@Marvin

re: "If you like, I could add a weapons&defences analysis sheet to the spreadsheet you have and Dropbox it back"

That would be great. Thanks.

@Maiden666

re: "Standalone ships that muster maximum defenses will be very hard to be defeated."

So what do you suggest we do? Increase the size of the defences a little? Reduce their absorption? Both? Nothing?

Like you say, fleet attack is uber good.  It's so good that when I have HP modules available, I add some to my capital ships, because past experience has taught me that you can't rely on defences alone.

Capacity (and also miniaturisation) dictates the number of weapons you can stuff into a fleet.  So perhaps something to look at with regards to hull stats (no matter what happens with weapons) is whether increasingly massive capital ships should offer good capacity for the logistics that they require, or offer a reasonable capacity but be a bit tougher.  It's something to keep in mind, I guess!

So I'll work on some analysis for weapons, defences and hull stats.  Shouldn't take too long.

Edit: Okay all done.  Updated spreadsheet is here.  Weapons and Defences are on a new sheet, hull analysis is in the hull sheet.

Somethings I noticed. There's several starter buildings that are marked as a GA. I'm not sure if this is by design or not but you might run into some trouble if people start creating custom races and lock out other civs of their best starting structures. This could be solved by turning them into super projects.

• Korx: Festival of Capatalism.
• Altarians: Social Matrix
• Arceans:Stellar Forge
• Torians:Aquatic Transport Station
• Yor: Maintenance Grid

Regards,

A.

If I were going to create a custom race, I probably wouldn't settle for just snagging any old racial tech tree and racial improvements.

The easy workaround for players that don't want to go to quite that length, but don't want some other race to steal their unique building is to not put that race into the game.  There are enough races in the game that you can have two on the sidelines and max out the number of opponents.

Xeno farm construction2:

short description:

Allows access to Enhanced Xeno Farms.

full description:

With our population growing constantly, more farms are needed to avoid stagnation. The space needed for these farms is immense, and on some of our planets there is no room to build others. Recently, a new design of layered farms is seen as a solution to this problem.

Xeno farm construction3:

short description:

Unlocks the Advanced Xeno Farm, and increases morale.

full description:

By adding a processing, and distribution layers to our farms, the amount of spoiled food has been reduced. As a result, the fresher food has increased our populations morale.

I want to redo some terraforming descriptions and...other stuff.

DARCA

Food percentages means that the AI doesn't end up with hugely overpopulated worlds (thanks to food bonus tiles and farm upgrades) which it tries to keep happy by lowering taxes across the board.  It tends to behave and only build a couple of farms on planets, which when fully upgraded nets a max population of 14Bn.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it I could use Object Desktop to remove the % bonus display in the Planetary screen (for tiles) and put those in the descriptions linked to each unique tile. That way there would not be a misleading bonus either.

Nice work, Mabus.

However, I don't know, if we are allowed to make any changes to the UI in this update. If we are, I'm going to need a changelog for all the changes you've made, before I can add your files.

Still, I'm a bit worried that removing any signs of the farm tiles might cause problems in the future. For example, if somebody decides to give the farms their regular food production again. How would they know, if there are any farm tiles on the planet? Worse still, if that person is a new player, and doesn't know that there are bonus tiles for farms. They might think the game is bugged, if their food-production is suddenly higher for no apparent reason.
Granted, the same can also be said, if we continue to display the farm tiles. A new player might not understand why the bonus doesn't work, and, once again, think that this is a bug. However, I believe this could be easily solved by adding a disclaimer to the description of the tiles, stating that the tiles don't work for percentage bonuses.

Anyhow, I've uploaded a new version. You can download it here.

This version contains the fully updated scenarios and campaigns. If you want to test the campaigns, then you need to replace the original ones in the Twilight\Data\English\Campaigns folder with the updated ones, because the campaigns don't work from the mod-folder. The scenarios, however, do. So you don't need to do any extra work, if you want to test those.

I changed the weapons and defences to the new values, and adjusted the starbase defense and military-assist modules. The first tier Battle Stations/Defense Stations are strong enough to repel several fleet of tiny/small hulled ships with first tier weapons. However, the starbase will eventually fall, which is pretty much how I want it. I still need to test the other tiers.
The military-assist modules are quite a bit weaker now. Their total bonuses are now based on the weapons/defences of the same tier. For example, the first Multiplier Field grants +1 beam, +2 missile, and +1 MD, which is the equivalent of one Laser, one Stinger, and one Railgun. Multiplier Field II increases the bonus by +1 to all, which makes the total bonus the equivalent of one Particle Beam, one Harpoon, and one Singularity Driver. Ditto for Protection Fields. To compensate for this change, I've reduced the cost for each module from 200bc to 100bc.

I've also reverted my changes to the Terror Star modules. As it turned out, military-assist modules don't work with Terror Stars. You can add them, but their bonuses don't get applied to ships in the area. The Terror Star's lack of ZoC might have something to do with this. Shows you how often I use these bloody things.

I made a first pass on the descriptions for the planetary improvements. They should be a bit more clear about what the improvements do now. However, this will probably be a WIP, because what's clear for me, might not be clear for everyone else.

Lastly, I, err, standardised the SPs and GAs. All SPs that grant a civ-wide bonus are now GAs, and all GAs that only grant planetary bonuses are now SPs. Due to this, I've removed the Morale ability bonus from the Shrine of the Mithrilar again, because I don't want to turn the Shrine into a GA. However, I'm not happy with the huge planetary morale bonus. So, if anybody has an idea about what we could do with the Shrine, then I'm all ears. I also moved the Weapons ability bonus from the Dark Energy Lab to the Unimaginable Destruction tech, because I didn't want to turn this SP into a GA either.
There are two exceptions to the standardisation: the Orbital Command Center (for obvious reasons) and the Artificial Slave Center (the bonus doesn't work for GAs and TGs).

I also added some bonuses to techs that only unlock a GA, but don't provide anything else, because I don't like the idea that two races could get the same tech, but only one would receive any sort of benefit from it. The techs in question, and their new bonuses, are:
Mercenary Academy (+10% Soldiering)
Cathedral of Valor (+20% Courage)
Fanatics (+20% Courage)

I still need a bonus for Fortified Freighters though. The most fitting ones, a bonus to Trade or Trade Routes, are out of the question, due to the Korx' super ability and the hardcoded limit on trade routes respectively.

There are still a few things that need to be addressed (What to do with the Technology Victory tech?; balancing; proofreading; maybe some new descriptions; making sure that everything is working as intended), but, on the whole, I think we are almost done.

Cool.  I've updated the top post with links and stuff.  Anything else you would llike to go at the top there, or take out?

I had a play around with the hull stats today.  Discovered that there's a particular order in which you need to do it in, otherwise you can be there all day tinkering with them.  This may be useful to designers and modders alike, even those not working on Galactic Civilizations specifically.  But otherwise is very dry, so feel free to skip it.

Basically, since everything that I analysed sort of revolves around logistics, that's the first thing you have to calibrate.  I didn't actually touch the values this time around, but if I had, this is where I would have had to start.

The next thing then, is capacity.  In the vanilla stats, there is an upward trend of capacity to logistics ratio (CPLR), starting with the light and heavy fighters at a value of 8 and ending up at 15 with the dreadnaught class.  In other words, ignoring the effects of component scaling, you can fit almost twice as much stuff onto the top-tier ship as on a heavy fighter.

Needless to say, capacity is important if you want to put a lot of weapons on a ship, or even if you just want to build a well-balanced ship.  A higher CPLR is better, basically.  I think that the frigate is not much of a step up from fighters here, considering that the base research cost is 1000 tp, but that's just my opinion.

I didn't include the cargo hull in my analysis, because it's a non-combat hull and should be figured after all the combat hulls.

Hitpoints are the next beast to tame.  Watching the ratio of Capacity to HP (or CPHPR) you can decide how squishy a given ship should be.  The higher this value is, the more squishy it is.  Indeed, were I to include the cargo hull in there, it would have a squishy factor of 60. Basically, what this means is how likely it is that weaponry and defences will have time to be useful in battle - very squishy ships can die in the first round of fleet combat, unless they are weaponless in which case they are at the end of the targeting queue.

There is a little bit of difference between the light/heavy fighters and the frigate hull here, but not a huge amount.

There is the hull cost to consider, and you can see on the spreadsheet that I have related this to hitpoints through the Cost per hitpoint value (Cost PHP).  You sort of expect that if you're paying a certain amount for a hull to be manufactured, that you get what you pay for, that there are savings to be made on a few large hulls as opposed to lots of smaller ones.

The vanilla stat progression here is okay, but not great.  By going from a heavy fighter to a dreadnaught, you're only saving roughly 1.5bc per hitpoint.

There's also a measure of how hitpoints are related to logistics, but since I didn't change logistics values, I didn't need to look too closely at those - as long as it goes up then things are as you would expect - big heavy ships costing more logistics but packing in more hitpoints.

Something to consider is that the changes to hull stats don't necessarily have to be very large to alter these ratios, because ratios are essentially division, right?

Probably because it's against the EULA?

Uhm. Guys. All I did was edit a DXPACK file which is nothing more than an DestktopX file. iMod did something similar but never finished their project.

Also the changed icons are part of Galciv 2, not twilight, so after the update they'll still be there for modders who want to restore farms and the same applies to English.srt.

Anyway. My stance on this is simple. Everything you show on screen communicates purpose to a user. If you show farm tiles old players will think the game is broken and new players will wonder what they are doing wrong because their farms are not producing more food. Hiding the icons is simple and no one will be the wiser.

Hopefully I'll have some time this evening to play a test game or two but so far I really like what I see. It took me a while to get used to the idea that AIP8 research tech is labeled as industry but it works really well and in hind sight I regret not doing something similar for APT2.0.

Oh. HyperionHullPoints needs spaces in it's display name.

Cheers,

A.

@Mabus

re: "I'm not to worried about the farm bonuses tbh. If we're going to put out a fix it might as well go all the way."

Okay, I'll add it. However, I'm still not sure about this. The manual explicitly mentions the bonus tiles, and I don't know, if Stardock is willing to adjust this part in order to accommodate the change.

re: "On a side note. I've done some other UI work. The Rally Point screen e.g. has a map that is rather useless so I removed it and made the list showing the rally points much, much bigger. Trust me it's an improvement."

I don't know. It looks a bit off to me.

The point of the map is to show you where your rally points are. However, they are often hard to make out (light-grey crosses). Especially on crowded maps with lots of planets. Maybe you could try to fix that instead?

While on the topic of fixing the UI, there is something wrong with the Government & Ethics screen. It doesn't show the description for Star Federation when you are Evil. I've already checked the Screen.str and English.str, but couldn't find anything wrong there. It has to be an error with the screen itself. Could you look into this?

re: "I've also uploaded a RaceConfig where the short racial bonuses are written as a sentence. If you have a CR/LF in there the game add one each time you customize a race. No biggie but it's easily fixed."

Thanks. However, I made some small edits, because I wasn't quite happy with them. For example, "+ Strong Diplomacy; - Weak Manufacturing", instead of "Strong Diplomacy. Weak Manufacturing." I hope you don't mind.

re: "Fortified trader. Hmmm. 2% war profit maybe? An overall boost to economy?"

War Profit doesn't fit, in my opinion. Plus, the Korx already get 5% from the Mercenary Academy. That should be plenty enough. An Econ bonus would be the next best thing. It doesn't really fit the tech either, but the Korx would never say no to more money. I was toying with the idea of giving it a Defense bonus, because of "fortifying", but am not sure, if that might feel out of place.

re: "HyperionHullPoints needs spaces in it's display name."

And fixed.

re: "Oh, is there a CSV repository or a shared folder I could upload changes to?"

Sorry, no. I'm still rather inexperienced with how these file-sharing services work, even though I've been using Dropbox for almost two years now.

@DARCA

re: "We have the permission to edit the game though, so no worries."

Frogboy never gave us permission to edit DLL or EXE files. He only mentioned XML. That we are making changes to the scenarios/campaigns, STR files, and the UI, might already be stretching this, but those are at least covered by the EULA.