Zenith Trader - System or Global caps?

[Rune]

Are we supposed to be able to buy each item from the Zenith Trader in every system individually?
I'm pretty sure that it used to be a global cap (1 Zenith Power Generator, etc) ... but now it seems to be a system cap.

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

It's a per-system cap, yes. This is by design, although of course we could argue about the wisdom of the current design with certain structures.

The main reason is I wasn't particularly thinking of ZPGs when designing this, and we don't have any system of global caps for any units in place in the game. I'd have to add that in order to have that sort of thing, although if we're running into any balance problems then we should probably do that.

Frankly I would mostly prefer for people to be able to get a ton of ZPGs if they REALLY want to, but for there to be some sort of downside to doing that. Some sort of risk. But I'm not sure if that's really feasible without making the ZPGs a cause for save-scumming if they get destroyed.

One thought is that, frankly, the ZPG might not fit super duper well with the concept of the Zenith Trader. Most of its other stuff is more local in benefit, and so the local planet caps make sense. It visiting is a quick way to bless a planet with more firepower and scariness-to-enemies. I really enjoy that.

But adding global caps for just specific unit types (like the ZPG) would certainly be possible and not that hard. We'd need to make a "Zenith Trader ZPG" variant so that its cap is separate from other ZPGs that you just find and capture by other means, I'd say. But that's just a couple of lines of xml.

Main thing is that I think that ZPGs coming from the Trader might be inherently OP, I dunno.

[firespier]

i have to say the Zpgs made my campaign a lot easier cause i had a lot of energy problems
however getting it isnt that easy cause getting 7 mil of metal is a significant drain on your eco for quite a bit especially if your engis try to speed it up ^^

[Rune]

I managed to carve out a small pocket of space for myself with 4 or 5 "safe" systems, and then each time when the Zenith Trader came through I bought another ZPG.
In the end I had over 7 million extra power, which isn't really that useful by itself but it sure felt nice to know I had no shortage of power!

You're right, that every other item is restricted to the system itself, and they *are* expensive ...
I like the idea of having an overall cap of ZPG from the trader (maybe 2?).

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Thanks!

* ZPG Rebalance:
** Zenith Power Generators (as they existed before) no longer are purchasable from the Zenith Trader; they can only be found in the wild and captured.
** A new variant of Zenith Power Generators, called Lesser Zenith Power Generators, are now purchasable from the Zenith Trader. These cost 1m less metal to construct, and produce 100k less energy. They also have a cap of only 2 per galaxy that you can construct.
*** The purpose of making these a split-out variant is so that the per-galaxy cap doesn't get mixed up between ones you capture and ones you construct.
*** The per-galaxy cap feature is new, and is an xml tag called galaxy_wide_cap_for_players_constructing.
**** Note this has not yet been tested, so if there are problems please do let us know and send a savegame. But it should work!

Coming in tonight's release.

[Rune]

Awesome!