FreeOrion

We used to have Balanced Focus, and i miss it, especially at the beginning of the game. From what i remember, it was removed because it really wasn't compatible (not without inordinate complexity) with the then new effects driven way of creating foci.

Well, now with Macros, i believe i have figured out how to reintroduce a balanced focus, with minimal additional complexity to the macros.

The balanced focus would produce 25% of what would normally be produced in each of the 4 regular foci.
Species picks would apply.
Specials, Tech, & Buildings that require a particular focus would not apply.

Assuming i can make it work, is there any reason i shouldn't put this back in?

EDIT:
Drat, it won't work easily with the new farming effects.

EDIT2:
It works as mostly expected for Industry, Mining, & Research.
However, i though effects in species were evaluated first. From the numbers it appears that buildings are evaluated before some species effects and after others.

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What about species with other number of foci? Would there be [33%, 33%, 33%] (sums to 100%, more or less) for species with only three foci, or just [25%, 25%, 25%] (constant multiplier 25%)?

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Good point.
I hadn't thought of that yet, but that should be easy enough, except possibly for food, which i haven't figure out yet.

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I'd rather not bring back balanced focus. Having to make an actual choice of what to focus on is important, I think, and having a "balanced" focus gives the player an easy non-choice default option. With the recent changes to food/farming/population/health, the one use case for a balanced focus is gone; there's no longer a need for isolated planets to farm a bit to sustain themselves, and then produce a little bit of something else instead of lots of useless extra food.
One thing I dislike is that "balanced focus" is a bit self-contradictory, and leads to desire to use "focused focus" in contrast as I discovered in the following paragraphs...

A more substantial problem with balanced focus and secondary focus settings was the lack of content to work with them. It's easy to come up with a tech that should boost primary focus on minerals output, but almost nobody ever made a tech or building that boosted things at other focus settings. Using a fixed fraction of the bonus would help solve this, but adding a * 25% multiplier on the end to species won't adequately implement this, as it will also reduce the bonus from focus-independent effects. Rather, you'd need to add a separate set of effectsgroups for each bit of content to give a lower bonus when on balanced focus.

The name "balanced" is also quite misleading, as it's not guaranteed, or even likely, to produce an equal amount of each resource, due to different techs or buildings being applicable to a given planet.

For the same reason, giving 25% vs. 33% won't reliably given an "equal value" even if the number of foci is always the same. If one focus gives a somewhat larger bonus to a planet (eg. +12 or +12 or +12 or +30) then 33% balanced on 4 meters would give (+4 and +4 and + 4 and +10 = +22; less than the +30 of a focused focus on the good resource).

Also, while macros make scripting easier, please don't go crazy with tons of effectsgroups to cover lots of narrow cases and situations. Those conditions do still need to all be evaluated every turn, which will affect performance, and can make things harder to debug.

A strategy of setting all your planets to "balanced" would go over about as well as doing nothing but building Mark I ships. If the player reads the tech summaries at all, he'll be eager to dedicate planet specifically to research, etc. to take advantage of the many bonuses that only apply to "focused" planets.


That's not the only use case.
Say you have a planet isolated from the rest by distance or blockade. You want to build something there. Currently you can't. Either you are focused on Minerals (which don't get stockpiled), or you can focus on Industry (which does nothing without minerals). And your new food focus does nothing to the planet, so isolated planets are wastes unless set to "Research".

In a similar, but less dramatic way, it would be useful to have a balanced focus in the early game before you have enough planets for each foci.Then you could increase your supply of all the resources, beyond the freebees that the homeworld supplies.

Without balanced, the current system is sometimes very awkard.


Why should there be content that only provides boosts for the balanced focus? In it's position as a simple fallback option IMHO there should not be much content that boosts only balanced planets.


That's what i don't understand. I though species.txt effects were supposed to happen first.


Point made. A better name can be found. But for sanities sake, i'll keep calling it "balanced" until that name is found. In the mean time, let it be clear, i don't consider equality of outcome important or even desirable.



I share your concern for keeping things simple-- not only because i'll end up working with most of the effects groups again, but because generally (not always) a very complicated effects group results from overly complicated game mechanics.

Overall i think i've left things a little simpler than i found them, if you include all the effectsgroups (many undocumented in the pedia) i cut/streamlined in recalibrating population. The stuff i'm adding for Heavy Mining probably would probably be balanced by the stuff obsolete by the removal of "health" (though i know it's all currently turned to population boosts).

I'm most concerned with the effects groups that deal with popuation, those are far and away the longest mass of rules.

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How is this handled when you only have your homeworld? Are there some minerals already in the cache at the start of the game? I don't remember having to alternate between turns of mining and turns of industry to build anything on the initial planet... Or can a planet generate production while not being industry-focused? Maybe some minimal amount of PP should be generated (or only on planets with non-farming foci, as both research and mining can imply some amount of productivity)?

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The "Cultural Archives" grants your homeworld some research, mining, & industry no matter what your focus.

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Pretty sure they happen last now (at your request, IIRC).

Also, I agree with the thing about not being able to build anything on an isolated planet. It can be awkward sometimes.

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Yeah, i did ask for it, but i didn't think i changed Geoff's mind.

Tags could accomplish easily enough what i wanted it for -- stuff like 125% attack strength, so i dropped it. Trying to make some sort of "balanced" focus with species evaluated anywhere but first seems pretty hairy.

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If we don't really need lone, stranded colonies to be able to produce stuff, then I don't think we really need a balanced focus, but it might end up being a big deal...

I'm starting to think that Minerals are a better candidate for removal than Food...

Edit: There could maybe be a (perhaps unlockable) combined mining/industry focus, if that would solve the problem.

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I've previously suggested that minerals & industry be combined into a single "production" resource like MoO to avoid the micromanagment issue of matching industry to mineral supply. I don't see much value in having both, though we'd sure have to change a lot of content.

If we had "production" instead of "minerals & industry", the case for some sort of "balanced" would be much weaker.

As to unlocking it, a "balanced" setting IMHO is most likely to be wanted in the early game.

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I don't see that as a major problem... If left as it is, it gives more motivation to keep and empire connected so that different planets can work together. Alternatively, this seems like something that would be fixed by content additions. I wouldn't object to having some (relatively small) focus-independent bonuses to various resource outputs that have to be unlocked as a specific strategic choice. This would let players be somewhat more productive with far-spread and unconnected planets, but this wouldn't be a very useful strategy by default, without specifically choosing things that support it.That's a particular case where I specifically want not to let players do everything equally. With a suitable boost to homeworld industry, there would be the option to produce growth boosts for new colonies ("food"), minerals to use with the free industry to produce ships, or research techs. You wouldn't be able to do multiple things will until you expand. If the main motivation is to let the homeworld build stuff on its own, that's fine with me, but I'd rather do that with a homeworld free industry (or minerals stockpile to start with, I suppose) than adding a new focus.Unless discrete planet types and sizes are replaced with statistics like "temperature", "gravity", "biomass", "insolation", etc. there will need to be a fairly big set of conditions to select which population bonuses to give to planets depending on their size and type... I don't think that's easily avoidable.http://freeorion.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freeorion?view=revision&revision=4675
I didn't have any major objections to the reordering; I was just describing the rationale for why it was original ordered as it was.
I'm not immediately opposed to this, but am a bit worried about there then really being no need to have planets connected to eachother and able to share resource output... and I think it's nice for there to be a distinction between good mining planets and good industry planets.

It might make more sense to drop minerals as a resource if there are (unstockpilable) strategic resources of some sort implemented, though. If these resources skew towards a decent variety of materials that need to be mined, then there could still be a mining focus that would be required to extract them from planets, which might suffice for making some planets good for mining and some for industry generation. One issue to consider for this, though, is whether a single supply is enough for any empire, or if (like some later Civ games) a single source has a limited output, and building more than X things that use that resource requires multiple sources of the resource. This is really a brainstorming issue, though...

I was thinking just the opposite, actually. Currently, there's almost no reason to ever deliberately have planets that are separated from the main resource group, and I think that deciding when and where to cut your empire into discrete chunks is a potentially very significant strategic choice, which would be much more interesting than everyone trying to keep their empires as single homogeneous blobs.

With the ongoing changes to food, the cost of having an additional resource group to take care of would be the need for an additional farming planet in that group, and the need to split the empire's forces between two regions, where as the advantage would be a better opportunity for good planets, as well as the advantage of splitting one's eggs between two baskets.

This I can agree with...

...and this as well.

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I scrapped the other things i was going to say, because they are mostly moot if we do drop minerals (or merge generic minerals with industry) in favor of "strategic resources". Maybe we should look seriously at doing that. The content isn't going to be any easier to revise further down the road. Then v0.5 can be the "Resource Revision Release".


There's the motive of grabbing a new useful species, or valuable special, or strategic choke-point. I've gone out on a long limb to grab an Oorbouls planet to take advantage of their Ultimate Detection pick.

To me there's lots of strategic interest in weather you expand quickly to the best planets leaving yourself with an easily attacked/blockaded empire, or weather you expand cautiously in the direction that's most easily defensible, ignoring pretty planets that might easily get cut off.

Since your enemies will theoretically be working to cut your empire into chunks, i don't think we need to go out of our way to make it useful.

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We could leave mining focus and industry focus as alternative ways of generating production. Mining focus would be most efficient on mineral rich planets, while industry focus would be more universal.

I also like the idea of strategic resources and requirement of mining focus (possibly any mining focus, foci could get flags like EXTRACTS_STRATEGIC_RESOURCES) to extract them.

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