Bring back the planet bonus and other planet things

[soul0reaper]

The random bonuses (or negatives) that planets may feature should be re-implemented. Now I know there are already tons of different planet types, but this way even premade maps have a sort of uniqueness to them each time they are played. After playing rebellion for a while, I gotta say I miss those porous core, high security, and other things. I know there are dedicated planets for probably all of the bonuses, but what harm is there to bring even more variation? Sins is a big game, each plant should have all the more potential to diversify. I'd do it myself if someone would point me in the right direction.

 

Other suggestions I'd like to make regard the planet development upgrades for some planets. I understand the rationale behind the decision for players to pay a cost to "maintain" a planet on a hostile environment. However given some maps like Systems at War/Fire and Ice, it would be nice to let players to be able to pay some amount of money to remove underdevelopment. It really cuts into your credits. In addition logistics slots on some of the planets are low, some planets do have tons of them, but I think the lower end should be given maybe 8 more slots or so.

 

Lastly, some of the normal sins maps don't work every well and I think it has something to do with the planet templates used. Now while I like making maps, sometimes I just want to play a premade map so maybe bring back some of the types of planet vanilla sins has so the vanilla maps work?

[Lavo]

Nova has said he isn't willing to re-implament planet bonuses. They would take far too long to devise, balance, and put in. There are hundreds of planet entities to edit, just to put them in. Further, planet characteristics are in fact planet bonuses, just ones set to spawn no matter what. Seeing the variety of planets ingame, I'm inclined to agree with him, particularly as this is his work.

 

While I'm against modifying planet upgrades, both in terms of population and development, I must admit that most pre-made maps are pretty damn broken by the current planet setup. Hrmm... There might be a way to fix this without modifying the planet entities themselves, I need some time to think about this.

[Lavo]

Alright so, I think I've figured out a possible work around. With planet bonuses, I can make a new, custom, planet characteristic that boosts a planet's tax income to make it actually make money, and depending on the planet, boost it's population count as well. I'll need a list of how many are necessary, how much of a population count boost and population growth rate boost, are needed.

 

The hard part of course, is making the new characteristics actually spawn. I believe it may be possible to make it an item in the GalaxyScenarioDef then edit each planet in question with a group that includes this item which is set to always spawn. Of course, if it does work, then the question become who is going to fix all of these maps and what have you... Though a friend of mine's making me a tool which might be useful for this. If it does work, I should be able to fix these up fairly quickly, if not someone else will have to do it as I really cannot be arsed to manually edit each galaxy file.

[soul0reaper]

All I meant was for the original sins planet bonuses to be brought back, maybe with star wars requiem naming. How exactly does the engine handle bonuses? Is it for group of planets or does each type need to be edited separable. Given that its random, its about as balanced as artifacts are (which is probably not saying much since one game my friend had all 3 artifacts that spawn in his area xD) Planet diversity is there by the sheer number of planets, but it still wouldn't hurt to have more differences possible between identical planets. Often whenever I try to make a map for SoaGE I rarely use any of the random planet selections because of the huge range of possible choices. Having bonuses would make maps have some differentiation when repeatedly played without drastically altering balance.

 

I'm willing to help edit files for you to implement the custom planet characteristics if necessary, and bonus if you choose to re-implement them.

[Lavo]

Oh, I see what you mean now. Well, I'll tell you the core of the "problem" of bringing back the old bonuses back, even if you want to do it yourself. When you open up a planet entity, there's the following bit on the bottom (example from LargeAcademy.entity):

 

requiredPlanetBonusesCount 1

bonus "PlanetCharAcademy"

possibleRandomPlanetBonusesCount 0

 

possibleRandomPlanetBonusesCount is what you would have to modify to put the old planet bonuses back in, but for every single planet entity. The names used in this specific case are merely the names of the entity file, no funny GSD business involved. To actually add them back in, all you will need is the actual planet bonus entities, an edited entity.manifest (add in these bonuses), and finally, edit every single planet entity you want to have the bonus. With a program like Notepad++, the latter isn't all that difficult, but it's a pain.

 

In addition, assuming you keep the entity.manifest uptodate, you could theoretically make it a stackable mini-mod, so that this way you can "give" people the planet characteristics without overwriting the base files, as I don't plan to put the old planet bonuses back in. I'd be happy to explain this more and help you build the initial version of this mini-mod; maintaining it of course will then be your responsibility (I'd suggest releasing it alongside full public releases, as continuously updating it for the beta would likely be a pain).

 

Now, back to the pre-made maps that are all broken, basically what I have in mind is to make planet bonuses which gets rid of the underdevelopment penalty, and possibly, boost total population, boost population growth, boost planet health, etc, as necessary to restore the pre-NU setting of these maps, or at least make them playable.

[soul0reaper]

That all sounds good to me. I'm not sure how free I will be during this summer, however I think I'll have enough time to work on this. I'm not very good at scripts but I think there might be an easy way to bring planet bonuses to each svn release. I would need it to search for all possible planets and add the range of all possible bonuses. Since I know where the line of code is, I think it should be simple to add. Still with the sheer amount of planets, a lot of typing and copying seems to be in the future.