Icemania
Posts: 1847
Joined: 6/5/2013 From: Australia Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Icemania Oh man this is meant to be my time off work ... Just tracked down an undocumented feature of the new freighter shrinking introduced in 1.9.5.8. The observation was that at the start of the game the modified (larger) freighters in the Mod were available to most races. However, this was not the case for the Ackdarian, Gizurean, Kiadian, Wekkarus and Jintus. The freighter designs were exactly the same. Why just these races? What do they have in common? They all have a Speed/Agility Energy Research Focus. But so do the Sluken, Enton and Riktoh ... yet they worked fine?! The problem was the field "ResearchDesignOverallFocus". If this is set to 1 (Speed/Agility) then the shrinkage algorithm changes. In order to reach the size limit needed, the number of thrusters in particular needs to be reduced by the game, which this setting prevented. When I changed it to 0 (Balanced) the freighters for the remaining races all shrunk to align with the others. I don't think changing this field matters otherwise, but I don't really know, as there is no detail in the Modding guide about exactly what it does (as is the case for the majority of fields). Since the Research Orders and Design Templates are customised anyway, hopefully not, but please report any problems with 1.02 once it's released. While civilian ship shrinkage looks good for pre-warp it remains problematic with 1.9.5.8 with a normal start. The game will reduce the number of thrusters to an extent but then give up. It doesn't reduce the number of cargo bays, for example. As you all know I don't want to kneecap the civilian economy but going back to the slow / limited extraction Vanilla designs. What I'm doing is increasing construction sizes by one class at each technology level. This was already done for Orbital assembly (Size 160 limit increased to Size 230) for similar reasons. Changing Space Construction from a Size 230 limit to a Size 300 limit will resolve the problem. But it will also mean larger ships are available a bit earlier generally. With Resupply Ships, I like the suggestions made previously to make them available earlier, helping the AI with early game resource shortages. If they are made available at Enhanced Construction the design size limit would be 1200, still quite beefy. Accelerated Construction is still an appealing technology as it grants access to an important Wonder relatively early in the Technology Tree.
< Message edited by Icemania -- 8/31/2014 3:05:38 AM >
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