Influence Claims are costing = 0
Just me or anyone else?

Mate, this mod is fantastic. Playing as humans, 1 alien civ next to me, feels like empty space of exploring and slow expansion. Very realistic. Very immersive. xx

really good mod, i love dig archaeology site outside my empire. i hope if i can build hyper relay or Gateway outside my territory

Well, it definitely doesn't work in 4.1. Currently, this mod completely disabled influence cost for outposts.

Will it work on 3.14?

@Eisenfresser what?

@kinngrimm Don't worry, Friend. Misunderstanding is not stupidity; it is simply the veil that shields us from seeing our own errors. It is the echo of our own limited perspective, but not the absence of wisdom. We are all, in truth, walking through a vast, complex melody, with each step forming part of a larger symphony.

Remember, even the most skilled musician occasionally falters, but in those moments, the choir of life doesn't judge. Instead, it pauses and listens—waiting for the next note, the next chance to harmonize. Our mistakes, too, are part of the music. They don't define us, but teach us how to find our place in the grand, endless song.

now i feel stupid :( i just recognized that you are also the author of the "Incremental Hyperlanes"

One heart wrenching question though that every developer dreads as we all are convinced at some point that our baby already is perfect =)
Would you care to make that one mechanic change into a stand alone version? Please. Explicit is better than implicit, and not being able to fine tune the experience is the bane of my existence.

Just as a thought, another way could be to make all points optional
and/or a more flexible approach where you give an UI interface that is flexible in its scaling within a spectrum/range. Upper and lower limits for values like min max cost or min max distance when cost effects would set in and a slider that allows the user to fine tune.

In any case, i love the unique playstyle changes that you offer and will definitively give it a go.

ha and suddenly the "Incremental Hyperlanes" & "Hypertraversal Manipulation 2" mods in my "Dark Space"-Nomad origin playthrough all come together for a synphony with yours of yet another new game play experience in this best of all and sometimes worst of all games hrhr

Yes, that's exactly what that means.

It also means you'll feel a spot of indignation far more frequently at seeing alien ships near your borders, because there is a high chance they will simply claim stars you were going to have and then oops, borders closed!

Makes the AI a prick when it comes to systems!

"No distance penalty for the influence cost of Outposts."
this sounds too good to be true, you mean i could leave out systems which i do not put stations in and then pick up a few systems later and would not have to pay a distance penalty?
Please say it is so :)

From the feel of it, I don't think AI's are impacted by this mod :/

I tried this with the wilderness origin and starbases have zero influence costs.

Does the influence cost also impact NPC empires?

Just played once so far but this really helps game pacing! This should be a base game option instead of a mod :)

Not sure if its because of other mods but there is no influence cost to building outposts. Currently playing with real space and gullies planet modifiers

@Redeye not quite in the late game but I've gotten to mid 2300s and there are still swathes of territory. I had a wormhole lead me to a huge area which is where I'm expanding now. Pretty cool since in most games you never have that happening

I played a game with 20 empires (22 since one had common ground) on a 1000 star galaxy and there were plenty of wars going on. I did see ai aggressiveness to high though.
So far I'm really enjoying the mod but, I will say personally I think lowering the cap a bit would be good( or maybe a means to gain a bit more?). That said it actually feels like influence has value so that when you have the option to expand agreements, pacts and decisions with events are more impact full choices

so what does mid to late game actually look like? Are there lots of unclaimed systems?

Interesting! That can't just be from lack of border friction, right? Maybe it's that they don't consider themselves boxed in, so they don't get that aggressiveness mult? I'll poke at this.

Yeah, my tests wind up looking like an interstellar HRE.

I don't have Plantoids, but in theory I could restore the distance penalty for empires with that origin.

Observations on the newest version (without hyperlane stuff):

- I made a "crowded" galaxy (600 stars, 18 empires, 2 marauders & 3 FEs). Most empires aren't touching each other. Played up through 2250 so far.

- No wars. I have a "neighbor" (non-touching) devouring swarm, but it's content to just hang out in its own space.

- Border Gore: The Map

- Fruitful Partnership is 100% busted since it gets distant habitable systems at no cost. Combo with a fauna-controlling civic like Beastmasters so you can control where the seeds go and it's 300% busted.

I like your ideas

@NGL My Alt: You may need to unsubscribe & re-subscribe to force Steam to download the new version.

for me im still getting the hyperlane discovery despite it being split form this mod

I love this mod a lot, I slowed my research and traditions cost to the max, and it was nice, though the main issue of this run was boringness. I am adding events mods and trying to find other mod to make it even more enjoyable. Thank you for the mod.

Neat, thanks for splitting out the hyperlane stuff.

I'm going to give this a try again and see how the galaxy evolves.

I tried this mod but I went to 2290 without discovering any other empires, and gave up. I think slowing down expansion is a good idea, especially for the AI who usually create sprawling empires claiming every useless system they can, however it gets boring to play that long just developing an empire in isolation

You could make hyperlane discovery interval and rate configurable by , if not interface/slider, by a parameter file.

This sounds like a great mod.I'll have to give it a go soon.

Great mod. Adds more strategic options when maneuvering fleets around and buffs the usefulness of the Great Khan.

I'm kind of conflicted about Hyperlane discoveries because on one hand it gives better mobility, but on the other hand it clutters the map too much and makes defenses kind off meaningless.

In regards to the comment about "75 years with no connections to neighbors", I am playing in a 2k star galaxy so it's perhaps a little exaggerated for me but I didn't make my first connection to another empire until around the 2400 year mark and that was only because the psychic coven reached out to me and I jumped a science ship halfway across the galaxy to check the area out.

I mean the consequence being that I have eyes on all of my rivals at the moment but my place in the universe is an enigma to them (I hope) but yeah, frequency of systems within my empire getting new connections and that's it is really frustrating.

There is a bug with merchant branch offices where the influence it greatly increased.

There's a mod which does hyperlane growth over time ("Evolving Hyperlanes" maybe?), that's a place to look for solutions.

Eager Explorers is kinda busted with this mod. :)

i like how this works i always hated how fast Ai expanded. Though could you make a version that already has all the hyper lanes active? i just want the Ai expanding massively slowed down not restricted to where i can go.

Thanks, I'll see if I can make the hyperlane search more...extroverted? I do want to to be gradual, but 75 years with no connections to neighbors is definitely too slow.

I generally like the idea, but find the hyperlane discovery way too slow. I've had every possible system owned and for the majority of the game, all that would get revealed is a new hyperlane connecting one system I own to another system I own. At year 2275, I needed jump drives to get to other empires since I still had no connection to any other empires, for militarist empires, it SUCKS to basically have to wait for jump drives before you can even find another empire.

I don't know how it's checked, but new hyperlanes from owned systems should appear far more quickly(especially hyperlanes from owned system to owned system) and only further hyperlanes should take years to be revealed.

I like this mod for how it plays with extending the game. However, I feel like it needs some accessory mods attached that can get more things happening in a smaller space. I don't know if one exists, but a good example would be a mod that gives scientists a good way of gaining experience when you've hit the wall on your borders and your best scientists have died before they could capitalize on the high end anomalies in the area. Just something to keep things lively while you're isolated in the galaxy for centuries lol

I have no idea how to make a mod menu, but I could certainly split this into sub-mods.

I think this mod should really be split into 2-3 submods, The extra cost of influence is quite nice, prevents going super wide asap, the starbase changes are... meh? and the hyperlane growth is at best net neutral, and at worse actively detrimental to building an empire at all.

This mod really needs a mod menu of some sort a la Gigastructural. While I love some features like more expensive influence cost, I don't care for the hyperlane system screwing with my long term defense planning.
Give us the ability to pick and choose features, and I'd be happy.

I played three games with this (up to midgame or so), and it was interesting, but I found that the expansion expenses caused stagnation and my dig-site precursor run was very frustrating.

I look forward to your future experiments!

@doctornull: Thanks for the feedback. I do like the idea of sector capitals becoming satellite hubs for later expansion.

Same here, I had to put it at the top for it to work.

Overall I like the direction, but I think it's a bit much for me.

What I'd love to see:
- Expansion cost is related to distance from capital
- You're expected to get your core sector (3 or 4 jumps from capital) relatively early
- Traditions, APs, and Repeatables can provide expansion cost reductions

Then at some point you'd be able to reduce expansion costs around a Sector Capital (so expansion into a sector or two would become cheap). This would be for a small, fixed number of Sector Capitals -- releasing one as a Vassal would reduce your Sector count so you could start over again.

I don't really value the hyperlane growth, nor the extra starbase buildings.

I think the expansion cost formula could use some tuning, but overall I like this, and I'll probably try it again when 4.0 is more stable.

@Ezra-Bridger: well that's weird, but glad you got it working

Ok, I put it at the top of my mod list and now it works

I tried with vanilla and only that mod turned on and it still does nothing

I don't even know where to see that @Arcontinnio

@Ezra-Bridger: Hmm, but other mods do work, I take it? Does your error.log have entries like:

"Object with key: influence_expenditure_stations already exists, using the one at file: common/ai_budget/expExp_influence_budget.txt" ?

It doesn't appear at all. Nothing changes in any regard after putting the mod on