I've returned to the game once again, this time I decided to more seriously go poking in the files. I came up with this. After a few playtests I believe it's ready for an initial release. The aim is simple, change the economy in such a way the game is less spammy, more balanced and hopefully more fun. Version: 0.0.1 - initial testing release Economy Reduced overall metal income to 5 per extractor. And proportionally reduced build power across all factories and fabbers except the commander. This is to limit the amount of unit spam in the early game and make it slightly more tactical. Doubled cost of extractors to slow opportunistic expansion. Removed tier 2 extractors. These extractors are mainly useful only when a planet is fully controlled. This creates a pretty significant imbalance for lone starts. The amount of metal gained from fully controlling a planet is high enough already. This also reduces spam significantly in the late game, and encourages expansion. Nerfed jig hard. 36/10000 income for a single, fairly cheap structure is ridiculous. It also strikes me as odd that metal planets are not allowed free mining but gas planets are literally ten times worse. It's now 9/3000, and has storage comparable to a single pair of storage structures (which are also nerfed somewhat). The metal for build power costs are now normalized across fabbers and factories. Lesson from supcom: engie spam is bad mmkay. This has made fabbers more expensive and factories a bit cheaper. Overall there is now no particular reason to prefer a fabber over a factory or vice versa. Nerfed air fabbers. They build slow and break the above metal cost rule by being twice as expensive for build power. Air fabbers should suck and suck noticeably. The tradeoff is you can fly. Bots now take less resources to build per second. This helps to distinguish them. This makes them actually cheap, rather than just faster to build. Conversely, ships are more expensive. Invasion Reduced cost of invasion oriented units such as the Helios and Unit Cannon. Increased energy cost of teleporters. Don't stall! Nerfed umbrellas and anchors to help break stalemates of heavily entrenched planets. Removed orbital build of Teleport and Titans, this was a hack in the alpha to make up for the lack of a unit cannon or any way to invade at all. Helios and Unit Cannon now serve this role nicely, making the hack unnecessary. Late Game I have generally "flattened" the very expensive structures to suit the new reduced income better, and keep the pace up near the end of the game. Titans are proportionally cheaper to encourage their use. Reduced cost of Catalyst to make Annihilaser more competitive with 2 or 3 Halley asteroid smashes. Apart from a full 4 or 5 Halleys, it is still the most expensive planet smashing method. Reduced cost of Ragnarok. The reasoning being that you have to have a significant presence on the enemy planet to use this unit. If it takes too long to build while in a battle for a planet, it is not very useful. Slightly more expensive than a single Halley smash. Water as an Obstacle Most structures except for very basic ones can now not be built on water. Bases are built primarily on land. This is to emphasize water as an obstacle, and differentiate naval play. I consider planets without any land at all to be an edge case. The aim was not to break the AI too much by preserving key ratios between the amount of generators, fabbers and income and expenses, so it should play reasonably well with it. Although it still does seem to suffer a bit. I'm not sure where it has trouble exactly. Eventually I'd like to pair it with a more complete rebalance to also address the "popcorn" effect, and further differentiate units. But this is likely a lot more work due to the amount of values to tweak.
version 0.1.2 - because having the minor version be 0 was silly further refined factory and fabber costs; overall reduced cost of build power fine tuned fabber build powers reduced extractor cost back a little rebalanced jig to now give more metal and less energy I'm very happy with how the early game has turned out, but I'm still not completely sure about the late game, the midgame transition to T2 and orbital might also still need fine tuning, the finer economic balance seems to expose more general flaws with the unit balance itself what is clear by now is that it is indeed working, people who have planets all to themselves do not gain such a massive game breaking advantage, allowing for more interesting plays
Goodluck! Very kool if you manage to do this. That is indeed a very huge change. Also, nice work picking up on oportunistic mex expansion and air fabbers being op
I do have some modding tools that could help with that. As in, you can define a patch saying "All mobile units of this type should have max_health be set to 1.4 times larger". Would that be useful to you?
Sorry for not replying back then, but no it probably would not be super useful, as just scaling health doesn't result in the same balance due to various effects like overkill and such. Weaker units will become proportionally stronger.
