a plus. On the other hand, I find hard enough to get through all the techs in my own mod. On the other hand, I think that most people prefer Starfall, probably because it is more extensive.

To be honest, it's probably best if you download both mods then take a look at the tech trees for yourself, and see which appeals more.

Osito

First, let me say that this is a fantastic mod Osito, it fits the way I play very closely. I especially like the excluded techs by race. There were a few things that bothered me about it though so I decided to fix them. I thought people might be interested, so I’ll share!

1. Deneba crystal is a strategic resource in this mod, but its description and icon still showed it as a super luxury so I fixed those. The icon was a quick fix, someone could easily do a better job.

2. Hyper jump initiation times go up to 50s in the mod, but in practice there seems to be a 15s upper limit hard-coded, no matter what the settings are for the component. So I adjusted all the times to keep the balance between drives, but with 15s as the longest.

3. To make prewarp more interesting I adjusted the costs of early hyperdrive techs (and lowered the speed of the first from 1250 to 1000) so that the first one is cheap, but the next few are pricey, allowing easy access to your own system and maybe very nearby systems. This works really well for games that I like to play that are sparse (250 stars, 15x15), I’m not sure if it would work for a very dense galaxy. I also hope (speculatively) that this might help the AI for prewarp to get a strong home system setup.

4. As a physicist, it really bothered me that the highest-end fusion drive used helium as a fuel source instead of hydrogen, helium fusion produces less energy than hydrogen fusion! So I changed it to hydrogen. Also, from a gameplay perspective, it is nicer to have fewer fuels to worry about for resupply ships as they always take onboard all fuels available when deployed at a source.

5. The mining techs went above the caps for resource extraction, which are 10/40, so I adjusted those techs.

6. Reactive armour was a side tech in the armour line, while gravity armour as the ultimate armour had a much lower reactive rating and I suspect would be less effective at that stage of the game, so I adjusted the armour line slightly.

7. By far the most time consuming adjustment! It bothered me in the ship designer that “Show only latest” wasn’t working for this mod. I realized that it had to do with the way techs were excluded from races; using the “Allowed Races” flag in the research file makes the game treat it as a special racial tech, and the designer always shows racial techs alongside mainline techs. I changed the way this was done for components, removing the “Allowed Races” line from any component-related techs, and adding “DisallowedComponentIds” to all the race files where appropriate. This also had the added benefit of making the race selection screen much much easier to parse.

I have (I think) included a zip file containing only those files that I changed, you should overwrite the files from Research Unleashed that are already there.

Hi Landris,

Thanks for the feedback. Many of your changes seem quite sensible, and I'd be interested in other opinions. If you don't mind I may incorporate at least some of these in the main mod (obviously I will credit you). Or i may just link your post in my original post,

My comments on your specific points are:

1. Ok, hadn't noticed that - good point.

2. Hadn't noticed that either, but, if true, it certainly makes sense to have some adjustments, given that long initiation times are no longer really a factor.

3. Interesting idea. Probably the generated galaxies don't get so dense that this change would be an issue.

4. Yes, I agree with you to an extent, but I really wanted a third resource, so I 'imagined' that scientists in the future had invented a different type of helium fusion. Initially I tried to do this with uranium as the initial fuel, but it just didn't work, because uranium is a solid, and I couldn't generate sufficient quantities from mining.

5. Hmm, that was an error on my part.

6. I was actually trying to make the end game armours a bit of a trade off between reactive armour and armour strength, but perhaps I haven't got the balance right.

7. That sounds like a very good idea.

Osito

Having a couple of weird issues with this.

1. The majority of the AI empires are either not expanding or expanding very slowly. At first I thought it was because I was just researching Colonization faster than they were. So I set that to Tech 0 and ran another game for 91 years, same result. Most of the empires started with nearby habitable worlds for their race. They just didn't build ships to go colonize them. Can't figure it out, but it started after I switched from Starfall.

2. Independent Colonies have ships but they aren't moving. At all. Makes me wonder if there is actually a problem with my install.

3. In pre-warp default freighter designs are over the size cap, preventing anyone from constructing them until research causes a retrofit.

Really great looking mod though, I just hope I can get these things figured out so I can actually play it! XD

(I really think there is just something wrong with my installation. I just wanted to post about it in case anyone else ran into something like this.)

Thanks for the response!

I understand the desire to have a third fuel source, some mods have seven or more! This was more of a personal preference for me. It was only a small thing until my resupply ship started taking helium onboard too, I already went out of my way to avoid setting up my resupply ships on gas giants that had both caslon and hydrogen.

As for the armour, I did think that you had probably intended for a choice there. That makes sense and is probably a better gameplay mechanic.

ORIGINAL: Unforeseen

Having a couple of weird issues with this.

1. The majority of the AI empires are either not expanding or expanding very slowly. At first I thought it was because I was just researching Colonization faster than they were. So I set that to Tech 0 and ran another game for 91 years, same result. Most of the empires started with nearby habitable worlds for their race. They just didn't build ships to go colonize them. Can't figure it out, but it started after I switched from Starfall.

2. Independent Colonies have ships but they aren't moving. At all. Makes me wonder if there is actually a problem with my install.

3. In pre-warp default freighter designs are over the size cap, preventing anyone from constructing them until research causes a retrofit.

Really great looking mod though, I just hope I can get these things figured out so I can actually play it! XD

(I really think there is just something wrong with my installation. I just wanted to post about it in case anyone else ran into something like this.)

It's hard to remember exactly why the freighters can't be built at the start of a pre-warp game, but I think it may have something to do with preventing the AI from building them right at the start of the game, when they're unlikely to be needed, and will probably just clog up build queues and use important resources. For myself, I always micromanage, so if I needed a freighter before I have the next build size tech, I'd just design one. So I think the game may well play better this way.

The problem you're experiencing with empires not growing could be down to pirates. I just ran a test game on 'automatic' with pirates set to normal strength, low amounts and distant from my own empire, but still pirates came to my planet every year and wiped out everything I owned. At 11 years into the game, my empire was sitting there with a bare planet and nothing else. So one explanation is that the pirates were inhibiting game growth.

However, I'd be surprised if that affected all empires. Certainly in my own test there were plenty of other empires with multiple planets after 20 years.

Osito

It's hard to remember exactly why the freighters can't be built at the start of a pre-warp game

It's the ship design templates. All the freighters are the same. I would suggest reducing components to the small freighter so it can be built right away. Right now they're 10 cargo, 15 engine, 6 fuel. Change the small freighter to 6-10-6. That should fix it. I posted an update to Unleashed Extended. You could pull out the ship designs from that if you want to change anything.

but I think it may have something to do with preventing the AI from building them right at the start of the game, when they're unlikely to be needed

The AI builds heavily pre-warp. They need freighters.

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970

It's hard to remember exactly why the freighters can't be built at the start of a pre-warp game

It's the ship design templates. All the freighters are the same. I would suggest reducing components to the small freighter so it can be built right away. Right now they're 10 cargo, 15 engine, 6 fuel. Change the small freighter to 6-10-6. That should fix it. I posted an update to Unleashed Extended. You could pull out the ship designs from that if you want to change anything.

but I think it may have something to do with preventing the AI from building them right at the start of the game, when they're unlikely to be needed

The AI builds heavily pre-warp. They need freighters.

Yes, I know about the ship templates. What I'm saying is that this particular feature may have been deliberate, rather than an oversight - I don't remember. It could have come from Icemania's AI improvement mod, or it could have been something I did myself. Having said all that, I'm personally comfortable that the AI doesn't build freighters until it gets the next build size tech.

This leads me on to your second point. The AI does need freighters, but with a pre-warp start, left to its own devices, the AI will often build freighters before it really needs them.

Osito