WARNING: Stellar Manipulation all fugged up in 1.20, good news is you can fix it yourself very easily |
Just discovered what a really, really useful tech stellar manipulation is by reading the pdf manual with the game. So useful that it is the only tech to go to level 80, and do lots of neat things which I won't spoil if, like me, you wanted to discover these things through the game and were wondering why you couldn't. However, running in 1.20 the cost for level 1 in this tech ran me 100,000 points, meaning I was not ever going to get close to the stuff I wanted, which apparently starts in the 30's, many millions of research points at that pace.
Fortunately I noticed in the manual that the cost should be 10,000 and not 100,000, something which can easily be corrected by accessing the TechAreas file in the data folder of SEV, finding stellar manipulation and changing the cost from 100000 to 10000. You will be at the level you were at in your saved game, and the price for the next level will be what it is supposed to be (30,000 in my case for level three, so I only lost some 170,000 research points, no biggie).

Stellar Manipulation
I think stellar manipulations are meant to be very expensive. 10 000 points must be a typo in the manual.
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Feel lucky earthling ?

Personally
I like the cost at 100,000.
the ability to manipulate Stellar bodies and eventually to build a ringworld is, imho, the Science Fiction of Science Fiction.
I prefer that level of tech only be available to MEGA research races. But thats my view. I had a super research race that was producing over 1,000,000 points per turn in a large galaxy stock game.

Costs are fine
Stellar Manipulation was never meant to be on the same level as any other technology. With it, you can create and destroy nearly everything in the game with very little being able to stop you. The 100k per level cost is fine.
My largest empire to date was producing in excess of 4,500,000 research points per turn, so it is very possible to achieve this level of technology if you put your slaves... er... citizens minds to it.
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Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!
Doesn't matter how expensive it is, it doesn't work in 1.2BM1.01
I started a full tech game with no warp points and built a ship with a warp point opener and can't open any. I click on Steller Manipulation and then Open Warp Point and it just goes back to the system screen. Shouldn't there be a popup window or something? Also, I can't see any other systems even though I know there are at least 30 with 16 other races.
Okay, so it does work, its just hard to see.
It's hard to see but there is a message to select a target hex to open the warp point in. Seems the ship doesn't need to be in the same hex you want to open the warp point in. Then a window pops up with a list of systems with their star types. It shows nebulas and other stuff too. Not bad but they could use a bigger notice. Its hard to see anything through all the flags and junk.

get in touch with Kwok
Send Captain Kwok a message here or at his own website, this maybe an issue with his mod, and if it is he will want to know about it and will ask for your saved game.

Check
Or maybe the ship flys to the selected point... have you tested that yet?
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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
Yes, it does.
It seems kind of silly but nobody asked my opinion before it was coded.

Sequential Vs. Simultaneous
I'm going to guess its for simultaneous games.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
It _IS_ a Kingmaker device
I understand the points about the powers of the technology and the ability of empires to generate a lot of research points, but I'm thinking that by the time you're researching in the millions per turn game balance isn't likely to be much of an issue anyway, is it? It usually isn't by the time I'm doing one-tenth of that. It would also be more interesting perhaps if not just the mega-dominant empire had a shot at doing anything with that tech tree; fine, your fleet may wipe me out with ease but can they do it before I make the star in your home system go nova? Do you feel lucky, punk? Go ahead, make my day.
I see this perhaps as more a multiplayer issue, that is if you are playing multiplayer you might not want this to be accessed too quickly, while if you're not there's no way the AI could do anything down this tech tree at a cost of 100,000.
Which raises a good question, has anyone seen the AI get high levels of this technology and actually use any of it? I'll have to give it to them and find out one of these days.
In my case I don't multiplay and I find that cluster maps with not all warp points connected generates very appealing maps, many equal sized clusters and sometimes one or two larger ones, unconnected to each other. On a large map you can have a lot of players each with their own cluster and one or two empy ones beside. Ideally there would be a race with the AI to create warp points to the empty clusters (a kind of rush to the new world in space, like finding a small empty continent in a Civ type game) and each other's territory (after buildihg up a massive fleet of course), and it would be nice to have it happen a bit earlier on than the time it would take even at 10,000. Perhaps in my case it would be best just to allow for warp point creation at a lower level of stellar manipulation, however I'm not sure if the AI up to it even then.
It's too bad that the AI bonuses seem to affect only resources and construction rates and not technology, I wonder if that's moddable? Or if I could give them a techonological boost over me at the start?
I prefer to play the seclusionist. Once you get to level 35 the game really opens up, you can open and close warp points. This is especially important if you're playing without warp points, as its the only way to travel between systems, and takes a few hundred turns to get there. In my current game, I'm over level 40 in Applied Research and am cramming Stellar Manipulation. The major bonus is that, once you get a powerful research corps to get that high of Stellar Manipulation, you can research just about anything in an incredibly short time. I went from Large Hull Construction to Huge Hull Construction in about 10-15 turns, including turns when they just got the porkbarrel research funding and I was concentrating primary research elsewhere.
In short, my primary method of seeding my people is an incredibly powerful, incredibly expensive fleet. The colony ship is a Battleship with all three colony equipments on board, maximum amounts of Quantum Engines, and plenty of cargo bays to carry the colony's population with it. With them are the other specialty ships in the fleet, the Warp ships(two designs that open and close warp points), Nova ships(kills the system in case of emergency), the Planetkillers(in case they start putting up a fight). Blunt force invasion fleets are irrelevant once you have the monopoly on intersystem travel. Just make sure you self-destruct anything and everything if it's in danger, keep your interstellar superiority for as long as you can. It'll waste resources and life, sure, but at your levels of research, you can compensate easily.
In short, the early game is a race to FTL. After that, it's merely a matter of maintaining your infrastructure and making sure the other factions don't capture one of your ships.

Sure
ZAPOW!
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There are 10 types of people in the world:
Those that understand binary, and those that don't.
It's been 100000 in all
It's been 100000 in all versions. And since u can f**k up the galaxy with it, it seems only right...

To get an idea of the level of tech required for a Ringworld:
Read the book by the guy who "invented" Ringworlds.
Its called... Ringworld.
Its set in the far, far distant future, where even races who are capable of moving entire planets are still in awe of the tech that would have been necessary to create a ringworld. They find one and set out to find out who built it and why.
Good book. Not for children though...




That is a signifcant
That is a signifcant difference, I just thought it was meant to be really expensive because it is such a powerfull tech..... You know the typo could have been made in the manual rather than the code
but don't let that worry spoil your game, all you have done is mod it to how you like it 