Re-balancing the game

Information, How-to's, and discussion about mod'ing Master of Orion II.
Torin
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Joined:Tue Mar 07, 2006 6:14 pm
Re-balancing the game

Postby Torin » Wed Mar 08, 2006 2:11 am

I discovered OCL a couple of years ago and had a lot of fun messing around with it. My brother and I like to play over a LAN (wireless) and I am looking forward to trying out the new 1.40b22 patch and the OCL plus editor (I haven't played MOO2 in over a year since I upgraded my computers and had to re-format the hard drives). I've gotten a lot of great ideas from reading posts and looking at other people's OCL mods. Here are some of the major changes I plan on making - any feedback would be appreciated.

-rebalancing the ships to reflect the maintenance costs for each size class.
I am going to re-balance size, cost, armor, structure and special sizes/cost to reflect the BC maintenance cost. For example - size going from Frigate to Doom Star will now be 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 and 1200 (vs. 25, 60, 120, 250, 500, 1200 - no change for the doom star). Very dramatic increase for the smaller ships (and it will cost a lot for them vs. before) but they will be much more viable vs. just making battleships and larger. Maintenance costs = 1,2,3,4,5,6. That equals an increase of x2, x1.5, x1.33, x1.25 and x1.2 for each size class over the previous. Of all the things I could think of this seems to make the most sense to balance out all of the ship size classes.

-dramatically increasing bases size/armor/structure - a star base will be equivalent to a doom star, a battlestation x2, star fortress x3 or x4. A big problem with the game (IMO) is that fixed defenses are just not strong enough when compared to fleets. I will also probably reduce the planetary defense structures cost and maintenance.

-removing techs that can be used for 'cheap' tactics (tractor beams, death rays, time warp facilitors, phasing cloak, neutron blasters, assault shuttles, transporters, etc..) and removing techs that put the AI at a big disadvantage because they don't use them as effectively or as much as human players (battle pods, reinforced hull and reinforced armor are three that come to mind; to offset this I am probably going to triple armor/structure for ships and bases).

-removing 'offensive' weapon techs that are too powerful (Achilles, hi energy focus?, structural analyzer, hyper x capacitors) - often when a ship gets the initiative in a late game with many advanced techs it is able to eliminate many enemy ships of similar caliber before they can even move. This is also part of my reasoning behind removing reinforced hull/armor and just making the ships and bases much tougher.

-dramatically increasing the research costs for intermediate and advanced techs so they are not researched so quickly.

-I would like to balance missiles, torpedoes and fighters more with beam weapons. Torpedoes seem easy because I can increase the damage they do. I'd like to make it so that only point defense weapons can target fighters and missiles (see my other post) but I don't know how. For now I guess I can increase the armor points of fighters and decrease their size requirement. Any way to make fighters go faster? The big problem with fighters is that often in a late game they just get destroyed before they can fire at all and now you've got a defenseless carrier ship with no weapons!

Using COORION I like to make a game where all of the homeworlds are huge and ultra rich w/ gems (makes early game go a little faster and I think homeworlds should be much better than others). I like to limit each star system to just one planet (too many planets = too much micromanagement) and to make it so there are no ‘bad’ planets (no poor, ultra poor, toxic, tiny or small). I also give the AI players some serious bonuses (for example – Psilons = democracy, +4 research, telepathic, +10 espionage, omniscient, creative) so it can compete later in the game.

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siron
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Postby siron » Wed Mar 08, 2006 7:23 am

For now I guess I can increase the armor points of fighters

You cant do this directly. The ocl description is wrong.

Any way to make fighters go faster?

good question....would like to do this too.

Jaded Tortoise
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Postby Jaded Tortoise » Thu Mar 09, 2006 12:33 am

I like the idea of rebalancing and some of your ideas are good, but I think you might want to reconsider some, and here are my reasons.

Ship size right now you can quickly in early game make a scout ship for almost nothing, but increasing the frigate size by much would make this too expensive. also frigates can presently be built or bought in a small system that needs immediate defense, or sent kamikaze to take out ship shields, or knock out missile groups. I would suggest a size sceme more like (25, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1200). Right now destroyers are only ever used if you needs something and don't have a starbase, but cruisers can be somewhat effective, this puts destroyers about where cruisers were. It puts cruisers only a bit behind present bships, and battleships a bit under present titans. I think this would make everything be useful and still allow for cheaper early game builds.

Agree completely with uping starbases its needed. just make sure cost reflects it somewhat though i think starbase may be fine as is its half a building platform as much as a defense platform, and need to have a possibility of early game raids. On the other hand battlestation and starfortress are just to weak.

be careful what techs you remove, this reduces the variety of tactics you can use. Assault shuttles for instance are powerful, but a group of interceptors, some decent point defense, or a lightning field can stop them quick. And the computer does use bpods, heavy armor, and reinforced hull almost all the time, assuming they have the tech. Remember most computer players don't have creative, so they often don't get every tech. Just upping the base armor for everything will make cybernetic suddenly very powerful as you get the armor bonuses for free, and make automated repair unit an enourmously powerful thing for the same reason. I also think the nuetron blasters have a niche though they kill marines too effectively. Either reducing their damage to allow shields to prevent more and slow down deaths, or make the deaths require far more damage would still allow it to be used, but not make it such a killer weapon.

-achilles is overpowered to the point it might not just be fixed, the rest of those just need there space point cost increased to balance them. Especially if you are increasing high tech research costs.

Torpedoes are already very very powerful, as they can't be shot down, however like missiles they can run into the problem of going against ships with too much jamming. That is why its important to build your fleets to counter your opponents though, and if the enemy doesn't have decent jamming they are very powerful. Missiles can get some bonuses like emmision guidance and mirv which give them a valuable niche and if you get near enough a ship or launch enough at once they won't all get shot down. Fighters are both over and under powered. First yes they can be shot down but they have decent beam defense depending on your engine tech, and increase speed very quickly with upped engine tech. Second they always hit ignoring beam defense. Third they can be used to kill assault shuttles and missile groups, and are also good vs. some monsters. if anything I'd just up heavy fighters as these are supposed to be built for fighting the heavy late game ships unlike the interceptors.

The homeworlds increase has a point but removes the ability to use RichHw and LargeHw, how about large rich base this gives everyone a great HW and those that use the race mods a maxxed one. Also allows an easy bonus for AI players if you want to up them. And removing the "bad" planets will make many other race choices garbage, if you do so reduce the cost for tolerant +prod and other things dependant on planet type and mineral richness. MAking all systems good will I believe make the game suck, but I might be wrong haven't played a game with all awesome systems.

Oh well just my thoughts hope you find a good balance for you and who all you play with. Just do remember most everything in the game has its counter, though there are a couple exceptions.

Torin
Posts:8
Joined:Tue Mar 07, 2006 6:14 pm

Postby Torin » Thu Mar 09, 2006 1:21 am

Thanks for the feedback.

About automated repair unit - I am going to delete this because I think it is too powerful and because the computer often does not make full use of it while human players (LOL - at least my brother and I) always do.

I am hesistant about the ship size changes but I just don't see any way to balance out the maintenance costs for ships; we need a mod that allows you to change the ship maintenance costs.

I have just finished going through a word.doc listing all of the techs and I am going to make some major adjustments. One of the things I am going to do is to bump fighters, bombers and heavy fighters to a lower construction tech level so they are available earlier. Heavy fighters and bombers are usually useless by the time you discover them in the regular game in my experience.

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zoetropo
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Postby zoetropo » Wed Mar 15, 2006 7:37 pm

Torin,

I understand your desire to protect orbital platforms from easy capture. However, the AI is very effective at using the boarding techs (esp. Transporters and Neutron Blasters). Omitting those would repeat one of MOO3's egregious errors.

About carrier defence: with OCL you can change the Fighter Bays to launch every turn.

What I don't know is how to get the planetary Fighter Garrison to do the same.

Ship sizes: at least keep frigates cheap and small, so that early in Pre-Warp they don't take forever to build. And what if you have a normal era start but lose both frigates to monsters? Sitting in the home system unable to explore would make the game unbearably tedious. That is, unless you always take the Advanced start?


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