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Return To Dust

Synopsis:

This mod makes it so that colonizers are cheap, cost no cosmite, and require no requisite research. However, only roughly 25%-30% of sectors are colonizable, and most of those sectors have a tiered ruin occupied by either an NPC faction or Marauders that you must first clear.

Description:

Currently the early game economy is dominated by colonizers. Early expansion is so important that any cosmite, influence, and most of your energy must be used to build colonizers and secure settlements. This makes the early game devoid of meaningful strategic decisions and it is counter intuitive to newer players. Modding units is such an integral part of the game and yet in the early game modding units is such an incredible setback.

To fix this issue, colonizers no longer have escalating costs, cost no cosmite, and are unlocked from the very beginning. To prevent a repeat of release Planetfall, where the viable strategy was to fart out as many colonizers as possible, how colonization works has changed fundamentally. You can no longer establish colonies on any sector. Now, the only sectors that can be colonized are sectors that have a tiered ruin, sectors that start with a settlement on them, and a small number of mountainous sectors (this is due to a small bug with the random map generator).

The bulk of the sectors you can colonize have a tiered ruin that you must clear before you can colonize it. This slows down colonization as you cannot beat the inhabitants of the higher tier ruins with a basic starting stack. Colonization occurs more gradually over the course of the game because you have to assemble larger armies, unlock techs, and use unit mods to beat the higher tier ruins. In other words, this accomplishes what the economy changes to colonizers did without making the cost of colonizers dominate the early game economy.

In addition to the ruins, there are now three new structures in the game. Bronze, Silver, and Gold varieties of ancient Star Union infrastructure. These structures spawn with the corresponding tier of ruin and provide large buffs to resources produced by colonists in the colonies they are attached to. Also, the base amount of resources that colonists produce has been lowered from 5 to 3. This effectively creates tiered cities. Cities controlling higher tier infrastructure towers will produce substantially more resources.

All players’ starting colonies begin with a silver tier infrastructure tower. In vanilla, starting a second colony almost doubled your resource income. In Return to Dust your starting city will out expand and produce way more resources than cities you found from low tier ruins. This makes early expansion much less of a dominating strategy.

Status:

This mod is in an alpha state. I still need to create models for the different tiers of ruins, and I need to create new tactical maps for them as well. Right now they use existing models and tactical maps. However, I have done a lot of iteration with the AI, and it seems to play well with the mod. Given the massive scope of these changes, I am releasing this early to garner feedback while I finish up the rest of the content.


Compatibility:

This mod makes changes to certain RMG sector definitions. it modifies the colonizer cost entries, and it modifies the global economy settings. It will be incompatible with other mods that change these records.