Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicheal
> In what way the shields are not balanced? Energy consumption?
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Basically the way combat works now: AI have infinite energy effectively, so the Distance management doesn't matter vs enemy ships. You have two approaches:
- wait until AI comes at you in 30 sq distance to shoot first, enable shields and disable AI ships with powerful specials to pick them apart from Distance 40 or 60 depending on your weapons.
- load up with the most cost effective one range 40 and mostly range 30 weapons, and have enough energy to kill AI in the first turn.
That 1st part is possible in the midgame cause shields take unproportional amount of energy or you have to take the full hit. And as you can see you usually need shields only for a single turn.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicheal
> I LOVE these expensive planetary buildings. Spares a lot of micro management. I always found it sad, that after 1800 turns the research is over, and after 2 turns any planet is completely built up, and you dont even build all ship stuff or Huge Class Ships cause all is built so easy and cheap and fast.
I wanted to make it more realistic and slow and beneficial - the AI benefits, cause it builds up slow, so, in middle game it has enough empty planet slots to build the good stuff, and in late game it has much bad stuff.  That just hampers the human, not the AI, cause the AI has AI War Center to boost its industry. If you want the AI faster, use Ascend00 Heavy.cob! Or even brutal. |
I don't get how this benefits AI exactly. Also AI builds those War Centers around turn 1000, so usually I have to cycle through them and build War Center on their Home World at the very least. I beat Brutal on Sparse map under 100 turns, but I think your mod is meant to be played at Very Dense setting, so you can't steamroll AI as easily.
The way eco progression works now on the new planets: depending on the planet you build up your planet to 11, 13, 15, 17 or 20 Industry ASAP. Usually you have about 12 PP on average with natural development of the first POP row. At this point you will also have 4 Prosperity and 1 free POP to start building mandatory Orbital Shipyard. It takes 40-50 turns usually and your POP grows during that time. After that point you build Research and Prosperity (to get to 3-4) until 1 free POP left and then do your Small Hull Colony Ship. Repeat that process until full.
Your next step is replacing Agropots with Research buildings. After that replace Factories with Shipyards gradually. OFC insert new ships when you have free slots. Then its time to upgrade Research buildings to 600 Production Points versions. You never have time to build anything above 600 PP buildings. Especially stuff that costs more than 1200. Its absurd how 600 PP Shipyard basically the same as 1200 PP Mega Factory.
I believe you wanted to balance building cost around Ships, but what ended up happening is AI taking too much time to develop new colonies due to Shipyard cost and their love to build it when they have 5 Production Points per turn. Then if they have free ship slots what will happen is queueing up ships on those new planets as well as on the proper colonies with AI War Centers. Basically for the first like 1000 turns and sometimes more AI is very vulnerable.
If you want my suggestions I will up to provide some. I'm playing Master of Orion 2 and 3 at the highest level for more than 2 decades, so I have the gist on how to balance 4X games.