Subscribe to download
Influence Rebates for Expansion

Take back part of the outpost influence costs for balanced expansion.

### Overview ###
This mod introduces a gameplay mechanic where the player is rewarded for expanding their borders in an organic way. Whenever an outpost is complete, you are refunded part of the influence cost, based on how many neighboring systems you already own vs. the total number of neighboring systems, up to 70% of the initial costs when you expand to a system that you completely surround.

This is not intended to penalize “snaking”, which is still just as viable, but to offer an incentive for other expansion strategies.

### Mechanics ###
-Variable outpost costs cannot be modded, so rebates are the only moddable option
-Base influence cost for outposts has been increased to 100, to balance out the new gains.
-Influence costs for distance from borders have remained the same (75 per system)
-The rebate formula is Rebate = (Initial cost) * 0.7 * (number of owned neighboring systems) / (number of total neighboring systems)
-The mod takes into account vanilla cost reductions, like the expansionist trait or xenophobe ethics. If you use mods that change those values, or add new ones, they will not be taken into account when calculating the rebate, resulting in more influence gains than intended
-For systems directly neighboring your home system, you are guaranteed a minimum 50% rebate. This is to counter the fact that those systems will always have only one owned neighboring system when you start a new game.
-There is currently no adjustments to the AI to take this mechanic into account when expanding, but it seems that its current strategy works ok with it

### Balance ###
This is the first version, and the numbers are probably not balanced yet. Empire builds that optimize for cheap outposts will see little gains from this mod. Alloy costs have remained the same for realism reasons, the intention is to calibrate everything around influence.

### Contributing ###
https://github.com/Rexides/influence_rebates
Feel free to open a PR. When making changes to the numbers, make sure to look around the code for parts that make assumptions about them, I have documented them.