White Mod- Vanilla Enhancement

[iancmtaylor]

Announcing White Mod, designed to improve and expand upon the base Tech Tree.

Current development is focused on the first part of the game, Prewarp and early game.

A new set of Hyperdrives is available from the start of a Prewarp games, before Skip Drive. Skip Drive and Warp Bubble are expanded, and two new Hyperdrives are thrown into the mix along with the traditional 4 mid game Drives.

Construction Techs are changed around, a work in progress solution is used currently.

Static Energy is almost completely removed. Some critical component sizes have been changed, which may result in buggy auto design.

Research costs for the changed techs needs to be increased, I am aware.

If you would like to take a look around, feel free to do so and leave feedback. This is technically playable, but isn't balanced well currently.

White Mod 2023_May_26.zip

(714.75 KiB) Downloaded 55 times

This post will be updated periodically with new builds.

[SnugglyPuffs]

Thank you very much for creating and sharing this. The immense jump in FTL efficacy after Skip Drive is the largest detractor of my personal enjoyment of the game. I really enjoy long-play with protracted pre-FTL and Skip Drive usage, when colonizing new systems is still an daunting undertaking. Slower and more expensive FTL research means maximizing fuel efficiency is a relevant and viable decision to make when managing expansion logistics.

I know this is a relatively small community, but I hope you continue your development of your mod.

[iancmtaylor]

Hi Snuggly, thanks for the comment

Yes I'm still working on the mod, between working two jobs, binging Darktide and being a closed beta tester for this game.

I put some text-in-file for the first time in a couple weeks, last week. Right now working on planning out more concretely what I want to do. I want to make the code base of the mod easy to work with, so dividing up ComponentDefinitions.xml into Hyperdrives, Engines, Reactors, ect, instead of one massive file. With large amounts of 'placeholders' between items to make is so that I can keep things organized more easily, and so others have an easier time of making sub-mods.

For example, if I map out that the first 100 Components are Hyperdrives, I fill a file called ComponentDefinitions_White0000Hyperdrives.xml, with the components I have mapped out currently, and a buffer of however many placeholders. Then ComponentDefinitions_White0100Reactors.xml starts at Component 100.

This means instead of adding on to the vanilla definitions, or having a vanilla-style random hodge podge of stuff, I can keep things more organized, which means updating/balancing/adding things to the mod are much less of a headache.

Then if I have 0-99 mapped out for Hyperdrives, but only currently use say 50, I can add 50 more. Or another modder can make a submod and slot it in, keeping the organization and readability of the base mod.

____

So now that I know what type of framework I want to use, I was stuck on figuring numbers for Energy/Fuel Usage. Because the amount of Energy that 'Reactor 0' produces, and how much Fuel that takes, will be the foundation that every Component is built upon. So I spent a bit of time working on maths for that.

But of course I keep getting sidetracked with 'oh, the game lets me mod THIS, that would be cool...'. So ruthlessly taking notes and trying to keep my focus on the goal is the long-game

My most recent fork was July 5th, when I settled on the above organization system, so still being worked on, just doing lots of groundwork still. Currently it's looking like this mod will have about 20 tech levels, where each level of most techs will feature Components with different strengths, and Ai Empires will choose one of the given paths for unique flavor.

For example, the pinch-penny Haakonish will prefer more efficient Energy usage (Caslon is not cheap...), stealthy vessels with exotic weaponry. Technologically backwards Teekan will choose cheaper Components that allow them to maintain numerically superior fleets- but are lacking in quality.

Also a new system of tech-gating that is somewhat similar to the Randomized techtree, but... different

Lots planned, pages and spreadsheets full of stuff, just slowly chipping away at it.