FreeOrion

Important questions are: is the policy a commitment? Why does it needs to be a commitment ? Because it provides momentum. It might take you somewhere you did not intend to. Your enemies can build their strategy on it. This results in depth of choices and good storytelling. Well, you spin it in a co...

An alternative that needs less changes: make self-sustaining apply only on good environments (so it's like an extra gaia instead of 3 growth specials). To get full gain you need to use terraforming a lot. It doesn't let you get poor planets sooner than anyone else. Very good thinking Oberlus, you n...

See the 50 uu circle? An abbadoni scout here can see both approach lines though a fast enough ship will slip through the southern system and possibly even the north one by going NW and taking the long way round. (which requires long fuel or supply and is much slower) bottleneck.png This picture all...

Energy hulls also needs love, no body goes for those early, seldom mid game, and so they are unused in many games. And robos are too easy/fast to start with. The problem with the Energy Hull line is that they're supposed to be fast but they actually aren't. Their flagship indeed has 120 speed but w...

Could "Engage at will" be a military policy [in which] all enemy fleet passing by would be engaged by any planet with higher than zero Defense. I don't know how to do that in FOCS, though; Changing the conditions for initiating combat in a system is not possible in FOCS as it is now. How to impleme...

Basic Damage Control is nearly useless in war, you are right about that, but that's not its main use, that would be exploration. When a ship encounters a space monster (or a competing explorer) once in a while, healing even slowly during the while allows it to survive the next once. But globally ind...

I have to point that such a setting, if it gets implemented, should not get in the way of treason - "highlander"-style victory condition (and diplomacy subsequent diplomacy) is something that should always be on the menu (as I explained in details elsewhere, I believe it's the only one which makes a...

The real question imho is whether Influence costs should be static or dynamic : i.e whether a new planet (or whatever) should modify the Influence cost of previous planets or have only its own Influence cost be raised. So there are two questions actually monotonic (static) vs non-monotic expansion ...

Indeed, the advanced Organic Hulls tend to come in a batch... Getting something more advanced than the Protoplasmic Hull (which has its advantage, but is extremely low structure, so not a potent fighter out of stealthy all-out first strikes) needs a long and quite low-return investment, but once the...

Oh, apparently you were talking mostly about terraforming rather than Gaïa, my mistake.
I think Oberlus's answer is quite an apt summary, then.

Right now it is 100 * habitable size weighted with some factors, meaning that you are looking at ~300 PP to terraform a medium planet one step, which increases population by 6 or so. After the recent nerf to bonus, that means that it takes 72 turns to pay off at late game 0.7PP per population! This...

On another topic, I'm trying to modify the way the Derelict Tanker works. For memory, here is the original Derelict Tanker FOCS file : Special name = "DERELICT_SPECIAL3" // FUEL description = "DERELICT_SPECIAL_DESC" stealth = 45 spawnrate = 0.5 spawnlimit = 100 location = And [ System Not Contains C...

It seems you are right, the problem with arrakiswheat was indeed a typo, and the log file¹ showed an error message "inexisting texture". What really puzzles me is that for the other icons (cropped and copied over), I had double and triple-checked that they were the cause of the problem (copying the ...

The real question imho is whether Influence costs should be static or dynamic : i.e whether a new planet (or whatever) should modify the Influence cost of previous planets or have only its own Influence cost be raised. I strongly believe that Static is better (and it would make much more strategic t...

I just thought of another mechanism that could be interesting for Influence projects : sunken bids ("Enchères perdues" in French, I'm not sure if my translation is right). In sunken bids, each player secretly invests Influence Points for the amount of his choice (assuming he has enough IP in stock),...