The Alignment Temples & the Nature of Their Bonuses and Penalties.

from GalCiv2 Forums

I've been looking for ways to spice up the game in my modding efforts, and one of those ways is to alter how certain civilizations create a stable economy.  There is of course the one supremely obvious way, kill a civ's straight economic capacity and jack their trade to new records; which is of course a little more involved than that's the gist of it.

Aside from that, there's realistically not much wiggle room in the game's model for alternative methodologies.  I came up with an awesome idea to create ship or starbase modules that I would call "Raider Modules" for militaristic and conquest-oriented societies that would generate income but take up so much space that such ships wouldn't be good for actual combat.  That of course obviously wasn't possible, as I soon discovered.

So I've come up with another possible option, but this one's more complicated to implement and I don't want to make the attempt without a little more info.  The three temples, Good, Neutral, and Evil, take a small slice from the tourism of other empires and give you a bonus.  The idea is to create a series of "Raiding Centers" that will take even smaller slices from opponents and grant bonuses smaller than those of the temples, but ultimately enough that one-per-planet can make up the key bulk of the empire's economic needs at any given average technological level.

The modding guide by CariElf states that the two tags for that penalty and bonus are hardcoded to the temple internal names.  I take this to mean that only those internal names can make use of those tags in an entry.  I-Mod's .xml Reference Project has nothing to say on the matter either way.

My question is obviously, is that actually the case?  Is it impossible to append those tags to other additional improvements?

Additionally, if it IS possible to do this, what do you all think of the idea in general?  Do you think it would add something worthwhile to the game in terms of differentiating the militaristic races in a more interesting and mechanically viable way?

modding
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Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

In TA very little is hardcoded but if your using DA or DL most of that might be.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Quoting foxthree, reply 1
In TA very little is hardcoded but if your using DA or DL most of that might be.
Well, I normally would've just tried it out in the mod folder to see what happens, but I thought it might be better to just ask first.

Hopefully this is a good sign though, and if those tags aren't hardcoded to the internal names of the temples, then I'm in business.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Update:  Just for kicks I decided to take a stab at it and see what happened.

What happened, was nothing.  I modded the Market improvement to do what the temples do instead of give an economic bonus, and nothing happened.  Now, in a way that's a good thing, because I think that means the tags can be used safely elsewhere without messing up the game.  Unfortunately, I have no idea if they actually work.  I think part of the problem is that so early in the game, there is no tourism from which to siphon away from the enemy, as I understand it.

If the tags simply don't function, I'm screwed.

But, if the problem is that there's no tourism to siphon off at the start of the game (which makes sense), then I just need to find a temporary "early game" substitute for militaristic races.  The efforts continue.

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I think the bigger issue here might be getting the AI to accurately make use of these things.

Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Well...every improvement entry has an <AI> tag, which supposedly affects the importance of the improvement to the AIs in the grand scheme, though I don't know how big the numbers have to be to make a real difference.  Aside from that, if the AIs recognize the "powers" of the temples to be worth X, and then factors in maintenance costs, etc, then it shouldn't be any harder to make the new improvement enticing than it would be to rebalance the temples themselves.

But before I bother with any of it, I do need one question answered...does tourism not even become an option until later on?  Is there actually a tech or something that opens it up or anything like that?

Also...I ask again...what're your guys' honest opinions about even the concept, assuming it actually works?  Would it be something you'd even find potentially interesting in the first place, this idea of making the races with militaristic AIs dependent on these conceptual "raider" improvements rather than normal economic improvements?  Does it even have enough merit to be worth this attempt if it would work?