Research/Production/Maintenance Mod Idea

Does this already exist?

from GalCiv2 Forums

I find myself more than a bit annoyed at the slider system and how it inherently seems to waste resources.  Seems especially annoying (to me) after they really upped the maintenance since vanilla.  Before you could kind of ignore it, but now it seems like you really but heads with it constantly.

So I was thinking that it might be interesting to mess around with the cost of production/research (hereafter just referred to as production) while drastically reducing or eliminating most maintenance.  For instance, if one unit of production cost 2BC instead of 1BC, while maintenance was eliminated, then you'd still have to think about what you built and how you adjusted your sliders.  In a sense, it would shift maintenance costs to production costs.

This way you wouldn't be directly penalized for merely having buildings, but it would affect the costs a lot more when you moved sliders up and down.  Similarly, you wouldn't be directly penalized for lowering your production capacity (since the maintenance on production-buildings wouldn't exist, so the sunk cost in those buildings each round would disappear).  There'd be an indirect penalty, however, since doing either of those to save money would indicate you probably built too many buildings and it could hurt production on some worlds if you have a massive planet that costs tons to run.

Increased efficiency could be represented by adding some more production bonuses due to technologies and the like, which give production that only costs half as much.

I haven't looked at modding in this game yet.  You might not be able to modify the cost of production directly.  You can achieve the same effect, however, by merely multiplying all production values and costs by a given number (double the cost of production by multiplying by 2, for instance).  That's straightforward enough.

 

Anyhow, has there been any mod that does something like this?  (I realize that doubling production costs might be too much, btw, it is probably more reasonable to merely increase them by 50-70%).  If not I was thinking of making a mod to do this.  Not sure if anyone else has an interest though.

 

PS.  Honestly I also find the current morale system rather annoying too.  Seems odd that the practical cap is so low (maybe 20 billion or so) compared to the game cap of 100 billion, especially given the diminishing returns.  I realize this does impact other variables, of course.

modding
5,702 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

You can add production bonuses.  Bonus production (anything over and above straight production from buildings/asteroids/colony tile) is charged at half the rate of normal production.  Races which have a bonus effectively pay less per unit of production.  However they still pay full price for the base production.

One of the ways you can work around that is to have their factories give less straight production but a small percentage bonus to production which improves as the buildings are upgraded.  Those bonuses are cumulative so with two factories at 8% bonus you don't see much effect, but with ten it's quite powerful.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I was thinking about that.

There are actually a lot of interesting things that could be done with bonus production, especially if you can also give it negative values (which I think you can).  You could make larger Empires have less efficiency by putting some global penalties on the main colony building.  Something small so it isn't really noticeable at first, but if you get 30+ worlds it becomes a problem.  Eh, then again that wouldn't scale well with map size or the like...so nevermind.

Still, a tiny planetary bonus on basic buildings could work decently well for varying the efficiency of maintenance-free buildings.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Quoting Drachasor, reply 2
There are actually a lot of interesting things that could be done with bonus production, especially if you can also give it negative values (which I think you can).

You can't. The UI will show the correct value (at least if you don't build the improvement on a bonus tile), but it is still counted as being positive.

Quoting Drachasor, reply 2
You could make larger Empires have less efficiency by putting some global penalties on the main colony building.

A normal building can't grant global bonuses or penalties (changes to the ability score). Only Trade Goods, Super Projects and Galactic Achievements can do this.

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Thanks for the information Gaunathor.  Disappointing, but not all that surprising.

I think I will start fiddling around with making a less ambitious mod to get rid of maintenance on most buildings while adjusting how much is spent when making something.

I'll see if there's a way to make a global constant to handle it, but I rather imagine everything will have to be edited item by item.