[DWU] Balance Mod v0.9 (extended TechTree) [Cancelled in protest]

[Locarnus]

ORIGINAL: Francoy

Upon further testing, here what is happening:

Test with Human Empire, tech level 1.
The default template for small freighter has 1 Reactor.
The latest patch add 1 reactor to the design when there is not enough, but it need 2 more.
So increase the energy ouput of reactor, or increase the number of reactors on all templates...

edit: The problem with the Enhanced HyperDrives at level 1, is that when starting at level 1, you get the 2 hyperdrive at the same time. (Sorry i don't see how to give it to the Pirate without giving it to the player!).

Yes, confirmed. It is not working at the moment.
Removed the version while investigating.

edit:
Confirmed that the ai does not balance energy needs with reactor output, contrary to what is stated in the design templates and in the 1.9.5.2 patch notes.

From the patch notes:
"- civilian ships now ensure they have enough reactors to power hyperdrives at full speed (same as state ships already did)"

From the design templates:
"'Also note that while Reactors and Energy Collectors can be specified here, an adequate amount of these components will always be added to meet the energy needs of the design."

This is simply not true.
It just puts 1 more reactor on the designs if the template number is too low. It does not put an adequate amount of reactors on the ship.
This missing mechanic just is not apparent, because the unmodded reactors, especially for the higher tiers, are way overpowered for smaller vessels in particular.


The reactor/energy balance is thus practically unmoddable.

I put a lot of work in this mod, fought a lot of limitations (the biggest one the max research cost limitation, which results in ctds), costing a lot of time for non content related error/modding design limitation hunting.

As a modder I have to rely on what is stated from the devs about how the game works.

In the modding guide there is no mention of maximum research costs, so I added projects and it CTDs without error code. It cost me hours to find that out and change the mod.

In the design templates it says the energy needs are balanced with the reactor outputs.
I change the reactor outputs only to find out that it does not "balance" energy need with reactor output.

I came here to mod content, not error hunt and revert my mods all the time because of some unstated limitations or mechanics that clearly do not work as stated.


I therefore put this mod on hold until at least the energy balancing issue is resolved by the devs, to a state that is in line with the statement in the design templates.

[Franky007]

I think a simple solution would be to use this formulas for the energy requirement of the Hyperdrive:

Max Energy requirement of Hyperdrive = 2 * Energy output of Reactor - 10. (Based on reactor of the same level).

I understand being frustated when not everything is working as planned, but i think this way your mod would still work...

[Locarnus]

ORIGINAL: Francoy

I think a simple solution would be to use this formulas for the energy requirement of the Hyperdrive:

Max Energy requirement of Hyperdrive = 2 * Energy output of Reactor - 10. (Based on reactor of the same level).

This way, only the first four Hyperdrives would need to be modified. I understand being discouraged when not everything is working as planned, but i think the rest of your mod would still work...

It is just the last straw that broke the camels back.

So far I spent about 2/3 of the time I put in this mod by dealing with unstated limitations and reverting to earlier versions. Only to have to redo the stuff later nearly from scratch because of the modding hostile file structure.
There are lots of limitiations, lots of problems, I put up with them so far.

But now reverting again because I based my modifications on what was clearly and unequivocally stated by the devs about the game mechanic is just too much.

There have been 2 tech tree mods (doing more than copying and changing values for race techs) so far.
One showed great potential, but was seemingly abandoned a few days ago.
Mine is on hold as of now.
Dont get me wrong, I like the game and I appreciate the effort by the devs, but the main feature of Universe above previous versions (for upgraders like me) was the moddability, as was clearly stated/marketed/communicated.

[Unforeseen]

Shoot. I understand your frustration friend, i hope they fix this soon as this is something that should not have gotten through the testing phase. Any feature that is stated to be in the game should be thoroughly tested and any issues fixed prior to release. I love matrix and its devs, but this is a little bit disappointing.

[AnddyiRaynor]

Perhaps they didn't expect someone would require 3 reactors to be equal to 1 of the base games, and they balanced it for the base game? Does it work if they aren't 1/3 the size and power of the regular ones? Are the templates per chance saying how many reactors can be on a ship? Try upping the number of reactors they should/could have in the design templates and see if the automated ships build 9 or so reactors to compensate.

I do think that if you edit a ship ingame and it is colored orange the ai won't manually update it correctly or at all. I manually do everything, which I've found to be a major time consumer so I backup my ship designs but it's how I like to play.

[Unforeseen]

Everything?! lol i can't get through the civilian ships before i go crazy.

Btw i hope you let them know directly about this issue, not sure if they go through every thread.

[AnddyiRaynor]

If you know what you want on the ship it doesn't take that long. Besides how can I trust a ai to do my designs when the private sector thought it was a great idea to send all of my steel to my new colony from my capital leaving me with none at my homeworld just because I decided I wanted to build a construction ship there. $$#$#$ Luckily it was closeby and they had lots of ships already. It was over 100k steel to so it's really hard to believe they'd leave me with none lol.

Editing the civ ships isn't that important I just make sure they are fast have decent cargo good reactors and some armor and shields, early on if they die that means more money for me I do keep them current though, and I protect the jizz out of passengerships.

He posted it in the 1.9.5.2 update thread, there's not many replies on the thread so if they checked it they'd see it. I did notice project 111-109-107 in the research.txt didn't have upgraded construction yards or upgraded tech labs like the last version did.

[Locarnus]

I did the reactors amongst the last things. I didnt expect any problems there, tested the energy balancing before with civilian ships. Just couldnt imagine any reason/possibility to do it they way they did, except to prevent people from modding away from the vanilla game.

I will probably sort this out tomorrow, again reverting the reactor changes while keeping the rest.

But this is the last damn revert I do for reasons that are non of my fault at all.
It is now the devs turn to fix it up to a level that should have been there when the game launched (beta-testing the modding, when it is your primary selling point!!!).

So, back to 0.86 tomorrow...

edit:
@AnddyiRaynor:
I split up many construction and HighTech projects into their "effects", the missing construction sizes should now be in seperate projects in the 400 range. I didnt want to screw with the design sizes in case other mods or players have size specific templates/designs, while still balancing the line costs in comparison to eg the weapons lines.

@Unforeseen:
No need to adjust the templates, I will work around it tomorrow, so the vanilla/extended/other mod templates stay valid. I want to keep this mod to be easily mergeable anyway.


PS: Sorry for the rant and the delay, but this mess is really annoying me.

[Zunos]

This may sound newbish, but where can I download this and play test?

[pycco]

it does not work right is my conclusion so he took the link down. based on the giant red text just up the page[;)]

[Ra131]

I therefore put this mod on hold until at least the energy balancing issue is resolved by the devs, to a state that is in line with the statement in the design templates.

Sounds not good

[Locarnus]

reverted the reactor changes because of unadressed DW:U energy balancing bug


released as 0.86

[Icemania]

This looks to be a sensational piece of work Locarnus. I don't play with many mods but this mod looks right up my alley.

I'm shocked as well that something so explicit in the template files is actually non-existent.

I expect there will be a number of interesting patches yet to come and hopefully this will be promptly resolved.

[Osito]

It will be a great shame if these problems prevent you from going forward with the mod. Perhaps this is simply an effect that the designer hadn't appreciated and it will be changed as soon as he becomes aware of it.

There do seem to be a number of undocumented 'features' that seem hard to explain. For example, when I was playing about with ship speed, I found that if I added a component with a ship speed above somewhere around 100k, the game crashed (I didn't determine the exact speed, because it's such a pain to wait for the game to restart following a crash). On the other hand, if I improved the speed of an existing component, via an 'improvement' tech, it would work to speeds of 5m and more. Whether this is deliberate, I have no idea.

[Locarnus]

Thank you all!

It just feels like being an alpha/beta tester for the modding capabilites, after paying for it.

If you advertise something as a main feature, it should work to an extent that does not require a paying customer to spend
about 2/3 of the time with troubleshooting.
If modding is something added, ok, but for Universe it was said to be the main feature, so it has to be treated accordingly.

This is not the standard I m used to, especially regarding matrixgames/slitherine.

edit: Fixed the full size tech tree images, imgur is just more user friendly than photobucket when you want to display full sized images.

[Sithuk]

Locarnus: Can you summarise the reason for needing to reduce the energy produced per reactor? Why is it required to balance the rest of your changes in your mod?

[Locarnus]

It is in no way needed for everything. But there are many interdependencies.

- First of all, the whole point of this balance mod is to rebalance the tech tree.
Currently a late game escort/freighter is grossly overpowered in terms of reactor output, which puts a maintenance/resource burden especially on ai empires (which tend to use small escort designs).
- Second, I cant rebalance the hyperdrives/expansion speed if I can not rely on a working mechanic regarding energy balance.
- Third, weapon energy consumption (which is a main part of weapon balance) can not be rebalanced, because they wont get enough energy without this mechanic.
- Fourth, in a later stage I think reactors should make up more of a ship size then it does now. The first step to achieve that, is to make reactors more flexible (0.9), the second step (after hyperspeed and weapon rebalance) would be to increase the size of the reactors again, without increasing the output and rebalancing this with the maximum ship sizes.

Generally I can only mod when I can rely on the statements of the devs about the games mechanics.

[Ardryn]

Are the Standard countermeasures and targeting supposed to give the same bonuses as the starting versions?

[Locarnus]

@Ardryn:

Nope, thx for the info. The starting versions should be 5%.
It also seems like the Standard versions cost only half as much as other tier 1 techs (as well as the Universal Medicine).

As it is currently only a minor buff on tier 0 and there is no real fighting on tier 0, I think it is not too problematic for now. I will fix it in the next version though.

[Ardryn]

Also Multiphase Capacitors has the same stats as the Zenox Pure Energy Discharge.