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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...