New Special: Temporal Anomaly

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Sloth
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New Special: Temporal Anomaly

#1 Post by Sloth »

Temporal Anomaly

Effects: Increases research on this planet by 2.0 per Population when Focus is set to research, but population is decreased: Tiny: -6, Small: -12, Medium: -18, Large: -24, Huge: -30.

Spawning location: Any planet without species.

Description: The flow of time on this planet is gravely disturbed. Seemingly random local occurences of increases and decreases of the pace of time, greatly disturbes any living being. A social or productive life is nearly impossible. Extreme adaptability and precaution is needed to establish a colony on this planet.
On the other hand the temporal anomaly has a huge potential for scientific experiments beyond what is possible on normal planets.

Gameplay: Because of the population minus a planet with a Temporal Anomaly will be impossible to colonize until the mid to late game (most species will need everything up to N-dim Structures). And even then the planet will only be ok when it is good for a good species (and reasearch is still needed).
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Dilvish
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Re: New Special: Temporal Anomaly

#2 Post by Dilvish »

Even if you do have enough tech to colonize here, that is such a big population hit, with a benefit that doesn't really seem to make up for the population hit (it seems to me, though I haven't run the numbers on it), that the special seems at high risk of just being a planet waster.

If instead of directly decrementing TargetPop, you simply had a turn to turn population decrease of something like 0.2*PlanetSize, then if the planet were colonized without LifeCycle Manipulation (or spending a lot on a multi-colony-pod ship so that starting pop were higher than 1) and without a high enough targetPop, then the colony would just rapidly die out, and even with sufficient target pop it would grow much more slowly than normal. But the ultimate max pop would not take a significant ding.

So its usefulness could be gated by pretty much the same tech constraints that you want, while letting it still eventually become more valuable. That seems to me like a much more interesting scenario.
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Sloth
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Re: New Special: Temporal Anomaly

#3 Post by Sloth »

Actually my plan was to create a special, where for the first time i can make the AI adjustments myself, after seeing all the adjustments you've made for my specials so far.

While your suggestion for a drawback sounds interesting, it would not only need a more complicated AI update, but it would also be pretty hard to evaluate for new players. A max population minus just needs an entry in POP_PROPORTIONAL_MOD_SPECIALS in AIDependencies.py and the habitability report makes everything clear for the player.

The numbers i've suggested are just a first draft and meant to be tweaked big time, because i also don't want it to become a planet waster. Maybe 5.0 Research per Population is appropriate?
Dilvish wrote:So its usefulness could be gated by pretty much the same tech constraints that you want, while letting it still eventually become more valuable. That seems to me like a much more interesting scenario.
I thought about giving the tech Temporal Manipulation a little role here. Maybe it can half the pop minus? (but that would mean another more complicated AI update).

Another idea that i found interesting, but too hard to implement is that the special is messing with build times and/or research times (maybe only together whith Temporal Manipulation).
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Dilvish
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Re: New Special: Temporal Anomaly

#4 Post by Dilvish »

Sloth wrote:While your suggestion for a drawback sounds interesting, it would not only need a more complicated AI update, but it would also be pretty hard to evaluate for new players. A max population minus just needs an entry in POP_PROPORTIONAL_MOD_SPECIALS in AIDependencies.py and the habitability report makes everything clear for the player.
Hmm, yes, good point.
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Sloth
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Re: New Special: Temporal Anomaly

#5 Post by Sloth »

After a bit of testing, i went with: "Increases Research on this planet by 5 per Population when Focus is set to Research, but population is decreased: Tiny: -5, Small: -10, Medium: -15, Large: -20, Huge: -25.".

But feel free to request further tweaks.
All released under the GNU GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licences.

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