First of all: Thank you for the great mod! The game is so much better with it.

The new ship designs are an interesting idea. They could bring another layer into the combat. But I am not sure if the designs are all equally good. My guess is, that the ship with more space on it will always be better/stronger. Maybe they should all have the same space and only differ in armor and speed.

And I have found a small cosmetic bug: The name of the Artifacts Research Facility is missing. The game shows only COLONY_STRUCTURE_ARTIFACTS_RESEARCH_FACILITY_NAME instead. But the facility is working as intended (+2 research) so its not a big deal.

Keep up the good work!

More space definitely seems to be the best benefit. I'm going to need to adjust the balance a bit. I think limiting it to just armor/speed wouldn't quite be interesting enough to justify a new hull type though.

Thanks for reporting the artifacts research facility text. Looks like something got messed up when I merged the various localizations. I'll fix it soon

No bug reports here, at least not yet, but suggestion for improvement: I think there should be Instant Uber tech to go along with Instant Gaia.

On a related note, a random event idea: Instant Gaia is described as exchanging planets with a parallel universe. So, random event, someone in a parallel universe uses Instant Gaia/Uber and your universe is the one they exchange planets with. Effect, downgrade a planet with any class A biome to a random worse biome. After looking through RandomEvents.yaml, I suspect this would require UCP support to make it possible.

I don't think it's possible to tie more than one tech to an uber race perk. I'll have to try it.

I can't add any random events, so yeah that would require UCP. You might suggest it to WhatIsSol and see if he's willing to try it. We wouldn't have any GNN report for it though, which might be an issue.

Looked through the yaml files a bit, I think you're right that you can't tie more than one tech to a single uber planet perk - directly. There doesn't seem to be anything stopping you from making an extra "instant uber" perk, adding that to the list of sub-perks granted by the one actually shown on the menu, and tying the extra tech to that perk, though.

On another subject, I think the scientific victory buildings are severely underpriced. I got the warning that one of my immediate neighbors, who I was already in the process of conquering with a fleet they couldn't stop, was building the last one. I immediately dropped everything and sent the fleet directly on the shortest available route to the planet that was building it, and simply physically could not travel fast enough to reach it in time. I was still three turns away, having set out four turns earlier, when they finished and won. Building "win the game" should not cost just a tiny fraction of building "one big ship".

I could add in another hidden perk like you say, but then I'd have to put it in a hidden tech node which requires the one you need to research, and that means it won't show up in the tech tree at all, unless you add some sort of dummy tech (like with toxic condenser) so that it shows up for everyone. It's not an ideal solution.

I've tried to increase the build cost of the scientific victory buildings before, but for some reason the game ignores the changed cost. The 3rd building always takes 1 turn to build.

Originally posted by Spud Dastardly:

I could add in another hidden perk like you say, but then I'd have to put it in a hidden tech node which requires the one you need to research, and that means it won't show up in the tech tree at all, unless you add some sort of dummy tech (like with toxic condenser) so that it shows up for everyone. It's not an ideal solution.

Why wouldn't the same approach as for the normal uber planet tech work? Or does that also show up for everyone, or have some special hard coding involved? I might experiment with it sometime.

Originally posted by Spud Dastardly:

I've tried to increase the build cost of the scientific victory buildings before, but for some reason the game ignores the changed cost. The 3rd building always takes 1 turn to build.

Sounds like a problem for UCP.

It would also show up for everyone if you added a dummy tech.

Yes, UCP would have to fix that. I need to find the exact issue before I report it to Sol.

Originally posted by Spud Dastardly:

I've tried to increase the build cost of the scientific victory buildings before, but for some reason the game ignores the changed cost. The 3rd building always takes 1 turn to build.

I just now tried multiplying their costs by 10, and it worked perfectly. Maybe you forgot that the second and third buildings are upgrades, so their actual build cost is the difference in cost?

Odd, I thought I had tried that before. Well, I'll increase the cost for the next update then,

So I checked those buildings out. In 5X I have the costs already set to 400/800/1200. Yet the third building still shows a cost of 0 when I go to build it, and the second building shows a cost of 200 (meaning a total of 600). I don't understand why. When I increased the costs to 1000/2000/3000, they cost 1000, then 500, then 0 to build.

edit: I figured out the issue and why my results were different than yours. I was testing on very fast production speed. On normal speed, everything works as expected. However, on very fast, it turns out when calculating the production cost, it's applying the speed modifier to the building you want to build but not the one you're upgrading. On very fast for example, this means it'll calculate the cost of the last victory building by doing 1200/1.5-800=0 instead of 1200/1.5-800/1.5=266.67. UCP will need to fix this bug. I'll increase the cost of the buildings anyway.

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but the Biospheres add population past 100% of the planet's rating. This has the interesting side effect of making you have 2 people always rioting even at 100% morale on planets with moons.
This is assuming you are over the planet's orginal rating.
2nd Edit, on the empire overview screen, they don't appear to be rioting, but they are definitely rioting in secret.

I'm told that morale striking bug with biospheres will be fixed in the next UCP update.

Sweet! Gonna keep an eye for that one then.

Spud,

We had been discussing the command point change before. That discussion was going all over the place. Partly because I didn't yet know your motivation behind the change, partly because the annoying 1000 character limit in that section of the forum.

As I understood, your main reason to make a change was because the small ships are relatively overpowered per command point compared to the bigger ships (in the unmodded game). As I said, I agree with this somewhat however not to the extend that the destoyer should only require 50% more command points than the frigate. It instantly obsoletes the frigates when destroyers come along (except for exploration). I know that the old glorious classic MOOII also really rewarded getting big ships as they were far more efficient per command point, but this was one of the few things that I found was a balance improvement in this game over MOOII.

In my view, if the ships get twice as much hitpoints and space while getting somewhat slower, then they should become about 1.7-1.8 times as expensive in command points. This will favor the bigger ships, but not so much as to obsolete the smaller ones (3, 5, 9, 16, 28, 50, doom star could get an additional discount because it's mostly unique). Such numbers of course necessitate more (double) command points for the star base/battle station/star fortress. You could argue that the bigger ships require a really well developed star system to even get constructed in a limited amount of time and therefore make them extra cheap (like MOOIV has done) and then I'd argue for 3, 5, 9, 15, 25, 40.

In extreme match-ups (frigates vs titans), there will be situations of overkill. Therefore, the best make-up of a fleet might not be all big ships. However, a titan will efficiently kill battleships and battleships will efficiently kill cruisers and so on.

Another way to limit the frigate spam would be to limit the command point bonus of the star base. I always found the star base to give a relatively high number of command point compared to the battle station and star fortress. Especially given the large investments.

I also agree that the Space Academy makes balancing stuff harder as it re-orders balance at that point in the game. With its present implementation, it's almost impossible to balance stuff right before and after the Space Academy. I'd prefer a version where the discount would be something like
frigate -30%
destroyer -25%
cruiser -20%
battleship -15%
titan -10%
It would narrow the command point advantage of the bigger ships a bit. It might require multiple buildings to get such an effect. You're the modding expert, I'm not sure what's possible.

And finally about ship modules:
If a ship module is placed in a ship that is twice as big and it's a type of module that enhances the entire ship by a percentage, then a perfect balance for that module would be twice the cost and space. For instance, a structural analyzer makes weapons better with a certain percentage. As the larger ship carries twice as many weapons, the perfect balance for the structural analyzer would be twice the cost and space (as you have done). If you wish a certain module to be ideal for small ships, then the cost and space should increase more than a factor 2 with ship size. If you wish a certain module to be perfect for big ships, then then the cost and space should increase with less that a factor 2 with ship size.
Some modules don't do anything extra in big ships compared to smaller ships and I guess they shouldn't scale with ship size at all then (stellar converter, as you have done).

I noticed that most shields and drives employ a factor greater than 2 making these systems take a relatively bigger chunk of space from the bigger ships. That's a disadvantage for the bigger ships which I always found that a bit weird.