[Updated on: Wed, 15 February 2006 10:25]

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To make the Retro bomb useful (and Orbital Adjusters less powerful), remove the offensive abilities of the Orbital Adjuster. Should be easy to do, just have it always help the owner of the planet, and if you bring some into orbit of an enemy planet, you just gave them a nice boost

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Uh. Leaving instaforming alone and tweaking the TT cost won't do much to the race. A friend and I once had a series of duels to determine which CA was better, a CA TT, or a just a CA with wider habs. I was able to make the TT perform better, but not by much (performance is subjective here, we took tech and mins into account). I was always killing him in the end game with TT25 and 30, ofc. However, up to that point it wasn't an eye popping difference, just better. The normal CA was still *way* better than a normal factory race, IMO.

Further, since a plain CA never needs to go past Bio 4... you can take Bio expnsive and concentrate on getting war techs. Scoops and RS are a natural fit for CA's, and you can pump out gatable Beam BB's fairly early. It's a great QS design.

No, I'd eliminate instaforming altogether, and make a special hull for the OA that weighed about 1500 without engines and OA's, but fairly cheap and low tech, so the CA can buy them early. Give it a buttload of fuel and next to no armor. That makes it nearly ungateable for anyone but a IT, and would slow the rate of terraforming to a more appropriate level, and ties it to econ.


-Matt

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multilis wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 17:19

Iztok tested the PicklePea mod which adds extra cost to terraforming and makes OA ships MUCH more expensive and seemed to find it a bit wimpy+boring but livable.

Yep i read it. That actually means that PricklyPea overmodded it. We dont need another wimpy/livable PRT that got additional boring MM to make?

LEit wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 17:47

To make the Retro bomb useful (and Orbital Adjusters less powerful), remove the offensive abilities of the Orbital Adjuster.

Nice idea. However there is also need to give the offensive abilities of OA to retro bomb then. Current retro bomb got weak effect. I am against getting rid of CA-s best offensive ability.

mazda wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 17:48

For CA I think the easiest option is to remove the instaforming. Rely totally on the OA ships.

Yep, it is easiest but it also makes CA a boring PRT with what you got to do MM that no one else has. Adding MM is actually wrong thing to do. CA already got additional ally helping MM to make. Monotone MM is the weakness of most strategy games.

mlaub wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 19:51

Uh. Leaving instaforming alone and tweaking the TT cost won't do much to the race.

I agree ... but lots of posts ... i cant find who suggested such a primitive thing as tweaking only the TT cost?

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I tested few test CA-s quickly in tiny packed. I ran each test only once or twice. Narrow immunityless hab usually makes the outcome differ more from test to test. Nothing scientifically clear, but impressions are like that:

1) CA HG without TT and with 130 leftover points behaved good. It is early weaker but later reaches up to JOAT HG.

2) TT CA HG with 170 leftover points was also OK. It is somewhat weaker than JOAT or IS HG but it got better diplo value than TT-less so lets say it is balanced. If to concentrate on Bio only then it got 38k.

3) With 210 leftover points TT CA HG looked really weak early despite it had everything beside bio expensive. I concentrated only on bio and it finally reached 30K@2450. Curve was like HP that has 1 in 6 hab without immunities. Unlike JOAT HP, SD HP, PP HG or AR with what i get same resources in similar conditions it had terrible tech. So it is overkill unless we want to leave only diplomacy value to our former feared monster.

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I wrote on Thu, 16 February 2006 09:10

(1) CA have instaforming, but because they expect to live in a good environment, they don't do so well away from optimum. Growth is growth_rate*hab^2, rather than growth_rate*hab, so a 50% planet only grows at 25% of the growth rate. Possibly growth_rate*hab^(3/2) if the squaring it is too strong, so a 50% planet would have 35% of the growth rate.

Actually for this, I meant to use the hab^2 or hab^(3/2) for the growth rate and/or the maximum population multiplier (I've been playing AR exclusively for the last few months, so I forgot about maximum planet populations being dependent on hab )

multilis wrote on Thu, 16 February 2006 09:25

Possible similar to how JOAT gets 20% more pop/planet, CA gets 20% less.

This is probably more doable but not as much fun.

My idea was to make CA _need_ their really good terraforming, because they only do well on good planets.

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mlaub wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 12:51

No, I'd eliminate instaforming altogether, and make a special hull for the OA that weighed about 1500 without engines and OA's, but fairly cheap and low tech, so the CA can buy them early. Give it a buttload of fuel and next to no armor. That makes it nearly ungateable for anyone but a IT, and would slow the rate of terraforming to a more appropriate level, and ties it to econ.

This is a nice balance - I like it.

Depending on the depth of the patch, perhaps future versions of the game (yes, I'm dreaming here) could have certain hulls designated as ungateable so we don't have to mess around with massive weights, etc. But this works for me!

Cheers,
Zoiker

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[Updated on: Thu, 16 February 2006 08:02]

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iztok wrote on Wed, 15 February 2006 13:46

IMO CA's cost for TT should be about 180% of other races. However there's a problem of HOW to implement this in a new mod, as RW is AFAIK a mess of interrelated formulas.

It could be done in a similar way as how NAS is currently done: with a nice IF (specialLRT) AND (econPRT) THEN (extraCOST).

How to wedge the few extra bits of code into the existing Exe would be another matter.

There might be another way, tho: the RW actually checks for TT when finding habitability costs. That nightmarish part of the code could be tweaked to acknowledge TT is a bit more efficient than expected (easy), or to account for CA PRT, too (harder but still doable).

[Updated on: Thu, 16 February 2006 04:34]

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[Updated on: Thu, 16 February 2006 08:01]

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All seem to say that it or that is "not so hard" to tweak. So why not to try it then out ... who can tell the RW point calculator offset in current JRC4 executable?

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wizard wrote on Thu, 16 February 2006 17:07

m.a@stars wrote on Thu, 16 February 2006 14:01 But it would not be too hard to tweak the RW so that JoaT got, say, only 35 points from NAS. JOAT shouldn't get anything from taking NAS, they should pay for it. Taking NAS is an advantage for JOAT. BUt that shouldn't be too hard to change either... wizard

Awww, c'mon, they are after all losing all those cool planetary scanners, plus some quite interesting ship-bound thingies....

[Updated on: Thu, 16 February 2006 19:32]

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multilis wrote on Fri, 17 February 2006 18:12

Quote: TT CA HG with 170 leftover points was also OK. It is somewhat weaker than JOAT or IS HG JOAT is with NAS?

Nay... i easily get 40K+ with NAS-less JOAT in tiny packed same with IS HG. SD HG and IT HG get like 35K. There are PP HG, SS HG, WM HG and AR with what i get only 30K. As side note ... Nothing beside HE gets over 25k in tiny normal.

Quote:

I will likely start a poll tomorrow on what to do with OA retrobombers currently being unused, unless someone has a better idea or launches a better poll. Happy to hear some input on choices.

LEits suggestion was good but they cant be turned into "negative only OA-s" i suspect.

Other good idea is to do nothing ... or maybe to view all useless items like Retro Bomb, Jammer 10, Strobnium, Lady Finger Bomb, Black Cat Bomb, half of Smart Bombs, Sub Galactic Fuel Scoop and Robo Miner all together?

Also maybe lets poll if to increase the flexibility of hulls somewhat? Some hulls are just outright boring. Futuristic warship = BB? :-/ Even if to turn the 2 x 2-weapons slots on BB into "general purpose" it would be whole different game.

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Retro bombs[ 12 votes ]
1.	leave alone	2 / 17%
2.	make OA ships more expensive/heavier	3 / 25%
3.	replace bombs with better bio armour	1 / 8%
4.	replace bombs with light anti-matter torps	0 / 0%
5.	other	6 / 50%

[Updated on: Sun, 19 February 2006 02:39]

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