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Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:49 pm
by Geoff the Medio
labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:28 pmEveryone seems to want to argue from reality now. And there should be clear, game mechanic based rules for what goes where.
They are organized thematically, not based (primarily) on game mechanics. This is not motivated by a "realism" argument.
I think that all the output (industry, influence and research) effecting policies should be in the same category.
This seems to assume or require hard divisions between what game mechanics a policy can effect, eg. no policy could boost research by making ships slower, or both remove species like-dislike stability effects and also boost influence, since by your categorization, those would belong in separate policy slot types.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:56 pm
by labgnome
Oberlus wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:32 pm
labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:28 pm there should be clear, game mechanic based rules for what goes where.
They are clear enough to me.
Then I am sure you can explain them here.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:01 pm
by labgnome
Geoff the Medio wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:49 pm
labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 8:28 pmEveryone seems to want to argue from reality now. And there should be clear, game mechanic based rules for what goes where.
They are organized thematically, not based (primarily) on game mechanics. This is not motivated by a "realism" argument.
That strikes me as a very arbitrary way to divide them up.
I think that all the output (industry, influence and research) effecting policies should be in the same category.
This seems to assume or require hard divisions between what game mechanics a policy can effect, eg. no policy could boost research by making ships slower, or both remove species like-dislike stability effects and also boost influence, since by your categorization, those would belong in separate policy slot types.
Not necessarily, however I would say that output boosting effects should take priority over other effects for classification purposes.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2020 7:14 am
by Oberlus
labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:01 pm That strikes me as a very arbitrary way to divide them up.
As long as you pick a way to organize this among several alternatives, you are taking an arbitrary decision.
Yours is also arbitrary, just less interesting to play with, giving less strategic variety, and rather boring.

labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 9:56 pm Then I am sure you can explain them here.
Sure. I don't think I can do it better than Geoff here, but:

Military policies' concept and effects are combat-related. Main affected game mechanics: troops, shields, planet defenses, detection, stealth, ships (if not clearly related to social or economics), influence through population control...

Economic policies' concept and effects are directly related to the economic system, and more particularly to production and supply (the economic concepts, not FO mechanics). Main affected game mechanics: supply range, stockpile capacity, industry, research and influence (if not clearly related to social), population...
Something about harvesting a star's energy, or getting extra output from certain resource thanks to a certain extraction/processing technique, or increasing available resources for the population to grow (artificial food), or moving stuff faster between colonies...

Social policies' concept and effects are directly related to social systems, and particularly to how is people organized, the relation between rulers and people, ideals, public opinion control, etc. Main affected game mechanics: influence output and upkeep, colonization cost and speed, population growth, species opinion, stability...
A production boost from slaving a planets population would fall in this category instead of economics, unless we have too many social policies and not enough economic policies and thus we prefer to make it an economic policy.

It's relatively ambiguous and rather flexible, just like reality in general. In reality, strong, separate, clear categorizations are illusions/delusions, except for certain abstract or physical concepts like "atom", "mass", classes of numbers, etc.
labgnome wrote: Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:01 pm I would say that output boosting effects should take priority over other effects for classification purposes.
That seems rather arbitraty.
What would be the reason?

If we allow for a given mechanic to be affected by more than one policy category, we allow for more specialized strategies. That is good for gameplay.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2020 4:20 pm
by Thinker55
I have a basic question: How do you obtain IPs? I'm down 300 anddropping 6 further into the hole every turn, while otherwise doing fine. Why are colonies pushing out negative IPs and how do I fix it?

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2020 4:36 pm
by Oberlus
Thinker55 wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 4:20 pm I have a basic question: How do you obtain IPs? I'm down 300 anddropping 6 further into the hole every turn, while otherwise doing fine. Why are colonies pushing out negative IPs and how do I fix it?
Each colony consumes IP each turn, a fixed amount (for now, still in development). Homeworlds consume more.
Your palace produce enough IP for you to ignore it at start, but once you have several colonies you get into defficit.
You can set colonies to influence focus to produce more IP.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2020 5:56 pm
by Thinker55
Thanks!

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:47 am
by LienRag
In the first game where I test the new 0.5 version, I have two military slots (one from Command Camp, the other I don't know) and I can't find a way to put a military policy in the second slot : I click on the one I want, drag it to the empty slot, and it just goes back to its initial position (on the list of available policies)...

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:55 am
by Oberlus
LienRag wrote: Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:47 am In the first game where I test the new 0.5 version, I have two military slots (one from Command Camp, the other I don't know) and I can't find a way to put a military policy in the second slot : I click on the one I want, drag it to the empty slot, and it just goes back to its initial position (on the list of available policies)...
Check out prerequisites and exclusions of that policy. Or tell the name of the policy for us to check it out (here some more verbosity would be helpful).

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2020 1:13 am
by LienRag
It was Marine Recruitment, but actually the problem was just that I was in negative Influence Points - stupid me.
Though, it would be nice to have a warning, rather than just having it not working - I'm not certain that I'm the only player that can be sloppy at times.
By the way, the second military slot came with Distributed Thought Computing (don't understand why this tech gives a military slot). It would be nice to be told in the sitrep that there is a new slot available, because a player usually doesn't need to check the Policy panel often, only when he envisages to change policies. And players shouldn't be expected to know the Tech Tree by heart...

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2020 1:20 am
by Oberlus
Yeah, the UI could be improved. Maybe it's me that need to get used to it, but I incur into IP deficit while expanding and might take some turns until I notice. Is it less obvious than the PP/RP warning signs?
Also, clicking on the influence sign next to current IP stockpile could open the policies window.
Allocation of policies to techs might not be optimal. We could need more techs also, or alter fluff.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 10:09 am
by freem
LienRag wrote: Sun Sep 06, 2020 1:13 am players shouldn't be expected to know the Tech Tree by heart...
That.
But at least, there is now a bigger incentive to research "architectural psychology" tech earlier for the 1st social slot (the 2nd one is obtained from the megalith's technology).

What I think should be improved there is how to make changes: currently, one must remove everything to replace/remove a single element. The need to remove everything to remove a single element is also in the "conception" dialog, so I guess "it's ok" but not being able to replace an element is pretty annoying and surprising.

About the lack of possibility to remove something, maybe it could be worked around with an "empty" icon? That would add one useless element, sure, but seems the easier "fix" to me?

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 11:38 am
by Oberlus
freem wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 10:09 am What I think should be improved there is how to make changes: currently, one must remove everything to replace/remove a single element. The need to remove everything to remove a single element is also in the "conception" dialog, so I guess "it's ok" but not being able to replace an element is pretty annoying and surprising.

About the lack of possibility to remove something, maybe it could be worked around with an "empty" icon? That would add one useless element, sure, but seems the easier "fix" to me?
To remove what from where?
I have no idea what are you talking about :lol:

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 6:50 pm
by defaultuser
My guess on what freem is getting at is that you can add a item to the research queue and all prerequisites will also be added. However, if you delete something, then it wouldn't affect the prereqs. However, sometimes you'd want those to remain either because they're useful on their own or as a prereq for something else. You might delete partially-completed items or have to add back ones.

Re: Testing Government and Influence

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 7:09 pm
by Oberlus
defaultuser wrote: Thu Sep 17, 2020 6:50 pm My guess on what freem is getting at is that you can add a item to the research queue and all prerequisites will also be added. However, if you delete something, then it wouldn't affect the prereqs. However, sometimes you'd want those to remain either because they're useful on their own or as a prereq for something else. You might delete partially-completed items or have to add back ones.
Oh, right...

When you are removing a tech X from queue, any other queued tech that has X as a prerreq. is safe to be removed, since those won't get any RP ever until X is queued again and researched. So it makes sense when removing a tech to recursively remove from queue every other tech that has as a prerreq. any of the removed techs.
Worth a feature request IMO.