Howdy, just wanted to comment a bit on the pacing of the game as presented with the mod only.

The mod can slow the game pace down enough to almost make it boring to play if you are not lucky enough to get the Physics lab early and/or do not know that you need a physics lab in order to get drive tech.

I recall getting the option to use the physics lab but wanted to secure power plants to assist in tile blocker clearage and the like. As a result, I have a fully developed home system and currently over 2k minerals/energy with one Tradition tree down and starting on the next with a fully populated home system and no Drive technology or even the physics lab researched.


*Suggestion*
If possible, place one of those technology chain indicators under the physics lab technology to indicate it is the path to drive technology and/or put in some hidden milestone checks when a tech is researched prior to tech pool generation to indicate that the player is close to vanilla game start. Once one of these milestone checks passes add a weight modifer to the needed tech along the chain to the FTL drive research to increase its frequency to allow for a soft counter balance against RNG tech generation and to alleviate a possile issue where the player does not get the proper tech chain option poppping up for FTL.

Currently, I have a about 2/5 to 1/2 of my planet using tech labs (only one had a physics resource) trying to get the tech to advance rapidly which is difficult.


*Importance of Adding Weighting*
The difficulty being faced is that I have had to go through 3 600-700 cost techs hoping to get the physic lab tech to pop up and the research costs increase while also still having a -50% base malus because I have not been able to get the darned physics lab researched. Beacuse of this, the game will just drag on until RNG brings the desired tech around.

Given that the Physics Lab and Hyperdrive techs are such a bottleneck to game progression it would seem natural to have checks in place to essentially inform the game that it needs to allow the player to progress to the next stage (so that player doesn't get bored waiting which breaks immersion) in a natural way that does not break immeersion.

Anyway, that is my two cents, hope the feedback is helpful.

Apologies, I imagine it is getting rather dull in your home system with nothing to do but grind physics. I don't know how to do the unlock indicator thing, but certainly could and should have edited the description to make it clear that FTL depends on physics labs. Will roll that out in tonight's update. There is a doubling of the chance for FTL after 20 years, I could adjust both the amount and the timing of that modifier also.
Silver lining, you might soon get to discover if my attempt to make drive tech salvageable from debris worked and be the first Stellaris player to pay the iron price for FTL.

Would be interesting to see that happen :)

*EDIT*
The Iron price was not paid, two tech went by then I got the physics lab as a research option so I went with that this time. We discovered FTL travel in 2134

Hm. 34 years even with skipping the physics labs at first pass is going to be awfully quick. The new STL drives are going to take about 10 years per jump. I want to leave enough time that remote colonies get a chance to develop into viable empires before the homeworld just rolls over them with FTL fleets. I may have to move FTL up to physics lab 2.

I think I do not understand your meaning here. It is 2140 something in my game now and I was just about to send a colony ship out to colonize my first off world planet.

What do you mean by remote colonies and the homeworld rolling over them with FTL fleets? In order to settle remore worlds, don't I need FTL? When I build science vessels and construction vessels early they had no option to more between systems, even if it was very slowly.

I do have a 1.1k+ fleet that i am using to clear rats and neutrals.

If it helps I am only using the Primitive Players 2.0 mod and not other mods atm. I was thinking of adding one of the ones you suggested regarding home system colonization but the belter one is a waste as the settled colonies wreck havoc with Reaserch and Unity advancement due to their low pop options.

Sorry, was thinking ahead and not clear. Andon taught me how to get slower than light drives working under 2.0, they're in my beta test mod right now. If no one hollers I'll roll them out in the main mod tonight. So slower than light colonies are about to become a thing, and I want to balance their growth versus the time it takes to get FTL

Well, should be interesting to try.

Also I had been thinking about you not knowing how to set flag or notifications (neither do I, I am more of a desinger and not much of a coder). I was wondering if using the Researched techs as a flag could work?

For instance, when a tech gets researched, it goes into the researched area of tech that the player could then click the "Researched" tech button to view the tech of each respective tree.

That being the case, I should think that one could add a check like an if/else statement regarding a list of researched techs.

So, if a player has X number of techs then the wieght of a certain tech increases. The idea being you could set up a a check during the tech update that checks a list of techs against a master list of your choosing to achieve a certain goal.

In this way, you could more or less guide the a player's overall development and if a player has every tech but (in my case it was two) the Primitive Player's 2.0 offered, then the weight of getting the needed tech to cycle in increases with each new tech of the given type.

Just a thought.

I know well how to increase tech odds if you have a specific tech, and at least for map modes it's possible to simply count number of techs. So I could add a factor or two that increased FTL odds if you had a large number of techs. That's a good feature suggestion. Not everyone is as compulsive a powergamer as I am, skipping an FTL critical tech shouldn't be such a huge penalty.

Originally posted by Pode:

I know well how to increase tech odds if you have a specific tech, and at least for map modes it's possible to simply count number of techs. So I could add a factor or two that increased FTL odds if you had a large number of techs. That's a good feature suggestion. Not everyone is as compulsive a powergamer as I am, skipping an FTL critical tech shouldn't be such a huge penalty.

Good luck with whatever your decision is, I like the mod.

Made odds of FTL tech choice double every 20 years for the first century.

Nice.

Okey, reading this, it appears there is something broken about STL. In my game i did get to the FTL/STL technology in year 2140 as well. Though i was lucky enough to get the mythical technology of hyperdrive before i did get the STL Drive.

Imho if you want to create outer colonies before people get FTL, STL should be around 2120. Because you need a science vessel to research systems, and send colony ships there. With STL you take someting like 3 years to travel from system to system, and even if you are lucky to get a planet next to your home system, you would need a total of somewhat 10 years to establish an outer colony.

I personally would like to see several stages of STL and the FTL should be locked down untl you reach lets say STL 3. This way there would room for expanding as a pre ftl species long before you get to the usual FTL tech.

As out of date as the mod is I'd be surprised if it wasn't broken TBH. When the new update drops and gets patched I'll rework the whole thing, especially the tech progression / timing