Balance Mod v1.07 Available!

Yay! Thank you so much!

Don't forget Soylent Cola! (Taste varies from person to person)

21. Added - New images for Small Supply Storage and Small Ordnance Storage
They aren't used...

Thanks for the update Captain Kwok!

Could you do me a favor and put up your latest AI scripts? I need the default AI building script (if it has changed any since the 1.05 version) to make sure the AI is as less retarded as possible when building buildings.

I notice that the starting facilities for an all tech game can be improved. Instead of a bunch of mineral facilities, make them Monolith facilities C.K.

____________________________________
"Genius is Simplicity" chris connors
"To win without fighting is best" sun tsu
those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do

Will a 500kt warp point stop a 600kt ship from going through?

____________________________________
"Genius is Simplicity" chris connors
"To win without fighting is best" sun tsu
Those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do

Any idea if PBW has been updated to 1.07? It has been nearly a week now, and still no news...

Ok, thank you.

Is there a reason the AI in my games keeps making fighters without any weapons? It's really starting to annoy me.

BlueTemplar wrote:

Yay! Thank you so much!

Quote:

There's also the addition of leaky intel

... he says humbly, when it's the most important change!

Hmmm...I didn't follow any of the intel threads, so I'm not entirely certain what "leaky intel" is. Perhaps someone could explain it to me?

I'm a little disappointed in the intel system at the moment. I'm in a PBW game, SEV 1.35/BM 1.08, and I took a large risk and went after a colony tech kinda early on, which took 20 turns at 100% research investment to achieve. During most of that interval, I was keeping intel levels at or above that of my opponent (as indicated int he intel screen). Still, he has had many successes, generally one about every other turn for the past 15 or so turns. It appears that 2-3 turns ago he achieved empire-wide espionage, as the attacks changed from resource theft to tech reports.

He just stole my 500k colonizing tech, at a time when he was putting about 2/3 the amount of intel against me as I was generating in defense.

Is intel supposed to be able to do this (ie steal a tech of this magnitude after 1-2 turns of limited effort)? What does it take to defend against espionage? Do I need 5x the defensive points to limit opposing success? This game is probably lost due to this single theft; that's 500k free research points for him. It seems a tad unbalanced, in terms of cost/benefit...low cost, game-breaking benefit.

Intel thread:
http://www.spaceempires.net/home/ftopict-2524.html

Intel cost thread:
http://www.spaceempires.net/home/ftopict-2618.html

Formulas:
Success % = Attack IPs / (Attack IPs + Defense IPs + Project Cost)
That's what's meant by "leaky intel": The intel projects have some % of sucess, not always 0% or 100%.

There are 5 projects in Sabotage - Empire Wide:
"Sabotage - Empire Wide":
set intel_type := 1
call pick_list.add(INTEL_EVENT_ID_EMPIRE_POINTS_CHANGE)
call cost_list.add(1000)
call pick_list.add(INTEL_EVENT_ID_EMPIRE_POINTS_STEAL)
call cost_list.add(2000)
call pick_list.add(INTEL_EVENT_ID_EMPIRE_RESEARCH_STEAL)
call cost_list.add(5000)
call pick_list.add(INTEL_EVENT_ID_EMPIRE_RESEARCH_PROJECT_DELETE)
call cost_list.add(5000)
call pick_list.add(INTEL_EVENT_ID_EMPIRE_INTEL_PROJECT_DELETE)
call cost_list.add(2000)

So if you have 5K intel points on Sabotage - Empire Wide, you have 1 chance in 5 that your operatives try to steal a tech.

Now the script for tech steal:
set tech_count := Sys_Get_Tech_Area_Count()

if (tech_count > 0) then
for index := 1 to tech_count do
set tech_id := Sys_Get_Tech_By_Index(index)
set tech_level := Sys_Get_Empire_Research_Tech_Level(trg_plr, tech_id)
set our_tech_level := Sys_Get_Empire_Research_Tech_Level(src_plr, tech_id)
if (tech_level > 0) and (tech_level > our_tech_level) then
if (Sys_Is_Empire_Research_Tech_Visible(src_plr, tech_id)) then
call tech_area_list.add(tech_id)
endif
endif
endfor
endif

set tech_count := tech_area_list.count()
if (tech_count > 0) then
set pick := Sys_Get_Random_Long(1, tech_count)
set tech_id := tech_area_list.get(pick)
set tech_level := Sys_Get_Empire_Research_Tech_Level(trg_plr, tech_id)
set our_tech_level := Sys_Get_Empire_Research_Tech_Level(src_plr, tech_id)
set tech_name := Sys_Get_Tech_Area_Name(tech_id)

set tech_cost := Sys_Get_Empire_Research_Tech_Area_Cost_For_Next_Level(src_plr, tech_id)
set accomp_amount := (tech_cost / 2) * (tech_level - our_tech_level)

call Sys_Change_Empire_Research_Tech_Area_Accomplished_Amount(src_plr, tech_id, accomp_amount)

So the game randomly picks one tech the opponnent has that you can directly research, and adds half of the points needed for the next tech level multiplied by the difference in levels.
So for 1 lvl difference you should get half of the tech level (so he probably only got half of the colonisation tech, unless he succeeded in intel twice for the same tech, which is unlikely), for a 2 lvl difference, you'll get a whole level worth, etc...

So research stealing is the most effective when you are seriously lacking in tech compared to the target player, and you can get (with some luck!) 250k research points with 5k of intel.

Looks like that intel is now horribly unbalanced in the late game.

The defending player could defend against it by researching lots of different cheap and useless tech instead of focusing in a single one.

It would be great if the Sabotage - Empire Wide events would scale with empire sizes, but I'm not sure you can do that... It looks like you would have to set the intel targets before the game randomly chooses between the intel projects, I'm not sure if you could do that...

You could also add several levels, the expensive ones stealing/destroying more points.

Also, I've made a mistake when I've told you that POINTS_STEAL and POINTS_CHANGE have the same amounts, so shouldn't have the same cost:
POINTS_CHANGE destroys 5k-25k of each ressource, but POINTS_STEAL steals 1k-5k from each ressource.
So IMHO a more balanced cost would be 9375 for POINTS_CHANGE and 3750 for POINTS_STEAL.
(Destroying 4.8 points of ressources would cost on average 1 point of intel, since on a 120% world a lvl1 intel center produces 500, and a ressource fac produces 2400, stealing costs twice that...
Of course you don't have to break through intel defense in order to produce ressources, so it needs some more tweaking...)

Thanks for the clarifications there. Would the message I received (as the victim of the theft) offer any indication as to whether the enemy now has the actual tech, ready for use, as opposed to having gotten the 250K research to get "only" halfway there?

It happened that in the game I played yesterday, I stole Rock Planet Colonisation from the Xi'Chung Hive. I was doing Sabotage - Empire Wide against them for 7 turns, starting from 9k research points to 17,5K now. They still have 0 intel points.

I have 26 successful projects against them:
7 ressource stealing (21k-105k), 12 ressource destroying (180k-900k), 4 research destroying (-20k res points), 0 intel project deleted (does it really work now? I heard that points were not carried on the next turn, but I experienced otherwise), and 3 research stealing (that's weird because I remember only 2 successes in Rock Colonization, but now I have 3 in history and 3 doesn't make sense...).
Also the intel screens shows 29/36 sucesses (80,1% success rate instead of 100%), so maybe it counts the 3 intel delete sucessful projects that were not shown.

I managed to get Rock Colonization in the last two turns: first half of the tech (250k), then the full tech. BTW I didn't get the tech in the next turn because I had exactly 500.000 points and the game needed 1 more turn to acknowledge that I had the whole tech. Maybe adding 1% of my research to it would have changed that.

Each time I had the following message:
"Our Operatives have stolen the advancements in the technology of Rock Planet Colonization from the Xi'Chung Hive, sire."

and they received:
"Spies have stolen the technology of Rock Planet Colonization from us, sire. (The Pirates Brotherhood are the most likely source of this attack. 25% chances of showing IIRC, and never a different empire)"

So you don't know if the attacker has completed the tech, but it seems obvious that for the lvl0=>1 and 1=>2 techs, he will get the whole tech only after 2 such reports. (Unless he started researching it on its own)
So build intel centers, diversify your technologies, and pray he doesn't steal it again!

It's more about "research raping" empires focused primarily on research: a lot of people like to play that way...

// Set the project success rate
set success_rate := Sys_Trunc(atk_spending / (atk_spending + def_spending * 2 + event_cost) * 100)

I think you meant:
Success % = Attack Pts / (Attack Pts + 2*Defense Pts + Project Cost)

So for 5K attack per turn, 5K defense per turn and 5K project, the success rate of stealing points from a random tech is 25% (*20%=5% for picking the right project).

EDIT: the calculation takes into account the 20% bonus intel defense: the defending player would have 4167 intel points.