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Maybe I will mod this by myself based/extended on xl mod.

Base principe: fight for resources and not for colonies. (I'm not a fan of killing an entire empire, I want to have a game that can run forever and is always interesting and you really use the latest/highest techs and not have won before or the game get uplayable cause of lags.)

There are 3 more evil races: Gizzurean, Dahyout and Boskara, the rest are quite nice.

Base late game performance problem is the number of colonizable planets. Second problem is the immense maintenance savings and that there are to much of all flying through the galaxy.
So the mod disables all colonizations techs except from Terraforming.

Mid-game you can invade small colonies and maybe medium colonies at late-game you need much more troop transports to invade large colonies.

- Troop transport is a mid game tech and extended troop transport is a late game tech
- No colonization tech except terraforming, to colonize more planets your empire needs other races
- No bonus %attack %defense troop techs just recruit more troops
- No droids cause ai does not use them
- For better performance and to prevent before jumping... bug ships have no hangers, fighters and bombers are only for defense at bases
- More powerful stations (I would add hangars for fighters/bomber but the ai is not able to use this)
- If ai can handle it only small and medium weapons on ships till battleship
- No specific bombard weapons till ai is able to bombard colonies
- Only one hull for each ship type, less annoying manual design
- Recreation component no maintenance saving (maybe better performance in late game) / medical component no damage reduction -bonus, because ai does not use it on all ships and bases
- No crew component maintenace savings I'm sure this boosts the late game performance instead maybe targeting, countermeasures and damage control bonus cause of more recovered crew
- No militarized crew quarters
- No cloning tech cause it's boring
- Earlier faster jumd drives but less jump range, let the galaxy seems to be more endless but you don't have to wait for long time to see where your fleet will be in action
- Fighters/bombers at start of game
- Earlier orbital defenses
- No troop stasis bay / passenger compartment upgrades
- Only non playable races as independents
- Maybe earlier long range scanners with higher scan range to be noticed earlier over whats going on in the galaxy
- Maybe less infinite techs cause ai does not really research them

I don't think you need to remove the colonization techs, just reduce the effect to say +2/3 per level and then increase the amount of terraforming you can do, also make terraforming much slower and costly as well. That means that worlds will be as good as in the vanilla game eventually but you will not be able to settle as many worlds in total leading to more interesting and dynamic game and less money overall.
You can then change the number of colonizable world by increasing or lower the quality of planets when you start a game, especially as terraforming will be much more powerful.

I changed the values for troops in my own mod and reduced the attack values of all units to about 1/3... there are no unit that ever get a higher attack than they have defence value. It make no sense a unit will ever be better at attacking than defending. This also mean you need more units to take worlds and the militia and some military units will make it way more difficult to take worlds. Large worlds have to be bombarded to even be considered to be taken at all. The AI seem to cope with this just fine by the way.

I have also already implemented the changes to colonization tech and terraforming in my own game as I identified pretty much the same thing as you, money eventually become too abundant. The other thing is that the AI don't cope with the spamming of colonies either. The AI just spam too much colonies which actually lead to less income as the luxuries to the most developed planets suffer and even in a late game the main income is located to a dozen high profit planets. Low population planets use a proportionally high amount of luxuries to high population planets.

fruitgnome wrote: Tue May 21, 2024 11:06 pm Base principe: fight for resources and not for colonies. (I'm not a fan of killing an entire empire, I want to have a game that can run forever and is always interesting and you really use the latest/highest techs and not have won before or the game get uplayable cause of lags.)

My thinking is the solution is to have resources consumed throughout the game. I have a mod for this on Steam - it is imperfect as all are consumed at an identical pace by planets, but it definitely imposes resource scarcity as your empire scales up in size. Unfortunately my sense was the AI really struggles with it - at least the last time I played a long game.

Ideally there would be a way to scale the costs (money, and resources) of maintaining a large population across many planets. I think an ideal balance would be end game fleets of a few dozen ships, one only a handful of these sustainable per empire - i.e. each ship is being supported by the economy of an entire fully developed planet.

Or, radically reduce the rate at which planets gain development points - so it isn't as trivial as just increasing luxury resource supply, but also some local construction of infrastructure that takes much longer.

You obviously can mod the luxury resources to give much less development in addition the mining rates need to be lowered as well, I think that mining rates probably could be slashed in half. That is what I have looked at.

In addition you should also make the small mining module size 60 and add one size 60 module slot for Fuel ships. The human player may otherwise just sidestep mining balance by adding multiple small mining modules for their mining stations and leave the AI in the dust in terms of mining capacity.

I will wait to mod the game till the game breaking bugs are fixed. And mainly it's to much work to compare xml files I will not extend xl mod instead make an own one.
Problems I could fix are:
Invading independent colonies as you don't want it.
Much higher strength for bases.
Much harder invasion colonies.
All empires have more money from start but less at late game. Much faster interesting gameplay at early game.
Less planets to colonize even at late game. - Better late game performance
No fleets stuck at jumping... cause of fighters and bombers that don't want to return to mother ship.
Let the galaxy feel much more endless - not tested yet but I think it should work
Much faster ftl engines to make it possible to manage all fleets manual at normal game speed.
---> These were my basic topics - maybe I would change more.

Im pretty sure that I would disable all tractor beam techs.
I can't decide if I would disable area weapons - if friendly fire were off I will let them enabled.