[MOD] ILO (insane map mod), updated 9/15/15

from GalCiv3 Forums

 

 

I finished an early version of a mod that makes a number of tweaks to the game aimed at accommodating play on insane maps.  Like Naselus noted in his IAB mod, the game really needs wildly different settings for different maps without any easy way of accomplishing them short of massive overhaul of stuff.  The mod ins designed for play on insane with loose clusters & occasional/common planets... As a result, it goes in very different different directions than IAB.  With that said, it should work on just about any map type or density that eventually reaches a point where research progress becomes trivial... but there will be a lower bound point where tech costs eventually escalate too high (likely one of the smallest map sizes depending on planet density)

designed forany map type, but targeted for  less dense map types (ie not iab), but works fine on those too in my experience.

Tech speed is too blunt with normal/slow making later game too easy and very slow crippling the game for the first 75-150ish turns depending on race on larger maps effectively putting it's use in the same general usefulness as a hammer to fix the screw holding the arm on your eyeglasses. an awful lot of this work would have been unneeded if we could configure tech costs by tech age  in techagedefs.

 

Tech research costs modified as follows (generally rounded up to nearest int) a based on age the tech falls in

  • AgeOfExpansion 1.25x Base
  • AgeOfWar 1.75x  Base
  • AgeOfAscension 3x Base
  • AgeOfVictory 10x  Base.
  • the additional cost per starbase beyond the free 20 is now 8 credits each as a # pulled from thin air as a starting point.
  •  StarbaseRange bumped from 5 to 8. their aura's range was so small it made certain types of starbases of dubious value
  •  starbases now need to be now closer than 10 hexes apart (up from 5), again a plucked from thin air starting point 
  •  minimum colonizable planet quality is PQ4 (down from 6), this helps build range bridges early on & works well with synthetic races.
  •  added a +25% multiplier modifier for life support range to cargo hullsso trade is more usable early on before mid/late in the tech tree
  •  bumped max range colonies can supply Shipyards (MaxSponsorDistanceWithNoPenalty) by 50%... Up from 6 to 9... Again a starting point pulled from thin air, this works great on insane maps, especially less dense ones 
  •  set the colony module to +50% life support range to help the ai colonize more as a lot of the colony ships are on smaller hulls
  •  did the same with the survey module to encourage ai to keep looking outside their borders more zealously
  •  building a constructor module on a ship is 4x more expensive than before (up to 108 from 27)
  •  telling a constructor to build a starbase now starts the starbase with 3 modulepoints to build improvements after using one to build the starbase itself rather than the default of 1 to minimize constructor spam
  •  interstellar travel, xeno economics tourism, & a couple others now have a significantly higher priority for the ai early on
  •  modified build priorities for what to build on specialized planets to look something closer to what players would build.  Although the ai only working at an empire level rather than planet by planet, this will be less effective than the  player equivalent likely running around 100% on the eco/mfg/research wheel.
  •  yor have a lower priority on manufacturing collectives & are less likely to shoot themselves as a result some other races might need similar on their respective equivalents.
  • made the early generally want a larger buffer, & run at 0/50/50 more frequently for the very early game. with brad having openly stated that one of his ai goals is to twist the ai scripts into something capable of working in smaller individual "theaters" rather than empire wide, this seemed like the best path for now given the impact of the adjustments. 
  •  Modified how far the ai is willing to send out a fleet of warships into enemy territory. This means that the ai will actually attack you more than a few hexes from their border after declaring war
  •  changed how often the ai will consider junking an old ship, this means that the ai will probably come at you with.  Unfortunately,it means the ai might sometimes despawn a colony ship, but they are more aggressive at expanding now anyways & that's ok.  It also means that when the ai declares war on you, better ships than a wave of old trash will eventually be coming your way..
  • Improved the ai's selection of what to build on planets so specialized worlds don't have half their tiles with random buildings. They will now probably look a lot more like your specialized worlds.
  • 8/24/15 update: This was such a small update that I decided to push it out instead of waiting for more changes.  Rather than colonization events giving you a flat +10 of your choice in ideology points, you now get +.2/turn based on your choice for each planet.  At 5 planets of the same choice , you get +1/5  turns, at 10 you get +2/5, 15 gets 3/5, etc based on choices
  • 9/15/15 update:

  • made compatible with 1.3

  • instead of directly editing the ResearchCost for all ~400 techs in all 10 tech trees, I opten to use the new(?) techinflation stats. This results in slightly different progression, but it seemned pretty good in testing. devstream seems to indicate that these & other things will be set on a per mapsize basis in the future.

  • changed the starbase spacing again (from 10 to 12) to make it more difficult to overlap stupid amounts of starbases on things. Since the spacing is >rangem this probably limits it around 4

  •  Changed the max range colonists can be pulled from a sponsor planet to a ship to accomidate the larger sponsor range. I actually made it slightly higher than the MaxSponsorDistanceWithNoPenalty with the MaxPopulationSourceDistance = 10 to allow for some decay military production from a sponsor feeding colonists

  •  CulturePerTurn structure changes .1 to .35, .2 = .75, 1= 2

  •  colonizationEvents with a negative/penalty other thabn -100 credits have had their ideology/turn changed to .75/turn 

  •  colonizationEvents that give -only- a penalty other tghan -100 credits give 1/turn

  •  In my own testing, I found the differing weightingto make the choices less of a "duh of course that one".

  • Unfortnately, I've been unable to find a target for the culturePerTurn that changes hands when the planet changes hands _and_ gives the ideology points to the faction to make them usable planet might assign them, but they do no good there

  •  Paul confirmed on the devstreamthat he didn't think it possible to spawn a specific improvement on a colony via a ColonizationEvent. If that were different, I would _like_ to grant +1 tiles and a structure giving the bonus(es) selected on that tile so they were easier to see on a per planet basis. it would also solve the problwm of planets not carrying over their ideology choice after they change hands

  •  WartimeFocusSectorRadius in GalCiv3AIDefs has been set to 256 for a while bow, but I'm finally noting it so I can quit having to remember the setting :D

  • Military starbases give +25% moves to you(allies?) and -40% moves to enemies

  • Mining starbases give +50% moves to you(allies?) and -20% moves to enemies

  • Culture, mining, & military starbase rings are no longer exclusive with each other, only economic ones 

  •  I suspect these mining/military starbase bumps might be too good combined with the no longer exclusive nature, but will wait for feedback & more testing

    •  again lowered PlanetClass_Colonizable, this time to 5 with PlanetClass_Dead set to 3, Great (12, and Fantastic (16 were unchanged))

    •  raised the returns for syntheticlife's assemmbly (yor tech tree) by ~50%  figuring 1.3.x or 1.4 will have more mathematically obtained numbers

  • added the fololowing PopulationCapYor modifiers 
    +50% barren world
    +50% aquatic world
    +50% frozen world
    -25% radioactive world
    *** Ignoring colonizationEvents, many of which have significant effects that stack with the other multipliers allowing truely silly happy nonsymntheticpop on a world covered in farms & entertainment(starbases). food has the following vanilla modifiers with many having a growth effect too so those numbers seemed easily justified:
    -25% desert world
    +25% breadbasket world
    +50% Thin atmosphere world
    +1 pop floodplain
    +1 pop grassland
    +2 pop wetland
    +3 pop wildgrain
    +1 food +2 pop to neighbors MonsatiumDeposit
    +5% growth global ArtocarpusViriles_Dec

     

  • Ignoring colonizationEvents, many of which have significant effects that stack with theother multipliers allowing truely silly happy nonsymntheticpop on a world covered in farms & entertainment(starbases). food has the following modifiers with most having a growth effect too:

  • -25% desert world
    +25% breadbasket world
    +50% Thin atmosphere world
    +1 pop floodplain
    +1 pop grassland
    +2 pop wetland
    +3 pop wildgrain
    +1 food +2 pop to neighbors MonsatiumDeposit
    +5% growth global ArtocarpusViriles_Dec

The latest version of the mod itself can be downloaded here!

100,167 views 31 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Do you know of any ways to teach the AI to expand AND scout with its colony ships? 

I like your tech research modifiers.  Was that an easy change to make or did you have to do each one individually? 

The extra starbase cost is another one I like.  The problem though is you'll have to teach the AI not to spam too many starbases otherwise it'll crash its own economy.  I'd change the starbase cost to apply ONLY to economic modules.  Mining and other starbases (without economic rings) should NOT count towards starbase maintenance cost.  

Also, I'd nerf adjacency bonuses as Naselus did with IAB.  But not as excessively.  Down to 4% is a good number.  

Haven't played with it yet, but that's my theory crafting.  

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting marigoldran, reply 1

Do you know of any ways to teach the AI to expand AND scout with its colony ships? 

 

Learning C++ and getting a job at Stardock would be the only way to do that tbh.

 

 

I strongly approve the idea behind this mod. Given the relatively limited scope your giving yourself to look at (single map size and layout), you should be able to script a a good AI. The more map-dependent AI mods we can make, the better; that way, people can select the 'correct' one for whichever game settings they fancy.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting marigoldran, reply 1

Do you know of any ways to teach the AI to expand AND scout with its colony ships? 

I like your tech research modifiers.  Was that an easy change to make or did you have to do each one individually?

I'm not sure on the scouting thing.  It should be possible to set techcost mods by tech age in techagedefs.xml, but I don't think it is.  Unfortunately I had to do the changes there by hand in the techdef files themselves.  If it were configurable by a techagedefs.xml level modifier, races that come with custom tech trees would be instantly drop in compatible with this sort of mod... because it has to be done to the individual tech trees, such a hypothetical race would need the same treatment.

Quoting marigoldran, reply 1

The extra starbase cost is another one I like.  The problem though is you'll have to teach the AI not to spam too many starbases otherwise it'll crash its own economy.  I'd change the starbase cost to apply ONLY to economic modules.  Mining and other starbases (without economic rings) should NOT count towards starbase maintenance cost.  

agreed, except it will take it a long time to get there & the ai doesn't seem to smash fatally into that wall in my efloats :).  The starbase upkeep stuff literally follows this line in the xml file "<!--Starbases are being converted to have maintenance-->" & I suspect the need to make the ai handle it on different map sizes/densities is part of why the old upkeep cost was 0 before.

Quoting marigoldran, reply 1

Also, I'd nerf adjacency bonuses as Naselus did with IAB.  But not as excessively.  Down to 4% is a good number.  

I don't understand why some people dislike these, but doing so has significant ripple effects as different races depend on them to varying degrees.

 

 

Quoting naselus, reply 2


I strongly approve the idea behind this mod. Given the relatively limited scope your giving yourself to look at (single map size and layout), you should be able to script a a good AI. The more map-dependent AI mods we can make, the better; that way, people can select the 'correct' one for whichever game settings they fancy.

I agree, it should work fine on any less dense maps big enough to eventually make research trivial by late game, but insane & loose has trouble right out of the gate with occasional only exacerbating it. I haven't tried playing with the aistrategydefs since beta when it was prone to drooling on itself, but expect there will be plenty of it to teach

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I like this idea. What happens if I lower planet hab to rare with this mod?

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

@larsenex. Probably fine since tech costs eventually become trivial in almost any game. I'd love go hear more about your (and others') experience in play with it. Insane/loose & occasional or common is just a baseline starting point

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Larsenex, how many habitable are you getting on rare these days? In my recent games with stars and planets on common and habitable on rare, I am getting 30-40 colonies on an immense map.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Franco, reply 6

Larsenex, how many habitable are you getting on rare these days? In my recent games with stars and planets on common and habitable on rare, I am getting 30-40 colonies on an immense map.

This will probably give you a bit more, but mainly because the min planet quality for what's considered "habitable" went from 6 down to 4, so they won't be especially useful beyond possible life support tentacle reach and maybe a building or two

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I updated the mod with a bunch of (mostly but not all, ai related) changes I've made.  See the opening post at the top for a full summary.

 

 - Tetra

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Did you increase ideaology point aquisition rates? I found they needed to be increased for balance in my personal mod when using my custom insane Milky Way map that has less than 100 habitable worlds.

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting ronnie76, reply 9

Did you increase ideaology point aquisition rates? I found they needed to be increased for balance in my personal mod when using my custom insane Milky Way map that has less than 100 habitable worlds.

no. the higher tech costs  prevent the need by keeping tech research from becoming near instant by mid/late game (along with a bunch of other stuff), there are the regular buildings to give ideology points every n turns as well.  I'm not against considering adjustments based on  feedback as more people play it & give feedback though.

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting ronnie76, reply 9

Did you increase ideaology point aquisition rates? I found they needed to be increased for balance in my personal mod when using my custom insane Milky Way map that has less than 100 habitable worlds.

 

I did some testing specifically on that earlier & agree that it should be changed a bit, but simply reducing the costs or raising the reward felt too bland.  It's always bothered me about how many of the colonize events are basically trivial one off things that would quickly be forgotten.    Instead of making them more rewarding or cost less, I went with making them all give a small amount of ideology points/turn based on your choice. :D  The +20 mega/galactic events (or whatever they were called) will remain as big fast gratifying payoffs up front.  Thanks goes to Moogle65535 for helping to get that working 

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Curious about what AI difficulty to set. On vanilla (and one game with IAB mod), "gifted" AI's tended to be too easy once I started warring around turn 100-220. Do you people that have played this mod feel that the AI at gifted (or any other specific difficulty) does better (significantly) than default, or should I try bump difficulty up one more level?

Reply #13 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

 

Quoting Appren, reply 12

Curious about what AI difficulty to set. On vanilla (and one game with IAB mod), "gifted" AI's tended to be too easy once I started warring around turn 100-220. Do you people that have played this mod feel that the AI at gifted (or any other specific difficulty) does better (significantly) than default, or should I try bump difficulty up one more level?

 

if you are playing at gifted, the next step up out just starts piling on more & more bonuses to the Ai.

with that said, there are a lot of things in vanilla that go from frayed ends to huge problems around the turn range you men tion (on larger maps especially), the mod explicitly tries to address some of those.

ILO & IAB are both aimed at addressing different different flaws in different ways & there are pretty big limits to what sort of ai scriptong can be done in 1.2 (naselus has posted at length about them in various tgreads. but without specific feedback, we can only do so much within the boundaries we have to work with in xml.

 

if it was "too easy" because you were abusing the ai's trading algorithms (which we can't really do much about in xml), it's still probably going to be..thats part of why I suggest disabling tech teading & tech brokering so only self researched techs can be traded.

Reply #14 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yeah, trading can be silly. I've played all my games with the option that you can only trade techs you researched yourself. Maybe I'll give a shot without ANY tech trading at all, instead of going up to genious. I'll give it a shot at gifted, and no tech brokering first I guess :-)

Reply #15 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Tetrasodium, reply 13

 if it was "too easy" because you were abusing the ai's trading algorithms (which we can't really do much about in xml), it's still probably going to be..thats part of why I suggest disabling tech teading & tech brokering so only self researched techs can be traded.

 

Actually, you can adjust the value the AI puts on more or less everything it might trade, and you can add a stacking penalty so that it will rip the player off when he tries large, multi-item trades. Diplo is one of the more open modules for modding, despite the very bare-bones nature of the system itself. While it'll still be somewhat dumb, it's not hard to tighten it up a lot compared to vanilla.

Reply #16 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting naselus, reply 15

Quoting Tetrasodium,
reply 13

 if it was "too easy" because you were abusing the ai's trading algorithms (which we can't really do much about in xml), it's still probably going to be..thats part of why I suggest disabling tech teading & tech brokering so only self researched techs can be traded.




 

Actually, you can adjust the value the AI puts on more or less everything it might trade, and you can add a stacking penalty so that it will rip the player off when he tries large, multi-item trades. Diplo is one of the more open modules for modding, despite the very bare-bones nature of the system itself. While it'll still be somewhat dumb, it's not hard to tighten it up a lot compared to vanilla.

 

I know I know, the reference was more in terms of more involved stuff. With tech trading off and brokering disabled so only self learned techs are tradable & the techcosts changes it's actually pretty tough to cheese the si too much. I might do some adjustments there down the line,but I'm waiting fir the next round of Ai tweaks and such from the SD folks (or st least more feedback from people playing the mod)

Reply #17 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Tetrasodium, reply 11


Quoting ronnie76,
reply 9

Did you increase ideaology point aquisition rates? I found they needed to be increased for balance in my personal mod when using my custom insane Milky Way map that has less than 100 habitable worlds.



 

I did some testing specifically on that earlier & agree that it should be changed a bit, but simply reducing the costs or raising the reward felt too bland.  It's always bothered me about how many of the colonize events are basically trivial one off things that would quickly be forgotten.    Instead of making them more rewarding or cost less, I went with making them all give a small amount of ideology points/turn based on your choice. :D  The +20 mega/galactic events (or whatever they were called) will remain as big fast gratifying payoffs up front.  Thanks goes to Moogle65535 for helping to get that working 

 

I did some testing of ILO as well. I totally agree that the colonize events are very trivial, and rarely present me with a difficult decision. 

 

I was going to run some tests after adjusting the ideology point costs, but couldn't find which file those costs are in. Do you know where the values are stored? During game

play, it appears that they may not be static and may adjust depending on which route you initially take. Example, is seems like the cost of the initial pragmatic selections go up if you first make a few benevolent choices. Is this correct?

 

Anyway, love the mod so far. Thanks.

Reply #18 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I love your work! I'm currently in a game with the 2.0 version. If I update the mod will it impact my current game or will I have to start over?

 

thanks again for developing this 

Reply #19 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

@ronnie, I'm ok my phone but colonizevents.xxml and umm something about culture I think it was during beta, haven't looked lately, I'll make another post about it next time at my pc

 

 

 

@tj. Some things (starbase range/thw supply penalty range type stuff) -might- get picked up in the new game, but I wouldn't bet money on that(and doubt it). Everything else is probably stored in the Game save itself.

 

edit picked up in the SAVED game, not Newgame.

Reply #20 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Tetra,

 

EDTA or pyrophosphate? :grin:   

  I was hoping to find a way to edit each cultural trait's cost rather than edit each event's and improvement's point teward amount, but I'm unable to find where the cost values are stored. Maybe I'm just overlooking?

 

Reply #21 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting ronnie76, reply 20

Tetra,

 

EDTA or pyrophosphate? :grin:    

  I was hoping to find a way to edit each cultural trait's cost rather than edit each event's and improvement's point teward amount, but I'm unable to find where the cost values are stored. Maybe I'm just overlooking? 

 

search for the word culture in galciv3globaldefs.xml, there are a few things pertaining to costs with it that you can adjust

 

as to the Nick?  I used to run a mud (or part of the staff that did at least)many years ago & needed to test something with a mortal character rather than my imm character, looking around frantically tetrasodium rolled off the tongue well on the ingredients list on a bag of pretzels.

 

When the nick I perfiously used happened to turn into a cool finalfantasy summon & apparently really good MtG card, I got tired of qiestions about them and switched.

Reply #22 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

For some reason I'm getting 7 upgrade slots from each Construction Module instead of 3? It's kind of cool to drop a fully spec'd starbase out there like that, but I think 3 would be better.

Reply #23 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting T333J, reply 22

For some reason I'm getting 7 upgrade slots from each Construction Module instead of 3? It's kind of cool to drop a fully spec'd starbase out there like that, but I think 3 would be better.

Thanks. I have a feeling that I know what it's doing & can change it easily, I'll do some testing on it tomorrow after the sun is up zzz

Reply #24 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Because there was so much that changed in the 1.3 opt in patch, just going by the patch notes,  I'm going to be  spending a little time getting a feel for the changes before rolling out a new compatible update for ILO.  Waiting for a final 1.3 non-opt in is part of that too

Reply #25 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I can't seem to get this mod to work. My work sequence:

I have downloaded, unziped and placed the files in the directories they are supposed to go in. ( I double checked by looking at the game files)

I have enabled mods in-game, then exited game....restarted. All to no avail.

I know the mod is not working because I first check to see the cost of the "Colony Module" and it is always 27. It should be 108 with this mod. 

 

Most of your files go in the "Game" folder, but the "English" file should be stand alone...right? Is that not the text file?

 

Version 1.2