Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod |
I'm not a Modder, but quite interested in helping the Modding folks. What I want to do here is start a CONSTRUCTIVE discussion on the various Racial Techs. The goal is to come up with something that can be made into a mini-mod that can be applied to existing Mods like FQM is added to other Mods or to give a Modder a sound formula for adding these ideas to their existing Mod.
I'll start with my Ideas on Racial Tech and we can go from there.
Premise:
I've thought a lot about what "Racial Tech" (RT) should be like. I don't see it as been vastly different than what we can call "Standard Tech" (ST). What I mean by that is whether its a RT piece of Armor or a ST piece of armor they pretty much do the same thing. Same goes for just about anything you could conceive. IE....Life Support is Life Support; a Gun is a Gun; etc.
My thoughts on how to make RT be distinctive is to use the Normal Tech tree but simple change the names of the Items to represent their nature. For example you would have Life Support being called Organic Life support. Nothing too fancy there, but enough to add some flavor.
Vision:
Taking into consideration the afore mentioned ideas. It takes engines in one way or another to move a ship, weapons for shooting and armor for protection. These items will remain the same, but with new names to for flavor. To set the RT apart it will become about the added bonus derived from the RT component. What I mean by this is that each RT component will have a built in bonus that relates to the RT in question. For example the Organic Tech will have built in regeneration on EACH component and Facility, Temporal will have movement bonuses built into each component, Crystalline will have added armor bonuses to each component and stronger facilities and Psychic will have added defense bonuses in components and Intel in facilities.
Putting it all together:
1. The ST tree must be replaced by the appropriate version for their Race. This doesn't need to be researched as its available from turn one.
2. The replaced Tech Tree is simply everything that is already there but with the appropriate RT modifiers.
3. Slight increase of the research cost for each item that is racially enhanced.
4. The changes are small in nature, but as a whole they will give slight advantages to those areas. Even though the bonuses may not be a lot on a single ship by ship base, you must keep in mind the bonus is applied to EVERY ship or facility in your WHOLE Empire.
Organic - All components and facilities regenerate. The Organic nature of this RT is that it heals quickly and adapts to stimuli (damage) on the fly.
Crystalline - All components and facilities have armor built in. The Crystalline nature makes all the inherent properties of all their items stronger and thus more resilient to damage.
Temporal - All ship components have built in movement modifiers (assuming Balance Mod type propulsion). This can be quite powerful, so no facility changes?? The Temporal nature as I imagine it being similar to the Necron (Warhammer 40k) that their ships move without moving. They teleport by small amounts giving the illusion of movement, when in actuality their ships never actually move in the conventional sense. This eliminates the issues with inertia, thus allowing perceived faster movement.
Psychic - Ship components add defense bonuses and facilities add Intel points to the Empire. The Psychic nature of this race sends out false imagines in your mind confusing the opposing ships in combat, thus adding defenses. In other aspects I imagine this race at being quite adept in the areas of Intel. I went with adding small Intel bonuses to their facilities as a way to take in account these obvious advantages in espionage. It would be VERY hard for an enemy to infiltrate a facility as a spy, when ALL the workers are Psychic!
Summary:
My idea is to not try and come up a bunch of facilities, components, etc that do virtually the same thing as the current technology tree. It is to take what is already there by applying modest additions and/or abilities to reflect the Nature of the host race. For example: If you are a Crystalline species that desires to build a spaceship. You would need the basic building blocks to make your ship. I.e. A ship would need a hull, engines, life support and bridge as part of a basic design. Being that your race is crystalline in nature you would have developed said components using crystalline construction techniques. Thus, your basic building blocks of anything you create will have your inherent nature in their design. Hence, all your components and facilities gain the benefit of greater resilience to damage.
The premise of each race developing similar construction techniques can be applied to all RT's. Thus, ALL Organic stuff regenerates a little, ALL Crystalline stuff is a little stronger, ALL Temporal ships are a little faster and ALL Psychic stuff is harder to hit and they have a little more Intel.
I look forward to your feedback.
Please try to be Constructive in your criticisms.
Brainstorming is quite welcomed and encouraged!
Thanks everyone who read this,
Romulus68
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
Yes. (to all)
Especially to the "it will take a bungload of work" to create all those modified components. I haven't played around with this aspect of the game yet but I wonder - would there be some way to make this sort of thing happen via a racial modifier of some sort? Aka the kind of thing that you select during empire set up? If you plan to keep all of the components the same - just with a special bonus - it would probably be easier to just apply a generic bonus over top of the existing components. Don't know if it's possible tho.
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
Nah, the "totems as ship components" is kinda silly anyway, assuming you prefer to think of religion as a psychological morale booster rather than some sort of supernatural magic. (If you want to make religion a kind of magic with actual divine interventions that's fine too, I'm just assuming you don't! 
) Religious tech I would then expect to provide a bunch of more subtle but nevertheless powerful effects, outlined below.
Then again, you could call the totems something else - maybe "mobile shrines" or "ship's chapels" or something - which would denote them as places of worship for a ship's crew, rather than "magic holy symbols of divine retribution (which happen to weigh thousands of tons!)" and perhaps prevent them from being installed on ships with Master Computers...
I also like Adamant's idea of multiple cheaper religious traits, each providing a subset of the original Religious techs... it seems to make more sense that a religious people would not follow ALL possible religions (war/death/nature/fate/time/whatever), but only a subset of them, so why lump them all together?
As for the more subtle effects of religion, I'm starting to envision something along the lines of Civ4's religion system or GalCiv's culture system. Think of this... a facility that affects ALL planets/ships/whatever in that system regardless of owner due to its great cultural influence. It would also have a similar planetary effect on the planet it's installed on. Also, you can only have one dominant religion per system. Using the new facility count functions in the beta versions of SE5 to become the next patch, the facilities would know to negate their system-wide effects if another religion had more facilities in that system. (The planetary effects would not be negated.) So suppose you had two Temples of Time in Lezzari, and one Temple of Nature, and no other empires had any colonies in the system. You would get the system-wide effects of the Temple of Time, plus the planetary effects of all three facilities (assuming the time temples were on different planets). But if another empire came in, they would get the time temples' system-wide effects. Now if that empire also was religious, and they built, say, three Temples of Death, then your time temples' system-wide effects would be replaced with the death temples' effect. Pretty cool, huh?
And religions don't necessarily have to have entirely GOOD effects, either! Some religions might be luddites and reduce your research points; others might proscribe the use of some particular technology, negating its effect (put some code in the ability amount of say the Organic Gestation Vat to set it to zero if the proscribing religion is predominant)... there's no end to what you can do! 
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious 
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
Given the way the plan is laid out you could instead make Deeply Religious override the Cultural Achievement techs with improved (and possibly slightly differing) effects and an override for Applied Political Science (Applied Religious Ritual?) to grant worship megacentres that produce the same kind of effect but slightly improved, perhaps granting additional bonuses depending on sub-discipline research.
I agree that Deeply Religious should not call down providence but should have relatively universal bonuses to population happiness, loyalty and so on.
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
I like both ideas. Let me throw my two cents in combining the options.
- 1. At game start you choose a Religion mindset for your Empire.
2. The mindset creates your Tech tree for you (War, Peace, Love, etc) by overriding the current Cultural Techs with your mindset being applied to the moddifiers. This can be Positive and/or Negative modifiers.
3. Your chosen mindset also affects your racial modifiers as well. Its like the government option on Empire creation except a third option is added if you choose Religion. IE....You could have Corporate, Engineers that pray to the Gods of War. This part is done as you create your Empire.
4. With the new "System Facility Counting" we add the Temples option Ekolis describes if possible. Temples would have to affect all planets/ships in a system no matter who owned them.
** This could create fun situations as two Empires not in open warfare battle for the souls of their people by building Temples in shared systems. This could lead to wars as you build temples that end up hurting other players planets as well.
Re: Racial Traits to be incorporated into a Mod or Mini-Mod
Hmm, sounds a bit like the Paradigms from Adamant, only more so - instead of only some things having bonuses applied to them and everything else just being renamed and given a new picture, *everything* would have some sort of bonus... I know the Energy paradigm did give all components built-in shield points (but reduced hitpoints) but that was more of an exception rather than the rule
I never liked the "research the racial trait theoretical tech" thing either - at the very least, remove the theoretical techs and make the applied ones available from the very beginning! I'm also a fan of the "racial tech does not obsolete regular tech, it enhances it" - so for instance instead of researching Crystalline Weapons and never bothering to research Missiles because you already have the Crystalline Torpedo, you'd have to research Crystalline Weapons *and* Missiles - or remove Crystalline Weapons and just say that all Crystalline races get the Crystalline Torpedo as soon as they research Missiles; they already spent the racial points, why should they have to waste research points too?
I guess the hardest (or rather most tedious) thing to implement with your idea would just be all the duplicated components and facilities and stuff with slightly different names, pictures, and abilities - but then Fyron did it for Adamant...
Now, for that religious trait you forgot about...
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious