First Impression

[Gyrfalcon]

The idea behind starting with a scout is so that you can explore your surroundings while you're building up the infrastructure in your home system.

Having a Scout makes some sense. I'm not sure there is a purpose in having a Colonizer or Transport in orbit at the start. Although starting with negative economy does kind of require you to colonize quickly so you can run trade routes.

Sven nerfed missile damage a bit, so your scout should have a better chance of being able to escape from pirates when they're discovered. Just make sure that you head back home to repair before exploring another system.

It is now possible to use a Scout for more than one mission, although I waited to research Lasers and retrofit the initial Scout with PD before I sent it out to be sure it survived. Although it will be destroyed if there are more than two pirates, but. currently, that seems about right.

[Arioch]

Having a Scout makes some sense. I'm not sure there is a purpose in having a Colonizer or Transport in orbit at the start. Although starting with negative economy does kind of require you to colonize quickly so you can run trade routes.

This is the sort of thing that we will be looking at continually as the gameplay evolves. The idea is to be able to get into the game quickly; the starting Colony Ship might be omitted on harder difficulty levels, but if you want to build one right away, it takes 36 turns... that's a lot of clicking "Next Turn." Even if the galaxy remains as unforgivingly hazardous as it is right now (which is unlikely), I think the player is still benefited by having a prebuilt Colony Ship sitting idle in orbit for 10-20 turns rather than having to build one from scratch.

Prior to the beta, you didn't start with a Transport and there was even a technology that had to be researched to unlock them, and this presented a problem for early colonization; since you couldn't move any population to your first new colony, the growth was glacially slow, and without any income from trade routes, you'd quickly run out of money. So you were essentially forced to choose this tech as your first research target, and build a transport as soon as it was available... and when there's no real choice, that's not fun. (Also, it didn't make much sense that a transport should require more advanced technology than a colony ship.) Again, we might omit the starting Transport based on gameplay balance or at higher difficulty levels, but being able to get one early is critical to early growth.

Tip: even though you can't establish trade routes until you've found your first colony, you can still send the Transport to the Trade Pool immediately. This won't generate income, but it will remove the upkeep cost for the transport.

Currently, the early choice in production is whether to build another Scout or Colony Ship, a Factory, or a Lab. Right now, I think the benefits of a Factory heavily outweigh the other choices, and that's something we will keep tweaking. Scouts are (in my opinion) currently way too expensive, being almost the same price as a Colony Ship. Scouts should be less expensive (especially early when they have no weapons), and Colony Ships should be more expensive. Sven is right now working on a set of changes to relative costs and how they are calculated, including making components (weapons and systems) a more significant portion of the total cost of a ship. This is one of what will be many balance passes on item costs.

[Gyrfalcon]

game-243 has me in awe of the Imperial Ashdar (in purple), who are able to knock out something like five colony ships in the time that it takes me to make one. They do have almost twice the population I do on my homeworld, but I actually have more factories. Also, they've filled up all of their planetary slots while also, apparently, being able to build more ships than I have. I'm not sure if the AI is cheating or there's some tech research path I'm not using that lets you get to the point where you can slam out colonizers. Either that or the Orthin have an enormous disadvantage in production.

[sven]

game-243 has me in awe of the Imperial Ashdar (in purple), who are able to knock out something like five colony ships in the time that it takes me to make one. They do have almost twice the population I do on my homeworld, but I actually have more factories. Also, they've filled up all of their planetary slots while also, apparently, being able to build more ships than I have. I'm not sure if the AI is cheating or there's some tech research path I'm not using that lets you get to the point where you can slam out colonizers. Either that or the Orthin have an enormous disadvantage in production.

Right now, the Orthin have a significant disadvantage in production (their workers generate half as many wrenches per-population). Ashdar Prime is also almost certainly OP, as medium sized Hive worlds are inherently awesome -- and the Haduir start the game with one. So -- you're seeing two extremes of the current strategic balance here.

We'll tweak the numbers as time goes on, of course, but, as a question of world-building, I the Orthin probably *should* be impressed by the production potential of Ashdar Prime -- it is the original capital of one of the elder races, after all

[enpi]

I dont think its a good idea to mix irrelevant information about the planets like temp with important information like pop. You should give fluff info to a special area for those who are interested in it, while you should graphical emphasize the game relevant infos. Its really distracting otherwise to have a " white text sausage" on the planet screen. (at least for me)

[Gyrfalcon]

We'll tweak the numbers as time goes on, of course, but, as a question of world-building, I the Orthin probably *should* be impressed by the production potential of Ashdar Prime -- it is the original capital of one of the elder races, after all

I hope they were impressed, this time around, with how I used my scout ship with its PD laser to destroy their space stations and, eventually, bombard the planets enough to allow my pair of drop ships to take their hive world away from them.

ETA: Drop ship is what I call a Transport with a Planetary Assault module, btw. I'll upload this game when I get done if you like.

[Gyrfalcon]

It seems like the best early game strategy for the Orthin is to focus exclusively on Factories in the first few colonies to address their lack of production, although I did get lucky that I was close to Gienah so that I could take over Ashdar Prime early in the game. I think the potential for them to steamroller everybody else is quite large.

[Gyrfalcon]

Removed the industrial production penalties for Orthin and Phidi colonists.

Although removing it completely might take the fun out of playing a different species.

[sven]

Removed the industrial production penalties for Orthin and Phidi colonists.

Although removing it completely might take the fun out of playing a different species.

Yeah, I'm going to need to keep testing this. Right now, with the changes that are going in to the AI, I'm starting to get a somewhat clearer picture of how the different races are balanced relative to each other -- and it was looking like the slower expansion of the Phidi and Orthin due to their production nerf was a much more serious handicap than I'd intended.

More philosophically, assuming you're going to be building more than one factory and one lab on every planet anyhow, there's a sense in which a racial special that gives bonus production in one resource in exchange for lower production of another doesn't really *do* a whole lot, beyond changing the ideal ratio of factories to labs. If the consequence of the Orthin's racial trait is just that you build one more factory and one less lab -- that's not really that interesting. A trait that's not as straightforward to compensate for, like, say, low growth-rate but bonus science (which is what the Orthin currently have) or a trait that's just a flat bonus (like the Phidi and Teros currently have), strikes me as a bit more interesting.

[Gyrfalcon]

I tend to agree that it is less interesting to change the ideal factory/lab ratio than something else. If there were some pop growth improvement techs, Orthin players who want to grow faster could chase after those to try and make up for the lack.

[Arioch]

Balancing of racial traits needs to be done as a whole -- population, starting position, special abilities, etc. Which we can't really do until we have the special abilities and unique techs in place.

[Gyrfalcon]

[rubs hands] I'm looking forward to seeing that.

[Gyrfalcon]

More philosophically, assuming you're going to be building more than one factory and one lab on every planet anyhow, there's a sense in which a racial special that gives bonus production in one resource in exchange for lower production of another doesn't really *do* a whole lot, beyond changing the ideal ratio of factories to labs.

Although, now that I think about it, this does raise the question of why build discrete factories and labs at all. Why not just have a slider so I can pick whether to emphasize production or research?

[Arioch]

More philosophically, assuming you're going to be building more than one factory and one lab on every planet anyhow, there's a sense in which a racial special that gives bonus production in one resource in exchange for lower production of another doesn't really *do* a whole lot, beyond changing the ideal ratio of factories to labs.

Although, now that I think about it, this does raise the question of why build discrete factories and labs at all. Why not just have a slider so I can pick whether to emphasize production or research?

Building icons are cooler than sliders.

Also, the buildings represent investment in infrastructure. I don't think one should be able to turn an industrial world into a research world (or a farm world) with the flick of a switch, so if you want to change the specialization, you need to build different infrastructure. Infrastructure investment is trickier to represent with sliders.

[AzraelRavenwing]

Personally, I love playing as the humans. Once ya get them going they are pretty good. My only problem is the Yoral are OP as hell. If they aint eleminated early in the game I just keep getting spammed by their fleets. i cant move any of me fleets off my planets cause once I do, OH hello Yoral fleet of Heavy cruisers with torpedoes and hellbore cannons x.x