Make influence focus produce 0.2*pop IP instead of 3 IP

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Oberlus
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Make influence focus produce 0.2*pop IP instead of 3 IP

#1 Post by Oberlus »

With current implementation, influence focus gives you +3 IP regardless of anything else (population, stability).
This encourages players to use for influence focus the planets that have low population or have been recently conquered, with no trouble to switch focus later since you only need 3 turns to reach maximum IP output. It's a bit boring/not challenging. Also, it makes quite impractical to set your capital to influence, while it kinda seems like the logical thing to do if you really want to influence your empire.
If we make influence focus work like the other two resources (RP and PP) all the above "problem" is gone. It would also help balancing influence output and influence upkeep late/big game (the more colonies, the more influence they consume, but also the older/bigger the colonies, the more influence they produce to fund further expansion).

Ophiuchus
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Re: Make influence focus produce 0.2*pop IP instead of 3 IP

#2 Post by Ophiuchus »

Mostly agree for the likely scenario that you have to put quite a number of your planets to influence focus.
In the long run you put your big planets on resource production and have the smaller planets on influence.

And if you have to put a lot of planets on influence, you could pretty fast run into the situation that you want to colonize smaller planets just because you need to free up the bigger planets for resource production - boring. Note that that is a bit different if influence upkeep is growing strongly with the number of colonies - you will still carefully choose all colony locations, because "filler" planets are just too costly in terms of influence.

The other side is that it is nice that bigger planet not always means better planet. (This is mostly for supply. And of course location (usually also for supply)
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Re: Make influence focus produce 0.2*pop IP instead of 3 IP

#3 Post by Oberlus »

Ophiuchus wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:33 pmif influence upkeep is growing strongly with the number of colonies - you will still carefully choose all colony locations, because "filler" planets are just too costly in terms of influence.
If influence grows strongly, the range of number of planets an empire can afford without getting some sort of influence upgrade (greater output or lower upkeep) becomes smaller, and you need too many of those different techs/policies/buildings if you want to make it balanced for both small and large galaxies (but probably not for huge galaxies). We should make it balanced for a wide range of galaxy sizes with just one tech branch of 4 levels for the main influence-upkeep-policy and 2 or 3 more complementary techs to improve influence output.
With N^1.5 we'll need three upgrades (kinda customary in FO) of the better-influence-upkeep policy to be able to colonize 1000 planets, with some boosts to output it should make it possible to own 3000 worlds (which should be possible, for aaaaaaaall those players that appreciate humongous game settings with 5000 systems).

Ophiuchus
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Re: Make influence focus produce 0.2*pop IP instead of 3 IP

#4 Post by Ophiuchus »

Oberlus wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 12:42 am
Ophiuchus wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:33 pmif influence upkeep is growing strongly with the number of colonies - you will still carefully choose all colony locations, because "filler" planets are just too costly in terms of influence.
If influence grows strongly, ..
I think your approach is totally legit and i look forward to playtesting.

I was arguing against too-low-upkeep-growth-plus-all-planets-produce-the-same-amount-of-influence.

Not against low upkeep growth with e.g. pop-based influence.
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