Armor mod

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

I have been working on this project on and off for months, and I decided to look for some feedback from the people who would play the mod.

The intention of the mod is to give more flexibility on combat design and more flexibility on early game play.

I want to give players the choice of expanding their HW instead of having to colony rush. I am using the idea of a HW expansion(more space for facilities) and making new colonies less efficient. I am also using racial colonization to prevent players from gaining all colonizing types early game.

Ships will not have an engine limit, but engines will carry little to no supplies, so you can have a wide range of speeds and ranges for them.

I am also adding new weapons and armor and shield types to give players more options for ship design. I intend to make the weapons useful in some situations, so most(hopefuly all) weapon typos can be useful in a game.

I am going to make weapons use a tiered system, so a race can specialize in one type if they wish. For example; level (6) DUC will open advanced projectile weapons(Gauss cannons and coil guns) and they can lead to relativistic guns.

I hope to make new weapons useful by incorporating a few new damage types that work better against some defenses. For example, kinetic weapons(DUC, anti-ship missiles) have some shield penetration ability and EM weapons are not stopped my normal armor.

I am basing this off of Balance Mod, but I don't know how much of a resemblance there will be when I am done(with the alpha version.)

WilliamTheBat · Space Emperor Joined: Aug 13, 2008

Cool stuff! Make sure to take a look at DJAS mod. I like your version of research tiers better than the one DJAS uses, but some of the other stuff, like unlimited engines without supplies, are in there.

For developing planets rather than expanding, consider a homeworld-only facility that has a negative space used. Much easier than screwing around with planet sizes and fixing the quadrants.

Added bonus, high tech expansions for homeworlds only could depend on the presence of the homeworld facility. Maybe lesser versions for your other planets.

Added added bonus, taking an enemy's homeworld intact would have great rewards!

Greatly increasing the cost of a colonizing component would also slow down the land-grab. People would definitely want to cherry-pick planets for colonization.

One thing: you'd probably want to uncork production limits per planet. Sure, you can build a bunch of construction stations, but probably better to allow either multiple spaceyards per planet, or "expensions" like DJAS.

I can't wait to see what you come up with.

Shrike · Space Emperor Joined: Jun 17, 2006

Sounds like you're mixing in some good ideas from B5W and Dark Nova as well. Don't worry too much about not resembling Balance Mod; that's only an issue if your goal is to have AI's still able to use the mod. Let people know when you're ready for a beta PBW game Smile

I also like this idea of tiered technology better than the DJAS all-or-nothing approach. Will you limit the tech levels per technology like BM does or rather go for stock/DJAS way about it?

Ender · Space Emperor Joined: Apr 18, 2008

I see great minds think alike Wink

I wish I hadn't failed to learn how to script (just the lack of time) as such a mod as yours would probably have been on the top of my list to do the "new planetary setup" submod.

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

I do have a homeworld facility that, when researched, can be upgraded to allow more space on the HW. I had the damndest time trying to make it buildable only on the HW, but it works as is, as long as no one scraps it...

I do plan to change production per population; it is one of the changes I plan to make to make new colonies less productive. I also plan to make colonizers either bigger or more costly; I have not decided that yet.

I plan to try to keep levels for most techs to 11 or so. Weapons and armor might get up to 20 levels, but I don't think that will be necessaty. Reaching the high end weapons(relacistic gun, singularity cannon, and Anti-Proton Beam) will cost a ton on research, so they will be quite powerful at level 1.

Thanks, Ender. I used your racial colonization idea for the mod. I much prefer this to letting everyone colonize everything for free.

I still have to balance the weapons defences and make a lot of changes in the racial tech areas. I don't really have a compleation date as of yet for the alpha.

WilliamTheBat · Space Emperor Joined: Aug 13, 2008

Mind f I borrow some of your ideas for Magic Mod?

Particularly, I want expansion to be way slower, and development of systems to be valuable.

I'm already mangling the tech tree by adding space monster and magic races. I'm still of two minds about ship speed. I needed some minor tweaking to make monsters able to catch anything in their claws, allowing arbitrary speed just by adding engines would make the short-ranged monster weapons useless.

One thing to think about, if you just scale production way down due to population, people will just cart in population as a matter of course. A lot of people do that anyway.

Large colonizing units just mean you need a big ship to carry it. Making it expensive to produce is how you slow down colonization.

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

Feel free. I am borrowing many good ideas from others in this project.

I am also going use SY expantions to allow HW production to grow.

I plan to allow Homeworlds to start with some racial facilities(the only one implemented so far is the temporal spaceyard) and homeworlds do have facilities that, so far, I do not plan to make available to be constructed to enhance their value.

The biggest problem I am having is finding good pictures for components and facilities. this actually stopped the project at one time; now I have just accepted that the first run at it will not be as polished as I like.

WilliamTheBat · Space Emperor Joined: Aug 13, 2008

Yeah, I ended up using MS paint to make new pictures. the magical ones look decent despite this, but the monster components and facilities really do look like they were done in MS paint. Don't be afraid to borrow pictures from elsewhere in the tech tree, I've done some of that, too. Oh, and unless you are into 3-d modeling, you'll have to allow your facilities to look like boring plain old facilities during ground combat.

I had zero luck getting different starting facilities for different racial traits. (and this is a big deal when monsters build monsterous facilities, etc)

Best I can do is allow them to build their own, but ignore that everyone's homeworld starts the same.

Oh, all you have to do for a homeworld-only facility is set "requirements allow availability" to FALSE and it will never show up on the build list. homeworld-only expansions you just add a requirement that the homeworld-only facility is present (hope nobody scraps it) and make sure that's in "requirements allow placement".

Shrike · Space Emperor Joined: Jun 17, 2006

Fyron · Galactic Guru Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: CA, USA

A more explanatory link for MMP:

http://mmp.spaceempires.net

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

@ Williamthebat

To get racial facilities, you need to alter their size depensing on if a race has that trait. For example, the Temporal shipyard is 1000kt for those with temporal trait, but 50000kt for others. That way, when startingfacilities is looked at, the game will try to add the temporal spaceyard for everyone, and cannot unless that player has the temporal trait because of available facility space, and will move on to the next item on the list. I plan to do this for all facilities that players could start with.

I'll have to take another look at the multimedia pack, Fyron; I thought I took a look a long time ago, but I could be mistaken.

WilliamTheBat · Space Emperor Joined: Aug 13, 2008

That completely rules all. I'm all over that. Thank you!

Hmm, I wonder if it will bork planets you invade...

Ender · Space Emperor Joined: Apr 18, 2008

Nice to see, Lorq, that someone reads my posts Smile

However, homeworld starting facilities can be dependant not just on racial traits but on whether or not a player has a technology at the start of a game that is needed to build a facility. It gives even more options.

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

Ok, I've been back to work on this mod, and have a little more info about it. I've condensed life support into the crew quarters component. I am also increasing the crew requirements for ships, and adding an Automation tech that reduced the required crew for ships.

I am adding system defense craft and Q-ships to the available ships types for players to use to give more choices to them, depending on their play style.

How important is it for you to have AI to play against in a new mod? For me, learning a new mod is much easier if there is working AI to play against; but I have found that altering Kwok's AI to work properly will take a large amount of time, and I can get the Alpha out much faster if the AI has not been optimized.

Also, I am thinking about releasing an Alpha version with no racial techs available. This should speed up the initial release by a large amount, but limit the options to explore until I can add them in later.

I am interested to hear your thoughts on these subjects.

Skyburn · Space Emperor Joined: Mar 12, 2008

doom3607 · Space Emperor Joined: Apr 08, 2009

I'll help test this hypothetical mod, if you're recruiting beta testers, as long as I can learn from it to try and build my own even better mod. Twisted Evil

Edit: Well, alpha testers. You know what I mean.

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

That sounds great, doom. I plan to run some game(s) on PBW2 once I feel the bugs are mostly worked out. I have the mod in an alpha state, ready to upload, but have not found where to send the request to. It is far too large to use the normal upload link(7-zip compressed)...

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

Seriously, how do I upload the mod? I can onlt find the Uload File button, and that had a severe size restriction.

I have searched the forums and cannot find how to do this.

Shrike · Space Emperor Joined: Jun 17, 2006

I think you can't upload any mods directly to PBW2. There's a link field in the form for new mod uploads, but that should point to some external location. Anyway, that's how I added B5W to the mods section.

doom3607 · Space Emperor Joined: Apr 08, 2009

You can upload the mod in a compressed file directly to this site, but if it's too large, try MediaFire (just google it). It'll let you upload for free, just make sure to copy the URL somewhere. it's what I did for the SEV PBC mod.

Fyron · Galactic Guru Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: CA, USA

How big is your mod in compressed rar/7z form?

Lorq13 · Space Emperor Joined: Oct 03, 2007

doom3607 · Space Emperor Joined: Apr 08, 2009

Use Mediafire, I think this site's liimit is 50 Mb.

Skyburn · Space Emperor Joined: Mar 12, 2008

It's 200MB for free users.

http://www.mediafire.com/faq.php#faq7

Fyron · Galactic Guru Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: CA, USA

What is in your mod that makes it 156 MB? Are you including MMP or shipsets in there?

There is an upload file link in the modules menu over on the left..