How many FOP should a tile be worth?

[Yitzi]

If you want to slightly nerf the late game supremacy of Nutrients, then you could cap the maximum number of useable sats to some high number, say 24.

I've already got a better idea to nerf satellites: Move things around so that orbital defense pods are the first and cheapest ones available, and sky hydroponics labs are the latest (and tied with Nessus mining stations for most expensive).  The problem is that even with that, nutrients are still the most powerful in the late game due to specialists; this would not in itself be a problem, but it does vastly decrease the advantage of being able to get more than one resource type when not using a crawler, leading to "crawl nutrients" being the best strategy.
Without mods (but with no satellites), crawled nutrients can provide 12 tech and 6 economy (before multiplying facilities) per tile; the best you can get with more interesting terraforming strategies is probably optimal fungus at 4 minerals, 6 energy, 4 tech, and 2 economy, and that's faction-specific, requires a project, and requires a fairly specific social engineering (Green/Eudaimonia); of options available to any faction regardless of projects, the best with interesting terraforming strategies is probably 0-1 minerals, 6 energy, 4 tech, and 2 economy, quite clearly inferior.
Hence the need to either depower condensers, make late-game crawlers able to use any terraforming instead of only boring stuff like "all nutrients", "all minerals", or "all energy", or both.  I'm leaning toward both, though it will require figuring out how to make a tech-dependent feature (probably not too much work because I can build a lot on what I've learned already).

Or one could possibly change sats to not give resources for specialists, but not being a modder myself, I am not sure that is implementable.

Probably is, but more trouble than it's worth.  Satellites are not the problem (or more precisely, they are a problem that I think I know how to deal with), the condenser/crawler/specialist combo is the problem.

[Earthmichael]

Actually, I don't see any of this as actually being a problem, just a preference for how you would rather have things operate.  It is just the way it is.  So food rules the late game.  So what?  It is the same for everyone, so it is balanced.

A mod limiting sats has the affect that only the first N food gets a +1/1/1 from sats; the rest of the food has to be justified based on specialists alone.  I can make a strong case that after the 1/1/1 sat bonus is limited, then working multiple resource squares makes more sense than more specialists, if that is your goal.

As for using defense pods to attack sats, I can build a lot of defense pods to defend my sats.  I build a lot of defense pods anyway to defend against hostile missiles, particularly planet busters, so I don't think your mod is actually going to weaken sats very much.  It will just mean that more of the economy shifts to space battles.

[Yitzi]

Actually, I don't see any of this as actually being a problem, just a preference for how you would rather have things operate.  It is just the way it is.  So food rules the late game.  So what?

So having everyone crawl nutrients is fairly boring, and makes the Manifold Harmonics useless.  As I said, it's not a problem that food rules the late game, except in that it favors "crawl nutrients" over everything else; no matter how good your solar collectors are, they won't be able to compete with +2 nutrients from a condensor and a specialist from the ability to crawl.

A mod limiting sats has the affect that only the first N food gets a +1/1/1 from sats; the rest of the food has to be justified based on specialists alone.

That's one possible mod, though IMO it still leaves satellites too powerful.

I can make a strong case that after the 1/1/1 sat bonus is limited, then working multiple resource squares makes more sense than more specialists, if that is your goal.

Ok, please make that case.  Describe a resource square (let's say late-game, so it can be anything you want) where working it is better than crawling nutrients.  Or if you prefer, we can restrict to things available to every faction in each game, and then I'll even allow something that's competitive with crawling nutrients.

As for using defense pods to attack sats, I can build a lot of defense pods to defend my sats.  I build a lot of defense pods anyway to defend against hostile missiles, particularly planet busters, so I don't think your mod is actually going to weaken sats very much.  It will just mean that more of the economy shifts to space battles.

Not quite...you see, for a land battle, it's not really possible to use your cheap military units to attack the enemy's more expensive non-military units without worrying about interference from his military units, so formers and crawlers can be defended by military units and are still fairly strong.  By satellites, you can use an orbital defense pod the turn you build it (before the enemy responds), apparently with 50% success (on failure you lose the pod), so by targeting a more expensive productive satellite, you do more damage than you take; as a result, it is quite difficult to keep productive satellites up in wartime.

[Yitzi]

Although it occurred to me...doesn't this still mean that sea tiles are underpowered?  Because it takes 12 sea-former-turns (twice the cost of land-former-turns until Fusion, and +50% even afterward) to bring a sea tile up to 8 FOP, whereas a land tile can get 7 FOP with 4 former-turns or around 12 FOP with around 30 former-turns (12 to raise the land the last 1000 feet, 8 for farm and solar, 8 for enricher, and then mirrors and condensers sprinkled around)...so a sea tile needs nearly as much investment as a high-terraforming tile, but only gives a bit more than a low-terraforming tile.  Or am I missing something big here?

[Earthmichael]

I agree that the sea is far more costly to terraform, especially since the formers are so much more expensive.  However, there are 3 facilities available fairly early for sea bases that give bonuses, which can help balance a bit, which should be taken into account.  Still, sea seems to max out its bonuses pretty early on the tech tree, and does not get anything equivalent to Hybrid Forest in the mid game.

[Yitzi]

I agree that the sea is far more costly to terraform, especially since the formers are so much more expensive.  However, there are 3 facilities available fairly early for sea bases that give bonuses, which can help balance a bit, which should be taken into account.  Still, sea seems to max out its bonuses pretty early on the tech tree, and does not get anything equivalent to Hybrid Forest in the mid game.

Indeed; in fact, sea is so costly to terraform that from what I can tell, you can (once hybrid forests and enrichers come along) mix forests with advanced terraforming for a combination that is both more effective and cheaper to terraform than sea is.

Hmm...what do you think of the idea of a mod that reduces sea formers (and their clean, super, and fungicidal equivalents) to the cost of regular formers, but moves those three facilities a bit later in the tech tree (say, aquafarm to ecological engineering, thermocline transducer to planetary economics, and subsea trunkline to Advanced Ecological Engineering)?