Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

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xepooqu80
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:15 pm

Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by xepooqu80 »

Hey!
I would like to mod the game so that having starships is something of a feat and manually control/name them for better immersion.
Base game with AI improvements allows me , after couple of hours, to have 60+ very very easily and while this is fine i would like to change that

How can i make starships "rare" ? Is there a mod already with this philosophy ?


One way that i am thinking is increase cost and maintenance like 5x --> how can i achieve that?
or maybe make components cost much more resources --> how can i achieve that?

Thanks!
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rjord2021
Posts: 2019
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2013 2:47 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by rjord2021 »

The mod I am working on will also have a limited number of ships and I will be looking at how to do this.

I suspect that for each race that you want to limit ships you need to go into the Empire policy file and make adjustments there.

To see what I mean....have a look at the Empire policy screen for your Empire and you will see a number of fields indicating numbers of military ships. Then look at the policy txt files for each Empire and see what areas of the file need to be changed.

I have also setup the races in my mod so that conditions in each of their home systems is set at Harsh which means it will be harder for them to construct when there is not a ready supply of raw materials... I still have to test the effect this has on the game.

To manually control the ships in your race, go to Options and change the automation settings to manual.
Sabranan
Posts: 474
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 4:05 pm

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by Sabranan »

Hmm, there's no direct way to edit the number of ships that empires will try to build. It varies over time; larger empires will naturally try to build more ships. Editing policies would let you set the proportions of ship types, but there's no simple controls regarding how many ships will be built.

The only real way to influence it is by adjusting the resource requirements for each ship component, increasing them will make it take longer to build ships and make them more expensive to produce and maintain. These figures aren't simple though because the cost of resources changes depending on availability.

To actually do that you'd need to create a mod folder and stick a copy of the components.txt file in there, changing the values in it until you get the behaviour you want.

Your post provided a motivational spark for me to update my mod tool with some component batch features for just this kind of work.
xepooqu80
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:15 pm

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by xepooqu80 »

Hey !!
First of all thanks for the time you took to answer :-)

Based on Retreat UE mod i think i did something along the lines i wanted by

1) Reduce the money available in general
--> This was achieved by editing the colony income bonus in the Government file; hopefully at higher difficulty will not affect AI too much
2) Reduce the resources in the galaxy
--> This was done by halving the prevalence of all resources... still need to test if it worked
3) Increase resource needs for each component
--> This was done by doubling the resource needs for each component... took quite a while to do it semi manually :P

Will test a game now and if it works will of course share this for anyone who might be interested

Will also check your mod tool..seems really awesome :)
Thanks again!
Aca
Rosbjerg
Posts: 88
Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2015 4:02 pm

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by Rosbjerg »

Looking forward to seeing your result, I would suspect option 3 is the best way to go. Do you know if this also affect upkeep? Because more expensive ships, that are also more expensive to have, would certainly reduce the overall number of ships even for the AI.
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Franky007
Posts: 179
Joined: Thu Mar 10, 2005 3:57 am

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by Franky007 »

I would go with options 1 and 2.
Set Abundance Maximum = (Min + Max) / 2
Maybe reduce cargo capacity by half too.
xepooqu80
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Mar 25, 2010 5:15 pm

RE: Mod to significantly reduce the number of ships?

Post by xepooqu80 »

tm.asp?m=3834204&mpage=7

I uploaded the changes with 1+2+3 on the Unleashed Extended - RetreatUE thread

By no means perfect but it does achieve what i was looking for.
@Rosjberg changing the amount of resources for components definitely increase upkeep.
I doubled them across the board so ship upkeep is doubled too at same resource prices
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