Race Mod Reviews - BoP Race Balance Mod

Major Additions:

• Trade is increased to 20 points per pick and its value is kicked up from around a 20% bonus to a 50% bonus at the top end.
  
• He adds Economics, at 20 points per pick. The top pick increases tax revenue by 20%, money from bioharvest and mines by 50%, and attempts to put 500 AU in your treasury to start. This last feature doesn't work, and should have been removed, because I'm sure everyone who takes this pick for the first time goes to his financial tab, looking for his 500 AUs.
  
• He adds an invention of his own, called Social Order. For -10 points there are no bonuses or penalties. For 0 points you get +25% Military efficiency, and -20% fleet maintenance. For 10 points you get 25% improvements to Gov efficiency and HFoG. For 40 points you get a bonanza: +50% recreation efficiency, +20% pop growth, +1 terraform ring, +1 production per pop, and + 1 research per pop. Bard of Prey himself thought this last was underpriced, and was going to adjust it in his next version, but there never was a next version. It's too bad, because a lot of modders have copied Social Order, but none of them has ever fixed it.
  
• He increased the price of Creativity to 30 points per pick.
  
• He increased the power of most of the specials.
  

Because BoP has more selections, races have more points. Compared to Vanilla MoO3, a race will need about +50 points more to keep its same relative point value. Changes to hard-wiring are in yellow.

What's not in the table: A LOT. BoP attacks the races with creativity and energy, making dozens and dozens of changes. This isn't a re-adjustment of MoO3 races; it's a total ground-up re-write. A lot of his changes are imaginative and creative; for instance, the Subterranean pick the Silicoids get will increase the max size of their planets. Big deal, you think? But this means they'll grow faster, since pop grows faster the more empty space there is. On the other hand, there are also many teeny tiny changes in the fine print. They make the whole mod seem twitchy, as though he were making changes just for the sake of making changes. He alters the hab for every single race, for instance, sometimes in miniscule ways. Humans in Vanilla MoO3 like 61 atmosphere, 38 temperature. In BoP's mod, they like 66 atmosphere, 42 temperature. Has he really so finely calculated race balance that he knows the value of 5 points on the atmosphere scale?

One of his most sweeping changes was to turn all additive bonuses into multiplicative ones. In Vanilla MoO3, additive bonuses eventually get swamped by technology; eventually technology dominates race. Multiplicative bonuses work the other way: despite technology they retain their full effect, so in BoP's mod, race dominates technology. I like this change: it magnifies the importance of the time I spend mulling over the Race Picks screen. It's interesting that, though other mods have copied many parts of BoP's mod, none of them have copied this.

This is a very directive mod, meaning that many of these races have a huge amount of required points to get the full listed value. Eoladi, for instance, have to max Economics, Diplomacy, Social Order, and they have to take Collectivist government, Free Trader, and Empathic to get their full value. Personally, I resent this kind of coercion from a modder, but other people will think it adds to the role-playing experience. There are other places where BoP clearly puts role-playing ahead of game-play. Almost all race modders fall into this pitfall at some time or another. In one version of his mod, he cavalierly says he switched the habs of Ithkul and Mrrshans, "because Harvesters are supposed to prefer cold planets." Good heavens! Since hab is the major problem of the Ithkul in MoO3, this kind of change could utterly make or break a race--and in this case, for the scantest of reasons!

Evaluation of race balance: Despite the name of the mod, BoP's primary purpose is not race balance, but race differentiation. He says this over on the Orion Sector forum. Still, he has balance in the back of his mind. You can tell it's not a sloppy mod, because the different races in each species seem, on the surface, to balance well against each other. The Humans don't look so bad against the Evon; the Psilon might even be viable despite their population penalty. I don't know what the Grendarl get for the 40 points they give up to the other lizards; the Trilarian look better than the Nommo--but these are pretty small gripes compared to the cross-species comparisons.

The Gasbags have more points than anyone, which seems odd, considering that they have the best planets. Have they gone from being overpowered in one way to being overpowered in another way? Why would anyone play the Fish when you can play the Gasbags, pocket a bunch of points, and get bigger planets to boot? The Evon have plummetted in point totals--to stay relatively as powerful as they were, they would have needed 460 points. Their sheer number of points was always their strength, now a weakness. When this mod was released, some multi-players thought the Low-gravity races, the Bugs and 'Bots, were terribly handicapped. In any case, I mistrust the balance of a mod that makes so many, many changes to the hard-wiring, particularly since, like all mods, there's never enough testing and feedback. It's an improvement over Vanilla MoO, but there's a lot of effort here that I don't trust. However, it IS the standard. For balance, I'll give this one three and a half thumbs out of five: 1/2

Evaluation of race differentiation & creativity: BoP had this foremost in his mind when he designed the mod, but despite making ground-up changes, differentiation has suffered. In some places he's gone out of his way to make races MORE alike. His Bugs are more similar than they are in Vanilla MoO3. So are his Lizards. His Gasbags are almost identical. He does a good job distinguishing the Fish from each other, and the Robots, but his Humans are singularly without character. BoP was the standard of race mods, but as we'll see, there are modders who have stood on his shoulders and reached farther into MoO's race variables. This mod is strange in that there's a tremendous amount of creativity, but the end result is less differentiation than you get in Vanilla MoO. I'll give this one two and a half thumbs: 1/2

Would I play this one? Not for me...there's simply nothing in it that's particularly attractive.