[Mini-Mod] For DW-Extended - Increased Intelligence, weakened humans

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Tehlongone
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Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2010 7:38 pm

[Mini-Mod] For DW-Extended - Increased Intelligence, weakened humans

Post by Tehlongone »

Introduction:
These are a few changes I’ve made to the awesome mod Distant Worlds Extended by Haree78, I made it to optimize my own playing experience but I thought I’d make it available to anyone else who wants similar things from the game.

Reasoning for Population Growth Changes:
My reason for changing this is mostly based on increasing realism for the sake of immersion. The focus is on decreasing breeding of humanoids and especially humanity itself whose potential for growth we know details about. As a side-benefit it will substantially increase the challenge of playing as one of those races, especially humans/Xhumans.

The problem with the current 18% growth rate is that I don’t believe humans under absolutely optimal growth conditions could maintain that rate for a sustainable period. It would involve most females world-wide having a kid every second year, all the time. That doesn’t even account for those outside breeding age, so for every child/elderly the rest will have to pick up the slack.
They’ll essentially have to each have a kid every year, but with the population doubling in roughly 4 years there will be so many children even that won’t be enough.

Basically looking at the countries in the world with the highest growth we are looking at 4-5% annual growth. With disease and starvation eliminated and a desire for growth I can imagine humans with perhaps 6-7% growth, higher than that would involve widescale cloning (or at least artificial gestation) and being raised in huge private/government group homes.

As a concession to balancing I’ll assume they do indeed make some use of artificial gestation and set the growth rate to 9% annually.

Reasoning for Intelligence Changes:
Going through the list of races the highest is at 140 which is weird considering the game limit is 150, therefore I decided to increase intelligence by 10 across the board (well almost).

This has the effect of improving the performance of these AI empires which will perhaps make the game slightly harder without decreasing the diversity in the races (like for instance making them all have high Int).

Dhayut and Wekkarus I’ve always found to be rather cool races (I like squids and arachnids), but they are almost always amongst the weak races (in my experience), and I don’t see any reasoning for the low intelligence from their descriptions so I decided to increase them by 20 instead, which puts them very slightly above humans.

As for Xhumans I’ve reimagined their history slightly:
Different Xhumans:
Image
The XHuman is unnoticeably different to a Human to other alien races, the majority of the difference is behavioral although a Human or XHuman is able to see the differences through slight characteristics common to each race. Despite their outward similarity making a genetic comparison reveals significant differences.

Known in Human history as the Relakis incident. Relakis, a colony of the Humans, had been quarantined due to an extremely virulent virus. This enforced quarantine lasted many generations and was largely successful at stopping the spread of the virus which the population had begun developing genetic immunity to.

In order to survive the humans of Relakis resorted to geneering and cybernetic implanting on a scale otherwise forbidden. At first it was only small changes aimed strictly at survival but over time significant parts of their genetic code were rewritten, increasing their longevity and making them smarter, but also making them wholly incompatible with other humans and it occasionally lead to fertility problems within their own race as well causing them to rely increasingly on artificial gestation.

The planet was separated from the rest of the universe in so many ways Relakis had become a mostly independent colony. Unable to breed with a Human but also noticeably different in behavior Humans began to dub the population of Relakis Ex Humans as a racial slur.

The 'Ex Humans' quickly adopted this name to describe their race as XHuman. Banned from migrating to human worlds because of fear of the differences and the implications it had for other Humans their separation into different races was finalized.

The XHuman behaviourally has less inhibition than a Human and they are quick to offend each other because of huge cultural differences.

XHumans and Humans find each other detestable. The humans feel the Xhumans have abandoned their own humanity and the Xhumans feel betrayed both by the enforced isolation and the subsequent shunning by other humans. These differences have cemented into a deep-seated mutual dislike between the races.

Changelist:
- Increased intelligence of all races by 10, excepting Atuuk, Gizurean, Teekan and Tairoshan who by race description are not supposed to be bright.
- Increased intelligence of the following races by 20 instead of 10: Dhayut, Wekkarus, Xhuman.
- Population growth increases: (as substitute for no intelligence increase)
o Atuuk +3 to 31%
o Gizurean +4 to 34%
o Dhayut +3 to 15%
o Teekan +5 to 24%
o Tairoshan +4 to 18%
- Population growth decreases:
o Human -9 to 9%
o Kiadian -7 to 11%
o Securan -10 to 17%
o Enton -7 to 13%
o Xhuman -16 to 7%
- Specific Human changes:
o Added 5% TradeBonus
- Specific Xhuman changes:
o Removed 5% satisfaction change
o Added 5% TradeBonus

Installation:
Extract the files to your Distant Worlds Extended map folder, overwriting when prompted.
Attachments
MiniModf..Extended.zip
(524.49 KiB) Downloaded 65 times
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