good / evil mod imbalances in default mods

Blue Steel,

The downside of playing evil is that you're almost always at war (and you never seem to get helped with a gift of ships). I find it hard to sustain trade routes and Alliance victory is not an easy option.

If you get unlucky, fundamentalists take planets from you... I agree that playing evil makes the game easier in some respects, but having played good on occassion -- it actually seems balanced.

And if you enjoy diplomacy, good is actually much easier. I'm playing a 'good' game now and I had forgotten that it was possible to be at peace with the Altarians and Torians.



Cypher

~SDC~

What i'm talking about is... that there are NO + something for choosing the good choice in the mods... they are all - something...

I believe that they should be balanced... eg: of a mod

the bugs...

help them sort things out... +1 diplomicy -1 moral

(choising this helps your diplomicy skill because your using it to help sort out another races problem to make it a better place... and a negative on moral because you have to share the planet)

not our business +2 production -2 moral

(choosing this would increase production because you don't have to allocate human resources to solve the problem one way or the other.... and a negative moral effect because the planet is in a constant state of war)

kill them all +3 moral -3 Planet quality

(choosing this option would increase moral because your the sole inhabitents of the planet but a reduction in planet quality because of you having to exterminate both sides)

or something similar...
there has to be a balancing stats... good and bad for all choices as there are in real life...

Hope this makes my thoughts clearer

Let's nor forget about the neutral choices. Even though I would like to play most of the good choices, sometimes they're just too costly to use; like saving some colonist would cost you -415 bc or something like that. Most often, the neutral choices will give you a good option, like +1% to research or morale. Heck, sometimes even the evil choices seem good without bothering your conscience too much. What happens if you go totally neutral? Would you receive any bonuses?

in my example of how i think they should work the

"help them sort things out" is the good choice
"not our business" is the neutral choice
"kill them all" is the evil choice

all have plusses and minuses .. it depends on what your after as to the choice you make

thats what i mean about balances.... it would give you reasons to choose the other options besides being good/neutral/evil as concequences for making that choice instead of just benifiting the evil choise in +++++++

Good has very strong long-term benefits that, especially in huge maps, are extremely valuable compared to single-planet bonuses.

There should NOT be short-term payoffs for choosing good. The benefits from being good are dramatic, and repeated playing - especially at higher difficulty levels - will show you. To give the good choice a quick payoff completely defeats the entire purpose, and would be MASSIVELY unbalancing.

If you think good is worthless, just keep playing and testing and you'll see what people mean.

This has been along debate.
Too bad nobody listens.

Try to play good you still get sucked into wars.

Even if you are not in a War the other races would be building battleships like crazy. Wiping each other out until one huge appointent is left and guess what you be the one victim left in galaxy Humanity.

Create an Ally and they always start wars suck you into the war and surrender to your common enemy.

What happen to the fundalmentalist revolt ?
In the latest build in seems to me like the evil alien races nolonger get the fundalmentalist revolts.

The users that win time after time on Painfull level and higher are for the most part winning on small maps playing Evil. I do not see them winning playing Saintly. Now I know there may "exceptions". Lets see them win time after time on giantic maps playing extremely Evil on a non moded game.

LOL LOL

They still do, Technician. I've got a fundie event in the latest build. I played all evil AIs and they were decimated.



I play Saintly on Gigantic maps with all evil AI, unmoded.

I said the same thing in "the age old battle" thread. However, my experience has beed only with the demo at this point (35% done on the FV ). I am looking forward to trying out both ways one the full version. but it does SEEM like evil is unbalanced. Even with the demo, playing an evil empire, I was able to have trade relations with neutral empires. What I did find funny, was in the last game. I was trying to make all the good choices, and the sainty Alterians (sp?) were really ticked off at me. They got pissed when I went to war with the evil Dregin. Go figure. Even after I eradicated the evils, they remained hostile. This is in direct opposition to what the good players say. they should have been at least warm towards me for taking on their nemisis. the neutral empires were....neutral in their attitude. In another game making evil choices, the "girl scouts" were more than happy to sell their cookie at my doorstep. I just figured this was because it was a demo game, and hope it is much different in the FV. Perhaps if your playing an evil empire, ONLY other evil empires will have anything to do with you.....Including the refusal to establish trade routes. If the neutrals and the good aligned "turned back" your freighters, then the long term impact of being evil would be more apparent. It just seems (in the demo) that choosing the good things is crippling. And as for the long term benefits of choosing evil being absent? Horse puckey! Measure the long term benefits of +20% research, +18%PQ, ect.... The benefits you get from being evil will allow you to drive the war machine (in econ, research and PQ) to thwart anything the goodies will toss at you. Who needs an alliance when your running around like Varth Dader (the evil Omish emperor) squashing everything in your path. But, as I said, this impression is based on demo play. And I know a demo is only suppose to give you a basic feel for the game, without letting you expeience the finer points. As a demo goes, I think they did a great job. Playing the demo made me want to buy the game. The FV (I hope) will make me lose many days of sleep.

The other comment here that causes me GREAT concern, is why are modded game scores allowed to be submitted to the Metaverse? If you change the basic game balances made by SD, then you should NOT be able to submit those to the Metaverse. (either that, or your idea of a modded game and mine are different)

There are checks in place to flag out submitted games which contain unbalanced mods. That's where we see some anomalous games in players' scores. But anomalous could be due to submission problems as well.

none the less even though the scores are flagged as anomalous... they do still count in the metaverse...

If I someone designed say 20 mods that would increase their diplomicy,moral,and weapons to maximum.. then it would make playing GalCiv at any level a hell of a lot easier.. and thus enableing higher scores..

wouldn't it ???

I think the anomalous scores are 0, aren't they? That seems punishment enough.

They are zero point games and they count as a game when the scores get divided by sqrt(total no of games).

And there is always the risk that you may get struck off the Metaverse if you are deemed to be cheating.

I thought i saw an anomalous score and it wasn't 0 ... i can't remember who's i was looking at.. if i find it again i'll point it out

BlueSteel,

You're sometimes see a difficulty of 'N/A' from early versions where the difficulty level is not available.

Is that what you're thinking of?

- Cypher

~SDC~

Well, I finally finished a game, which was a medium galaxy, but I was using the 1.09b3 beta with the cheat mode turned on, and I did use the cheats from time to time. So I didn't even try to submit it to the metaverse. PLus I have most of mods added into my data folder.

so how can you tell if you have too many mods' etc.... does the game tell you.. you do you have to wait till you try to submit your score

how many extra mods can you have etc... before it knockes your score

I don't think the number of mods is as important as what the mods do.

~SDC~

couslee -- You do know that most of the colonization event bonuses only apply to that planet, right? Think about it. Is the diplomatic penalty worth a bonus that only applies on one of, say, scores of worlds?

Actually, no. Didn't know that for sure, but kind of suspected it. You say "most" though, any list arouynd that shows a detailed description of events and whether or not they are single planet or empire wide benefits?

A list of all the possible UP proposals would be kinda nice too. While playing the demo, may times I would reload before the UP event just to see what all might be in the senate. It's more fun for me to hope for a specific thing to show up, than hoping that something bad is NOT gonna rear it head. example? "Should we all vote the human player has to pay 20% of it's income to everyone else?" (KISS MY ARSE)...... hehehe

couslee --

Hm, the colonization events are all planet-specific, I think. I don't have a list, 'tho. You can tell this because the bonuses are reflected only on the colony info screen, not from the empire-wide ability screen. So, if pirates help you build better ships, it's only for that world. And so forth.

On the other hand, the random event questions can yield empire-wide benefits or penalties. For instance, the "do we crack down on financial corruption, tolerate it, or exploit it" event will affect your empire-wide economic or interest-rate abilities. The "do we create undead armies" thing affects your empire-wide research or soldiering bonuses, as well.

UP stuff and the empire-wide non-colonization events are in the text files that come with the game, methinks.

Well, if it is like most text programming files, it will be all greek to me LOL

Don't know why, but that kind of stuff just don't sink in easily for me. I bought C++ programming learning package once. Half way down the first page I think I looked a bit like Opie Taylor and felt like Forest Gump.

I will give them my perusal anyway, but it would be nice if SD gave a quick reply to the question at hand.

I would be good at game concept though.

Soon as I win the lottery I will hire all the programmers from the sevral BBs I frequent. (I know, lottery= gambing for those bad at math, but hey, it's the fun of the fantasy that is worth a buck a week).

It does make me wonder though, if those that are complaining about the (planetary) evil choices being better than the good choices are under the empire-wide assumption. hmmm.

Did see a funy thing though. I am playing a demo game while I wait for this DL to finish (85% done). Second planet i colonized i got the bugs..... killed them all, and my morality only dropped 1 (down to 49).

The change in morality is influenced by how big of an effect the choice in question has. Something with no bonus or penalty always changes your morality by exactly 1.

~SDC~

Choices with marginal bonuses/penalties (single digits most times) will also alter morality by just 1.

So if the evil choice for worms gives +3% PQ, you will only go down by 1.