Balance Mod v1.11 Available!

You're the awsomeist, Cap'n!

Me liking the new A.I diplopmacy in this update.

yaaaaaaaaaaaay

thank you very much Captain, also for the updated techtree PDF.

greetings

Prankowski

Fantastic! I will get stuck straight into this, this evening. Thank you Kwok, your tireless work is appreciated.

Excellent, thanks Capt!!

There was a post earlier about a missing star_green.bmp file. This problem still exists in V1.11. I copied the file from V1.09 but the green star still looks odd. It is black on one side. Green on about a third of the rest. Have I missed something?

Its Ok. I figured it out. I had copied the wrong file. I put a green_star.bmp in the planets folder. But it should have been the file star_green.bmp in the models folder.

No it was a brand new game with a new map. Also a new race. I had remembered the comment when the last person posted.

No it was a brand new game with a new map. Also a new race. I had remembered the comment when the last person posted.

Sorry double post.

I am using FQM5.00beta11 if that might make any difference. I followed your instructions about moving the data text files.

Thanks. Its now working fine after moving the file. Just one more question. Did you have a reason to have a maximum ship limit of 5000 ships in the balance mod compared to the 20000 ships of stock?

Captain,

Any chance you can offer your improved AI script source code so we can learn from what you did?

I'm playing 1.10 right now and I'm finding the AI is going 'mines crazy'. They may be more of a challenge when they deploy 200 mines around every planet, but I'm not enjoying it at all, half my fleet now has to be minesweepers.

I'd just as soon reduce the mine warfare as much as possible, keep it low-key, just enough to cause the odd problem not not a major issue. If I could find the entries in your AI scripts and rebuild, I could fix it.

All that is done before the naked stars is remembered

Awesome! I swear you have a temporal displacement device in your house, your always one step ahead of us!

All that is done before the naked stars is remembered

Another round of thanks for your efforts Captain Kwok.

My first 1.11 game is providing me with a good challenge.

Hello Kwok, here is some feedback for you.

I am having a great deal of fun with 1.11. I have a game underway with High Difficulty / Medium Bonus / No minor races / Simultaneous moves, which is still at a fairly stage (after some basic techs I have just researched Physics 2). I am 5th place of 5 players due to the AI bonuses and at war with the Sithrak who are #1.

Observations:

The AI players are building well. They have consumed all planets in sight (I have 20 planets, the AI players have 15-30 apiece with no uncolonised planets left, it seems). Many of these are defended heavily by units (some outlying planets have 100 mines + space stations, some have frigates and destroyers, some have kamikaze fighters!!! The AI build balance is quite unit-heavy still (my early game is fighter / carrier heavy; I have 400 units and the Sithrak in #1 position have 2700) although this does achieve the objective of making his planets hard to overrun so it's not a criticism.

The Sithrak have defended well - my incursions into his systems immediately trigger fighters or ships to intercept me. Now my carriers are assembling for a mass assault and all hell's gonna break loose when I warp in! I haven't noticed any warp point defences yet from the Sithrak. I am very happy to see empires responding actively to the need to guard their systems, a few months back I felt like they were more or less oblivious to your presence in their systems but that has definitely changed now. If I send uncoordinated ships into the enemy space, there is no chance of them surviving which is great!

AI diplomacy has been sensible too - having the Sithrak and Jraenar next to me has meant that I have been in two wars for a while, but the Sergetti have appeared on the scene and are friends with the Jraenar and are pestering me to make peace with them. It's all played out quite sensibly. Intelligence has been liberally used too, I have been under constant espionage and sabotage attack - while my few intelligence centres were being built I had my progress into Physics wiped out on three separate occasions!

I'm playing an FQM Spaghetti quadrant and have a major choke point into my home systems which I have fortified with numerous fighters. One or two enemy frigates / destroyers come through most turns (between my two enemies) - this has been fairly easy to contain, perhaps a shift in build priorities towards more ships would help here? Or grouping these diffuse ships into fleets more would pose a bigger threat. Perhaps this will change later in the game - the AI races play out heavily on the defensive from what I've seen so far.

Overall I am really liking 1.11. I've seen no bugs whatsoever and the AI behaviour is the best I've seen to date. All the ministers I used have worked fine (Colony Ships, Scout Ships, Colony population. I even used the Carrier minister to automate carriers travelling from planet to planet scooping up fighters). I am also very happy with the 1.58 official patch, things are hanging together really well now. I was one of the people who thought that the lack of "Colony Memory" was a big deal and I am really happy to see it in place now.

Hopefully the feedback is useful. Now the game is in such good shape I am taking it as a sign, and starting a PBW game!

"1. Fixed - Error in Miltia amounts"

I kinda enjoyed the old system where every man, woman, child and pet took up arms against the invaders. Don't think I was ever able to take a planet with troops.

Good stuff

Groovy Baby Yeah!

has anybody else performance problems in combat when fighters are involved??
cpu is at 50% but the tacticla combat is extremely slow and the framerate goes down to 4.

Are you aware that a well-armored (Or even more hilariously, a well-sheilded) kamakazie drone is able to survive head-first impacts? I realise this seems to be an inherent problem with drones if you change their orders to do anything but 'ram straight at the other guy' (I found this out myself recently)...

This is less a balance concern as a query as if you realised this was an issue still. I must admit it's kinda funny when it happens to a drone with enough sheilds to withstand the blast completely, though. >.>

I believe the warship in question in the BM case was a dreadnaught. In my own fiddlings in the previous post (Which co-incidentally used much the same solution to drones as you did, but with stats otherwise as 1st level Stock other than slightly heavier armor), I've repeated it against frigates too. I would assume the ones in between are therefore covered.

This is an anti-ship drone with warheads, and set to 'kamakazie attack' - I'm aware that not all drones are rammers (It's the same approach I was working on myself in an attempt to get armed-drones working right), and indeed without the 'kamakazie' strategy, they refuse to ram at all. With all that set, though, they ram just fine: the oddity comes when you have a heavily sheilded or armored drone - that is, More armor+sheilds than the total warhead damages can deliver - and the drone is able to survive its own ramming attempt.

I've been tempted to fiddle with the 0-range damage in an attempt to assure a self-kill, but I'm not sure how I'd prevent a player from getting a ramming ship 'close in' enough to exploit using that damage on the other guy... Then again, I've only been playing with this quirk of drones for about a week, so there may yet be improvement avalable

This seems more to do with how ramming damage is calculated. So you're saying ramming drones with warheads on them can survive detonating their on warheads if they're armoured/shielded enough to survive the number. Is the enemy ship dead after that blast? The way I understand it, ramming doesn't leave behind 2 survivors - one must die while the other takes some damage.

Also as an experiment, can you try making ramming drones with 100% Armour after the necessary engines, drone computer, etc? As in, uses raw armour instead of a warhead to do damage? Make it ram some paper-thin Frigates and some thick tough things.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

They've always been the survivor of the attack - the other ship falling to their warheads. (These were test setups, so I never tried them on opponents heavier because it didn't occour to me it would matter.)

As for armored drones... hmmm. I could give it a go, though I'd need to find a race that gave their drones enough armor slots to try it. I'll see what I can do in the morning.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with a ramming drone with warheads on it surviving (or even the target surviving as well) - in the first case, if you protect your drone well enough, it ought to hold together - I do hope the warheads are destroyed so they can't be used in the next ram though! - and in the second case, when both survive - well, maybe the drone bounced off because it was too weak!

The numbers might need some tweaking - maybe reduce the HP of shields and armor on drones, or give the warheads' damage type the ability to pierce drone armor and shields but not ship armor and shields (since the warheads ARE inside yet can damage the target ship directly!) - but I don't think it's completely unreasonable that a drone survive!

~~~
The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

ramming is a bad thing!
in my current game the enemy freighters go on ramming if i attack them with ships and they have no weapons.
already lost 2-3 light-cruisers cause they turned too slow

another thing i´d like to ask....i´m having strange ground combat. the defending militia-troops are always fleeing to the edge of the map. the troops have weapons, supply and ordenance (if needed) but they just flee.
anybody else having that problem??

I've had a couple of ground combats in my 1.11 game and everything seems OK. Militia numbers seemed correct, enemy troops had weapons and fought back as they should.

Testing complete: You're entirely right, the ramming warheads aren't damaging their own craft. Indeed, this seems to be the same case with the cobalt warhead too. ...In fact they're even able to /fire again/, if the ship survives the initial impact. They're working largely like fitting a meson blaster to a warship set to ram - the warhead is firing on the way in, but otherwise not doing warhead-y type things.

I'm assuming this is a bug in the game code?

Excelent. Let's see what happens.

By the by, how do you feel about people using your mod as a base for their own projects? I've been fiddling with a few design ideas for a mod of my own, and about 75% of the baseline improvements I come up with are ones you've already implemented (Better cataloguing of what each missiles statistics are, more flexible freighter hulls, and the like), and if you don't mind it would save an awful lot of wasted effort to be able to use your work as a baseline. Credit would of course be given.

Ah, very good. You've done a most excelent job; I just wanted to show common courtesy before going ahead myself.

If your mod doesn't stray to far away from stock it may be something Kwok could add into BM as a whole.

SE5 Files hosted on Filefront (Patches, Mods, Races, etc)

Out of curiosity, can anyone give me any pointers as to how to possibly remove the use of mines from the mod AI, or even the mod entirely?

Credit to Kwok for making the AI so effective, particulaly in this version, but personally I dont enjoy always having to research/integrate/deploy anti-mine components on my ships, and several times already in 1.11 I have had fleets decimated by minefields left over warp points in particular. Its just annoying, and I dont like using mines myself, its frustrating seeing the AI use them so well.

Can anyone please suggest ways of removing them from the mod? Preferably in a way that the AI dosnt waste time researching mine technology etc. Thanks in advance.

Romulus: Doubtful. A couple of the main aspects that will be getting rejiggered is going to be space yards (To the point where you will quite plausibly dedicate entire planets to factory production), and technology trees - which are going to be more or less completely rearranged, so I somewhat doubt it will be reintergrateable.

Hello Captain Kwok you made the AI build more?
thats cool because I made the AI build Drones And fighters on the first starting!
they even build a drone carrier. I even know how to make them build mines too.

The A.I is breaking treatys for no reason even when we are at good relations all the time in 1.11.No it's not mega empire.

I have noticed the CueCappa,Phong both breaking a treaty when at very high relations for no reason.I am not at war with their friends.

I have noticed the A.I making requests to break treaty with other A.I's they are not at war with.Maybe they should only ask you to break treaty when the A.I is actually at war with that other Empire.

It just seems odd that an empire who you have great relations with will just break that treaty,and then ask for another a few turns later,kinda kills immersion,and adds spam.

About the population transport and retrofit ministers: They don't seem to be working properly for me.

I have the Colony Population and Population Transport minister's enabled and my pop transports are just sitting stationary despite having a number of worlds that could use some of my homeworld's population.

When the retrofit minister retrofits my ships, should it go to more advanced ships of the same type? I only ask as it has retrofitted a scout ship to be a defense ship.

I hope I haven't missed a subtle point with these two, just this is my first BM game since I've heard the latest patch broke IRM.

As an aside, if I wanted to move troops, weapon platform and any other units around my empire, what type ship and minister would I use?

Thanks

~~~~~~
The Zanshaa Docks ~ The Deck

Is possible to program the minister that manage colonizer's to

if the ship have enough space, and exist, load some pop and one WP ?

That make the attack on new colonies much more difficult.

Thanks Captain Kwok.

~~~~~~
The Zanshaa Docks ~ The Deck

The A.I are building so many units it is no wonder they can't make big fleets,and when they make fleets it seems half of the fleet are non-combat ships.

Oh dear.It would be nice to release a hot fix for these issues,rather than having to wait weeks for 1.12.

Jettison? Maybe have it only jettison if there is no pop storage available?

Wasn't BM 1.12 going to come out around now anyway? Why do you assume 'weeks'?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Lets hope soon

Groovy Baby Yeah!

I've also had the same issue with the population transport minister in 1.11, i.e. the Population Transport Minister is enabled, a small freighter of type Population Transport is under Minister control but just sits there for several turns without leaping into action.

I've also avoided the retrofit minister because of exactly the issue being described. I had the impression that the most recently designed ship design matching the hull being retrofitted was being used, that would fit what has been described above.

I guess it would be good to get fixes for both of those, but I do find that with migration and the colony population minister that I don't really have a lot of need for population transport. I'd rather make plans to steal a new population type rather than pay for ships to ferry people to non-breathable planets... they can only hold so many people anyway. I guess if the AI and minister could transport population well then the planet population bonuses could be more strict at low populations.

Lastly, probably on balance I've found the AI build priorities a little unit-heavy too, which probably does affect offensive capability as mentioned above. If you are still tweaking Kwok, maybe what we have now is a good preset for Defensive-style races.

Anyhow, these kind of issues are getting smaller and smaller with time, I think that SE5 and the Balance Mod together are feeling very solid nowadays. Please keep up the good work.

Hi, could you create one comp for troops and another for population. And maybe add a AI tag so the AI knows which one to use.

He ponders the dangers inherent in the advantages, and advantages inherent in the dangers. - Ts'ao Ts'ao

Crimson

Captain, do we have a rough ETA on when BM 1.12 will be ready? Or alternatively, what there is still left to accomplish before you're happy to ship 1.12?

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Cap, if you are asking MM for that kind of function, is possible to make it to let us players change behavior ?

Option to change from aggressive if we are at war to neutral or defensive if not.

Exist, or if not is possible to ask MM for a function that report if all possible items to research are researched, and if that is true, then the AI start to remove all the research centers and central and system computer complexes, because after that point they are only wasted space and resources ?

Also, i noted that the AI don't scrap facilities to add and atmosphere converter....

I remember IRM was able to do this (both the retrofit and the population stuff) properly. I'm probably going to say something incredibly naive and annoying for you (even though I don't intend to be annoying), but can't you use the same sort of code as IRM? If that's what you're already doing, or would end up breaking something else, then nevermind me

~~~~~~
The Zanshaa Docks ~ The Deck

Hmm.. would it be possible to have the AI use Storage for the Pop instead of Jettisoning them?

You mean, organic storage?

[I think I'm writing too much, but I'm going to jot down all my thoughts anyway.]
[Thoughts from anyone are welcome, of course. Just because this is what I'd like to see doesn't mean everyone wants to see it.]

One thing I've noticed with BM (and a couple others) is that an AI will petition the player for a treaty, so you accept (which gets sent next turn) and in that wait, the AI sends *another* treaty request. I'm not sure if the conditions are the same or not, but this goes on for a couple turns (5 or so) then you get a slight lul (the more empires, the more spam) and then it starts up again.

Also, the AI uses crystal armor without sheilds: isn't the crystal armor less than effective if you don't have a sheild generator?

I do like the BM tech tree, though in my search for a nice AI selection I've run across a few things I liked:

*Organic Tech making an empire need primarily organics (instead of minerals)
*Crystal Tech making an empire need primarily radioactives (both techs makes a balance between--from GidMod)
**Also, the races weren't allowed to build non-organic/non-crystal hulls--I don't use them anyway, so I think of them as clutter
*Other organic components that regenerate as well (Devnll Mod, which I still need to try)
**I've always had the fantasy of having an (almost) completely biological ship, not so much like Babylon 5's organic tech where ships were "kinda alive" but more along the lines of almost being creatures in and of themselves; the crew being just along for the ride (and to tell it where to go)
*Differet kinds of PDC (poind defence cluster bombs, point defence blasters, PD anti-proton beams, etc. each with their own uniqueness, and each needing another tech line advanced--Devnull)
*"Light" Organic/Crystal armor (a 10kT version--Devnull)
Components as tech level increases get smaller as well (forget where I saw this, didn't try it out, just thought it was appropriate in some cases)
*Religious tech tree needs more ship-toys (is this even possible? I just keep forgetting why I never choose it, then decide to take it and go, "oh yeah, the damn shrines" which are cool and allow for early game planet-boosters, but they aren't nifty playthings like ships are).
*Planets are harder to kill without planet bombardment weapons (forget, but seriously, I've destroyed 5 billion people in 3 minutes with 5 cruisers each with 4 level 10 anti-proton beams: 1 million people have 10 structure. This shouldn't happen, if you look at any sci-fi story no one's killed people that fast without giant bombs, planetary destruction took weeks without them--the only exception being the Vorlon's planet killer ship, even the Shadow's cloud-like planet killer used 1000 nukes to destroy planets)

In the area of not-so-useful, we have the unique techs:
*Massive Ionic Dispursers (engine damage), 3x damage, 3x size, 3x delay? It's not efficient
*Massive Sheild Depleters, haven't encountered under BM, but do make sure that they don't suffer from the above OR the GidMod problem: decent damage (~200), but horrible delay (30 whole seconds), and at 100kT it's more effective to have a bunch of level 1 non-massives (or hell, 2 Lv1 capital ship missiles!)
*Power Leach (supply damage), funny, but I didn't think it did enough "damage" to make it more effective to starve ships than to blow them up
*Massive Planetary Sheild Generator was spot-on IMO. It offered double the protection of the ordinary version at no penalty, it was clearly a better choice than the ordinary ones (for components, I could see 4x damage, 1.5x size 2x delay as being along the same lines--all the multiples should come out to "even, but ahead")
*Is there a reason to keep researching one engine type after it opens up the next? The new engine type at Lv1 is better than the engine I just had, so...

In the area of OMG-broken, I once discovered (notably SEV 1.44) that anti-planet warheads (3 fit on the drone size I had at the time!) did normal damage to ships. Yes, that's right. Normal damage. Each warhead did MORE DAMAGE than MY ships had sheilds + armor + stucture, and consequently I could maul a whole universe on the production capabilities of a single planet (and in Stratigic Combat mode too). Upon realizing the broken-ness of it, I have since ceased researching drones/warheads in every game I've played.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

Good point. Not that I've ever really cared. Only had one game so far where I had a shortage of minerals, but the 75 planets of just research centers probably had something to do with it (475 tech levels and only 12 ship designs to show for it--I mean, why upgrade the design for that component when next turn I'll have that one too?).

The main benefit in 'cheaper' is not a matter of affording it, it's a matter of build rates - a lot of the time, the difference between a full suite of ion engines compared to a full suite of bigger ones can actually give you a full turns worth of construction difference... which matters quite a bit, especially on things like colony ships that can take a while to crank out (And often are going to take 3 or 4 turns to get to where they go, and that extra 3 tiles of movement won't get them there any faster!).

While it's a moot point against the AI, every last single movement point/ship built one turn sooner is important in multiplayer.

Movement points are interesting, actually. Other than in combat ships (Where the real time combat means any speed difference is immediately demonstrated), the only time speed bonuses make an actual difference is when it means you get to a certain goalpoint a discrete number of turns sooner. If the trip is going to take longer than, eg, 10 turns and you have the option of a 10 or 11 propulsion, then you're at an advantage to use the 11-movement ship, certainly.

But if the trip is only three turns, indeed, if it's only 35 hexes away... it makes no difference whether you used a 10speed or an 11speed vessel.

...And you might just be able to crank out the older ship more cheaply, to boot.

Yes, but it grows annoying to manage after the early game...

I suppose that brings me to another question, in terms of "getting a ship there now"

Is it possible to get outdated components onto a ship, i.e. for say a Minesweeper and getting...out of date armor for the sake of it HAVING armor, just not the best (i.e. most expensive) stuff? Or obsolete crew quaters where 50 and 60 crew doesn't matter (i.e. 200 crew).

I remember in SE3 there was an option to hide/show obsolete components...

Oh, another good question:
Is it possible to find the distance between to hexes without counting manually? Cross multiple systems that could get rather...trickey.

- Use obsolete designs

- No, except using 1 movement rate ships. IIRC if you multiple-select a ship and a planet (/base?) you can give move orders to the planet (but it won't move of course), and since the minimum speed is 1 you will be able to count the hexes.

I'd really, really like a distance-counter on the system map.

Yes, that would be great...

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Probably asking in the wrong place.

Probably, but it doesn't stop us.

Never got around much to doing mods, but after the possibilities seen in a small "unnamed" mod, I'm very interested in all the features listed in this. Can't wait to try it out.

EDIT: I guess a map I created with the new Genesis map editor/creator (with SE 1.63 stock files) won't work with this, will it?