FreeOrion

revision 4702.
"gave free weapon techs to 'aggressive' species."


This should only happen on turn 1, and for now i took away free stealth techs for the sneaky species.

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I'm guessing nothing...?

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The GiveEmpireTech effect gives techs to empires. If you don't specify an empire ID in the effect definition, it uses the ID of the empire that owns the target object. If the specified ID doesn't match an empire, or there is no owner, then nothing happens.

revision 4711
Species tweaks: Made George playable, demoted Etty. Other tweaks to make minor species generally weaker, but more can now colonize."

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I went through the species.txt file and read most entries (as well as their corresponding forum descriptions) of the minor species and came up with some propositions:

- At the moment all species use one of the environments makros. I think it's important for the playable species to be balanced, but i don't see a reason for the minor species to all have exactly one good, two adequate and two poor environments. Especially for a colonising species these tables can be used to make them more distinctive: Maybe an otherwise powerful species could have lots of hostile environments, a rather weak species on the other hand may have more than two adequate environments.

- Currently all species use the makro "STANDARD_HEALTH_AND_POPULATION". Are there any plans to differentiate here? The description of the Cray for example mentions an "Extremely slow population growth."

- The Fifty-Sevens should not have HAS_ADVANCED_FOCI according to their description.

- The Setinon should be swamp based according to their description (but it might be worth to give them a custom environments table).

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That's dedication!

That sounds reasonable. It's one of the less exciting ways a species could vary, but it is worth having as long as it doesn't make remembering who goes where too complicated.


Yeah, fast population growth is one of the classic MoO1 pics. I just haven't messed with that mass of effects yet.


I'm assuming these machines are built by other members of the empire (whoever provided the minerals and PP), and that whatever devices/buildings are added to a 57 planet have voice controls, or are in some other way adapted to the hand-less 57.

I've occasional deviated from the descriptions on purpose, but that one was an accident-- or at least i have no memory why i did it. I marked it to be fixed next time i update that file.


I have a couple of things i want to work on before cycling back to "diversifying species", so if you want make some additional macros for EP pickiness and tolerance, and rapid & slow population growth, feel free.

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Here is what i did so far:

1. I've split the "STANDARD_HEALTH_AND_POPULATION" macro into "STANDARD_CONSTRUCTION", "STANDARD_POPULATION" and one of the health macros ("TERRIBLE_Health", "POOR_HEALTH", AVERAGE_HEALTH", etc). The following species had their Health changed:

CRAY: TERRIBLE_HEALTH
CYNOS: GREAT_HEALTH
PHINNERT: GREAT_HEALTH
RAAAGH: GOOD_HEALTH
FIFTYSEVEN: POOR_HEALTH

2. I've also made some changes to the environmental tables:

CRAY: have their own table with more than two adequate types, because the description implies a high adaptivity/resilience.
CYNOS: have their own table with more than two adequate types, because the description implies a high adaptivity/resilience.
PHINNERT: have their own table which has swamp as good (according to their description) and more than four hostile types.
SSLITH: have their own table that reflects their aquatic nature in addition to their tundra home.
SETINON: Changed to "SWAMP_STANDARD_EP" (that's what their description sais).
UGMORRS: have their own table that changed barren to adequate (according to their description) and switched Swamp and Desert.

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Geoff has a point-- but my impression is that the majority of players go with a custom race in games like MoO that have robust species creation. I would expect the use of the pre-made species to be most common among new players, who want to jump right into the game and don't know what picks to choose. So from the standpoint of giving the player enough choices i think it's find to have only 4 or 5 playable species.

But from the standpoint of imperial opponents, i think it would be better to have a very large number of imperial species, otherwise it feels like you are fighting the same guys in every game.

But there's no reason that ultimately the set of playable species has to include all the imperial species. Or we could put a small group of "recommended" species at the top, but allow access to all the imperial species with lesser emphasis.

Either way, i'm not especially worried at this point about picking a number

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I've just glanced at the patch, but...

Have you tested that?
My expectation, is that it would only make population loss to starvation more or less likely, but make no difference when there was enough food. If i'm right, i don't think that's a very interesting pick



.
I don't want to stray away from the patterns of having one preferred EP, with increasingly distant EP being increasingly bad. I think it's fine (subject to play-testing) if the rate at which distant EPs get worse varies, but i think it overcomplicates what is supposed to be a very simple system to irregularly pick and choose.

Also it makes terraforming counter-intuitive and odd, as sometimes terraforming a planet would make it worse (since terraforming heads on the shortest path to the best EP).


Standard Wheel

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I think a slight asymmetry in the wheel could still work without causing the thing to be too strange, and without causing terraforming paradoxes. (eg, if one of the top hostiles becomes poor, and/or if one of the poors become adequate)

That could be interesting for an already strange specie, but I agree that it should not be used too much.

I thought Health affects the population growth rate. The growth should be proportional to health-20.


Argh, i haven't thought about terraforming. I will fix it.

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Here is the new terraforming compatible patch.

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Your patch replaces all Unix end of lines by Windows end of lines, which is very bad, because a large part of what is (maybe?) modified is not really easy to look at.

Besides that, I think you should have declared new macros for your new EPs.

As for the Ugmorrs, I suggest putting the Swamps and Tundra to Poor instead of Hostile. Else terraforming would be very long for Terran planets… (and, that would put a Poor planet in the way, too)

Yeah. Higher health gives a boost to population growth, which has typically been the main reason for having techs that increase health.

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Thanks for the hint. I was wondering why the patch replaced everything.


A macro only pays off if the configuration is used at least twice. I don't know if future species want to use these tables.


Ugmorrs are a minor species at the moment. I think there is no reason to give them a "fair" environmental table. I might be swayed to make Swamp poor, but Tundra should be hostile for a heat loving species.

Here is the functional identical version with Unix line breaks and based on r4733:

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