FreeOrion

Im working on updating the English String table with up-to-date stats and have a question.


If it has in the first effects group:

What does this mean in the second effects group?


Also what does this mean? Does it mean it only works if the population is equal to 1?

Does this mean the special affects every planet?

Also what are all the planet types? ie: Hostile, Good...etc

And could you explane all that this does?

One effects group has an effect that increases target construction by 30. The other has an effect that increases target construction by 10. These may or may not stack, depending on conditions and stacking groups.
See http://freeorion.org/index.php/Effects#MeterValue
I assume this is still a BuildingType definition, so there is no "special" to speak of. If this is a location condition for a BuildingType, it determines where the building can be produced by empires. In this case, any location owned by the empire being checked is allowed, although in the game this is further limited to planets, and not any other type of object (eg. ships, fleets, systems).
See http://freeorion.org/index.php/Effects#Planet_.2F_Star
That defines a tech with one effects group which increases the target construction of all planets with population 1 or greater owned by the empire that researches the tech.

Ahhh..I see.

What about this? Does this mean that this building stacks and it adds on the effects for every instance of the building? Whats "activation" mean?



So the Megalith has a 1 time effect of 10 construction plus 30 for every instance?

Activation conditions and stacking groups are discussed here:

http://freeorion.org/index.php/Effects#EffectsGroup

In short, things with a stacking group don't stack with other things that have the same stacking group.

So if you activate a effect with a stacking group name, and then later you research another tech with the same stacking group name, it ignores the second techs stacking group effects group?

Also, whats "Contains Source" mean in a scope? And how can I tell if it effects your whole empire or just that specific planet?

The ordering of which tech's effects are applied first probably isn't dependent on the order they were researched. What order they are applied might be alphabetical by the tech's (internal) name, but I'm not sure about that.
Objects that contain the source object are affected by the effects group. If it's a Building Type, the source is the building object, so the planet or the system could be affected. If it's a ship, the Fleet or System (if in a system) could be affected. For techs, I think each empire's homeworld is the source object for that empire's techs, though using this fact for anything is somewhat discouraged.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Ah...I get it.

Im wondering how I could explane Stacking effect groups to the player so they know whats going on if they reserach a stacking group that adds 5 to something each and the player wonders why they it only increased 5......

You write in the description: "Effect is non-stacking." Also, don't use the word "each", as that implies stacking effects.

Also, players don't research, or even know anything about stacking groups, so I don't see why that would be cause for confusion for the player.

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Example:

Well if you research something like "ATroops", that gives your empire 5 troop points (one effects group) and 10 troop points (stacking effect group "TROOPS_SPECIAL").

The player will now have 15 troops on every planet.

Then the player researches another tech like "BTroops" that offers 8 troop points (one effects group) and 3 troop points (Stacking event group "TROOPS_SPECIAL")

If i understand correctly the player would have a total of 20 troop points (5+10+8), The player would wonder why they did not have the full 23 (5+10+8+3) (The ATroops stacking bonus took precedence). Thats why I think we should say something about stacking in the description.

"This offers xxx plus a additional xxx which is a "Empire Supply Line" Stacking bonus.

Get it?

I certainly agree with you about this, but I'm pretty sure that any effects with stacking groups are specified as such in the stringtable entry. From scanning the files, I think the biggest current use is for buildings so that multiple copies of the same building don't double the power, which often doesn't make sense logically and would usually be a bad decision gameplay-wise. If you think that building that don't stack with themselves should be marked as such, I think I agree with you about that as well.

It seems all stacking effects are completely omitted from the stringtable which seems to make the results look erroneous when the player sees effect changes that are not documented....(or does not see effect changes that he expects due to stacking)

I havent checked to see what happons if you make multiple buildings of the same type to see how the effects/bonuses are treated.

Sometimes the math is complicated to accomplish something that is easy to explain and understand with words.

But if the effects for something are needlessly complicated, please bring them up so we can consider ways to simplify the effect, and thus make it easier to understand and explain.

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I think it would be simpler and "friendlier" to have just 1 effects group per a tech/building where the effect is easy to understand and straightforward. We could split the multiple effects into separate techs instead of having highly complex fine grained techs.

The player builds a building and gets a bonus and/or a reduction which is clearly stated in the string table. Thats how simple it should be.

Some of these effects are proving to be so specialized im having a hard time figuring out what they do.

Let me fuss with the string-table more and ill post a list of overly complex techs i recommend be simplified or broken down into simpler techs.

Alirght.

Iv went though the Buildings.txt and the Specials.txt and made a lot of modifications to the English string table. Iv improved some of the grammer, fixed some punctuation and spelling here and there as well as removed extra spaces and simplified some of the descriptions. (specifcying "Target Health" insted of just "Health" seems to be extra words that are implied I think). Iv also capitalized anything that is a stat. Iv gone though half the tech tree making corrections also. I also moved the meat first to the specials.

I still need to finish the tech tree and run a spell checker to get the rest of the spelling issues (I even made a few typos) and do some mor standardization (I can tell a few diffrent writters editied this file becuase I found 3 distinct styles which seems inconsistent.

I have included a rough draft of what I got so far. I think its much improved but still needs hours more of work.

It will be so nice to get updated and corrected meat.

Imperial Palace, Megalith, Concentration Camps, Industrial Farms, Black Hole Power Generator, Tectonic Instability, High Axial Tilt, Very Slow Rotation and Tidally Locked Rotation all have newly introduced spelling or grammatical errors, or are worded much more awkwardly than before. There are also a few other descriptions that have retained grammatical errors or missing words, but those aren't really your fault...

Genome bank contains a sentence in the fluff which explains vaguely what the building does, and seems out of place now that its effect is fully described above.

I don't know if this is due to your edit or eleazar's, but many of the descriptions don't flow as well if the order of the meat and the fluff is simply reversed; for instance, starting the Space Elevator description with "The supply meter of the planet which contains this building is tripled" doesn't sound very good - much better is something like "Triples Supply on the planet on which it is built." Gaia Transformation is another building with this problem, probably among others, and in the case of Solar Orbital Generator, the description barely makes sense anymore. (Also, you didn't capitalize "supply" in this description - was that deliberate? There are also many other cases of this.)

Collective Thought Network says:

"Increases... research on Planets with the Research focus by one and a half."

And lastly, the sole purpose of Construction in the game at the moment is to increase resource supply length. This is why all the things that affect construction say (or rather, said) "Increases/decreases max resource supply range by X."

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