I would go for the second. The short desc under the improvement name is useful only to very new players and only for a very limited time, then it becomes useless. And, as you said, for improvements that do many things it could be misleading.

Regarding the Space Trucker's Guild, any reason behind the +1 speed bonus? It seems a little out of place.

Something like an increased asteroid mining output (if possible), or decreasing the time needed to develop asteroids, or a slight industrial/economic improvement would fit better, imho.

not possible. what you can do with asteroids is very very limited. believe me I've used a full day to find out what could be done with those (my original intention was to give each race different asteroid mining stations) but the game won't allow me

well, the building will reduce the buildcosts of an ordinairy Space Miner by 50% = so you can have twice in number in the same time and that should actually have a huge impact on the development speed itself

it already brings +10% MP and I didn' want to get overboard with racial stats

the +1 in speed is simply there because there aren't many improvements in the game that will do this (Hyperion Shipyard is actually the only generic one) so I thought it may be interesting for a player to perhaps couple those two in the long run.

but frankly, I may introduce more buildings that give such rare bonuses and then, may turn the Guild into an improvement similar to the Galactic Guide Book. but we're not there yet  

Sure, I just want to point out that an effective colony rush is almost always the key to victory, so giving +1 speed at game start or middle game is not the same thing, they have very different weights for game balance. Consider this when you decide which tech should trigger the availability of the improvements that give the speed bonus

A last word on the Truckers Guild; I would consider building it only for the speed bonus, nothing else. It's the only effect for which the upkeep cost is probably well spent ... maybe 

I used to play on immense galaxies, but turned to gigantic after realizing that the bigger the galaxy, the worse the AI performs when choosing targets during a war, and for the same reason maybe I'll go to huge sooner or later. But I really don't like small/medium galaxies, because I feel like I'm playing chess.

I'm not sure I understand your question, are you asking which should be the maximum achievable speed, excluding improvements?

I found the speed setting of the CU good enough, playing with humans, I don't know about the other races.

Please don't insert in the mod too many speed bonus, an immense galaxy actually should feel immense.

On your gigantic maps, did you feel your fleets should be able to move around more quickly - even after research into propulsion is finished, or not? Speed has a great impact on how swiftly a map can be developed - ultimately conquered, and there sometimes is this loss of excitement once you know you're gonna win when it's mostly abouzt moping up the AI worlds. That phase should happen rather swiftly IMO, many players don't play it out anyway...

It's unfortunately not possible but that would actually the very best solution.

The thing that can be done is to "lock out" certain high-end techs from being accessably on smaller maps by having their research-costs up to regions which simply take too long in these maps. The "problem" here is that many players, if they encounter a situation where they can't get technologies they want - simply set the default techspeed setting to something faster and that does actually cripple a game completely.

Ok I just checked and Minors are still there, just no one was in my area

I always used additional engines only in cargo designs, and scouts. I considered them too space consuming to be used in military ships, even in CU. So the difference of approach in FW would not impact on my military ships speed, regarding the others I think it doesn't matter, so if this approach will make the AI to design better ships  

In a gigantic galaxy 15 turns are still acceptable, and even if when the ships arrive they are not using the latest tech anymore, it is ok because the same is happening to everyone else.

The backline core worlds are obviously more developed and so capable to build bigger ships, so unless there is a tactical need to do otherwise, I use to build the stronger ships there and scouts/fighters along the frontier younger worlds.

As I said the time needed to move fleets is not an issue, in big galaxies it is a nice part of the gameplay, and adds a strategic layer that is missing in smaller galaxies.

Absolutely perfect 

Quoting Maiden666,

reply 40

The race-wide speed anomaly is kinda rare, and actually offset by another rare anomlay which actually takes -1 speed away from you ("slimy space krill"   )

Ok I see. A couple of notes about the anomalies. From what you write it seems you can decide the rarity of any anomaly.

I'm asking because I started a new game and after maybe 20 or 25 turns I have already found 2 anomalies that gave me 2000 bc each. That is an enormous amount of money at game start and gives such a big advantage that I wonder if it isn't too much.

Of course if the other civs are getting similar benefits that it's ok. 

That is good, my concern is just if they are balanced with the other civs. They were so much better than anyone else that I think they would have been unstoppable. Anyway, I'll see if that happens again.

But I have to say that also with the CU Drengin and/or Korath were very very often among the best civs, if not the best, sometimes by far.

Oh my, I didn't notice it was a 1pp building, then it's ok, sorry.

When I played Humans in CU I always tried to specialize planets, but the Iconians start with powerful 1pp buildings, so now I'm trying to use a different approach, more generic worlds during the first part of the game, and see how it goes.

Are Iconian farms worse? The initial one is very good, I think.

And the initial industry is heavy-maintenance? It is true that the basic replicator has a low output, so if you need a high output you need to build many of them, but it has not a heavy maintenance, I think it's cheap. What do the other civs start with?

I may at some point introduce some engines which use very little space but are expensive, perhaps as an alternative branch to the conventional engines branch, and distribute it among the civs so that there are (incl. Arcean) 3 different approaches ingame. Or maybe just expand the generic one for everyone, but it's not high on my agenda.

Yes, I do. In the vanilla game and (still) in the CU all rarity is equalized to the same level so all anomalies occur in the same numbers. For FW I've reduced some annyoing ones (like real Wormholes - because a player can effectively avoid while AIs always use them most likely transporting their only Surveyor into out-of-range regions so they'll loose more anomaly-bonuses than the player...)

I've also used this setting to balance some anomalies against their potential strength - or handicap in case of penalizing anomalies.

I've doubled the output of all existing money-anomalies by 100% but introduced a -1000bc anomaly to counterbalance that. In DL there even was an anomaly that gave +5000 bcs so FW tries to cut a middle-path to that. Not saying now that DL or DA are better balanced than TotA, they were different and several regions were OP and they got subsequently nerfed, and perhaps too much to bring in fun for the player.

You are raiseing alot of concerns about general balance, so let me give just a basic idea of my personal view on the subject:

If something is available to anyone and all these factions are also able to use that then it's always balanced by default because an advantage to anyone is a disadvantage to noone. However, that doesn't mean to suggest I can increase bonuses mindlessly throughout the roof because then, certain features will become so strong they do become "no-brainers" - something you always go for regardless of timing, cost-considerations, alternatives or other trade-offs. Essentially a strategy game should force you to make meaningful decisions once the time is right for them.

Regarding anomalies, they've historically been a very strong asset for the player because the AI is unable to muster additional surveyships. In FW I've taken this into consideration and made it more easy for the AI to pick up anomalies (for example, I've introduced an anomaly which does increase the base speed of the ship which picks this anomaly up, so all the initial Surveyship of the AI will become gradually faster thereby shrinking the window of time for the player to lift new surveyors into the air before their all collected. This anomaly also helps returning AI ships from out-of-range positions from wormholes. And for the player I've increased the cost of the Survey-module, although the GGB can get rid of that. It basically boils down that a player will have to prepare/fullfill some prerequisites until he's able to fully exploit anomalies. But once he's there these anomalies should give considerable bonuses because that's fun and I don't want to nerf things so much into the ground that players simply stop to use these things because of lacklusterness.)

One of the reasons why Korath have these bonuses is that they're required to counterbalance their spore-SA which the AI cannot use to its full extend. It's even exploitable for the player. I've witnessed many Korath games where they spore worlds, which default to 5m people and without considerable popgrowth-bonuses they take forever to grow to normal size. Most of these worlds simply flip to whoever is also present in that sector. The AI also tries to get rid of planets which have a negative/red economic balance so esp. diplomatically-good civs can trade for them for a bunch of technologies. There's nothing I can do to prevent that, nor can I teach the Korath AI to fill up a population-ferry and transport a 1000m people to a freshly spored world to make it economically self-sustaining. But a player can do all these things and neither will the player give away planets.

The Korath SA debacle is perhaps the reason why Korath do have the superstrong Dark Influnce building - it may prevent these worlds from flipping but still, the AI makes no difference where it does build this improvement. I've therefore reduced its bonus by 50% because the racial bonuses (Loyalty, Popgrowth, Moral) should do enough to throttle the flipping debacle.

It's a common misconception that because someone is "too strong" or "stronger than others" that this is unbalanced or bad for the game. Under many circumstances this is even good. The primary function of all AIs are to give a challenge or obstacle for the player to overcome.

Imagine all AIs are completely the same, the same strength and even the map and everything else is created homogenuously - then for most parts of a game the map would be in a stalemate and without player intervention would stay like this forever. Not that then most games would look/feel very similarily, it would also be easy for a player to simply pick on a single AI, conquer him, repeat on another, and from there game is won.

And that is why exactly here, basically everywhere in the game, a (planned) randomization comes in - anomalies, habitable planet dispersal, bonustiles, different AI behaviour, different strength in technologies, factions that are weak early stronger late and vice versa, Events/ MegaEvents, UP votes etc pp.

IF you have one AI in your game which is so strong it's able to successfully conquer another AI, and keep on anexing more and more planets consequently, then this means you'll also have to gain in likewise strength otherwise the day will come you won't be able to withstand once it attacks you. Of course it shouldn't be always the same AI, but there are indeed some factions which are deliberately designed to be more strong early (and because early bonuses weigh usually more heavy into a game it may appear that these are generally stronger). At the end of the day all of this unbalanced randomness adds greatly to the replayability. It has a very positive function.

One of the main strategies to win a warfighting suicidal game actually is to exactly prevent one AI to emerge victorious by constantly keeping them busy to wage war on all their neighbours, to keep all their military mutually low to give the player time to come out of his defensive play (on suicidal the AI bonuses are so strong they'll force you defensively very very soon^^)

And the only one they have - 4mt food against 6mt food. They need 3 tiles for a 20b planet that's 1 more than the generic approach. The tradeoff is that they have it right-away, which may even be a handicap for the AI because you don't need to set farms during the colony rush, but they at least don't need to invest additional reseach.

Pardon me, I ment the Molecular Fabricator & the other Precursor fac, those two plus the 2 1pp labs actually weigh heavy on the Iconian game (just like labs/facs in the Thalan tree). How well the Iconians do is mostly decided on how well the AI is able to muster money to keep his global spending slider high.

Yes, you should mark it, but not with a plus or II, but with a different name.

E.g. "Krynnian Diplomacy" or "Mystical Diplomacy" or even something strange like "Cultish Relations".  No direct indication that it's better.  Let the player explore that on his own.

E.g. "Drengin Body Odor" that gives +5 Soldiering and -10 Diplomacy...

But wouldn't that also suggest that if you trade for this technology you intent to get a completely new technology? Because, it could also lead to the opposite situation where you trade for a technology which turns out to hold less bonuses than the original one in your own tree. And that's actually something I'd like to prevent for a player...

But I agree, it's not elegant that's why I was asking... just can't think of a solution that is both practicable and elegant... 

No worries I didn't take it any negatively 

One thing that had a tremendous effect on both Drangin/Korath was that Frogboy changed the code of AIP7 to be able to colonize outside their territory. The Yor are also affected by this but Yor do have other problems to cope with, namely a severely restricted techtree and some unorthodox approaches to planetary buildings.

In FW I designed the Yor even more extreme - fully aware that the AI may struggle with that but I'll get it its own tree running once I'm done with the inclusion of all content.

Just yesterday I went back to do some modding (and can now stay at it for several days) so you can expect some great changes to basically all places of the game on all civs in the coming week.

I agree that on average strength should be equally distributed/balanced. However, only if you also totally shuffle all available variables to any part of the game around. And that begins at the very setup of a game. Some civilizations are deliberately designed to have an early advantage, to be an early threat, to have all sorts of different types of weaknesses or advantages.

For example, a civ that thrives high towards a cultural win or flipping planets (like, the Krynn) may not do so well if you select rare-occasional planets. Without frequent-extreme-planets Iconians may not do so well. On smaller maps early military civs like Drengin may be able to rushstorm civs. On larger maps with lots of planets social upbuilders like Korath/Torian may become unstoppable. Without techtrade or brokering Terrans will suffer greatly. How a player behaves on a map may also completely cripple certain civs (ie. if you bring others into war against Drath or Korx it'll completely nullify their SA...). Some others, like for instance Thalans, have such a wide range of extreme possiblities of what they can do, that sometimes they're doing exceptionally well and sometimes it leaves their game cripppled.

In order to find some of these problems, and construe creative workaround I usually setup a dozen of AI autogames, but even that doesn't give me full control over what potentially could happen in a game involving a real player. I doubt I'll ever gonna finish this mod, but once I reach at v1.0 I'll start playing real games with it and from there, hope to get a better scope to the ultimate finetunes.

No, the ManuCap is part of the generic factory-branch. The Iconians have an own, and unique way of factories, which I consider to be stronger. You currently could trade for "Xeno Engineering" to get that, but in v.05 the only way to get that is through stealing.

They also only have the Dream Conclave as morale improvement. It's very strong in the beginning - twice as strong as the generic approach, but in the end much weaker that what 30% of other factions can muster, although these need a significant amount of research for this. For v.05, I've given them the weaker FantasyConclave which OShee designed some time ago, and let them have a small morale-branch containing a beefed up version of the DreamConclave.

I'm very happy with the current state of the Iconians although, except Yor/Thalan, I still have to make all other trees more unique.

Yep, this is exactly how I ment it. I don't want to create a new technology just because I want to slightly rebalance an already existing technology in a single races tree - because then I either have to make that tech untradeable (ultimately, all of them...) or a player could collect massive amounts of racial bonuses in a game involving max factions.

My current undertaking however, is exactly the opposite, I'm actually lifting sanctions on unique techs so that techtrade becomes more interesting again. BTW I just completed a full comparison of values affecting techtrade of vanilla 2.042 to the CU and can definitely say that the increases AIValue in combination with decreases WillingnessToTrade is responsible for the bad techtrade-behaviour you find in the CU. Not all techs are affected but on many, the AI is currently asking about 4 times the compensation. I think someone oversaw that the WilingnessToTrade-tag was oftentimes set in each of the individual races' techtrees and got omitted on the general TechTree.xml - here an average of value = 50 was simply set while indeed it was oftentimes much higher rangeing from 70-100.

But to come back to the previous problem, I think the different Space Militarization techs are perhaps mostly known so a player is already on the hood to lookout for them specifically. In FW there will be LOTS of those to come, so my intention is to present it that way it's somehow self-explanatory. I don't want to have a player find out he locked himself out of a specific racial bonus, or accidentally got himself a tech which is inferior to the original in his own tree, but how the hell do I do that? If I change the ingame shown name it may appear as being a new technology, and if I don't it'll create a false sense of that it's the very same technology.

Maybe simply keep the same names and advise a player to use the right-click popup more often? But that's also not really handy - it implies a player already knows by heart all the techs in his own tree - and if he don't, and a previous trade already has been done, you can't just go look at your own tree because you won't be allowed to get back into the diplomacy screen for another 8 turns.