Negative ability "bonuses"?

Answering my own question, you can enter negative values without it going wrong, but they're treated as 0.

Alternatively, give your race of choice some nice bonuses, and then play maso.

see Cari's brief guide to modding, the section on modding data

Link

it's a shame she doesn't explain exactly what negative values do... maybe they're treated as 0, except in terms of building them back up? (as in, if you have a -10 econ bonus, but then get a +15 econ bonus by researching the econ tree, your net bonus is only +5).

they're not treated as 0, they're treated as negative values, just not displayed in game. I.E., they work... i've done it.

sweet! i've been wondering about that! good to know, too. i've always thought neg values should be in the main game.

ugh, so much to mod, so little time

they're not treated as 0, they're treated as negative values, just not displayed in game. I.E., they work... i've done it.

What do you mean? When I tried it the negatives showed up on the civ stats screen but when I looked at the planets I was getting exactly the production and income you'd expect with zero bonus or penalty. Are you saying that what's displayed on the planet screen is not actually what you get? Or did I do it wrong? (I just edited the raceconfig file and put -50 under social and economy to experiment)

Alternatively, give your race of choice some nice bonuses, and then play maso.

Yeah, that's the easier possibility. But I think the research times and build times are quite nicely balanced pre-bonus. It gets a bit crazy on masochistic when every planet can turn out a dreadnought in 4 weeks! So I'd prefer to try it this way round first.

Edit: just tried it again and, yep, the effective value is zero. As the earlier poster said, if you start negative, racial improvements get added to that value, so you can at least keep yourself at zero bonus through the game.

This isn't true (at least, not when done through the abilities screen.) My mod, the "Dynamic Abilities Mod" (it's on the forums and in the library, easier to search for on the forums) has negative abilities in it. I know for a fact that they work--for example, if you put full negative to logistics through the mod, you will have less logistics to begin with than your colony ship takes up! (still moveable, but the logistics are lower so there's no way to make a fleet with it). It also definitely works for speed. I can't explain what you're doing wrong with the customrace.xml, but it does work.

Negative values for logistics and speed don't make sense though, so surely all the penalty can do is affect how many improvements you have to research or put on a ship before you see an ACTUAL improvement?

This is exactly what appears to happen with production. ie I put in -10 in social, at the start of the game I can get 24 points out of my civ capital. I put in -50, I can also get 24 points. After researching up to planetary improvements (+20 bonus overall) I can now get more than 24 points if I start at -10, but I will still only get 24 if I start at -50.

Y'know, I don't know, I was just checking logistics to make sure and it doesn't change. However, miniaturization does: a small ship normally (no miniaturization bonus) has 16 points to place equipment in. A small ship with the negative modifier has 11 points.

I know for sure that negative interest rates and negative speed do affect things... you must remember, negative goes by a percentage of the base, so -20 speed translates to -20% speed, so you're still able to move, just slower. I can't explain the economics, I will test that in the mod and get back to you on how it affects for me.

I just checked social production, and it does affect things. I see the 24, but I also see that for default settings and it stays the same even after I research planetary improvements (for both negative and zero settings). However, on default settings, it will take 28 weeks to build an entertainment network on the first turn. With my most negative setting, it takes 55. Obviously the mod is working.

Well, I just downloaded your mod and it works exactly the same way for me as I described above, not the way you say. Which is to be expected really because whether it's through picking negative abilities or just modifying the raceconfig file you still end up with -x% as the racial bonus. Also, it takes 10 weeks to build an entertainment network in my game on the default settings, not 28 (and that isn't altered by choosing a more negative selection)

Which version are you using? I'm on 1.2 beta 2.

negative bonuses work just fine, i've made many modded galactic wonders and superprojects that have a trade off, something good and something bad. For example, the harmony field, sets morale at 100% for a planet, but cuts production in half and lowers resistance ability. and AS SOON as it's built you can see production on that world drop by half. But the negative number doesn't show up on the list of bonuses IN GAME, that's all. So i just make sure to put that in the description of the wonder, that way you know what it does. that's all.

We're talking about different things, logicsequence. I'm talking about a racial bonus (or rather, penalty), not a colony bonus. I just tried it out, creating a building that gave a civilization wide -50% social "bonus". This made my civilization social ability -40%, at which point it behaved exactly like I described above as an effective zero.

Still, it does work correctly on a planetwide basis like you said. So I guess I could create a cheap building which nerfs each colony. That'll do as a solution for now, I think, provided it's safe to assume the AI won't go building it too?

I'll have to work on v 1.2, because I do have v 1.1 which could very well explain the difference.

I'm not sure there's anything for you to work on, Rasori. There's only one way to modify the xml file (the way you have done) and it doesn't work in 1.2, or at least works differently in the way I described.

I'm going to take the building on each colony approach instead, but if you think the way the racial penalty works now is a bug you might want to report it before they get 1.2 final out.

Edit: I just posted about the apparent differences in one of the bug threads.

I just got 1.2 (I don't like beta-ing, lol) and it works for me. I believe the logistics thing is a bug: the default logistics seems to be 6, but after using the negative bonus one time, it drops it to 4, and it doesn't automatically re-raise it to 6.

As far as social production, I will concede that you may be right... the negative ability there doesn't reduce anything, but I didn't apply any special bonuses so I don't know whether or not it affects it there. This does appear to be new.

As for other abilities, such as miniaturization, speed, and interest rates, they work just as they used to for me. If you want them to get to work (I don't know your playing style, but if you commonly go for conquest victories then it'd probably be worth it for you to put negatives in such abilities), make sure that you make a mod folder with a data subfolder, and place the AbilityBonuses.xml in the data folder.

I didn't have to change the xml, that much is true...