Since Histidine says that faction mods will require tweaking to take full advantage of the diplomacy changes in Nex 9.5, I figured now was as good a time as any to bring my own concerns to your attention: Namely, Shadowyards seems too competitive on the galactic market of the vanilla (Corvus) map, noticeably outstripping the vanilla factions' market share in heavy industry and refined metals, and also being overly competitive in light industry and food.
Now whilst this is no way a game-breaking concern, it really just feels wrong for the canonically dominant powers to lag behind in commodities, even with Shadowyards being a larger and more expansive nation than other modded factions such as DME and Scy. This, to a large degree, can (I think) be traced back to the faction's over-proliferation of industries (just for once, it isn't their access, due to the lack of Waystations and freeports. That's very much to your credit, by the way). There are two Shadowyards markets that have more industries than industry slots (something no vanilla faction is permitted to do), and compared to the vanilla factions Shadowyards has a much smaller proportion of planets that are not utilizing all of their slots. This has had the effect of giving Shadowyards as many refineries as the larger factions and actually more heavy industries than even the Hegemony (in vanilla the only faction to feature two markets with heavy industry).
If you'd like to improve the campaign feel of Shadowyards, I'd suggest, first and foremost, removing the heavy industry from Theramin, the light industry from Stillness, and the refinery from Jnana. This would nicely curtail most of their overly-dominant market shares while also eliminating both of the over-capped industries and the second nanoforge (the vanilla factions are lucky to have even a single nanoforge, after all). I would also propose reducing Euiprides' size to 7, as this would help to blunt their food share and their other presently overly-dominant shares. Granted this would result in smaller defending fleets, but it just seems rather curious that Shadowyards' population is on the same order of magnitude as the Hegemony's, let the League's is not. Note that, in the case of the latter, you might have to tweak the production of solar collectors and/or the demand of parallel fabrications if you still want Euripides to be short on high-capacitance storage such that the player can buy these cheaply from Pillager Point and then sell them dear at Euripides (a detail that does seem to be very much on purpose and, if not, should be).
A few other unrelated suggestions:
- You may want to modify Hotri a bit, since the only planet so exceedingly similar to Earth (i.e. 50% hazard) in the core worlds is supposed to be Gilead. That's why it's so sacred.
- Pillager Point's lore doesn't really explain why it has solar collectors, which seem to be a rare technology given even Shadowyards only has one of them. I'd also say that, since size 5 pirate markets are otherwise kinda rare in the core, that either Pillager Point or Auris Grip should probably be downgraded to size 4.
- Matra arguably makes the Persean League a bit too strong in mining. You could look at dropping the colony's size to 5, or even deleting one of the planet's resources.
- More a bug report than a suggestion, really: Cloned organs don't seem to work properly, because despite the fact that everyone is supposedly in a deficit of them, there's nowhere where they sell any higher than how much you can buy from Euripides for.
I hope these proposals find you well. Shadowyards is certainly an interesting mod, with its relatively high level of integration with the lore and the existing map. I feel strongly, then, that that if there are measures that could be taken to improve campaign feel, it's at least worth putting on the table.
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Topic: [0.95a] Shadowyards Reconstruction Authority 0.9.5-rc4(4/12/21) (Read 1177020 times)