Planetary Ringworlds: Rebalanced!
This originally started as a project to fix a couple of bugs the original mod but I got carried away and so much has changed I felt it would be better to re-release under it’s own heading.
In terms of bug fixes, the industrial districts now have support for catalytic processing and masterful crafters, rogue servitors can use the bio trophy district in the city rings, you can no longer build farming districts on machine rings, and I fixed that issue where hives could inhabit machine rings and vice versa. There are now additional ring designs for aquatic, imperial, lithoid and necroid ship classes, removing most of the issues with invisible rings. However if you’re using a modded shipset this will turn your rings invisible. This is not an issue with this mod, this is because the shipset mod author has not included the line fallback = mammalian_01 in their graphical culture. You have two choices: yell at them to fix their mod, or use Irony to comment out graphical_culture = fromfrom in the megastructures file in this mod.
New features include:
- Technology requirements for building planetary ringworlds: In order to build the rings you need to have the Voidborne ascension perk, and the mega-engineering technology researched. This will then provide an option to research planetary ringworld construction, which has a base cost of 10,000 (the same as entry level habitats).
- Compatibility for Void Dwellers Expanded and Zenith of Fallen Empires: You should no longer need to take arcology project, hive worlds or machine worlds if you meet the conditions from those mods.
- Hive and machine ring deposits: These are pretty much identical to the deposits you get from Planetary Diversity. So you’ll get -15% amenities use, -10% building upkeep and +5 stability on machine rings, and you’ll also get +25% organic pop assembly and +10 stability on hive rings.
- Rebalanced city, machine and hive rings: City rings districts now provide 6 jobs each, the same as a regular ecumenopolis. Machine and hive rings now provide 3 jobs per district, or 4 with the correct colony designation.
- City ring refinery districts: Like a Planetary Diversity ecumenopolis, or a Void Dwellers Expanded Grand Archology, you’ll be able to get your strategic resources from a city ring district.
- City ring administration districts: Updated for 3.3, these provide bureaucrats the same as any regular ecumenopolis. Unlike regular ecumenopoli, they will also be available to gestalts.
- Orbital Infrastructure: Planetary ringworlds now add extra districts to the planets they orbit, and the planets do the same for the ring. Currently this is a 1:3 ratio, which leads to some pretty crazy feedback loops. As an example, a size 30 world will add 10 districts on the ring, which lets you add an extra 8 to the ground, which lets you add another 2 to the ring, which leads to one more on the ground, and then one final one in space. So a size 30 world ends up with 39 districts, and the size 16 ring ends up with 29 districts. By popular demand there’s also a buff of +5 amenities each step. It’s me. I’m popular and I demanded it.
This rebalance isn’t perfect. Currently terraforming rings is disabled due to a bug in the original code that makes them go invisible, so make sure you’re building your forever ring before you put it down. Additionally the refinery districts will be a 6th district type, if you’re a regular empire, forcing them offscreen. I recommend using a UI mod to avoid this issue, however there are a few pixels poking out so you should still be able to use them either way.
In order to patch this mod for 3.3 I have had to overwrite 00_colony_types in the game files. If you’re using another mod that overwrites those (like planetary diversity) I recommend you patch them together with Irony.
Please leave a review and tell me what you think. Any issues, suggestions, etc are more than welcome, even if it’s just to tell me this mod is unbalanced as heck and I need to sort it out.
