New Mod - "Capship Mod" |
I've finally released a mod for SE5! It's the Capship Mod, and you can download it at http://kolis.dyndns.org/se or read about it at http://wiki.spaceempires.net/index.php/Capship_Mod - yay! 
The basic premise of this mod is that ships need to be more varied in size than in stock. Thus, the smallest ships are only 50kT, while the largest ships are a whopping 3000kT. To avoid the need for scale mounts and such, as well as to allow big ships and little ships to be treated as separate target types, they are now actually separate vehicle types with separate components to install. (In case you're curious - I did this by renaming "ship" and "base" in MainStrings.txt to "patrol ship" and "capital ship" respectively! 
)
Capital ships can install much heavier weapons than patrol ships, but those weapons are really only good for targeting other capital ships and such. They can, however, mount "weapons banks", which are super-sized versions of regular ship weapons that fire at 10x the normal rate - think "massive point defense" versus smaller ships! Capital ships also have exclusive access to some of the more powerful types of armor, such as emissive armor, which has also been souped up. But the smaller patrol ships are the only vehicles which can cloak - capital ships are just too big to hide!
Along with that, the racial traits have been revamped. To avoid working on this mod forever, the racial techs are gone, but the organic and crystalline armors are now regular techs. The minor traits such as mining bonuses are increased in disparity, much like the ship hulls, so if you want a +25 or +50 to resource gathering (or even both!) you can have it. I plan on adding pirates & nomads (maybe monsters too, for the heck of it?) to the mod eventually, but I'm going to have to wait until Malfador (hopefully) implements a Get_Empire_Society_Type function, because doing them as racial traits would be awkward.
There's a new ground-combat system too: instead of swarms of little troop units running around, you're only going to have a few (but larger) troops on a planetary invasion. This should clean up the clutter on the ground combat map which people have been experiencing! Also, instead of installing components on individual unit designs, each design represents a type of army, and you install a commander (aggressive or defensive - perhaps I'll add more later?) as well as any combination of four types of troops: marines, tanks, artillery, and "neotanks". (Later I'll probably add combat medics and mechanics as well, so that the troops can heal/repair themselves during combat...) Each type of troop also has its own speed bonus, so if you have neotanks (the fastest) along with marines (the slowest), the army will travel at the speed of the marines in combat, until the marines are all killed, at which point the army will travel at the speed of the neotanks. (At least that's the plan!)
Also, mines are a bit different from in stock: they don't detonate when ships enter the sector; instead ships enter into combat with them. This means that you can run away from a minefield laid in open space (in a warp point combat the mines should surround the warp point so it's no problem), but it also means that when mines are laid in combat, they can be armored mines which can't be shot down quite so quickly! I realized that mines have cloaking, so they won't actually engage in combat with ships that can't see them, which is rather stupid... I guess I'll have to either remove the cloaking or give mines a very short ranged sensor ability so they can see anything that comes by!
The AI is probably not going to do very well with this mod - I redid a lot of the techs, and I'm no AI scripter... anyone wanna give this mod a try?
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Space Stations are now 300kT patrol ships which can't have engines. Starbases are now 3000kT capital ships which can't have engines. Satellites (in case you were wondering about those too) don't exist - I don't really care much for satellites; they seem to be too much micromanagement getting them placed in the right places, and they are a rather cheap way to get sensor coverage 
Speaking of sensors, I ought to incorporate that "sensor relay" idea I posted the other day into this mod... maybe capships can have a small enhancement and planetary sensors can have a large enhancement, or maybe planetary sensors add range (big telescopes) while capships add penetration (no atmospheric interference), and patrol ships are stuck mounting wimpy sensors no matter what because the good sensors are too bulky...
No, I didn't mean I wanted someone else to do the AI for me (though that would be nice 
) I just meant anyone wanna try it out in multiplayer
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Rather than edit mainstrings.txt, did you consider adding new vehicle types to VehicleUnitTypes? You could probably accomplish a lot of this stuff through that file as well, without having stations classified as patrol ships etc.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
That would require patrol ships to be units, since VehicleUnitTypes can only define new unit types, not new ship types. I didn't want patrol ships to be units because then they would launch in groups, be stored in cargo, not be able to carry cargo, etc. I guess that might have worked, but it wasn't what I was going for...
If you think you can convince Aaron to add a VehicleShipTypes.txt, or even add those abilities to VehicleUnitTypes.txt, go for it!
One other idea I had for a mod a while back, BTW, was where the *big* ships became units, and couldn't warp, had to be "towed" (stored in cargo) by smaller "tugboats", etc. That never quite worked out - it might work even in SE4, but you'd still have the oddity of "system ship groups" launching and being stored in planetary cargo
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Were you able to incorporate accuracy penalities into the various weapons versus certain classes?
Example:
1. A Patrol ship should have near 100% chance to hit a Capship with all weapons.
2. The Capship would have a VERY hard time hitting the patrol ship with its capship class weapons.
3. Capship weapons versus one another (cap to cap) with reasonably good to hit modifiers?
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
You made it rather rough on Fighters/Carriers in this mod it seems. Are you intending this to be mainly ship to ship action with low emphasis on Fighter/Carriers?
I have an idea. See if you like this.
If you want this to be mainly ship to ship action it can be done with some good fighter action involvement.
1. Limit Point Defenses to not being able to target Fighters.
2. Capship weapon banks and Patrol ships can target fighters.
3. Limit Fighter bays to be no more than 25% of hull mass and only available to Capships.
4. Create anti-ship Torpedo Tech tree/line.
5. Anti-Ship Torp not too big (in Kt mass) allowing the Fighter decent movement, armor and shields.
6. Anti-Ship torp is ONE shot deal as in its Ordnance cost is the same as the fighters ordnance storage.
7. Anti-Ship torp (AST) can be targeted by PD.
8. The AST is a hard hitter than can overcome the Emissive nature of the capship armor.
I sorta picture this as Star Wars like that they don't really have carriers, but all the Capships carry a fighter/bomber compliment. This will add a new dimension to the combat as the Capships will be able to deploy fighters/Bombers to contend with a Patrol heavy fleet or mix it up with capships.
This also sticks with your vision of capship battles as there will be technically no carriers in the game.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
How did I make it tough on fighters and carriers? Fighters are used for two purposes: air support in planetary invasions, and harassing patrol ships en masse. Is something wrong with fighters being unable to attack capital ships? Capships can't attack fighters either (unless the capship is a carrier and has its own fighters) I know it's kinda silly to not allow capships to carry PD weapons batteries but I'm afraid that if I do so, capships will be able to blow away anything by mounting tons of batteries in addition to their heavy weaponry! (Remember, the batteries are small enough to fit a decent number of them on a patrol ship, and capships are 10 times bigger!) I want capships and patrol ships to have their own strengths and weaknesses, rather than capships being uber-kill-everything ships
All weapons have a base accuracy bonus of zero at point-blank range, and they vary in dispersion at range (from 1%/8km for lasers to 2%/1km for plasma pulse weapons). Capships have defense penalties while patrol ships have defense bonuses and fighters have large defense bonuses. I don't think it's possible to have the same weapon have an accuracy bonus versus one type of target but no bonus or a penalty versus another. But this is pretty much approximated by the larger ships having defense penalties, since it wouldn't make much sense for a light weapon to be less accurate against heavy ships! I suppose I could tweak the accuracy bonuses/penalties of various weapons designed for various purposes, but that would just make them more or less accurate against everything that they can already target...
edit: oh, yeah, I also forgot another thing you can use fighters for... point defense! Fighter weapons can target other fighters, seekers, mines, and drones, so you might want a fighter screen protecting your ships/planets from enemy missiles and such!
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
My concern is that you have the Capship (CS) set up that a fighter pretty much can't hurt them. I was looking at it realistically that anyone can stick a Huge Torpedo on a fighter, line the fighter up at the CS then fire the thing at the CS. At least put some fighter heavy weapon selections in that can harm a CS. I'm not saying the weapon will cripple the CS, but the CS will have to contend with possibilty of being crippled by fighters if unescorted. This means that planets/systems can mount reasonable defenses against CS acting alone or in a manner they should not be acting.
Battleships in modern day navies don't sail around without Destroyer Escorts or better yet carrier support as well. They need those escorts to screen them from damage from sources they cannont target so well. This will also lend itself to you as a player being required to build fleets that support one another. A CS by itself could be ambushed by a bunch of fighters with the CS finding itself in a world of hurt without having proper escorts.
The Anit-Ship (AS) weapon is a lot like RocketPods. If you add it to the fighter it will hurt a larger ship, but with a price. It takes up a lot of room limiting the fighters other options....ie armor, shields, engines, etc.
I just can't see the possibilty of a fighter not being a viable Anti-Capital Ship option.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Aha! The "Small Cluster Bomb" can target capships - I forgot about that! It's a seeker that's 5kT, range 20km, starts with 10-30 damage, and can be installed only on fighters. So yes, fighters CAN target capships!
Kinda like the bombers in MOO2, huh? They could shoot bombs at ships...
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
I went to try out your mod, and after setting up the game I recieved several file errors...unable to load .bmp...did I install the mod incorrectly?
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Oops, forgot to mention that you need the SE5 multimedia pack...
http://mm.spaceempires.net/
It's mentioned in the readme included in the mod zipfile but I don't blame you for not reading it - I don't often read those things either
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Finaly got to play the mod today. Have some feedback for ya
First off it is an intresting premise. And had a lot of promise. A few tweeks here and there and we might have a very good mod.
First off ship range:
You need to increase that either by the amout of supplys that a ship can carry or by decreasing the supplies used. I am used to my basic scout ship having a two or three system range in this mod it surveys have a system and needs more fuel 
Next of cost of captiol ships:
I tried to build a large firegter for supply transport. I only installed the bridge and crew quarters and in was up to 50k minerals it would take 20 or 30 turnes to build one of those(at least in the early game) Yes they need to cost more than patrol ships but not that much
Sats:
Why get rid of them:
Maybe an option to turn them off but not get rid of them completly. I like them. They are go sensor bouys
Well other than that good job I may take a stab at the two class ship system into my mod one day Like I said intresting premise with a few blancing tweeks we'd have a good mod
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Cool, thanks for the comments
As for ship range, yeah, I guess I'd better tweak that!
Capital ship cost - hmm, haven't really tried to actually build one yet, but I figured that since they're 10 times as big as a patrol ship, they'd take 10 times as long to build, too... keep in mind that spaceyards improve rather quickly with tech advances! (And if you manage to build a starbase or large freighter with a space yard component, those start out building pretty fast and just get smaller as tech advances! )
Satellites - yeah, I think by the time I got to satellites in the unit list I was just getting lazy and felt like cutting *something* out to save the trouble of making components for them! I might add them back later but I'm not sure... I'd like them to be sort of like "sensor relays" that enhance the range of nearby ships' sensors without actually sensing anything themselves (I had a thread about that before) but I realized that the enhancement would apply to the satellites themselves! If only there were an ability scope which said something like "everything but satellites in the system"!
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Changelist thus far for v1.1.0 (scheduled for release with the new SE5 patch):
1. Changed - Warp points are now visible at any distance on the system map.
2. Changed - Mines now have the Seeks Towards Target And Rams capability so they will detonate in combat.
3. Added - Combat thrusters for mines so they will engage ships in combat.
4. Changed - Gave mines combat movement stats suitable for low-acceleration, high-speed, low-turn-rate movement.
5. Added - Sensors for mines which detect cloaked ships in the same sector so they can engage them in combat.
6. Changed - Halved supply usage of all engines.
7. Changed - All weapons now store some supplies and ordnance: projectiles/pulses 20 rounds, missiles/bombs 10 rounds, beams 40 rounds. (Batteries/Banks x10)
8. Changed - Doubled capacity of supply and ordnance storage components.
9. Fixed - Large Ordnance Storage was not improving enough with tech advances.
10. Fixed - Aggressive Commander now uses supplies and ordnance when firing.
11. Fixed - Supply usage of various weapons.
12. Changed - Reduced size of Thermonuclear Bomb to 200kT (was 300kT).
13. Changed - Reduced space yard (component and facility) cost and build rate by half.
14. Changed - Space yards (components and facilities) are no longer one per ship or planet.
15. Changed - Homeworlds on regular starts now get an additional spaceyard and one fewer research facility.
15. Changed - Homeworlds on max tech starts now get a two additional spaceyards and two fewer monoliths.
16. Changed - Reduced space yard component size at lower tech levels.
17. Changed - Increased space yard component hitpoints.
18. Changed - Life Support and Crew Quarters components now advance at all levels of Vehicle Systems.
Comments?
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
OK guys, this REALLY sucks... but I have to tell you...
Apparently bases are hardcoded to not be able to move in combat, even if you put engines on them.
As you might know, I used the "base" vehicle type for capital ships.
Guess what?
Capital ships cannot move in combat - they just sit there and spin, like a base!!!! >:-(
All that work on this mod...
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Is the 'ships as patrol ships' and 'bases as capital ships' divison purely for splitting up the components?
If so, you could try making them all ships again, and use the Availability Requirements on the components instead. Or, if that doesn't work quite right, one of the other Requirement thingies.
Edit:
Setting a ship tonnage as Availability requirement makes it disappear for all ships. The Usage Requirements blocks you from placing it on a wrong ship, but unfortunatly it will still show all components in the list.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Not just for splitting up the components - it's also for weapons targeting: e.g. some weapons can target patrol ships but not capships or vice versa. So no, that solution wouldn't work
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Ouch. Yeah, that makes things difficult.
Okay... ehm... I think you could still do something like that by changing the offense/defense abilities so capital ships will never hit patrol ships, and modding the damagetypes & shield/armor levels so the non-base-targetting weapons can't damage capital ships. That would also give you good control over weapons that might do only partial damage, instead of the vehicletype's all-or-nothing. This is all getting much more complicated though.
A funny different way, which doesn't work, was changing capital ships from bases to planets or seekers, or even beams. That works perfectly, except for the minor snag that you can't add those designs to a construction queue.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
To make this work the way you want it to it looks like what we really need are some more unit capibilities to be added to the game.
Can Not Be Stored In Cargo
and
Can Carry Cargo
are a couple that come to mind.
Or how about,
Acts As Ship
to make the game use all the coding for ships for the unit.
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Problem is, I don't want capships wasting their ammo on patrol ships they can never hit, or patrol ships wasting their ammo on capships they can't scratch! Now Fyron suggested something on IRC about messing with the ships' combat strategies... I guess it might be possible to make "roles" for ships and encourage players to select the appropriate strategy for the ship's role - by "role" I mean what it's intended to target - capships and planets, or patrol ships and light units/seekers. Thus there would be a "Max Range - Anti-Capship" strategy and a "Max Range - Anti-Patrolship" strategy, and duplicates for every other strategy as well, telling ships not to even bother firing at anything other than their designated targets. The problem is that what if you want a ship to be mixed-role, e.g. carry both heavy and light weapons? There's no way to designate targeting strategies for individual weapons, AFAIK, except by giving them specific target types... And weapons always have 1%-99% to hit, never 0% or 100%, so it's not like capships can "tell" that they're going to always miss...
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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
I know you were worried about the idea of patrol ships being carried internally, but this is a suggestion, all the same - turn 'patrol ships' into using the unit rules, but for drones rather than fighters or such. You then tweak cargo capacities for storage such that while you can carry a small number of craft, it's not many - you can modify the size of population and fighters such that proportionately, a 50kt corvette is, indeed, a very large vessel.
Couple with a generally limited range (So if you want a long range scout, you'd better install supply storage) and a heavy-weight patrol-ship-launcher (To discourage folks from having lots, rather than maybe one or two at the outside), and it might almost work - yes, you can hold onto patrol craft internally, but you want to have your defensive screen deployed before battle as a patrol group, not waiting until they're in combat! Heck, that could almost be an interesting quirk of strategy - catch a fleet of capships offguard, and their escort vessels haven't had time to fully deploy...
As for the 'sillyness' of them being kept in planetary cargo - the smaller warships would now be warships capable of planetfall for maintinence and repairs, and were intended to be small enough to be able to be built by local ground-based facilities, whilst reserving the major drydock shipyards for capital vessel construction. And a craft that carried smaller, 'parasite' vessels would be not entirely different from the amphibious assault vessels that carry small coastal craft inside them, and deploy them as needed.
Of course, this would likely cause issues for formations, but I suspect bases did that too...
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Minor clarification: What I meant by making 50kt 'large' was to cut the size population & fighters required to a reasonable amount, and then modifying cargo etc so it was proportionately less of a 'good deal' for patrol ships - instead of (as in stock) a 20kt component granting a 200kt storage, it might be closer to a 20 kt component granting only 50kt storage, with population/mines/etc reduced in size so you can drag the same number of them around anyway.
Actually, apon further pondering, there's a thought in general lurking there...
I also mentioned reducing the range a patrol ship was capable of. An interesting possibility to emphasise their supporting role would be to not only do so, but have larger warships carry both a vastly improved range, and a magnitude more supplies in a numerical sense as well. Your average WW2 destroyer tended to have quite a limited range, while larger capital vessels were able to steam for large distances. (In fact, the Iowa class battleships carried a full refuelling dock, so as to be able to top up any escort craft en route!)
Thus, you'd end up with patrol craft being largely limited to picket duty, scouting/searching if one traded a noticable chunk of space in for a greatly extended supply capacity (Thus giving you heavily armed (as current) picket ships, and lightly armed cruising scouts), but if you want to really perform a deep-strike assault, you feild a fleet of capital ships, and have your patrol craft parasite their supplies off the big boys, and even spending much of the trip 'hitching a ride' to save on fuel economy...
Re: New Mod - "Capship Mod"
Interesting ideas. What have you done with bases etc?
If you want the mod to succeed beyond PBW use, you'll have to do the AI yourself. No one else will do it for you. It shouldn't be that hard considering your background.
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