Life support ranges

Are trying out the changes from a brand new game or a saved one? I doubt a saved game would recognize the changes you've made, the values would be stored in the save.

All my attempts have been made using new games. The fact that I can see the changes to range indicates that the data in the mod is being used, just not consistently.

I hope you find the answer. I wanted to make myself a range-nerf mod sometime.

Note that the range granted by life support modules varies depending on map size, though I'm not sure of the exact amount it varies. This could be the source of the apparent inconsistency.

If you want to reduce range across the board, you can also grant all races natural negative range modifiers in raceconfig; AFAIK some users who wanted much reduced ranges have seen very good results from that method.

I'm guessing that's the case. However, this may mean that map size is the main variant factor in determining the range granted. I guess I may have to consider increasing the size of the range modules (decreasing as you develop more sophisticated, less bulky support technology) to compensate.

Well, I've finally got the mod off the ground. As it turned out, editing the raceconfig file proved very necessary. Of course, for this to take effect, races must be cleared before they're used in a new game, or edited to make the range penalty take effect.

The next step from here is to look at nudging the priority of life-support technology. The mod I'm working on makes early life-support modules large (perhaps a little too large, I'm wondering) and all life support is a bit more expensive than it used to be. The more research you accomplish, the better things get. Miniaturisation will make a bit of difference to this situation, of course.

What concerns me is that this will may draw the game out unnecessarily, and as I've read the AI may not be able to adapt to this penalty and compensate by using starbases and colonising planets to extend range. I guess I'm only going to find out once I try a game

Instead of modifying the raceconfig.xml to give each race a penalty, you could just lower the Range increments each module gives, then up their Sizemod so that the module takes a percentage of the hull size.

If you set the Size to 0 and the Sizemod to 25, one life support module will take up 25% of the ship. Makes exploration craft 'special' =D

I personally use increments 1,2,3,4,5 respectively, and Sizemod 25 for Basic Support, 22 for General, 19 for Enhanced, etc.

Doing this kept those ugly range penalties out of the race config window, and it goes along with the natural scaling the map sizes do.

On a huge map, a basic support module will increase a ship's base range by 0.7 even if you specify an increment of just 1, and the ship already gets 0.7 to start with. The range penalties may look ugly but it's the only way at present to dial down the modifier given by the map size.

The range penalty means that to start out with, planets and starbases grant quite a small radius of range increase, making life support on ships useful. Because the mod also makes early life support more bulky though, it tends only to be useful for finding nearby planets to settle.

When I played around with range, I found there was a map-dependent value that figured in many places. I don't have my notes, but this is what I remember:

ShipRange = 2*MapVal + RaceVal + nModules*(MapVal + ModuleVal);

Measured in parsecs (little squares), the maps values were:

Tiny: 1
Small: 2
Medium: 3
Large: 6
Huge: 10
Gigantic: 13

RaceVal was 0.2*RaceBonus, your racial range bonus.

So, if you set the basic life support modules to be 1, then each module would actually give 11 range on a Huge map. Throw in the race bonus and the 20 range you get for just being on a Huge map, and it's hard to severely restrict range.

Then there was hidden cap, where even if you had zero range, you could still make it to the edge of the sector from one of your planets.

ActualShipRange = max(about 10, ShipRange);


Edit: adjusted map values.

Well, it's not a problem if ships can actually travel a single sector. It would be hard to break out of your starting solar system otherwise.

My first play through suggests that I'm on the right track, although I may want to make early life support less ridiculously huge. There's a definite limit to how big you can make a module before it's too big to reasonably use with other components.

Here's an easy way to curtail starting range and avoid early colony rush.

After some experimentation with figures yesterday, I found the easiest way was to set Range Ability to -250 (beyond -270 appears to make no difference). Then you can smatter range increases (or decreases!) throughout the tech tree however you want.

For my Slow Start mod, I set the -250 under the Hyperdrive tech, because everyone gets that at the beginning. Then I set up 30 Range techs (Range I - Range XXX) each with +10, but you might want to do it quite differently.

If you're interested in what I've done, follow the link.

Slow Start Mod