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ENDLESS™ Space 2 is turn-based 4X space-strategy that launches players into the space colonization age of different civilizations within the ENDLESS™ Universe. Your Vision. Their Future.

Luxury Rebalance mod [Feedback/Discussion Thread]

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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 8:21:36 AM

Huge work, and intelligent developement !


I am not an super fan of the fact that luxuries in your mod increase the specifity of each planet types. I like resources upgrades as something that square each planets types with each other (i have no idea if my sentence ihas sense huehue). If you are lack of industry because you had no hot planets around your empire, but have jadonyx, you can go trough this weakness. In another hand, with the balance you made, it's still possible to do that. So, it looks fine i think.


I love the gas. Gas are already very powerfull by themselves, but a player with eden incense would give them a special importance !


I will 100% use your mod after the release of the next patch ! For the moment i dont play a lot because of the ai, and i also want to see how devs modifed the luxury stuff, and then use your mod.


Great job !


Edit : Looking more in detail into the stats of each luxuries, some things look a bit dangerous for balance. I didnt tested it already, i might be wrong, but intuitively it tickle me.


Dustalicious trees : As i said on the other topic, those tree are very weaks. They are hard to make profitable in early, because of the limited population, so more worth to sell, and almost useless in late game because of inflation. With your mod they give almost nothing exept on sterile, that are very hard to colonize in the first steps of the game (exept of riftborns). So getting thoses trees at any point of the game is never worth. They need to give more, be more easy to make profitable in early game, and greatly increased in late. 


Rough suggestions : 1) Make the base income from trees to 5, at least. 2)Make the dust income scale with fertile or temperate planets (they are trees after all), so they are strong in early. 3) Make the dust income scale with system levels, so they are not reduced to nothing in endgame, and scale with inflation growth. They would still be weakened by late game, but less.


It's 3 buff suggestions, so maybe cumulating the 3 is too much. In another hand, even in the current state of the game, stacked dustalicious trees (+12 dust pop) are not such an income for the empire. It's nothing compared to luxury sellings and trade routes income.



Proto orchid : Kinda same thing that dustalicious trees.



Lost cities and Benthic gems : They have kinda the same role, but there is already so much things that decrease colonisation happiness penalty. This fact make them not really relevant. Worse, the fact that transvine increase the pop slots make it absolutly superior to Lost cities and Gems. On your mod, I would always prioritise transvine to the other happiness luxuries. Transvine give inderctly a ton of fids, meanwhile Cities and gems give solution to problems solvable from many other ways, including transvine ! 


Rough suggestions : 1) Remove the pop slot increase from transvine 2) Decrease the effects of Gems and Cities 3) Give to Lost cities extra pop slots on few planets types, those wont dont give a ton of FIDS 4) Give to Benthic gem an extra pop slots on ohter types of planets, those who gove a lot of FIDS, like gas.


I am afraid that a cumulated effect of extra pop slot is totally OP, but in another hand, i am super fan of your initial idea to give transvine extra pop slot. It's actually one of the main things that want me test your mod. Anyway, this ability need to be harder to get than on the easier luxury to stack !



Gossamer : The +300% converted to inf is going to be so OP. It's already extremly strong in the game. I cant imagine the result with you mod, especially staacked :o . In the other hand, the +25% trade value is a very good idea and balanced.


Driftbuds : The most OP thing in your mod :D . The +100% trade value is already immense, and the science given by this luxury will probably allow to any trading empire to overcome any science empire finger in the noises ! Inthe current state of the game, the science given by trade routes is on the edge for. It's a little bit too strong, but not enough to be a huge problem. If you directly increase thisd aspect of the game, you make trade routes godlike, in late game, at least. 


I have no worth suggestion for this two ones, but they need a rework from the beginning. 


But some rough/shitty suggestions : 1) Make one of them give a FIDS bonus by pop, increased on systems crossed by a trade route. 2) lol i have no other suyggestion it's so hard to relate trade routes mechanics with other part of the game. Sorry :c

Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Mar 4, 2018, 4:19:41 AM

New patch, big overhaul :



Main changes :


-Overhauled the code to uncluster the tier 1 luxuries, allowing me to not make several regions on smaller maps, generation should be back to before the region change on those sizes.

-Reworked the deposit amounts, reduced the tier 1 a tiny bit, to compensate for the increase in yield for average/abundant depots and to give the galaxy generator more space for other luxuries, it should fix the issues people were having on bigger maps.


-Hydromiel won’t spawn on Gas anymore (oops).

-New balance pass :

    -excluded Vodyanis and ship-bound custom factions from the bonus FIDSI on Sterile and Gas only, as well as the +Pop improvements

    -Changed (read : nerfed) most tier 3 luxuries (more on that later), also removed the conditions they still had on Hot/Cold/Sterile to be more in-line with the previous tiers.

    -Food luxuries now give +%Health for defenders on System, as I felt manpower became less relevant in late game, making them food luxuries less appealing than the rest.

    -various stuff changed




-New prices for the upgrades : less penalty if you use the wrong tier of luxury in the tier right above/below, but increased the cost a lot more if using it for the tier further above/below (tier 2 luxuries are not impacted). This is because a) the old system isn’t working that well anymore with the new Federation luxury cost reduction combined with luxury connoisseurs, and b) because I felt it didn’t reward the exploration playstyle which I tried to encourage with other changes. The old system also tried to stop players from stacking tier 3 luxuries, but it instead pushed everyone to wait for their preferred combo before upgrading as the tier 3 were still way too strong. It also made balancing the tier 3 really difficulty, especially with the Vaulter’s ability to boost the already powerful effects with Quadrinix.


Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Feb 1, 2018, 10:00:13 PM

v0.8 - Yet another Balance pass edition :


Changelog tl;dr edition : 

  • specialized the MP luxuries : T1 and T3 are now meant against sieging, giving you less siege damage on your System and higher rate of Defense MP refill, T2 will now be Anti-"snipe", aka to counter high movement point fleets dropping tons of manpower on enemy systems in one turn (for example to win a Supremacy Victory).
  • Removed the Hot/Cold conditions and replaced them Sterile. I kept the bonus influence for Gas though. The Industry on Hot and Science on Cold were meant to rebalance the yields of non fertile planets compared to the all powerful Tier 0, but had a lot of drawbacks, for example it also hit Science heavy Empires because they gained less industry from Jadonyx/Void stones.
  • Removed the per planet bonuses, re-added some flat +FIDSI bonus for Systems on Tier 1 and Tier 2. 

This last change has three goals : 

  • Making smaller systems a bit more equal when compared to 4/5 planet systems when considering Luxuries
  • Re-add the dynamic that old tier 2 FIDSI luxuries had which let you boost your newly colonized systems in late game at the cost of luxuries.
  • Keep the reduced effect of the RNG on luxury spawns, they still give you a significant boost but you'll need a fully populated System to see the full benefits.



Full chart :




Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jan 29, 2018, 6:21:17 PM

Well, I actually managed to do it relatively fast, so here we go :


V0.7: Reworked how tier 1 luxuries spawn, instead of spawning in a giant cluster with all the luxuries of a given type in the same region, they now spawn in 3 different batches. This should :

  • Reduce heavily the RNG associated with the tier 1 luxury(ies) you spawn next to. As stated earlier in the thread, spawning with Jadonyx let's you snowball while spawning with MP luxuries slowed you down heavily (for example), now the chances are you'll spawn next to several clusters of varried T1.
  • Encourage people to fight a bit more for the tier 1 Luxuries, with more clusters, more chances of friction.
  • Still let you form a monopoly on a given resource on the market. The clusters are smaller, so the faction bonuses to luxury generation will be more important than just getting the luck of the draw and spawning next to a luxury.

Here's the new repartition of depots depending on map size :


I had to accomodate for not having any control on the number of clusters depending on galaxy size so tiny and small galaxies depot numbers change a lot (not much I can do around it, and I'd rather have that with bigger galaxies having unclustered depots).


Finally, I'm expecting a few bugs/crashes here and there (mostly from weird galaxy settings that would cause certain tier 1 depots to not spawn) so I'm always looking for more people to help me test.


Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jan 29, 2018, 11:21:48 AM

Made some small tweaks since the DLC update :


  • Activated Riftborn pop boosting. This is only to double their IDS output and doesn't affect their growth at all (don't know why this isn't in Vanilla).
  • Reduced the amount you gain from Lodes anomalies (when discovering a new luxury deposit) and buffed a lot the amount you gain from pure Loot anomalies. I'm still not 100% happy with that, as loot anomalies are still extremely rare. In the OP I was mentionning how I wanted to buff exploration by buffing loot anomalies, when in the end I reverted it and only buffed Lodes anomalies. Rectified that, now loot anomalies are also significantly buffed, the amount you get from lodes is lowered down (but still a lot higher than vanilla) as I felt it was giving a bit too much in the previous version.
  • Fixed the Luxuries needed in Diplomacy with Minor factions. I originally wanted to have them demand their preferred luxuries (now that I Fixed them based on the population) but couldn't find a way in the xml so I went with a particular luxury for a particular action :
    • Transvine for Selective Migration
    • Superspuds for Development grants
    • Dark Glitter for Training foreign corps
    • Dustciduous trees for Essence tribute (Ship bound only)

The reasonning behind that last change was to encourage using Minor Diplomacy actions by making the costs more consistent, a particular civ will always ask the same luxury so you can plan accordingly in the early game. I chose those luxuries in particular to make them ever so slightly more desirable than FIDSI luxuries (along with the buffs in the recipe from the mod) and to make them more "Roleplay" : Warmongers will ask for MP luxuries, you'll need the Dust luxury to ask for the Essence tribute, etc and to remove another instance of Pacifists sometimes asking for Manpower luxuries.



And now, for my next step : I'll be trying to decluster the tier 1 Luxuries to lessen the pure RNG factor of tier 1 luxury spawns while still allowing players to form monopolies on them.


Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jan 25, 2018, 12:41:23 AM

Well, after giving it more thoughts, I actually don't like the new balance all that much for the FIDSI luxuries, and for a simple reason : the flat increase makes snowball starts even worse. Basically, if you spawn next to Jadonyx, you'll be able to double your Industry production as soon as you upgrade (so within 25 turns) and with how everything in the game scales exponentially as turns go, it makes the spawn of tier 1 luxury close to you even more impactful than before, whereas before Jadonyx was nice to have in the long run but didn't instantly double your production because it scaled with your population, so every FIDSI luxuries were more or less evened out because of that. Maybe making the new FIDSI resources scale based on the number of planet already colonized would be a good fix?


On the plus side : 

  • I really like the new tier 2, now actually worth using (at least the FIDSI ones)
  • The Trade luxuries got buffed, still not quite competitive with the rest of the board, but it's a start
  • Manpower luxuries got buffed, but :

On the negative side :

  • MP Luxuries now take food out for every point of MP they give, I can see that being problematic (Although, I'm not sure with the food rework incoming), but for example stacking Virtual Artifacts could put you in a constant state of being starved because of the -5% Growth/System level.
  • MP Luxuries still have the same problem of actually giving you less MP in the end because of the +Defense MP on Systems, for example the tier 1 Gives you +10 Food to Manpower conversion (flat, not percent) but also gives you 200 More MP capacity, so in the end you need at least 20 turns before you start seeing benefits (not even counting the 200 Less food you'll miss), and you'll take longer to refill your systems after being invaded. I really think they need new effects, with my mod I went for a reduced sieging power of enemy fleets and bonus to refill the Defense MP pool while also giving MP conversion to the food luxuries, this might be worth looking into.
  • Gossamer (Trade to influence conversion) was changed to affect TradingRouteSystemBaseIncome (and also fixed to be 100% instead of the old 80%), from the little testing I've done, it's even worse than the old one (roughly 1/4 the output of the old one), this still needs some tweaking.
  • Happiness luxuries got infinitely worse, Tier 1 is now a flat +15, it used to be +2/Pop like Eden Incense, which got turned into +30 influence, so I don't know what warranted a nerf, when it was already pretty bad to begin with.
  • Still on happiness : Tier 2 is now the +2/Pop (well, right now it actually gives 2*Pop*number of planets but that looks like a bug), but imho not worth it for the new t2, could use a buff (what happened to over crowded malus reduction?), tier 3 is also unchanged and still not worth taking compared to +60% of any FIDSI except for VERY specific cases, maybe give it more utility (more pop on Sterile?).
  • As said earlier, Trade luxuries were buffed but still not nearly enough to be viable choices compared to raw FIDSI luxuries.



With that said, I also spent the whole day refactoring the code for my mod and made a new balance pass for it, and of course, I tried to fix the problems I've just talked about : 

  • Swapped tier 1 and 2 effects, much like the new vanilla balance.
  • Tier 1 is now a flat bonus per planet colonized to counter-act the effect of the randonmess of tier 1 luxury spawns.
  • Reduced the "specialization" of luxuries, they still provide bonuses for choosing the right planet type for your purpose (like Hot for Industry, Sterile for Dust, etc...) but it's not as bad as before to make them more generic. The point was to give incentives to go away from Fertile planets, not nerf Industry for Cold planets or Science for Hot planets.
  • Nerfed Gas planets bonuses, and made the +2 Pop on Gas +1 On Sterile, that is because I made a mod on the side rebalancing the population slots of the high tier planets, which makes Gas planets "Sterile" so they'll benefit from the +1 Pop on Sterile improvements, which should buff them a good bunch. They're meant to be played together but I didn't want to force it onto people.
  • Added the support for the Vaulters DLC, and changed a bit the effect of their strategics recipes to be in-line with the mod's luxury effects.

I need to tweak some GUI stuff, but it should be out before the DLC is.


Full table here :


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fgVuXFCwagDmO_6IWIiZwHtznkARSUj5xZ8OOei9AeE/edit?usp=sharing


As usual, I'm looking for feedback.

Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jan 19, 2018, 4:20:34 PM

Glad to see some rebalancing being done to luxury recipes in the base game, although it wasn't mentioned in the patchnotes (also lots of work for me incoming because of the Vaulters but that's fine).


Some examples, Jadonyx got hit really hard, tier 2 luxuries are finally better than their tier 1 counterparts (they get the +4 FIDS per pop), MP luxuries buffed A LOT, I'm liking the new balance, even if it's still far from perfect (trade luxuries were mostly unchanged changed for example) : 





Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Dec 27, 2017, 1:42:34 PM
SuperMarloWorld wrote:


Gossamer : The +300% converted to inf is going to be so OP. It's already extremly strong in the game. I cant imagine the result with you mod, especially staacked :o . In the other hand, the +25% trade value is a very good idea and balanced.


Driftbuds : The most OP thing in your mod :D . The +100% trade value is already immense, and the science given by this luxury will probably allow to any trading empire to overcome any science empire finger in the noises ! Inthe current state of the game, the science given by trade routes is on the edge for. It's a little bit too strong, but not enough to be a huge problem. If you directly increase thisd aspect of the game, you make trade routes godlike, in late game, at least. 

So I tested it a bit with the devmod console (as the effect isn't displayed in the System tooltips or anywhere else) to see exactly what the values are, and I can say I could see myself boosting the Science effect even further than 300% and I think it'd still be overshadowed by the Tier 3 Science luxury effect, even nerfed by the mod. But let me explain : 


The number it takes for the multiplication is the base output for trade routes of one system with all its bonus. This is affected by all the +XX% trade route income System Improvements, the System level and the length of the trade routes that pass by but is not affected by HQ level or number trade ships.

I took one of my vanilla games on turn 360 (normal length), with all the upgrades affecting trade route income except driftbuds as they did not spawn, and the highest number I had for any Star system trade value was 48, but I did not focus on trade at all in that game. So I tried moving one of the subsidiaries to the other side of the galaxy (on max size) and it added only ~12 to that value (on the other hand, I gained roughly +1000 Dust/turn income from each trade companies). So will that be better than a flat +20% Science (+x% depending on how many cold planets you have) from a Science focused empire? I'm fairly certain this will not be the case, but it'll be a nice boost for any trade focused empire, especially in late game.

Now on the other side, we have the Trade to influence luxury, which I don't know if I should nerf or not. On the one hand, the mod adds a huge cost disincentive for stacking the same luxury so it's unlikely you'll have 600% conversion or even 900%, but on the other hand I think it should be lower than the Trade to Science conversion effect, only based on the fact that influence costs are bellow other FIDS costs. Now, the thing I'm wondering about is does it warrant a nerf? It's not that strong of an effect, in vanilla it's roughly the same as the flat +50 influence effect while also having the HUGE disadvantage of being countered by blockading the trade routes or capturing a Trade HQ. I'll probably reduce it to 150% in the next version of the mod and wait to see if it needs to be changed again.


EDIT :
I just pushed a new update for the mod that reactivates the tooltip so you get better feedback concerning the resources you gain from your System trade routes output. Along with that, is a bunch of tweaks and fixed luxuries when you boost population, no more pacifists asking for a manpower luxury.

Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Dec 13, 2017, 9:42:02 PM

Thanks a lot for taking in account my suggestions, really. This is very nice from you to stand at attention on feedbacks !



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6 years ago
Dec 13, 2017, 7:06:26 PM

Thanks for the reminder, there's still 30 days and I was thinking maybe I'd finish the last few features I wanted for the mod before submitting.



Anyway, took some of your feedback into my new balance pass:


-Moved the +1 Pop on sterile to the tier2 luxury
-Moved the +1 Pop on Gas to tier3, made it +2 to be more competitive with the other Tier3 luxuries

-Moved the overcrowded unhappiness reduction effect to tier 1

-Buffed all tiers of dust luxuries.

-Buffed the MP gain from Dark Glitters because I thought you just ended up with less manpower overall due to the increase in system defense pools, it now scale with system level.

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6 years ago
Dec 13, 2017, 5:02:10 PM

Looks awesome!  Endless space 2 is having a mod competition (multiple entries are allowed), you should submit your stuff.  http://www.moddb.com/games/endless-space-2/competition

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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 8:23:42 PM
Kuma wrote:

MP Luxuries both affect max system MP pool and generation:


+20% Means the pool is augmented by 20%, thus scaling better in late game with other upgrades.
+5MP Defense/Turn means you refill 5 MP per turn on the system, but that MP never goes in the empire pool. It does, however, help you refill your systems faster so you end up having more Empire MP in the end since once a system is filled the growth it generates can directly go in the empire pool. I wanted to make it different from the food conversion.

Thx!

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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 6:16:17 PM

MP Luxuries both affect max system MP pool and generation:


+20% Means the pool is augmented by 20%, thus scaling better in late game with other upgrades.
+5MP Defense/Turn means you refill 5 MP per turn on the system, but that MP never goes in the empire pool. It does, however, help you refill your systems faster so you end up having more Empire MP in the end since once a system is filled the growth it generates can directly go in the empire pool. I wanted to make it different from the food conversion.

Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 3:30:38 PM

Seems good job. I have to try it!


Only a question about MP luxuries: the +20% and +5 MP defense/turn are impliying MP generation?


Also say I like your idea to someway ling resources tier with resources level cost and how you reworked it.

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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 9:33:01 AM

Hey, first of all thanks!


Then, to answer some of your points:


Dust luxuries : They can already be super useful, for say, Vodyanis (using the Dust to Essence conversion), also I'm relunctant to buff them too much as they help you reach economic victory threshold really fast (but then that's more a problem of Eco Victory being triggered a lot earlier than other Victories). On the other hand, I can't play around with Dust Inflation as it's something taking effect at the empire level, not at the System level. But I agree Dust is the weakest of the 5 FIDSI especially in late game. I'll try to find better effects that could apply to Dust only to make it more competitive.


Lost cities/Benthic gems : I'd strongly disagree saying they're useless but they are pretty situational, they help a lot when you're expanding too fast and reach over colonization before you're able to counter it with the Left side of the tech tree, also they offer an alternative. That being said, I do agree I could change the effects to give them more utility. 


Transvine's pop slots only apply to sterile (and gas) planets, which by default have the lowest amount of pop slots in the game (I'm trying to give some love to gas and sterile planets with that). Do keep in mind I added huge disincentives to stacking the same resources so I could go a bit more wild on those effects.


Driftbuds, Gossamer : I won't hide that my goal here is to make trading focus a lot more relevant, in particular in late game. I need to play around with it myself more but unless you're trade heavy, the Influence and Science bonuses aren't THAT big compared to, say, the equivalent Tier 3 Luxuries that give you 40% FIDSI. With that being said, this does need more testing and values are very much subject to change.


Also, I'm trying to draw players away from Fertile planets, as stated in the OP, Fertile planet benefit a lot more from vanilla effects just based on the fact that they have a LOT MORE population slots. Thus why I "specialize" the bonuses, to draw Empires away from Fertile planets (no this isn't Riftborn propangada).



Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Dec 11, 2017, 5:10:41 AM




Steam Workshop Page



The Luxury Rebalance mod's goal is to rebalance all aspects of Endless Space 2 centered around Luxury resources. This thread will both serve as an outlet for me to share my design choices, from stating the problems I personally identified to the features I implemented to try to solve them, as well as a place for discussion and feedback on the changes implemented by the mod or that you'd like to see.


Coming from Endless Space 1 and Endless Legend, the new stock-based Luxury system in ES2 is a new and really interesting pan of gameplay, but my personal feelings about it are mixed, and I think the main problem with it is that it lacks polish. First of all, it is too random and the range of impact it can have on a player start is too wide, for example getting a Jadonyx start versus a Dark glitter start can affect the game a lot. Whereas good players can overcome randomness from systems and planets generation (which offers way more variety thus being less likely to give you extreme -both extremely good and extremely bad- starting places) by choosing where to colonize, scouting ahead of time and fighting for the better systems, Luxuries end up spawning in clustered (at least for Tier 1 luxuries) locations with lots of small depots, making it hard to fight against RNG while also taking care of other aspects of the game (like colonizing high FIDSI systems). On top of that, since not all luxuries spawn in a given Galaxy, especially higher tier luxuries  (which in itself can be a source of frustration), players tend to ignore luxury deposits when choosing which systems to colonize or fight for, thus relying too much on tier 1 luxuries, using whatever the galaxy generation gave them instead of purposefuly making the choice of securing access to certain luxuries.



Galaxy Generation


The first thing I wanted to change was the limited number of unique types of luxuries in a given Galaxy. Where in Endless Legend, the number of luxuries gradually increase with the map size, in ES2, the increase stops at Medium (normal) Galaxy size, but, here, luxuries can have an even bigger impact on an Empire. Thus, why starting from Medium galaxies, I made it so that all luxuries would spawn in a Galaxy. To counteract the fact that now Galaxies would have around twice the number of deposits of Tier 2 and 3 luxuries, I also reduced the overall number of deposit spawning for each luxury, while also increasing the yields for average and abundant depots (to mirror the yields of strategic depot yields). This change makes luxury depots of a given luxury harder to find while also increasing the importance of lone deposit and the average number of luxury types available around players.


With those first changes, I had tree goals. Firstly, I wanted players to now carefuly look at the luxury depots when deciding which systems they want to colonize or secure from their enemies. It is now possible to secure a sufficient income of luxuries to upgrade your systems with fewer systems, and you also gain other resources, although in smaller amount, which I hope will encourage players to experiment with underused aspects of the game like population boosting, using luxuries on minor population to exchange them for resources and exchanging luxuries during Diplomacy with other players.


Secondly, I wanted to encourage the exploration playstyle (one of the 4 X in 4X after all), before if you decided to invest massively in explorers, you had absolutely no guarantee that the luxuries that could help you spawned in the Galaxy, thus making it a gamble against Galaxy generation. Now, you still have no guarantee of your playstyle being profitable, but you're not fighting against randomness anymore, you're competing against other Players to secure those resources, as you now have the guarantee they'll exist somewhere.


Finally and most importantly, some players think the available luxuries in a given game is one of the main sources of variety in the game, along with System/planet generation and empires repartition. I didn't want to reduce that variety,  on the contrary, by making all Luxuries available in a given Galaxy and carefully tuning the rate at which they appear, my goal was to offer more variance in the luxuries repartition, while also increasing the number of ways to access them, thus increasing the number of combinations the random generation can give. Situations where you lack a direct access to the luxuries that could help your strategy will still happen as often, but players now have access to more possibilities to get them out of those dire situations, be it by being more inventive, trading or by using other play styles (eg: exploration).



New values for the different types of Luxuries spawning in a given Galaxy


System Development Upgrades


The next step I took in order to rebalance luxuries was to rework all their effects in Empire Development Upgrades. My philosophy when it came to their changes was the following :

  • Removing effects that do not scale at all with Game Length or with how advanced your empire is. For example, I changed Dark glitter's effect from a flat +200 System manpower Defense on system (which is borderline useless in Vanilla and is better used by selling them on the market) to a flat +400 System Manpower, +20% system manpower and +5 System Manpower refill/turn, so now Dark glitter's effect stacks with your other manpower upgrades and it also gives some utility by helping you fill System defenses in early game, so your growth can go into fleet manpower faster.
  • Removing effects that favorise fertile type planets. It's no secret Fertile planets are the best type of planet in the whole for everything except maybe Science generation and that is because they have the most Population Slot. So I changed all effects scaling only with population and added recquisites to give more incentives for other types. For example, Jadonyx went from +4Ind/Pop to +2Ind/Pop and another +3Ind/Pop on Hot, in general, Dust production is favorised by Sterile, Science by Cold, Industry by Hot and Food by Fertile. I even threw some love for Gas planets by adding more Influence on Gas planets as they are the hardest type of planets to colonize, which is bound to give your Empire some prestige for it (and it helps make them a bit more interesting).
  • Removing effects that do not scale with System size, I basically changed all Tier 2 luxury that add flat FIDSI to be based on the number of planets (again, with bonus for Hot, Cold, Sterile, Fertile and Gas depending on the FIDSI). It doesn't feel right that a System with 1 planet gets the same bonus from 5 planets systems.
  • Adding more utility to the effects. Instead of only being raw FIDSI, you'll now find varied effects like more growth to manpower conversion, better trade value, trade to Science,... I even went as far as creating new effects unseen anywhere else in the game for certain resources, for example Virtual Artifacts now have an effect of -33% Enemy siege power on System.
  • Finally, I nerfed the Luxuries that were a lot better than others and tried to buff the ones that offered little. Trade luxuries are now buffed and offer a valid alternative to their raw FIDSI counterparts for Empires focusing on trade. Manpower luxuries are now a good way of stoping Blitzkriegs on your systems.



Full table of reworked effects of luxuries


One of the other aspects of Development Upgrades I wanted to tackle on was the poor diversity when choosing the recipes, often preferring the stacking of a single resource, like Jadonyx for example, instead of having more varied combinations. I consequently reworked how the prices of each tier of luxury is calculated in the development upgrade recipes :

  • Tiers of luxury are now meant for different, Tier 1 for Level 1 to 2 modernization, Tier 2 for Level 2 to 3 and Tier 3 for level 3 to 4, and not using the correct Tier results in a drastic price increase to discourage players, while still giving them the opportunity in case they lack the access to varied luxuries.
  • Using the right tier of resource on the other hand is now encouraged by a cost reduction.

Hopefully, with those changes I give enough reasons to players to not stack the same T1 luxuries in all their upgrades anymore.


New table of the costs of Empire plan upgrades


Minor Tweaks


One small aspect I also changed to encourage Exploration even more, was to change the amount of luxuries you get from loot anomalies. Loot anomalies are those anomalies that yield some luxuries but don't correspond to the discovery of a depot. Basically, I wanted to make it more worthwhile to discover anomalies, especially in the mid-late game part. It also doesn't feel right that Tier 2 and 3 anomalies recquire higher tech equiment to find them, while yielding the same as Tier 1. If they're harder to find, other people (like pirates or adventurers) are less likely to have discovered them before you, so you should find more.


The new values are as follow :

  • Tier 1 : 15 from 5
  • Tier 2 : 45 from 5
  • Tier 3 : 75 from 5


Where to go next


I'm pretty happy about the mod's features as of right now, but that doesn't mean developement is over. First of all, tweaking of all the new values will continue. Then, one of the features I want to tackle on is population boosting (using Luxuries to favorise a certain population in your empire). Now that all luxuries spawn in most Galaxies, I'd like each population to have a fixed family of luxuries they like, and tune the costs in luxuries to boost them.



Spreadsheet (google doc) link for the most up to date values


Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jun 26, 2018, 6:56:34 PM

v0.10 :


-Relunctantly made luxury upgrades more equal across the board, ie more or less divided FIDSI effects by 2
-Added system "level up" effects : +FIDSI on lvl 2, +FIDSI and population slot on lvl 3, etc (cf full chart). The incentive here was to reward players that commit to luxuries early with bigger bonuses, players that would rather wait to get their perfect combo of luxuries before commiting because they don't need to move populations around (*cough* Vodyani players *cough*) should now be at a bigger disadvantage.


-Reverted back to a tier 1 = per pop, tier 2 = flat and tier 3 = percent system for the FIDSI luxuries, as I liked the old system more, it also makes the different tiers more unique and fixes the issue of vanilla luxuries tripling or doubling yields in early game.-Added more utility for FIDSI Luxuries, such as repair rate and vision (on top of More HP for Defenders and Trade value effects that already existed), this should help make the new luxuries a bit more unique in their own regards.
-Updated tooltips, fixed some vanilla tooltips about system developments that were wrong.
-Bugfixes (sorry, no more infinite pop slots)
-Little bit of balancing, for example made quadrinix only apply to FIDSI effects to fix some really broken combos that still exist despite my pleas to devs (spoiler : superspuds + Quad), also made superspuds give FIDS, because they were still really bad apart from that abuse.


Full chart :


As always, I'm open for comments and feedback.

Updated 6 years ago.
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6 years ago
Jul 2, 2018, 7:16:40 PM

I appreciate the frustration involved with vanilla luxuries; it's mainly that so many luxuries are often excluded from the game and just as often as not the luxuries needed for your luxury booster are on the other side of the galaxy.


The second problem is one you appear to be trying to address, in that several luxuries are just plain redundant or so niche as to be unneeded.  Overcolonization penalty, for example, is far less useful than a flat approval boost, since it ONLY applies when overcolonized, whereas happiness always counteracts disapproval.  Hence, transvine or N-P artifacts are usually better than benthic gems as a development upgrade.  Some luxuries are hard to argue as being worthwhile over anything else and that's if they even APPEAR in the game.  There are luxuries you aim for...and then there are luxuries you use because they're all you've got.


The one thing I think is understated though is the nature of tier 1 resources with flat bonuses vs. others with per-pop or per system level bonuses.  While Jadonyx might seem less valuable than voidstones once a system hits 15 population, it really works best as the first system development built on a new system to jumpstart production.  Tier 2 resources are best once a few more pops have established themselves and tier 3 stuff is usually best when the system has improvements and population to make that % boost really stick.  For this reason I tend to pick a t1 resource for the first system development, then try to switch it up later.


It would seem this mod turns a lot of that on its ear for better or worse.  It's a curious thing that way, I think.

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