NPR Generation Questions

[TallTroll]

I also read that any new NPRs that are "discovered" on the fly are generated based on the player's empire size and power. Does this mean that odds are no matter how big you are, any NPR you encounter will be more or less the same size/power as the player?

Its based on a bell curve with the average player race pop as the centre of the curve. This allows you to create games with very different starting sizes and still have challenging NPRs.

Steve

Could we have a game start option to shift the bell curve for NPRs? Shifting it 0.1 SD or multiples thereof would let you tailor the NPR challenge a bit, without otherwise impacting on them and allows a bit more finetuning outside of spoilers. Turn it down for a pacifist run, up for a "pacifist" run (it's technically peace when everyone else is dead, right?)

[Ragnarsson]

I also read that any new NPRs that are "discovered" on the fly are generated based on the player's empire size and power.  Does this mean that odds are no matter how big you are, any NPR you encounter will be more or less the same size/power as the player?

Its based on a bell curve with the average player race pop as the centre of the curve.  This allows you to create games with very different starting sizes and still have challenging NPRs.

Steve

Could we have a game start option to shift the bell curve for NPRs? Shifting it 0. 1 SD or multiples thereof would let you tailor the NPR challenge a bit, without otherwise impacting on them and allows a bit more finetuning outside of spoilers.  Turn it down for a pacifist run, up for a "pacifist" run (it's technically peace when everyone else is dead, right?)

Bear in mind the statement you quoted is 12 years old now - this thread was first created in 2010 then necro'd.  This might still be accurate for C# - but it may not.

[TallTroll]

The changes from VB6>>C# are pretty well documented, and I don't remember seeing anything about changes in NPR generation, which while not conclusive, is a pretty good hint, I think. I can't think of any particular reason not to have ported it straight over either. If there has been a change, then yes, it's a pointless request, but if it does still work that way, I do think it would make a neat way to tweak challenge without using the blunt instrument of spoilers

[Garfunkel]

Doesn't the difficulty percentage do that already?

[TallTroll]

AFAIK, the diff %age acts as a multiplier to the rolled stats of an NPR, not a shift in the range of the roll. Depending on how things actually work, that may end up being about the same thing, but I don't think it's ever been publicly established what the NPR generation black box actually contains, so it's hard to make a direct comparison

[nuclearslurpee]

The difficulty modifier acts as a multiplier to the mean of the NPR population distribution, in fact that is as far as I know its sole function as every other starting value is directly set by the initial population. There is no accessible control of the distribution spread/deviation otherwise.

Due to caps on some installations, notably research labs, the resulting actual NPR difficulty is often not as high as you would expect if you use >100%, an issue which is finally being rectified by Steve in v2.0.

[Droll]

The difficulty modifier acts as a multiplier to the mean of the NPR population distribution, in fact that is as far as I know its sole function as every other starting value is directly set by the initial population. There is no accessible control of the distribution spread/deviation otherwise.

Due to caps on some installations, notably research labs, the resulting actual NPR difficulty is often not as high as you would expect if you use >100%, an issue which is finally being rectified by Steve in v2.0.

One other thing to note is that NPR populations will no longer exceed the carrying capacity of their homeworld either in 2.0. So they are somewhat nerfed in that aspect.