Shattered Ring habitability (2024)

Muyotomi said:

It would be ok, if Paradox edits the Multiplayer Lobby, so you can ban some origins. That would be a fine solution for all.

Ringworld is strong, but i dont know if it gives you a overpowered advantage. I think Scion is scarier.

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they are both broken right now, but thats why i want some balance changes, so people dont feel compelled to ban origin starts. therefore taking away "My choice"

Honestly from a flavor perspective, the pops not having Ringworld Preference makes very little sense with a lot of the potential RP. And even the RP that has the pops starting somewhere else and being put there, they've been there so long it's perfectly feasible that they adapted.

The one problem is that it doesn't nerf machines on Ringworlds at all. While different nerds for different authorities is possible, it's not elegant.

Tamwin5 said:

Honestly from a flavor perspective, the pops not having Ringworld Preference makes very little sense with a lot of the potential RP. And even the RP that has the pops starting somewhere else and being put there, they've been there so long it's perfectly feasible that they adapted.

The one problem is that it doesn't nerf machines on Ringworlds at all. While different nerds for different authorities is possible, it's not elegant.

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Does it really NEED nerfing in the first place, though? LIke. I'm really failing to see how its so overpowered.

Tamwin5 said:

Honestly from a flavor perspective, the pops not having Ringworld Preference makes very little sense with a lot of the potential RP. And even the RP that has the pops starting somewhere else and being put there, they've been there so long it's perfectly feasible that they adapted.

The one problem is that it doesn't nerf machines on Ringworlds at all. While different nerds for different authorities is possible, it's not elegant.

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So you think we should have ringworld starts have 0% habitability on everything else?
Because that's what ringworld preference gives you.

DreadLindwyrm said:

So you think we should have ringworld starts have 0% habitability on everything else?
Because that's what ringworld preference gives you.

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From a lore/flavor perspective, Yes absolutely. From a balance perspective, that's another discussion (which is also going on in this thread). I haven't played a ringworld start myself yet, but it's definitely about the power curve. It's not just a free Ringworld, it's a ringworld which has no upkeep on districts AND has 30ish minerals from a couple of mining stations. Now if you couldn't colonize other planets being mineral starved might be an issue.... but you aren't, so it won't be. For the low low price of 500 energy and 2000 minerals, you get 10 labs worth of researchers. That's 4000 minerals and 10 building slots, for those poor sods not on a ringworld. AND with absolutely 0 upkeep... except for the jobs. Speaking of which, is the upkeep of 20 researchers too much to bear? Just build a commercial segment (for the same cheap price) to get 5 artisans, more than enough to cover those researchers. You'll also get 5 merchants, who are one of the most powerful jobs in the game!

What makes Shattered Ring origin OP is not just the ringworld itself, but that you have the means to support it and to fill it, by setting up a bunch of generator and mining worlds and then resettling pops onto the ring. Setting habitability to RIngworld preference though might go too far the other way: if you don't colonize early, then the ringworld districts sit half-empty for a long time and you don't actually get that much power out of them.

There are also Machine Intelligence Shattered Ring starts to consider; setting habitability preference to Ringworld does nothing to nerf this particular combo. What makes this origin particularly tasty for machines in 2.6 is that most of their advanced jobs consume energy now rather than minerals: in particular, the obvious Generator Segment + Research Segment combo is mostly self-sufficient once you've set it up, needing only amenities to support it. I don't think machine intelligences should be banned from taking this start (like they are with Void Dwellers and Life-Seeded), but the balance needs to be considered.

One way to give a moderate nerf to Shattered Ring would be to remove the nearby guaranteed habitable worlds. That way you're not starting with cursed pops like Life-Seeded, but you also can't bank on having early colonies like you can now.

Fox McCloud said:

To be honest, Life Seeded could probably have its disadvantage removed, at this stage; the only real advantage it has is the exotic resources on it and guaranteed 25 size....prosperous unification is, in general, stronger than it now.

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Life-Seeded is indeed a cursed origin, but I think if you remove the disadvantage, you lose all the flavour. I would rather instead they leant into the 'Gaia world preference' as follows:

1. Give Life-Seeded pops a slight (say 10%?) production bonus on Gaia worlds, like Void Dwellers. That way, you again have a slight efficiency advantage at the beginning of the game compared to a default start, and your primary species stays useful later as long as you can make more Gaia worlds.

2. Some way to get to Gaia terraforming earlier than empires who have no particular interest in it. Mimicking Void Dwellers and giving you the ability from the start would be OP, but it would be reasonable to have improved draw weights for terraforming tech, or to have a mid-game special project that requires the terraforming techs and costs a lot of science, but unlocks Gaia terraforming without needing World Shaper. (In lore terms, your scientists finally figure out how your homeworld was created.)

Riince2 said:

yeah 20 researchers is great and all but how can you feed them? Ringworld start has mineral production as its achilles heel, actually footing the consumer goods+the food+alloys and energy to actually have a fleet of some kind is going to be impossible if you cannot expand early... even with the upkeep for the first district you make covered. It's a good start but it depends on you immediately colonize sources of mining districts to make work.

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settle a starting world and make people mine it. Problem solved..... All you need to do is make all three districts (trade,research,farm) and then limit the jobs they take in increments. Being able to get so many researchers without taking up building slots is the biggest advantage. That means no need to get the research building upgrade for a while if not ever, and also no spending money or building slots on gas refineries also!!. while everyone else is hardcapped at level 1 research facilities that take up building slots that are not producing consumer goods. The travasty of needing tech to upgrade your tech. its a 1000% snowball.

The limitation of habitible worlds might slow them down a little bit...

And the worse of it isnt over, as soon as you build your districts you can buy the Gas/crystal/motes from the market while everyone else needs to research a tech upgrade to buy them

Dr. Crabnipples said:

And the worse of it isnt over, as soon as you build your districts you can buy the Gas/crystal/motes from the market while everyone else needs to research a tech upgrade to buy them

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that's clearly not intended behavior tho

Incompetent said:

There are also Machine Intelligence Shattered Ring starts to consider; setting habitability preference to Ringworld does nothing to nerf this particular combo. What makes this origin particularly tasty for machines in 2.6 is that most of their advanced jobs consume energy now rather than minerals: in particular, the obvious Generator Segment + Research Segment combo is mostly self-sufficient once you've set it up, needing only amenities to support it. I don't think machine intelligences should be banned from taking this start (like they are with Void Dwellers and Life-Seeded), but the balance needs to be considered.

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Yeah the Machine Ringworld is just silly with the change so that they can fuel research with energy. Scaling up research becomes trivial and you have an absurd amount of building slots and minerals left over to pour into alloys. Ringworld is debatably OK-ish balanced with the other high powered start options but machine ringworlds are a cut above.

I see no reason whatsoever to nerf a shattered ring world start. You think it's unfair in MP? Ban it, simple.

Don't take the ability away from the people that actually want it.

Scion is even more broken and I don't see any reason to change that either.

The Ring world Origin is the most overpowered thing in the game, its practically cheating. It needs to get nerfed.

Ontop of being just strong overall, there are some quirks you can exploit to be even more overpowered. Pick the prosperity tradition, clear blockers and build a researcher district. Since the tradition reduces district upkeep and the Arcane Generator gives you free strategic ressources, you end up with net positive income of strategic ressources! You can easily get 300-400 research within 4 years into the game without having to use any strategic ressources. All you need to do is juggle your jobs a little back and forth.

Banning it for multiplayer isn't a solution. Ever since 2.3, we banned Synth Ascension and every single Machine empire from multiplayer. And Paradox improved the balance for Machine empires thankfully, so now we can allow them in multiplayer again. That should be the goal. Not have things so horribly overpowered that we have to ban it, but have interesting and reasonably balanced content that everyone can use without screwing up the game for everyone else.

We still have to ban Synth Ascension by the way, because it did not get nerfed. Instead, the new Slaver civic which enslaves 40% of your pops is now S-Tier since the specialist slaves and it even works with Synth Ascension. So thats even stronger now.

The start isn't as OP as people are suggesting.
You can't really get 20 researchers from the start or even in the first two decades. Said researchers will need CGs and lots of them. Those need buildings and pops and those need energy and food. Even if you attain all of that you need 20 pops to spare. If all your farmers become researchers you're gonna have a bad time.

Mind you, we are assuming you won't need to build Alloy Foundries, a unlikely scenario unless you are on ensign mode or are bribing the AI with gifts.
In both of my last Shattered Ring games, it took until 2040 to get one research segment going.

At the same time, I do agree that it needs a nerf. I think that much is obvious. Scion also needs a nerf.
Giving it Ring world Habitability would make it utter and absolute garbage, so I would advise against it. Perhaps a habitability debuff by 30-40% on all non ideal worlds? Ideally we would nerf it in such a ways as to make it an even more unique playstyle. Void Dwellers is a brilliant example of this done right.

To all the people questioning the need for balance: Would you like the ME starting growth of 4 back, and the maintenance depots back too?
There is little fun in seeing the same strategy or even worse, same builds prevail regularly. It makes the game boring and predictable and directly detracts from the MP experience as well. Why have 10 decent, 2 OP and 2 weak build when you can have 14 decent builds that ,while playing differently do not have a power discrepancy equivalent to that of the civics Idealistic Foundation and Technocracy?
Would the game not be enriched if these two were on par with each other?

Giving choices reasonable disadvantages makes them more meaningful.
Even when playing SP and not trying to minmax, Idealstic Foundation simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth and the existence of pre 2.6 Byzantine Bur. made all other choices just feel wrong. It prevents things like ME's dominating the galaxy every time, leading to a somewhat repetitive end game.
And when one IS trying to win, whether against the AI on high difficulty(which many players in SP spend their time doing) or against other people in MP, these sorts of unbalances simply kill non OP options as sensible choices and detract from the game variety as a result. If I truly want to win and I am playing on a high difficulty or against a friend, why would I ever not pick scion? Has scion then not effectively removed all other Origins by its very existence in its current state?

Additionally you can absolutely have two builds that play very differently from one another and which are still balanced. All it means for them to be balanced is that they are more or less equally likely to lead to victory

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Lord Holhart said:

I see no reason whatsoever to nerf a shattered ring world start. You think it's unfair in MP? Ban it, simple.

Don't take the ability away from the people that actually want it.

Scion is even more broken and I don't see any reason to change that either.

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So what you're saying is 'Forget about people who enjoy MP. They want a balanced game among themselves and want to enjoy new origins along the lines of Shattered Ring World start at the same time? That's just ridiculous!'

What do you gain by having scion be this OP? Or having SR be significantly more powerful than other starts. What would you lose if it was still there but either had less positives or more negatives?

If Paradox were to add a medium sized habitabillity penalty to the SR origin and change the way the Arcane generator worked so that one wouldn't be able to accumulate strategic resources in exploity ways, would they be taking it away from you?
That would make it fairly balanced by the way. Probably enough to allow in MP.

Dainty Owl said:

So what you're saying is 'Forget about people who enjoy MP. They want a balanced game among themselves and want to enjoy new origins along the lines of Shattered Ring World start at the same time? That's just ridiculous!'

What do you gain by having scion be this OP? Or having SR be significantly more powerful than other starts. What would you lose if it was still there but either had less positives or more negatives?

If Paradox were to add a medium sized habitabillity penalty to the SR origin and change the way the Arcane generator worked so that one wouldn't be able to accumulate strategic resources in exploity ways, would they be taking it away from you?
That would make it fairly balanced by the way. Probably enough to allow in MP.

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While I do agree that SR origin may use some kind of nerf, esp for machine empires, I do not agree with the logic of this post.

If this game is geared towards "MP" and/or "balance", then it makes a fairly dull game since anything causes "imbalance" should be removed or changed, greatly restricting what can be implemented.

While I do not have concrete data to support it, I observe most people play this game in SP mode. So sacraficing SP experience to just make MP gamers happy would be unwise and detrimental to the game's success.

Many things are already banned in MP, like pause and console commands, but I really see no reason to remove these from SP games.

Some choices are inheretently stronger/better than others, and this is one of the things that makes the game more interesting. If it imbalances the MP games too much, maybe the best choices are 1. using a mutually accepted MOD to change SR(among other things) in MP, or 2. disallow it in MP games. But please do not change them just for MP games' sake.

There are so many crazy things with SR.

• Functional Architecture/Constructobots civics just got a HUGE boost. In addition to making the districts significantly cheaper to build (including leaving a small stock of strategic resources), they make the upkeep-compensating generator actually overcompensate and give free resources.
• Machines (who start with generator districts and thus with access to crystals) can use the market to get the Crystal Sensors edict before their science ship makes its first hyper jump. Boom, no more searching blindly for your guaranteed worlds or accidentally landing on top of a leviathan/3k amoeba swarm/marauder galleon and losing your early scientists. You'll also be able to win the first contact project races, for that sweet influence bonus.
• Because your minerals come from space mining for so long, you can ignore the minerals-from-miners techs/traits in the very early game, and just get the space mining techs. Bonus if your ruler has the Space Miner trait (or you are a machine race), which will have you start with something like 50 mineral surplus and not even need pops to maintain it. Nobody starts with that kind of income!
• Because food harvesting is 50% more efficient than energy generation (for non-machines) and it's therefore actually more efficient to sell food than to use technicians even at the full 30% market fee, you can just sell your ludicrous food income and not worry about other sources of energy.
• Because you don't need energy from anything except selling food, you can change your trade policy immediately and still have all the energy you need.
• Because you can easily use trade to generate a ton of consumer goods, you don't actually need a lot of minerals to support ludicrous numbers of scientists (build the commerce district first, then the tech district).
• Because your districts are few but absurdly huge, you get an advantage in early empire sprawl, freeing at least one bureaucrat worth of pop to do something useful with its life.
• Because you can always have outrageous numbers of jobs and housing available in the early game, you can steal enormous numbers of pops from other empires if you can get migration treaties. Throw on an Artisan's art installation, and you can get +4 or more growth from immigration, all stolen from outside of your empire.

I'm not saying it's stronger than Scion, but it's sure as hell stronger than most. Rogue Servitors and Merchant Guilds empires in particular have a ludicrously easy time with this origin.