UCP5 - Research and Trade Treaty Details Expansion

[WhatIsSol]

Just adding the benefit (per-turn) for these treaties.

http://www.orderofmidnight.com/MOO/V5/TreatyTradeResearch.jpg

I'm almost done putting my other enhancements back into the latest patch.

[Reriser]

Thanks for that, Sol. :)

[WhatIsSol]

UPC5, I have corrected the following: (reposting here since some people do not have access to the Bugs Forum)

General bugs:

• RefreshLeaderBonuses - Correctly switch to divide by 100
  
• Telepathic training - Removed from Offensive Spy Calculations
  
• AntaranSettings.yaml - Corrected flip of # of frigates and cruisers
  
• AI doesn't use black hole generator in combat - Corrected AI usage
  
• Pollution buildings - Removed high static rating that was making the AI overbuild these structures
  
• Cloaking device - Partial Correction, now firing removes cloak, moving does not, but both cloak devices function the same

Text issues:

• Bad float formatting with too many decimals in ship building - rounded to 2 digit precision

I'm going to do a few more tests of this and then release, since it also includes all the applicable enhancements from the past UPC and adds the following:

• Ship Naming - Increased length of possible names and allowed the space character
  
• Trade/Research Treaty - Added per-turn yield to tooltips
  
• Empire Research Tooltip - Added missing catagory for research treaties that are currently active.

[WhatIsSol]

UCP5, got delayed working on the cloaking/phasing devices - I now have them working I think as intended or if not how I think it should be working :)

Cloaking Device - Ship is still targetable, but gets missile and beam defense. Amount adjustable normally in the yaml files.
Phasing Device - Ships is untargetable

Both devices deactive when you fire, but not when you moved.

Also removed that message that keeps popping up saying "xxx ready to fire yyy" on the these devices, since they are auto-activated, and that message is just annoying.

[gGeorg]

Hello Sol,

Is it possible to mod/fix research treaty bid, so they are viable also in later game stages ?
Current Research treaty price is based on the research points income and count money. Which generates ridicoulous numbers. Make it oposite.

I think make a price for research treaty value like 2 times turn icome of less wealthy participant. Then count research bonus income based on this price.

Idea is, make scinence we could afford. Not ask scientist for money they need. :-)
That way we can have another Diplomatic option again.

[WhatIsSol]

Easy possible to adjust cost of research treaties, update --- It actually like adds up all research items. But yeah it needs to be adjusted cause currently it is only useful maybe in the very beginning.

[WhatIsSol]

Yeah I think it should be set like trade treaties they are based off of raw income, so setting it to research per turn instead of total of all researched items sounds more in line. I will make that change - why not.

[WhatIsSol]

Adjusted them to work the same as trade treaties. Currently in turn 448 of a game. My race generates 1671 research points and 4286 BC per turn.

Talking to an AI race, new adjusted research costs are as follows:

Trade Treaty costs are 1751 BC reward is 350 BC per turn
Research Treaty costs are 983 BC and reward is 196 research pts per turn.

Just for reference before my changes (current hotfix) the Research Treaty settings:

Cost 992,575 BC and the reward was 97 BC per turn.

[WhatIsSol]

Hey, anyone care to comment on putting a cap on these treaties? Make them based on a max of X times the lower economy? It would make them more affordable all around if this was done.

Right now for trade treaty if one economy generate 2,000 BC and the other generates 10 BC both must pay for a comined treaty of 2,010 BC.

Thinking if I went in and capped it at say x2/3/4 of the lowest the cost and reward would level out a bit.

So in example below at x2 BC:

10BC x 2 = 20 BC, 1000 BC => 20BC due to cap, so combinaed would be 40 BC

[bilbous]

is there no concern with giving races that already run away with tech access to more tech points? Of course the way tech victories are calculated is already pretty bogus, I often have had nothine to trade for from races a thousand or more points ahead of me. Would it be possible to change that so that instead of 100 points per node you divide the 100 points between the techs in that node? That way any tech traded or stolen would count towards your score. Potentially you could use that in calculations to determine trade offers.

[WhatIsSol]

I actually backed the research benefit back towards the old calculation, but adjusted the cost to be affordable. Balance is always a concern but as it stands right now the cost for research is way out there. After feedback can always adjust later if it proves to be troublersome.

I also do not like how research just kind of ends in the default game. I think the last tech (future tech) should give some bonus besides just to score. But that is something else to think about.

[bilbous]

I think the three buildings you need for the tech victory are kind of cheesy. HTTP UDP and FTP is it? better off first to future tech but oh well. I'd like to have an option to destroy a building type empire wide to get rid of all the tech buildings without having to go to each system and doing it manually when there is nothing left to research. At that point it doesn't really matter anyway.

[roland.johansen]

I actually liked your ideas for the new research treaty stipulated in post 9:
- dependent on research output
- capped by n times lower party research generation (n should be greater than 2 though, otherwise research treaty output is always equal to 2 times lower party research generation as a+b >= min(2a, 2b) for a and b positive)

For future tech, one could do something like
Future tech 1 (8 variants):
- Shielding: + 5% shield hitpoints, +5% damage absorption
- Armor: + 5% armor hitpoints, +5% resilience
- Command: +5% command points
- Beams: +5% beam damage
- Cannon: +5% cannon damage
- Torpedo: +5% torpedo damage
- Missile: +5% missile damage
- Fighter: + 5% fighter damage

Future tech 2 (again 8 variants): +10% bonus, future tech 3: +15% bonus, etc.

Costs of Future techs should gradually escalate.

Spud already created a far more creative end game techs, but even then you could still add these at the end of the tech tree to make it never ending.

[WhatIsSol]

@bilbous: Mass scraping of buildings is something that has been asked about - I have not researched into feasibility of doing so.

@roland.johansen: Yep Spud's mod does add rather nicely to the end of the tech tree but even it has an absolute ending.

Spud was recommending a higher constant than 2 as well. Most likely if I actually implement this - I will just add another variable to the globals.yaml to allow for it to be moddable.

Right now it is just an idea to make trade and research treaties more easily accessible than they are now. Cause sooner or later with the current calculation they become prohibitive expensive. Obviously research gets there much faster.

[Exoclyps]

So I had a bit of a thought process here on the cost vs benefit on the treaties.

Obviously a weak economy shouldn't be able to go into big treaties, makes no sense that the other part would be able to benefit that much from them, so obviously that has to be taken into consideration. But the same time I do like the idea that a bigger partner should be able to support a better treaty so a simple cap also feels a little "boring". But then again, we gotta make sure that the treaties are accessible still.

Lets take the example of 10+2000bc here. A simple cap would be the easiest approach here as you say, but that completely ignores the stronger parts influence. A 10 bc trading with a 2000bc empire should net more than a 10 bc trading with a 10 bc empire. Be it that the "stronger" part would have to help out? Heck now I'm starting to think of ideas that would lead to different parts benefiting differently. The stronger part would have to pay a bit more than the weak and the rewards would be slightly different. In a way a system that would also help weaker empires grow stronger by getting trade deals with stronger empires. But not sure that's even possible so I'll leave the math for that out atm.

If we do go with the simple multiplier I'd go with either 5 or 8. 5 is a clean number (5 turns to enter a treaty), and 8 is 4x2 (4x being the return from the trade treaty in the first place). Also what part of income is it based of? With a multiplier of cap, it could be drastically increased for each trade treaty that the party enter.

(edit: I reread your post on it and did notice that a pure cap approach would fulfill the goal I wanted as a 10+10 empire would be 20 while the 10+2000 would be way more. That said the cap should be set on the bigger part only, so with a 5 cap it'd be 60)



As for research, I think it needs to be reworked in such a way that it rewards depending on tier. Or at least seemingly so.

Meaning if you've got 2 trade deals with empires at tier 3 and you're tier 3 then you'd get x% towards your next tech. Change is so that you're all tier 8 and you'd still get x% towards your next tech. Ofcourse we don't have a working system like that, so what needs to be done is some math that can emulate the effect.

Usually there is 6-8 research in each tier. So that means we'd say have to use say 8 as a note somewhere in there for the math. I think for best results we'd have to make a table where total research and tier cost is added. If increase where more consistent that would have been easier, but it's around 100% early game, 50% mid game going down to around 33% late game.

Would it be possible to make it so that the longer you go, the "less" it calculates? I'm sure there was some way to do that. Why I want that is because we want it to look at your current tier and base the research on that, rather than accumulated total points.

(2nd edit: Would it perhaps be possible to base cost on the average research points of all your tech? Late game it'd mean the reward would be somewhat diminished compared to early, but I think if possible that could prove to be a nice approach)

[WhatIsSol]

Default in the game: Trade Treaties are based off of Raw Empire income. Research Treaties sums up the cost of all research items - which is why they balloon so fast.

I left Trade Treaty calculations for cost/reward alone.

But I set Research Treaties to use Raw Empire Research for now (basically the number at the top of the screen minus any active research treatys).

This makes them much more affordable and you can set them up even very late game. So far with testing it appears to be working well. At the start it means they are not worth a whole lot, one of them I setup in the start was worth like 2 RP per turn.

If I have seen one maybe negative thing is the AI almost seems to prefer research treaties over trade treaties, it had definitely been asking me for them more often - have not dug into why, but assume it is cause they are currently cheaper usually since RawIncome > RawScience output most of the time.