Do you recommend the Mod XL?

[Paddy]

I see this is the most recommended Mod on the workshop so I'm just figuring out if it's worth it. I'm in an early game with this Mod and so far with planet colonization turned to rare the only thing I notice is that there are fewer resources and even less colonizable planets than Vanilla. Also that there are different technologies to research which takes a bit of learning

What else is different about XL, does it affect how other factions play, the Ai etc?

[Tyee]

I've played hundreds of hours with XL on hard, 1500-2000 systems on 8 by 8 or 10 by 10 sectors. Generally I prefer it to vanilla. It evens out the extremes of race habitability, so you don't need every race to inhabit all the planets. I'd need Teekans for Desert planets in Vanilla, but I can make due with Humans in XL. I'm still unsure if I like this approach, as I like the complexity that vanilla colonisation delivers.

XL reduces the types of ships to the basics, so, for example, you wont have patrol escorts, escorts, and heavy escorts, you'd just have the 'patrol' ship. One ship version instead of three. As you get better at the game, you'll find that this limitation may not be to your liking.

XL also removes some race specific fighter hangers, so there are fewer fighters/bombers in game. These ship changes help out the late game load as they can wear down your CPU.

XL also adds in super-size planets, while removing moons. The bigger the planet the bigger the population, which helps economy, research and defence. It's a good addition.

I play the humans exclusively, with the whole tech tree visible. The Tech tree in XL makes more sense to me. I also like XL's organisation of the Shakturi Technologies--XL makes it far more organised.

On the current version of XL it looks like area effect weapons have been dropped from the Tech tree, so if you like those kinds of weapons they aren't currently in XL.

When playing XL many of vanilla's uneven distribution of artefacts/relics/story elements are gone or reduced. While I was waiting for the new DLC to drop, I played two games of vanilla as XL was updating only when the DLC dropped. In both of those games I had to use the Game Editor because Terra (Earth) and it's relics and empire bonuses were the sun in one game and Terra wasn't even in the solar system but Mars and its relics were in the sun in the other. So useless for the human race in 2 consecutive play-throughs. My advice is get to know the game editor as it will save the hours you've put into the game without starting over.

Can't talk to the other factions or the AI because the (uneven?) race, resource, artefact and planet distribution still seems to dictate the strength of the other factions to a large degree. Often settings you decide on during the pre-game options aren't accurately delivered on the galaxy map. This means some races are too close together, while one or two are out in the open on the other side of the galaxy and just expand and expand until they dwarf you and those races around you. You could look at this as a 'feature', and rise to the challenge each time, which is what I do, but I think there needs to be more work done in this area.

This isn't everything XL does, it really is quite comprehensive, but I hope it helps answer some of your questions.

[Paddy]

Thank you for this detailed reply. Regarding colonization with XL. I have it set to rare and so far only a one planet was habitable however I noticed there is a terraforming building which increases a planet a further 15% plus you can improve habitablity through research. Does this mean that essentially all planets are habitable with humans through the terraforming and improving habitable research options?

I do like i can make more planets habitable especially the likes of desert and savannah planets but the likes of Volcanic planets i don't think should ever be habitable for humans so this is where i prefer vanilla

[MrXoT]

No. weapon balance are joke, broken economy.

[Paddy]

Originally posted by MrXoT:

No. weapon balance are joke, broken economy.

In what way?

[TheCr33pur]

Well depend how old is that mod, if that mod is pretty old, i would recommend not to use it. Since they did some updates, trying to improve the game and the new DLCs may have added something, especially the new species or so call race. Becareful when using a mod, cause can break the game or DC'ed.

[Nightskies]

It was updated hours after the most recent expansion was released.

[Tyee]

Originally posted by Paddy:

Thank you for this detailed reply. Regarding colonization with XL. I have it set to rare and so far only a one planet was habitable however I noticed there is a terraforming building which increases a planet a further 15% plus you can improve habitablity through research. Does this mean that essentially all planets are habitable with humans through the terraforming and improving habitable research options?

I do like i can make more planets habitable especially the likes of desert and savannah planets but the likes of Volcanic planets i don't think should ever be habitable for humans so this is where i prefer vanilla

Yea, I agree with you. Humans can colonise sulphur, carbonaceous and volcanic worlds quite easily, so all the race world types can be colonised, but there are far fewer worlds to colonise in the mod. The sulphur worlds break the immersion for me.

A while back the mod author tried to drop terraforming altogether. There was some push back and he put it back in. So he's trying different things out to see what works best. I like the current implementation of +5 habitability values stacked 4 times and the +15 then +10 for a total of 25 terraforming points. So 45 points max to develop each world. Since you can't repeat the habitability tech in the mod it's a good idea to increase the abundance of habitable worlds to max when setting up each game. Give yourself a great home system, too, as on a 1500 planet map if playing on hard you're just going to end up with 50 odd planets colonised by the time the Shakturi show up and the border wars begin. You're going to need allies because there aren't enough planets to go it alone and the bonuses the AI get ensure they can compete with you.

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Tyee:

Originally posted by Paddy:

Thank you for this detailed reply. Regarding colonization with XL. I have it set to rare and so far only a one planet was habitable however I noticed there is a terraforming building which increases a planet a further 15% plus you can improve habitablity through research. Does this mean that essentially all planets are habitable with humans through the terraforming and improving habitable research options?

I do like i can make more planets habitable especially the likes of desert and savannah planets but the likes of Volcanic planets i don't think should ever be habitable for humans so this is where i prefer vanilla

Yea, I agree with you. Humans can colonise sulphur, carbonaceous and volcanic worlds quite easily, so all the race world types can be colonised, but there are far fewer worlds to colonise in the mod. The sulphur worlds break the immersion for me.

A while back the mod author tried to drop terraforming altogether. There was some push back and he put it back in. So he's trying different things out to see what works best. I like the current implementation of +5 habitability values stacked 4 times and the +15 then +10 for a total of 25 terraforming points. So 45 points max to develop each world. Since you can't repeat the habitability tech in the mod it's a good idea to increase the abundance of habitable worlds to max when setting up each game. Give yourself a great home system, too, as on a 1500 planet map if playing on hard you're just going to end up with 50 odd planets colonised by the time the Shakturi show up and the border wars begin. You're going to need allies because there aren't enough planets to go it alone and the bonuses the AI get ensure they can compete with you.

Ahh so is it harder to fight the Shakturi with this mod?

[Tyee]

I don't think the Shakturi are hard at all on the larger galaxies in this mod, or in vanilla. On normal arrival they arrive with about 400,000 fleet power, but I often have that level dispersed among 20 raid, attack, defence and invasion fleets by the time they arrive. I'm not sure if the Shakturi scale their invasion power upwards on the bigger maps, if they do it's not enough, as I can scale up my fleets easily at that point to counter them.

In one encounter I had a 40,000 fleet sitting at the rift breach annihilating rift striders as they came through. I forgot about it and focused elsewhere on the map. Then the Shakturi entered the galaxy and immediately attacked my fleet. By the time I turned my attention back to the rift, my fleet was in its death throes, unable to escape, and just managed to take down one Shakturi carrier before the end. The Shakturi then separated into smaller fleets, but the largest one, at 260,000 strength, stalled out refueling at a system halfway to the galactic rim. I saw my chance and doubled the strength of two of my largest attack fleets. They hit the Shakturi with 340,000 strength and eliminated them. The Shakturi didn't recover from that loss, so I don't think they are that robust a threat unless you give them lots of time to establish themselves. That is something the devs. should change. There should be 2 invasion points on big maps and double the strength to avoid the strategy I employed.

Are they harder on smaller maps in this mod? I would say yes because you'll have less planets and wont have the economic depth to adjust so quickly. Would probably make for greater tension in the game, though, knowing they're coming and you're likely not ready despite all your efforts. I'd like that kind of tension on the biggest map, because that's what I play, but it doesn't come from the Shakturi. The tension usually comes from a faction that controls about a third of the map and could be any other race in the game (I've been crushed by the Ackdarians and Zenox of all races in the past).

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Tyee:

I don't think the Shakturi are hard at all on the larger galaxies in this mod, or in vanilla. On normal arrival they arrive with about 400,000 fleet power, but I often have that level dispersed among 20 raid, attack, defence and invasion fleets by the time they arrive. I'm not sure if the Shakturi scale their invasion power upwards on the bigger maps, if they do it's not enough, as I can scale up my fleets easily at that point to counter them.

In one encounter I had a 40,000 fleet sitting at the rift breach annihilating rift striders as they came through. I forgot about it and focused elsewhere on the map. Then the Shakturi entered the galaxy and immediately attacked my fleet. By the time I turned my attention back to the rift, my fleet was in its death throes, unable to escape, and just managed to take down one Shakturi carrier before the end. The Shakturi then separated into smaller fleets, but the largest one, at 260,000 strength, stalled out refueling at a system halfway to the galactic rim. I saw my chance and doubled the strength of two of my largest attack fleets. They hit the Shakturi with 340,000 strength and eliminated them. The Shakturi didn't recover from that loss, so I don't think they are that robust a threat unless you give them lots of time to establish themselves. That is something the devs. should change. There should be 2 invasion points on big maps and double the strength to avoid the strategy I employed.

Are they harder on smaller maps in this mod? I would say yes because you'll have less planets and wont have the economic depth to adjust so quickly. Would probably make for greater tension in the game, though, knowing they're coming and you're likely not ready despite all your efforts. I'd like that kind of tension on the biggest map, because that's what I play, but it doesn't come from the Shakturi. The tension usually comes from a faction that controls about a third of the map and could be any other race in the game (I've been crushed by the Ackdarians and Zenox of all races in the past).

No worries. I ended up stopping my playthrough with this Mod. I had an issue where I couldn't build any mining stations as it said they were all out of fuel range for my construction ships even though they clearly weren't. The only way I could build mining stations would be to manually assign a construction ship which is incredibly tedious.

I'm not sure why I had this issue. I'm playing with vanilla to see if the problem persists

[Mordachai]

Appreciate the discussion.

I also friggin' hate having to have races kind of all able to settle everything (at some penalty, but not an atrocious one). And in particular, I loathe the whole idea of sulfuric / carbon / volcanic worlds as being inhabitable by any h2o + carbon species at all. I find it totally wrecks immersion on so many levels.

That said, I made this change for two reasons: 1) in order to have workable maps generated by the game engine for a much sparser allowance of worlds at all, and 2) so I could stop carpal-tunnel inducing arguments with having to set every single niggling planet's allowed races which is a UI micro management nightmare.

I don't like having to keep track of - and set build orders and setup defensive troops and all the rest for a 100+ worlds. I prefer fewer, more precious worlds that you can care about. But in order to make that feasible with the current engine and lack of modding exposure of map generation, I simply threw in the towel and made all races able to colonize all types of habitable worlds (still with a spread of about 20pq) - which also massively assists the AI in remaining functional in a sparser universe.

Everything is sparser - including poly, carbon, caslon, etc., as I substantially reduced the count of planets and moons. So there's much more opportunity to use raids and other tactics to blunt or even cripple their production capacity during warfare (and the AI is pretty good at doing this to you, so it raises the overall difficulty level).

This also reduces the load of the game on the CPU. Less mines to build, less freighters to build & schedule, less for the underlying engine to literally have to handle. XL runs at least 200% faster late game than vanilla due to these changes (and more: there are substantially fewer strike craft, while still having plenty - there are battles well north of 100 strike craft in each armada).

I made changes to the fleet templates to help out the AI. I made changes to the tech tree to make it easier for the AI to thrive (though I have only limited control there).

I've had to remove some features (which I hate because it reduces complexity and detail) because after having played this many games, I just couldn't spend time arguing with the game engine yet again on the same damn failures. So, simplicity = better AI competitiveness and less arguing with the game's automation to do the right thing.

It's not perfect, it's not what I originally chose, but it's vastly more functional to create a competitive interesting game to play through, IMO.

XL is definitely not for everyone. I strive to offer a similar in many respects, but also solidly new and interesting take on DW2. I also hope to restore some of the complexity - exactly when the dev teams makes that complexity more manageable and the automation capable of doing reasonable things with it (so I don't have to spend time arguing with it every single game, but can set policies to get what I actually think is reasonable out of it).

My 2c - and to speak to whomever was warning about mods and stability - I've actively kept this mod up to date with literally every beta and DLC as they were made privately available through their development process. This mod is extremely unlikely to be the cause of actual bugs - it's an XML only mod - it doesn't mess with the game engine at all.

Cheers

[Mordachai]

One more thing - I don't recommend XL if you haven't played a bunch of vanilla yet.
Play Vanilla. It's a great game!
Explore the gameplay they provide, enjoy it, master it!
And then, if you're looking for something different to give some new juice to the game, that's when you want to pick up XL and give it a spin. :)

[Kilgore Trout]

Is there someplace I can look to read detailed information on XL?

[Mordachai]

I keep it as a publicly visible repo in gitlab - https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL
If you have the stomach, I've documented every change to every version going back 3y now.
I've tried a lot of things - some of which I've walked back gone the opposite direction on (e.g. I originally made races MORE picky about biome, but that just doesn't work well for viable games and increases frustration with the bad automation & UI around controlling species assignments to planets).

but it's all there - and the entire set of scripts, code, and resulting XML and .bundle (images) that are included.

Mod-mod welcome, but know that you have to keep up with changes in XL itself to remain viable as a mod-mod.

[Kilgore Trout]

Mordachai - I see that you recommend to set Colonizable Worlds to rare. If that is the case, should Independent Colonies kept at normal and Colonization Range Limit be kept at 300M?