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ESG Mod - 1.4 - Outdated

And dust, in general, is far far more valuable with the economy rework. Mostly the inflation changes, but also the buyout and trade changes.

Waky forgot to mention this, but our general goal, ever since starting out, has always been to buff the S tier factions down to A, and everything else up to A. S tier is classified as "so powerful it breaks the game mechanics", such as Vodyani being uninvadable in vanilla.

The main problem with Lumeris is that.. they had no supporting mechanics. They weren't a good dust faction, they weren't a good industrialist faction, they weren't fun to play, they were just kind of.. generally sub par. When reworking them, I heavily consulted the original GDD amplitude released, and asked the Lumeris mains on our server what they would like to see them able to do, and I'm fairly proud of the end result. Rather than buffing Lumeris dust production, they are just more efficient at using dust in general.

@Butcher Pete (2/2) Fourth, the change is one (relatively minor) element of our ongoing goal to reduce the RNG sensitivity of the Vodyani, which is simply enormous in vanilla.

Finally, we agree overall with the approach you described (better to buff the trash factions than to nerf the great ones), but have needed to make some modest calibrations as we have continued to progress in the modding project. now that most of the other factions are generally clustered around the same level of power, it is much easier to ding a faction a bit than to apply targeted tweaks to everyone else--particularly given that we typically prefer to do so in ways that are thematically targeted to each faction.

@Butcher Pete (1/2, regarding the Vodyani) First, a clarification: the Vodyani malus applies only to the initial planet FIDS, so the penalty is non-trivial, but not enormous. It doesn't reduce the +8 FIDS per pop that they generate while boosted, nor does it reduce the effects of buildings, hero skills, events or other means of improving yields.

Second, we felt that this version of the change is a means of leaning into their theme of generating FIDS from means that are decoupled from planetary yields, in-line with their other faction abilities (ex: very large bonuses that come directly from the population)

Third, there is some element of a "trade" embedded in that trait, as it does also provide a -25% reduction in the approval penalties absorbed from planets, which is reasonably useful.

@Butcher Pete I wouldn't say that we are buffing Republic in order to buff the Lumeris; we gave an extra law slot to ALL government types (except for Democracy, as they were maxed out already), and then gave extra bonuses to Democracy instead. That enables the changes from our law rework to be more relevant by using more of the new higher-tier laws.

In fact, Republic is the only government type that has received no specifically targeted buffs. All others have gotten a fair bit of help, particularly Dictatorship.

@Qareen Yeah the Riftborn AI was always one of the stronger ones due to their rapid ability to colonize and grow (combined with the AI's enormous happy bonuses at higher difficulties that enable them to mostly shrug off the overcolonization penalties that would cripple a human player). I do typically find that the Cravers are comparable or better simply because they invest considerably more heavily in their military (and again, the huge amount of extra approval for them is easily "spent" on maintaining a larger number of slaves). So it's really just an extension of 2 fairly straightforward advantages of the factions that the AI can easily exploit without needing to modify how it plays, combined with a greater ability to "spend" the excess approval that other high-difficulty AI's wouldn't have as much use for.

So I noticed the modder nerfed the crap out of the Vodyani with a massive -25% FIDS production on planets. Yes, Vodyani are strong, but this has to do more with the power of their pops.

You did not need to nerf Vodyani with just a horrible malus. What needs to happen is that the other civs need some actually GOOD pops. Remove or reduce the cost on all that political party crap in the custom race editor and make it so Lumeris pops actually produce something other than +2 dust naturally. If you gave them the old "Meritocractic Cosmopolitans" that would be +2 FIDSI across the board and that's all that you would need to make the Lumeris an actually good civ. Same goes for the Unfallen. They need something other than just food production on Fertile planets for their pops.

I would rather you buff the F, D, C, and B tier factions than nerf the S tier factions like Vodyani. If everyone is OP, no one is.

@Qareen It's probably because Riftborn now have access to Cram Exam, whereas they did not before because they are a Republic, and so their pops now will produce +9 science (+5 from Riftborn, +4 from Republic Cram Exam) per turn per Rift pop. Plus Riftborn can settle outposts into colonies faster than anyone else, making that +9 also insane.

I feel a lot of unforeseen consequences coming in attempting to buff the Lumeris by buffing the Republic. Not to mention Republics now have as many laws as Democracies. Riftborn was already a great non-custom faction.

I have now tried this mod on a few games... a truly excellent job. :D

One small thing, in just about all these games I have played (all single player against AI), the Riftborn (if I am not playing them myself) tend to overpower all the other AIs. It is normal for the Riftborn to have double the points by turn 50 (on normal speed), almost every single game, then all the other AIs.

So almost every game it is me Vs the Riftborn.

The Cravers never have been able to be threat to just about anyone.

I play on huge maps with 9 AIs.

Documents/Endless Space 2/Temporary Files, send the most recent html from that folder.