MOD: Slow Start 1.61 for both DA & DL

1.1

I have staggered Stellar Cartography research by dividing it into I and II.

Stellar Cartography I is theorectical or preliminary research for seeing all the stars. This is the tech that races get now that got the original Stellar Cartography before. And it's the prerequisite for Sensors.

Stellar Cartography II costs 10x its predecessor but gives you Stellar Cartography proper.

1.0

Spaceports cost 5 times as much.

Colony modules, constructor modules and mining modules cost 5 times as much.

All colonies now begin with half as much "automatic" industrial and research points.

In the unmodded game, Logistics goes 3, 6, 9, 12, 15.

For this mod, it is 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21.

Note I've added a 6th Extreme Logistics tech to get the 21.

In case anyone's interested, I've updated my mod to stagger ship range.

1.2

Added two in-between range techs to research - basic range & extended range, interleaved with the life support techs.

The unmodded game range was 20, 40, 50, 50

For this mod it is 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60

1.3

Range ability of life support modules on ships now begin slowly and increase exponentially.

Standard Game: 6, 8, 10, 12, 14
Slow Start Mod: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15

Ship range now begins with a decrease of 50%!

I am planning to tweak the tech tree with range settings next.

This is a very good idea, Slow tech makes for very slow games and isn't as wide ranging as this mod. I especially like the idea of things settling down to a faster pace later in the game.

Thx. I've just done 1.4 and am about to put it up.

1.4

Decreased logistics by 3 and drastically decreased ship range by 250 at the beginning of the game!

Restored the life support tech tree to be as per the standard game (though not the changes to life support modules) and added a new tech branch for ship range. There are 30 of them called Range I - Range XXX. Each one adds another 10 to your basic range and the prerequisite for Range I is Xeno Engineering.

This has been done to have near minimum range at the beginning of the game and a slow increase over time. Note that there is no guarantee of any increase in range after a range tech has been researched, particularly the early ones. It partly depends on your ship configurations and the size of the universe.

Ok, having played this for a while, these are some thoughts.

The threshold before increased range begins to have an effect depends on the size of the universe. On Gigantic, there is an immediate effect whereas, on Small (or it might have been Medium) it doesn't start having an effect until range gets to about -80. Remember, the range begins at -250 so this is an increase of 170 in range before things start to happen. While I don't think this is a bad thing for smaller universes, because, after all, you should not be able to get round the entire universe early on, the problem lies in that the AI doesn't know how important it is to persue the range threshold and so, since we are likely to reach it first, the AI could become sitting ducks as we attack them and they don't have the reach to retaliate.

Therefore, I am removing the Range branch I created in the tech tree and instead am scattering the range increases around the rest of the tree where I think appropriate. I have so far done this for DA but have yet to do it for DL.

1.5

Removed the Range branch of the tech tree I'd created and scattered range increases around the rest of the tree.

I am thinking of revamping this whole mod with a different approach. It may only be for DA though, and not DL.

about the slow start mod: you are absolutely correct. the initail colony rush is a game killer for me. personally i found that there's no fun in playing the game after you've colonized the initial systems.

and dont get me started on a colony beeing able to grow to the size of twice the homeworld in just 20 game turns; that's just plain wrong!

so id like to suggest you something a lot more radical:

a) make a huge maintenance cost per colony; something that would really make you think twice about : "Do i want a 4th colony or i should wait until the ones i have start producing some income ?"

colony modules should't cary more than 50 (not 500) colonists. this should force you into transporting population into more than one colony ship to a new colony to help it out.

c) lower the population growth significantly. as i said, a colony to be able to outgrow the homeworld in just a few turns is just wrong.

d) lower the ammount of troops that can be carried in a troop module as well; this could be an easy exploit by the player.


Now all of the above soung nice, but my only concern is that the Ai wont be able to keep up with all this.

it would be very cool if it was pozzzible to limit the number of colonies a player has at one time by some tech (let's say government system) but i dont believe that this is moddable.

any thoughts ?

Some good ideas there.

a) make a huge maintenance cost per colony; something that would really make you think twice about : "Do i want a 4th colony or i should wait until the ones i have start producing some income ?"

This can be done, since there is a different building for the initial colony and the colonies that come afterwards

colony modules should't cary more than 50 (not 500) colonists. this should force you into transporting population into more than one colony ship to a new colony to help it out.

This can also be done since you can specify the number of colonists/troops in a ship module. At one point, I had a variation whereby you could research further colony modules that gradually became cheaper and could hold more people. I may very well reinstigate that.

Incidentally, I don't know if you know this, perhaps it's a bug or an exploit, but you can use colony ships to transport to and from existing colonies without the ship being used up!

c) lower the population growth significantly. as i said, a colony to be able to outgrow the homeworld in just a few turns is just wrong.

Again - it can be done. At one point in my experiments, I had the pop cap at half the intial amount given. You can alter pop cap increases from farms. And you can alter the initial population growth rate, like I did with range, say set it initially to -100!

d) lower the ammount of troops that can be carried in a troop module as well; this could be an easy exploit by the player.

Same answer as

it would be very cool if it was pozzzible to limit the number of colonies a player has at one time by some tech (let's say government system) but i dont believe that this is moddable.

No, not so far as I know. You could fiddle with planet quality - perhaps -10 for each new colony, but that would effect existing ones.

As regards range, I'm thinking the problem partly stems from being able to jam extended range modules into ships. They are only size 2. I'm thinking of making them size 10 and stripping them off all the ship designs. If you want them, you have to fit them yourself and you have to find room for them. However, I also want to allow scouts to go a bit further than other ships (particularly colony ships), as they should, like in Master of Orion. So, you can explore a little further but you can't do much else until after more research.

1.6

Ok, I'm really happy with what I've just done here. I've finally got the range to work the way I want to.

Removed the -3 for logistics from 1.4 version of mod. It is now the standard starting value.

Set initial range to -100 instead of -250

Reset the increased ranges in the tech tree to better suit this purpose (took most them out). It's not a pain to research range now. The difference is instantly noticeable for scouts (see later).

Increased the size and cost of all life support modules 5x.

Stripped all ship designs of life support. This is to stop them from having more than basic range. Also the new sizes wouldn't fit the current designs in any case - this has been done deliberately. If you want to add extra range to a ship, you need to manually design it, probably with a bigger hull.

OK, this is the sneaky bit - gave an inbuilt range increases to tiny hulls of +1 (equivalent to basic life support). This is so that tiny ships like the Scout can go a little further. I also had to change to a tiny hull for the scout in DA because it was using a small hull, but without life support, it won't need it. The point was to make scouts more important to build and to actually be the explorer ships, not the bigger hulled ships whose range has now been nobbled.

Increased the size of some ship modules +5 - they are, colony, constructor, mining, troop, and advanced troop. This is partly to fill the gap created by removal of life support, and also to help prevent smaller hulls being used for the modules. ie: You could actually fit a colony module into a small hull in DA but not now!

Decreased the maximum number of colonists that a colony or troop module can carry from 500 to 100! The advanced troop module has been reduced from 1000 to 250.

That's it! I think you'll like the changes. Let me know.

Also, be free to post suggestions here or let us know of anything you don't feel works right.

1.61

Removed one troop module from troop ship designs as they didn't all fit after resizing.

Changed some screen titles etc to make it clear you are in a mod.