Energy Tree Mod

[Retreat1970]

Energy Tree Mod

Made for myself just to dabble in modding. For Vanilla DW:U. Posting for others to try. On the off chance you like something, feel free to reuse anything.
The concept was to make warp choices more difficult and the tech tree longer. There are no longer interconnecting prerequisites for the torrent drive. Now there are 3 or 4 paths for the player to take depending upon playstyle. Also the Gerax drive is much slower. 7500, 10000, and 15000 for speed.

Kaldos: Moderate speed, very high fuel usage, very fast jump. Made for system defence. Tier 7 has a one second jump initiation time. Any enemy that is in your system will be immediately pounced. It's awesome. My idea was very quick jump times needed a huge amount of power for the warp computers to nav safely and not through a star or planet.
Equinox: High speed, moderate fuel usage, very slow jump times. If you need speed this is the choice. Doesnt burn as much fuel as the Kaldos, but the jump times are stupidly slow. Not useful for local defence, but useful to hit a target quickly a moderate distance away.
Calista-dal: Very slow speed, low fuel usage, moderate jump times. I wanted this to be the line for the private sector, but realized this also could be the line for the long distance warrior as well. Want to hit a target 5 sectors away and not refuel? This may be your line. Explorers will like it.
Torrent: Mostly unchanged. Kind of a middle ground between the other three. Branches directly from Gerax. Who knew you might actually research the second Gerax upgrade (no one does, now you might).
Velocity (racial): Unchanged.

I tried to split the reactors into three seperate choices like the warp drives but I am unsure of the result. I had output and storage to work with. I made the fusion line high storge low output, the quantum line high output low storage, and the third line fission in the middle of the other two but different in two big ways. Fission reactors work off Helium (yes a third fuel), and the are also half the size, power and storage. I haven't tested this very much so I am very unsure if this is interesting and diverse enough to warrant the changes. But here they are.

As with the themes before, shields are diversified as well. Talassos shields are weak with very high recharge. Deucalios shields are very strong with weak recharge. Corvidian and Meridian take the middle path. Racial shield (megatron Z4) slightly changed. Area shield recharge is unchanged.

The other change was I added a repair to the early damage control. Damage control 1 is 30% reduction with a 15 sec repair. Damage control 2 is a 40% reduction with a 10 sec repair. All other damage control, including the racial are unchanged.

Oh, one more thing. I made a prerequisite for Hyper Jump Disruption. Massive shield projection is required. I figured if you can put a shield around a planet then you probably have some knowledge to extend a warp inhibiter field. Just something that made sense to me (maybe only me).

This is barely tested and who knows if I'll even keep playing with it. The AI may not use it well.

Retreat1970

[Retreat1970]

Reactor / Shield Pic

[Retreat1970]

Warp drive area pic

[Sirian]

Interesting mod! I thought about doing something similar to the Gerax Hyperdrive (reducing its speed for the first two tech levels) Sort of "putting the Distance back into Distant Worlds". I had a speed of 6000 in mind for the first tech and around 12000 for the second. But then, I thought about pirates, would this change gimp them enough to make pirate play obsolee? I don't know at which technology level they start and how they progress, so I would have to investigate that further.

Personally, I would not remove the dependencies of the super-technology (Torrent Drive, Meridian Shields) to their specialized predecessors. I imagine for one to build a technology that is the best of all worlds, one would have to explore those worlds at least a bit. But this is only a suggestion.

I like your approach of keeping the usefullness of the specialized tech by increasing the benefit they give over the super-technology. After all, they are specialized.

[hewwo]

Hmmm I actually don't really want to reduce their speed all that much, but rather their range. But as documented in another thread, this is somewhat complicated because of the interaction with weapons through energy use.