Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod. |
While waiting for the new patch and some new mods to come along I've started playing with the SE5 Editor and have been considering making a mod of my own (or atleast learning how to do it for now). Granted it's still in the early planning phase and may never get done, but figured I'd throw around some ideas while I wait and see if some of it is even feasible or not.
Some ideas such as adding new ships classes seem pretty easy and have minor impacts on the AI. But I was wondering just how easy it is to break the AI. If I change the tech tree a whole lot, will the AI be able to adapt or would it need to be changed to cope with the new setup? My current thought is to make 5 smaller but seperate tech trees based around racial type. The choices would be Standard (for lack of a better word), Organic, Crystalline, Energistic, and Mechanoid. This way each race while having similar components would get a bonus applied to each part of the ship based on the race type (ie: Organic ships would be weaker but every component would repair itself; Energistic ship would be all shields with every component having a shield value; Crystalline ships would be all armor with every component have an armor value). Would the AI be able to handle these changes without a drastic rewrite?
Another potentially (okay definately) AI breaking idea I took from talk about the BSG mod. The idea was to add a similar method of transportation but based around stations rather then ships (If I recall correctly, their idea was to use an event to close all warp points at the end of each turn thus simulating 'jumping' to a new system). This expesnive base would then become a transportation hub for each system. The question here isn't will this break the AI (pretty sure it won't know the first thing to do) but is it even possible to teach the AI to cope with this method of play? Could the AI even figure out how to plan or respond to attacks in other systems?
Anyways thats it for now. There are a few other ideas I'm putting under the 'when I learn how to even read that data file' section and will worry about those when I get closer to understanding them to begin with. 
[edit]Unable to sleep so I guess I'll add a little.
One thing that has been bothering me about the numbers in the game is population size. The planetary populations seem small but the amount that'll fit into a ship is huge. The standard homeworld in SE5 is a Large world with a pop limit of 5B which makes Earth closer to a Huge world with a pop currently over 6.5B (expected to hit 9B in roughly 40 years). I've found this easy enough to fix by doubling the population limits for all breathable worlds. But on the other side of the issue is a transport with a crew of 100 being able to carry a population of 15 million people. Since the game measures in M and B, is it possible to change that to K and M? Or even K, M, and B? Would make more sense to start out a new colony at 10k people rather then 10m (Ideally I'd make it 1k but that would probably slow the pace down a bit too much). Guess I'll play around with it when I have access to my other computer with SE5 on it. Would be interesting to start a domed world with a 10k pop limit and use Dome facilities to add more population to it.
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
Well so far I know the game can handle a large number of population. I have tested so far up to 1000000000 which shows up as 1000001B (not sure why there is an extra 1 in there). Guess this means if I figure out how to change M and B to K and M then things will work out nicely.
I considered the way Proportions did it, but I really don't consider it worth it unless I can get to more realistic numbers. Transporting a million people in a single ship makes just as much sense as transporting 10 million. It's the measure in millions that is bugging me.
Course looking at the resource production for the homeworld....ouch, that'll need to be fixed if I get this working.
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
I can now confirm that changing population to units of 1000 is indeed possible.
I didn't have time to do as much testing ingame as I would have liked, but transferring a planets population in the space simulator worked. Well, except one minor thing. When you set the number of things to move as high as 'all', it apparently only moves a really high number, instead of all. So I had to click it more than once to clear al the population off the planet.
I was also somewhat alarmed when I first looked at a planet; it still said 2500M population. For a moment I didn't think it worked. Then it turned out it scaled up the unreasonable 2500000k to the next modifier so it would fit. 
Note that there isn't any further modifier above M anymore, so 100.000M isn't going to get shorted to 100B...
(Also, thousand should be lower-case k, K is something else.)
The datafields I changed:
MainStrings.txt
Global 320 Global 321 Log Words 62 Log Words 63 Log Words 64 Log Message Text 201 Datafile_GameSettings 93 Datafile_GameSettings 94 Datafile_GameSettings 95 Datafile_GameSettings 96 Datafile_GameSettings 97 Datafile_GameSettings 98 Datafile_GameSettings 99 Datafile_GameSettings 100 Datafile_GameSettings 101 Datafile_Happiness 32 Politics_AllianceRules 31The Datafile entries are optional. See notes further down.
EventText.txt
Event Message 12 Text
IntelligenceText.txt
Intel Message 19 Text Intel Message 20 Text Intel Message 41 Text Intel Message 43 Text
HelpText.txt
Dlg Empire Options 2 Descr Dlg Report - Planet 8 Descr
Also check the descriptions for anything using the 'Planet Population Amount' ability. In stock, that is only the Replicant Center in Facilities.txt.
For my test, I also multiplied the populations in PlanetSize.txt by 1000, and set the number of Population Modifiers in Settings.txt to 0, to keep things simple.
The optional changes in MainStrings.txt are not visible in-game, and Settings.txt and Happiness.txt need to be modified accordingly. I think they keep things a little clearer when modding those files, but I guess it could also be confusing to others.
Other things that need tweaking or some thinking about:
- Population Structure Per One and Damage Points To Kill One Population in Settings.txt will need adjusting. Oh, also Race Migration and any population maintenance costs.
- Population Cargo Space Per One will probably need to be dratically lowered. In the cargo transfer screen, the population space was still displayed in the base kT unit, which made it a big number.
- Damage done by sabotage will need to be scaled up.
- I'm not sure how plague damage is affected, but I suspect the casualty rate has gone way down, and it doesn't seem moddable.
(some late editing done)
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
One thing that annoys me is the game measuring in kT -- straight tons might be better, since the way things are, fighters can end up being larger than most modern aircraft carriers . . . and the basic frigate design is 2.5x the size of the largest warships currently afloat (the 100kT Nimitz class carriers).
I also wonder exactly how the amount of cargo you can fit in cargo components can be bigger than the component itself (well, if they were exterior only components, then maybe they have external areas for cargo), how 1M population can fit in such a tiny space (and weigh so little!), but how the crew needs incredible amounts of space. . . .
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
The kT has bothered me before as well... I'm confident the kT measurement can be modded to straight tons in pretty much the same way I changed millions of people to thousands.
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
You'll retain your sanity better if you think of them arbitrary units and not try and affix any sort of real meaning to it.
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
The modding docs say population structure and the migration fields and 'numbers', as opposed to decimals. So you can't have anything between 1% and 0% migration. Although, when I put it back to 1%, it was actually ~0.11% that migrated. Still, that was 2,524,000 people. A bit more than I'd like.
For the mod I'm experimenting with, I was indeed planning to eliminate all migration until certain teach-areas were researched (cheap-masstransport-privatised-spaceflight, or somesuch), and then increase the empire's migration using a cultural achievement. At least that delays the mass-exodus a bit.
Re: Some mod questions, brainstorming, and a possilbe future mod
I can't say anything about the AI, I have yet to take a good look at that.
About the populations, the simple answer would be 'no', 1 million is the smallest unit of population you can have.
However, in theory, if you multiply the population amounts by 1000, and change all the right entries in MainStrings.txt, you'll end up with 1K units of population. Except for where it's been hardcoded. It might be possible, though it might a lot of work just to see if it can be done.
Another isue would be the amount of people on a sphereworld. In stock that's 64,000 population. A straight conversion would make that 64,000,000. What is the maximum amount SE5 can handle? At a guess, probably higher than that, but the numbers are gettig a bit big.
If you want to keep things simple, you can always do what the SE4 Proportions Mod did; make population take up lots of cargo space. Still, if it can be done, I'd prefer 1K over 1M amounts.
And yes, I think Earth is considered large, in normal Space Empires. In SE II (and maybe III as well, can't quite remember) one of the pictures for large oxygen planets looked suspiciously like earth.