Production Priorities
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With Add priorities and attempt to balance Industry modifiers I've used the relatively new ability to decide when an effect is processed to try to balance out various effect timings to make the Good/Bad Industry species modifiers more effective. Before doing this virtually all effects were added after the species modifiers making them effectively irrelevent after the first 20 or so turns.
This is a follow on from the work I did a few months back on prioritising the Population modifiers (before I did this virtually all modifiers happened before the species effect making Good Population stupid-good and Bad Population actively debilitating. I'm going to be working on Research priorities over the next couple weeks (for which a separate thread will be started when I've got my head around the basics).Early is for effects that are then modified by species traits, default should be just the species trait, late and very late for items we don't want modified by species (for either balance or flavour), and then the concentration camp set max is given a very high number to ensure it does just that.
So, as you can see from my brief commit message above, effects are split into two main groups, before and after the species modifier.
I have two questions for the other testers (ie anyone playing with the new Test builds onwards).
1) Have I set the priorities for all/most techs in the right places, are there any you think should/should not be modified by the species traits?
2) Does this make any particular species substantially weaker or stronger in a bad way?
For 2) I am specifically worried about Gysache (because I'm always worried about them) and Egassem (because, seriously, get a large world full of these guys with end game level of bonuses and see how good Ultimate Industry now is).
Due to the problems Bad Population gave them, Egassem have over the last couple years been given huge numbers of other bonuses, Great Supply and Great Attack Troops being the most obviously powerful bonuses. I need feedback from some players starting games with these new numbers and playing through to see if, when you play to those specific strengths, we need to tone down some of their bonuses in some way.
I genuinely think we almost certainly need to here. There's a good chance that for the next week at least the Egassem are the most powerful Playable race.
(NB: they'll lose a bit of power regardless when the Research priorities are set as they'll almost completely lose the ability to research things effectively on their own, probably, but even so the early power they have will be scary I think)
For Q 1) There are a few I was unsure about, I think setting Pure Energy Metabolism in the Early group is potentially too much (both ways, Bad traits lose a fair bit as well—on the other hand PEM is possibly an overpowered tech regardless of what we do with it), on the other hand having Collective Thought Network in the late group makes it a bit weaker for Good/Great species.
NB: the idea of setting some priorities to strengthen these traits in the early, mid and late game is definitely happening. The specifics of which effects are set where and just how good the difference is/ought to be is definitely negotiable. Whether we need to then rebalance other effects to reduce or strengthen species that win/lose as a result of these changes is also negotiable.