Rebalanced Research Penalties

If you liked this item, please rate it up on Steam Workshop page.

Author: NordikaMan

Last revision: 16 Jun, 2018 at 22:49 UTC (1)

File size: 1.02 KB

On Steam Workshop

Description:

Rebalances the population and colony research penalties. Research time will be significantly increased with every new colony, but reduced slightly with every new pop.

Heavy expansion and developing colonies put a burden on a the progress of a civilization’s science industry; however, once populated and developed, colonies should be able to provide increased overall scientific output.

Each colony will incur a 40% research penalty while each pop gives a 1.25% research boost.

A fully colonized planet with:
25 tiles = 8.75% research penalty (31.25% research boost)
20 tiles = 15% research penalty (25% research boost)
15 tiles = 21.25% research penalty (18.75% research boost)
10 tiles = 27.5% research penalty (12.5% research boost)
5 tiles = 33.75% research penalty (6.25% research boost)

Note: I’m completely open to balance and improvement suggestions! I threw this together really quickly after becoming rather frustrated with how slow wide empires develop technologically. That being said I do want to keep the game balanced in order to accomidate both tall and wide strategies throughout the early, mid and late game.

As requested by @aidynmaster I’ve uploaded a variant of this mod which uses half the colony penalty and half the pop bonus (20% and 0.625%), give that a try if you feel this is too punishing.

To do: Make the penalty relative to the overall size of the colony, rather than a flat rate.

Compatibility
Only touches ‘common/00_defines.txt’ lines:

NGameplay = {
TECH_COST_MULT_NUM_COLONIES = 0.4 # Each Planet adds +X% tech cost
TECH_COST_FREE_POPS = 0 # First X pops do not add any tech cost
TECH_COST_MULT_NUM_POPS = -0.0125 # Each non-free Pop adds +X% tech cost
}