Toning down the resources requirements.

[Gavin]

I don't like the minerals requirements for the game, it's too excessive, difficult to get any kind of a decent sized fleet going unless you colonize and mine huge numbers of colonies. Is there a way to tone down the maint. cost values? I had a search the other night and couldn't find anything. I know how to turn down the initial minerals cost on things, but not the maintenance cost.
(and how is that calculated?)

[geoschmo]

Look for this line in the settings.txt file:

quote:

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Empire Starting Percent Maint Cost := 25

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Drop that number. Make sure if this is a multiplayer game that everybody has the same settings though.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Gavin:
I don't like the minerals requirements for the game, it's too excessive, difficult to get any kind of a decent sized fleet going unless you colonize and mine huge numbers of colonies. Is there a way to tone down the maint. cost values? I had a search the other night and couldn't find anything. I know how to turn down the initial minerals cost on things, but not the maintenance cost.
(and how is that calculated?)

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Besides changing the single setting in settings.txt for maintenance costs, you can also increase the mining ability of mineral extraction facilities or edit components.txt to decrease the minerals costs of various components. There is lots and lots of room for customization of the game.

[Gavin]

Thanks for the ideas, guys! I was on the wrong track I guess, looking for a 'maintenance cost' for various things, and it's actually 25% of the completed ship's total cost (which is rude, we never went above 10% in our old pen and paper galactic strategy games)

[Suicide Junkie]

I reccommend using the bases' maintenance reduction ability.

Copy that to the ships, and set it to whatever you feel like.
-60% to maintenance will give you your "10% of build cost"

This way, you don't have to reduce the build cost, or affect the racial characteristics limits (reducing the starting %cost will affect racial traits such as "maintenance reduction")

[Repo Man]

While we are on the subject of maintenance, is there any way to give mothballed ships a small maintenance cost?

Without it, it seems like its a very easy way to store minerals; just build em, mothball and scrap at a later date.

Repo Man

[Suicide Junkie]

Mothballed ships are hardcoded for no maintenance.

Sure, you store minerals, but at a hefty price: scrapping is not typically efficient, and even with the scrapper facilities, you're losing a big chuck of the investment.

[Taqwus]

Or choose 'Engineer' culture (the only culture with a maintenance bonus, IIRC) and for a further bonus, spend race points on maintenance.

Of course, you can't make a mainentance-free monster race anymore... but you can still lower it.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Of course, you can't make a mainentance-free monster race anymore... but you can still lower it.

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You can, but only by adding a racial trait, with new hulls or components.

[Dragonlord]

Actually the Merchant trait (the best I think) has a 5% maintenance reduction, making them very strong...I always buy up maintenance to 110%, but every 1% after that costs 200 racial points, so the merchant trait becomes real valuable!