In general - thank you for the feedback. I do appreciate it, but your tone could be improved - you are not very polite. I do this in my free time, without pay, after all.
Oh, this is me being polite. Here's a very real response: I only give feedback on quality and your Mod was my second post, which might make you pause and wonder why I'd bother with the feedback (and I have installed every 9.51a compatible mod and used them). Since English might be your second language, that's a compliment. Here's a tip: when someone says "blueprint" when they obviously are referring to your Mod Only Content[TM] item, cut them some slack - everyone knows I was referencing your Mod Only Content[TM] Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness or whatever, so -- don't project too hard or get defensive, this will work out a lot better.
You've some genuinely good ideas and your code/mechanics grasp is good. But certain parts of it plays like professional torture at the moment -- prime example: you have certain trigger events on salvaging various facilities / ruins (e.g. use a
blueprint Mod Only Content[TM] Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness) but these... immediately trigger the salvaging screen on chosing "Come back later". i.e. removing the conditional that spawned them (in particular research stations / wild ID events that decay on use) Likewise: realistically, which player will sacrifice a nanoforge (even a 20% corrupted) merely to remove some DMods / repair that a base skill does for free? Answer: no-one.
Your issue there? No-one, and I mean
NO-ONE is going to remember a RNG spawned 1-hit loot pinata to return to RNG galaxy #8899 with a valuable item to potentiall get a middling reward. You're making content / stuff that is literally insane to 99% of players.
So: some good ideas, some terrible ones. Let's help you fix that. Oh - and nitpicking over +2 vrs +3 industry slots and not addressing the actual issue? Again - stop being so defensive. You've made something that's good: let's make it amazing.
More feedback - Courier station: I get the design ethos and even the implementation (given the vanilla UI / code) but it leads to the actual issue: as far as I can tell (and from reading historical posts about prior builds and economy and how the engine essentially just 'fudges' the numbers now) there's 100% no point in putting raw materials in
any station inventory other than to use in a crisis. e.g. you cannot set up couriers like they should work -- Station X hits cap of 20,000 food > sends to Station B who then eats it or Station X hits cap 10,000 of raw ore > sends it to Station Y to process. The engine simply doesn't support what you're coding for.
The tryptch of Labatory - Forge - Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness writer. Since making an entire set of unique ships is probably not what you want to do, I'd suggest something far more radical. Ditch the entire Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness printing thing entirely - it's 100% not required content and unless you want to be really bold and mod out the ability for the vanilla game to simply Right Click BP > open screen > pay $400,000 > wait 1/2/4 month for ship, then let's rethink it.
The "Print from
BP Mod Only Content[TM] Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness" is an idea you're sticking to because you thought it was neat and saw how to make it work. You succeded. Mechanically it's pretty damn genius. Play wise? 100% sucks. Look up what a "sunk cost" is. It's already in the game and doesn't require another version.
1) Laboratory: Crystal Lattice Tablets of Ipadness -- instead of a consumable, it's now a buff to the Lab. Each one gives a Faction wide (!!) +10% to Fleet quality. Slot in the holder, lab fixes it, you get a Faction wide buff to all planets / colonies ship quality production. You'll probably want this one to cost some resources / money to process.
This also makes finding multiple ones exciting and not a "Meh, who the hell is going to want 6 x3 (18) ships of whatever in their final fleet anyhow?". You find one, you dump enough commodities in the hopper with it, you just made your entire Faction wide fleets better. Your average universe is going to spit out 10-15 of these, max. Which is a fairly strong but not too powered buff.
If you want to cap it, simply have a little power bar that fills up, scaled 1-10 (presuming +100% is your preferred cap). Get +10, get a super special hidden bonus. Oh, and +BONUS ROUND: you just solved an actual issue with the vanilla game, which is colonies having masses of dumped items in their inventories because the
actual game economy totally ignores them. Now then: you also made it so that another part of your mod (Courier stations)
has a real use case for it. Make the costs silly number - we're talking 100,000 commods at higher tiers.
Well done: you've just solved two issues with your mod and one from the vanilla game. 100% success.
Player: "Why am I building Courier Stations when the actual game economy totally ignores that part of the equation and lugging 100,000 ore to an AI station is peanuts when I can sell AI cores"?
Answer: Because you want to send them all to your Laboratory base to get those sweet sweet Fleet Quality buffs.
2) Hull Forge - yes, I understand the mechanics. Referencing sacrificing 10-12 ships to get the deconstruct was obvious. So, again, let's do something different with this. What do players have by mid - late game in the 100's that have zero use (apart from feeding to Pirates to create farming fleets)? Yep: redundant BLUEPRINTS. So, let's use that. We throw BLUEPRINTS and materials into the hopper (and scale it to rarity here - common weapon or common freighter? meh, not many points - top tier Atlas print, now we're talking) OR hulls (this ... is probably outside of the scope of your current code, so ignore that unless you want to jink in the stuff you've already coded with "sacrifice hull" > "give hull" in events, but for points). So what's a fully powered up Hull Forge going to do for us that the Lab hasn't already and that we need? Let's keep it basic and make it give Faction wide +% to fleet size.
And cost out the points etc and the tiers - if we're doing 1-10, scale it so getting to +7 (+70%) is gonna take ~500 or so BLUEPRINTS depending on quality. You understand math, it's an easy log calc.
Player: "Meh, why do I bother looting? My pirates have full Triangle of DOOM fleets and I have 10,000 of these redundant BPs in my storage"
Industry Mod: What if I told you that you could convert those into MASSIVE DOOM FLEETS OF YOUR OWN?
Side benefit: it will make the otherwise underpowered Privateer base that gets 100% insta ganked by the AI.... actually dangerous. HOLY CRUD. WE JUST SOLVED ANOTHER ISSUE WITH THE MOD, WE'RE ON A ROLL! If you're worried about power-creep, just make it -50% to stationed fleets (aka, defensive ones) and full bonus to offensive ones (aka your privateers).
3) Deconstruct Forge. Ok, so - let's do something a little different and more exciting, given that anything vanilla you do with deconstructing is open to player abusing it (i.e. use the vanilla way to make ships > feed to forge, unlimited power). So, let's make this one clever. Each ship fed to the Forge ticks off a unique ID (the... list of unique ship IDs). It's pokemon for Nihilists. What's the buff? Let's add some Lore stuff in here - AI Simulation Threat and Nullification Matrix. +1-10 .... that adds +X% damage to each hull on the list **BUT** gives a Faction wide +x% cost to making hulls. Scale it 1-10 for ease --- yep. You feed the horror AI run Forge enough different hulls, you're rocking +50% DPS, but you're also running +100% cost on each hull. (And... you can be mean here and add in a hidden coda where [REDACTED] are secretly hacking your source code and get a 10% DR (damage reduction) instead).
e.g. (note: I'm not going to pull up the vanilla list - given the # of mods that add hulls, you'll just make these flat percentages. i.e. X% of TOTAL UNIQUE ID loaded)
20% unique hull types -- +5% damage to said hulls
30% - 10%
Underpants Gnomes, the math is easy
100% unique hull types- +50% to each hull type in game
Underpants Gnome says don't forget to fake add certain mission hulls otherwise you'll get a bug where you'll never hit the top tier - for these (unique) ones, just add a 'if owned / captured' hidden flag)
This one is also adds
massive weighting to all those "meh, not gonna bother using a Story point for **THAT** tiny hull" salvage cases if you get clever with it. What if I told you to make certain hulls... only recoverable from salvage? Suddenly all those debris fields / mass looting of junk in the mid-late game are 100% pointless
suddenly now has a use. DPS.... the ultimate player driver. There will be complaints they're not common enough.
~~~
See? Easy. And that's all possible using the code you're running to essentially make a really long winded and boring version of "Right Click BP, click tab, select ship, click make".
~
Good code / mechanics. No vision
Author
Topic: [0.97a] Industrial.Evolution 3.3.e - Campaign content expansion (Read 1267319 times)