Modding Solar Collectors

[lithovore]

I'm almost certain I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Is there any way to modify the energy gained by solar collectors?  I assume it requires .exe modding.

If it does require .exe modding, can anyone tell me the tools people are using in that regard?

The reason I ask is that I want to rebalance the terraforming options to encourage use of all of the improvements.  As part of that I want solar panels generate 1 energy plus one energy for every unit of altitude, because currently farm/solar is only really attractive at high altitude, and there are relatively few squares that meet that criteria on most maps.

I'd also like to mod echelon mirrors to not effect surrounding solar panels, but instead to gain +1 energy for each (cardinally?) adjacent echelon mirror (because that makes much more sense).  Again, I'm assuming it's an .exe mod.

[Nexii]

I had asked Yitzi awhile back he thought it was possible through his patches...not exe modding but can't be done currently in alphax.txt

One thing you can do is make solar/echelon take less former time.  I found this made a big difference.  You could play with raise elevation time reduced too.  I found it got a bit ridiculous though for the whole planet to be raised...it also makes terrain/bottlenecks less important.  But it does make solar more viable.  Actually I found that kelp/tidal became the best (aside from boreholes) when modding this way...but at least the N/E from sea tiles & boreholes can be altered.

It would have made more sense for solar to be inversely related to rainy than elevation (IMO).  Something like 3 E for dry, 2 E for moist, 1 E for rainy.  With echelon being the upgrade to solar and coming around the time of Super Formers.

[Yitzi]

One mod I have in mind for "sometime" is to change echelon mirrors to not increase the production of solar panels next to them, but rather that any panel or mirror could, instead of using its own altitude to calculate energy, copy that of any mirror within X distance.  That way, if you had a single high-altitude location, you could build a path of mirrors in order to let all your collectors get the benefit.

I believe that would resolve both of your goals, as well as making for some fun potential involving destruction of improvements (take out one mirror, and if there wasn't any redundancy your enemy could lose 75% of his energy production).

[Nexii]

Yea that could be a good solution.  I assume then of course mirrors would have the same base production as solars?  In that case you'd probably build 100% echelons and no solars, thus having lots of redundancy by default.

I suppose mirrors could be restricted like boreholes by being unplaceable side-by-side.  With X>1 of course.  This might actually be a pretty good 'fix' for condensor spam as well now that I think about it.

[Yitzi]

Yea that could be a good solution.  I assume then of course mirrors would have the same base production as solars?  In that case you'd probably build 100% echelons and no solars, thus having lots of redundancy by default.

No, because mirrors pollute more and cost more to build; that much redundancy is just causing needless ecodamage and wasting former time.  The question of how to balance redundancy in case of war against efficiency would not be a simple one.

[Nexii]

Yes true I had considered that with former time.  I was thinking incorrectly that echelons were always 1 E but they're affected by elevation so that wouldn't require a change.  Actually in war you'd just have to bomb out the high elevation echelons.  Ecodamage is less a concern, though if your bases are tightly packed it could matter.  A lot of the time you'll try to build echelons outside of the base radius