StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Ding dong the witch is dead. For people who don't know, there's been a game going on between eight SDN players for over a year now and it's now reached an anti-climatic end.

I'm opening this thread for discussion about how to implement a Babylon Five modification for Space Empires V. In the words of Nephtys, it's got the best diplomacy model she's ever seen.

Diplomacy being the heart of any B5 universe, I think the foundation's there for a really great modification.

Also I would like to avoid the problems of the other B5 game. We've had over a year playing that piece of shit, so we know exactly what we want. SE:V is new, but a lot of people are playing it right now too.

So what exactly are you looking for in a B5 modification.

Also general discussion of SE:V modding is cool too. I know that GuppyShark is working on a Battletech mod.

In general I believe the groundwork can be laid over a couple weekends with spreadsheets. It might take a lot longer to figure out all the nuiances though. And there'll be problems with creative control, since as Tuxedo has mentioned he wouldn't be willing to work on a mod without complete control and who can blame him. My suggestion is this: whoever contributes the most to the mod gets the most clout. Which makes absolute sense. But that obviously should not be a hard and fast rule. If there's a disagreement about a certain implementation, we're adults, we can talk it over without resorting to flames .

Game on.

My suggestion is to break the mod into a lot of really small sub-goals so it actually you know, gets done, rather than festers around with nothing happening. I have no idea how this will work with more than one person working on the mod. Perhaps a software engineer can weigh in on how we could adequately split the workload.

As for theory, the first thing to deal with is game balance.

I think the Vorlons and Shadows should be powerful, but unable to colonize planets. They should have to rely on some other mechanism to gain power, probably through building orbital research and intel generation, and remote mining. Basically I think they should be gimmick races like Pirates and Nomads, but far more powerful. Possibly their homeworlds should be cloaked, definitely the Shadow one, and maybe some other mechanism for the Vorlon one.

It goes without saying the Vorlons and Shadows should have incredible intel projects. Their work should be mostly behind the scenes.

As for the tech tree, I think it should be simple as possible, not just for our own sanity, but because I really fucking hate the B5 SE:IV tech tree. Fuck "grid-research" or whatever it's called when you need more than one tech area for a weapon. For weapons, I think there should be light, medium, heavy and strategic mounts.

For the differences between YR races, after the success we had with Star Trek mod, I'm thinking the most effort should be in facilities between different races. The weapons themselves should be balanced as hell, and there should be varied options, all balanced. In Star Trek mod, a torpedo was a torpedo and did 71 damage no matter who it belonged to with rare exceptions. That should be the way it is.

The diplomacy... I'm not entirely sure how to take advantage of this. But perhaps there can be an invincible class of "civilian" ship one can construct and fly around. This can build space stations devoted to diplomacy, like a Babylon Five. I'm not sure exactly how this would work though. Ideally the only way to take down these civilian ships/stations would be through intel attacks, like planting a bomb .

I absolutely concur with regard to the tech tree, and whatever's implemented should never require the player to dig through the data files... even if it means drawing up a spreadsheet to be distributed alongside the mod files. (Sorry. I know you like that, Brian, but I absolutely cannot stand it, and I will freely admit that that may make me a poorer SE:IV player for it.)

Perhaps a high maintenance rate for the Vorlon and Shadow fleets - that way, they can have very powerful starships, but they cannot have quite as many of them. But I do concur with regard to Vorlon and Shadow intel projects.

What would be ideal in a diplomacy-oriented game would be for civilian and military ships to be treated differently - so that in a treaty with another power, you can specify that their military ships are fair game but their civilian ships are not to be fired upon, or something like that. Another ideal would be an ability to levy "sanctions" on a power without having to resort to completely breaking a treaty. I'm not sure if SE:V is capable of this, though.

I disagree with stations like Babylon 5 being "invincible" except to intelligence attack. If it's destroyed in the early stages, EA (or whoever decides to build such a station) will simply have to try again, as they did in the actual show. If it's destroyed later in the game, when hopefully more of the players would have more invested in it, everyone can simply declare war on the guilty party, or otherwise penalize them by cutting off trade. Killing B5 would certainly make for a sure-fire way to bring the EA out swinging, or at least piss them off to no end.

You can do that in SE:IV even, but much better in SE:V. SE:V gives the advantage that you can choose to give or not give your minefield codes to an ally. Mines would be the only way to kill "cloaked" civilian ships. As for sanctions, that's easy too, in SE:V you can adjust the level of your trade at whim, so it's up to the player. The diplomacy allows you to for example not give your minefield codes but allow trade. The technical details would be I'd make the "mines" be called a "shoot at civilian ships" weapon and the mine treaty would be called an anti-civilian treaty or pro-civilian treaty, or something like that, but the technical detail doesn't matter. The point is it can be done in SE:V, far better than in SE:IV.

The only problem with not making a B5 invincible is a single isolated station out in the middle of nowhere would be fresh meat. There's consequences politically in real life for destroying an embassy, but there would be 0 in a game, unless the player chose to cut off trade. I want to hardcode as much diplomacy as possible, and if we're going to encourage civilian stations they should be invincible. At the very least, the controller should have a choice whether to build the station to be invincible or not. If he builds it invincible, it can't have any weapons on it (if it had weapons it'd be stupid, the person could just drop 10000000 of them on a warp point.) Also what is the point of a station in the middle of nowhere. There has to be a point. I think it could be a "hero" station, which generates a lot of intel points. To make heroes with SE, you just have to have one of the 3 resources be dedicated to homeworlds only, and make sure you can't build miners for that type. If we go the "hero" route, maybe it doesn't have to be invincible. If it was not invincible, the player would have 0 incentive to build it in the middle of nowhere, and would sanely instead build it over his homeworld.

Definitely intelligence has to play a major role in B5. Intel and diplomacy are the brick and mortar of B5, and SE:IV just isn't good enough for it. But SE:V is. The advantage to a cloak 10 fleet and minefield treaties is you can scout your entire opponent's territory as long as you have a civilian treaty with him without him realizing it... and why the hell not, since any government should be able to send spies on civilian ships to go around snooping.

It goes without saying all civilian shit has to be unarmed, because you shouldn't be able to build up a million perfect cloaked armed ships appearing out of nowhere. The only mechanic which is troublesome is decloaking civilian ships, one over each planet, and blockading. But that is easily solved. As long as a person isn't stupid and keeps one ship or base or maybe a few fighters on top of every planet, this tactic wouldn't work.

Another advantage to SE:V is the fighters kick fucking ass. With the real-time combat the fighters swarm around the target like real fighters. I know some people say looks don't matter with this kind of game... I say hogwash, the way SE:IV treats fighters as "stacks" is lame. And in SE:V units can have maintainence. So many things I can mention better about SE:V.

And no I did not like going through the data files. I saw them as a necessary evil. Distributing a spreadsheet is a good idea though. Your old gripe with Star Trek mod that new players didn't know the "special" weapons were shit kind of doesn't make sense... everybody knew torpedoes were the kickass weapon in Star Trek and ships with lots of shields ruled, so anybody who made their ships heavy on torpedoes with lots of shields would have kickass ships like Trogdor did. But with B5 there's no such other easily identifiable weapon to a casual B5 watcher. So perhaps the solution is all weapons being balanced, whatever they are, and just having different names.

I really do not want the "rock paper sissors" syndrome where you need a certain kind of weapon to beat a certain kind of strategy. If the advantages to a weapon aren't in damage, aren't in cost, aren't in maintainence, and aren't because they do more damage to certain kinds of armor or more damage to certain kinds of shields (SE:V lets you define damage types and we could say make a weapon 10x more effective against a "Brian" type of armor) there's not much left. Which is no problem.

Weapons damage and so on should be balanced, so that leaves facilities and intel projects as the major thing which needs dealing with.

Considering how important the B5 station was in the show, I think it should be very important in the game, too. It should be one fuck of an undertaking to build one, I think, or at least take a long time. To make it desirable to have one despite this, I think there should be a component that can only be put on such stations that grants a lot of intel points. If possible, it should also improve the attitudes of any AIs in the game toward the owner of the station. And I don't know how we'd implement such a thing, but I think there should be a limit to the number of such stations built. One or perhaps two. And (again I have no idea how this would work other than the players agreeing to do it), I think there should be an alliance that anyone who sends an ambassador ship to the diplomatic station should get. Nothing major unless everyone agrees to it, just trade or something to serve as a little bonus for being diplomatic. Oh, and if the station is impossible to destroy except with intel once it's built, I think it should still be possible to board it and capture it, but that it should take a huge number of boarders to do it.

As for the Vorlons and Shadows, I agree that they shouldn't be able to colonize planets and that they should have high maintaince costs so they can have small but powerful fleets. I would also suggest that they should have high trade benefits, so that they would feel the need to court allies and treat them well enough to hold them.

There should also be benefits for the YRs to ally with the First Ones other than having powerful friends. It would be really cool if the First Ones could give the YRs the ability to make suped up, organic versions of their own weapons and armor, and if losing the First One race that gave them the tech as an ally made them lose the ability to make it (not sure how this latter would work, again).

As just a little nifty thing, it would be cool if the Shadows had an intel project called Mr. Morden (there was a pic for this in the events folder for the SEIV B5 mod but no event to with it). Not quite sure what it should do, though. Forcing a YR into an alliance with the Shadows through an intel project seems extreme. Perhaps the victim should lose a few ships or something to the Shadows.

Besides that, I can only think of the obvious: that we'll need ship sets, flags, and race portraits for the B5 races. If none of the regular SDnet SE players can do it, perhaps we can ask Shep. He's already done a bunch of other flags and portraits.

EDIT: And we'll probably want to fix the problems with resupply, too. We can just pump up the number of supplies that resupply bases give if we have to.

I completely agree with all the points mentioned. In B5, one needs balance between the races in fields other than 1 ship to 1 ship, since some races are clearly superior. These guys of course need massive maintenance penalties, or slower buildrate or some other form of balance.

Ideally, the Older Races should be used in more cloak and dagger stuff. The Vorlons flying their colors around as shows of force to gain supporters, while the Shadows make threats and offer pacts, destroying a targer or two as a demonstration of power.

'Mr. Morden' could simply be a powerful steal ships attack, and the Shadows Player can use the captured ship without consequence.

Additionally, you could make one resource 'rare' like Radioactives, and have only certain planets generate small amounts, making strategic places to negotiate or skirmish over.

Research ought to be simple. For the races, they all start with 1 level in '(my race tech)'. From there, if you gain 1 level in ship size, you get a bigger ship hull of your race's. And you also get access to tech like 'Minbari Capital Weapons', and 'EA Light Weapons' or 'Centauri Missiles'. Just 3 or 4 techs per race, each a linear advancement. A tree or two on the side for special techs, and you've got a pretty simple but effective setup. Sorta like how in the STMod, there were 'romulan torpedoes'.

Regarding the diplomatic station, I think all races should be able to build one. The minimum it should give should be a very large number of intel points. To encourage it being built in the middle of nowhere, in other words on trade routes frequented by many ships, it could A. be the only thing which can "sense" civilian ships approaching and B. be invincible. I agree it should still be boardable. But if you board it and you can't maintain it, it blows up . It could require radioactives to build, and it could be impossible to build rad miners or remote miners. In SE:V you can specify exactly what buildings you want your homeworlds to start out with, so perhaps only the homeworlds have rad miners, and the "heroes" such as diplomatic stations require rads. Viola, limit of one.

I think you should be able to build better and better versions of diplomatic stations. Going up from one level of station to the next should be worth it. That way people don't have to wait the entire game to build a "B5..." they could build a diplomatic station to start the game with right away, and in order to build a new one they'd have to scrap the old one because it'd cost rads to maintain. You should be able to build shitty diplomatic posts and stations straight from the beginning, if only one or a handful. As you research better and better stations, you can scrap and build a newer improved version. Or relocate it to where you think someone else is sending his cloaked civilian fleets to keep "tabs" on them.

The only problem with "grid-based" research where you need a Shadow tech level to get say Warlock cruisers is it forces people to ally with the Shadows or Vorlons to get the most game advantage. You should never be forced to ally with another player to get ideal technology, because of random player placement and the fact one player might be there and the other might not. I want it to be possible for a player to play whatever race he feels like, not 1 Vorlon 1 Shadow must be in the game, etc. And if there's more than one Vorlon Empire, why the hell not, could be rival empires. The Shadows could be absent in some games, both could be present, whatever.

The "rare" radioactives is worth looking over too, rather than an outright banning of radioactive facilities. That requires more balance and testing than simply banning them except on homeworlds though.

The rare rads seems like a good idea to me. We could say that rads are Quantium-40 or something.

Perhaps it should be possible for the YRs to steal tech from the First Ones through intel, so you can get it without allying with either of them. Maybe obtaining tech from both should make it possible to build weapons on par with the First Ones (these would have to be either very difficult to get or very expensive to maintain, though).

Nephtys wrote:These guys of course need massive maintenance penalties, or slower buildrate or some other form of balance.

In Babylon Project, it was all about the range. But the problem was there was no balance to the range at all. I'm not sure exactly how to balance unequal numbers of ships at all. Part of the problem is just math... with n-squared larger number of ships present more targets and are more powerful than one large ship. Take out one high value ship and you kill a lot of firepower, while you have to kill a very large number of smaller ships to equal destroying a large one. The basis of "focused fire" in real-time strategy games, which is unfortunately a balancer's nightmare when dealing with uneven number of ships.

As far as I know, A Shadow ship can slice through a Narn ship in one hit, but a Minbari ship can slice through another Minbari ship in one hit, so the firepower difference can't be that great. All YR have to be within the same OOM if they're battling each other, and Shadows and Vorlons the only ones "clearly superior". The Minbari-Earth war in the show could just be the Earth player not researching combat sensors and multiplex tracking, and the Minbari player doing exceptionally well on her tech tree. It sounds like suck, but remember Sheridan did say they used the same shit sensors on B5 as in the Earth-Minbari war .

In other words, I'm not sure whether different races should be clearly superior to others (except for Vorlons and Shadows). Romulans are clearly superior to Cardassians and clearly superior to Klingons, but they don't end up being clearly superior in the game for balance reasons. Dominion are clearly superior to Federation, but that doesn't show up in the game either.

I think there should be at least a slight difference in the power levels of the different race's weapons. Nothing insurmountable, but just enough to say we're being accurate to the show.

At the least, certain races should get their special techs, like how the Romulans and Klingons got better (but still defeatable) cloaks than the other races in the trek mod.

It should be something insignificant. The Centauri in the show use a lot of rapid firing glowing balls. While the Minbari fires a slicing and dicing yellow beam. So instead, the Centauri can have say 500 damage 2 second refire, while the Minbari can have 2000 damage, 8 second refire, or something like that. But the Minbari should not have clearly 3000 damage 8 second refire, or the problem is everybody will want to pick Minbari. Also there's a "beam duration" too so we can make the Minbari beams last say 5 seconds. The impression is that the Minbari have really powerful weapons since it looks that way, but the game would actually be balanced. We could also fiddle around with ordinance and supplies used per shot. Aggregrate damage should remain untouched.

I agree with the special. Minbari should get uber jump drives. Narn should get energy mines. EA should get better interceptors. Centauri should get... well something.

EDIT: I would settle for a small insignificant difference. For example if Centauri weapons do 1000 damage, one second reload, and Minbari ones do 10200 damage, ten seconds reload, it's just an overall 200 more damage. But the damage is the last thing we should think of changing. We can change beam duration, refire rates, supply and ordinance usage, size of the weapon, research cost, all before messing with the actual damage or range.

I'm not so sure changing the number of shots needed to do the same amount of damage is a good idea. Seems to me like that could make a huge amount of difference unless the ship with the less powerful, quick firing weapon can shrug off the first shot from the more powerful, slower reloading weapon. I'm not too experienced with SEV's tactical combat, however, so if I'm in error here, just tell me.

The other things you listed, supply and ordinace costs, weapon size, etc. would be better to mess with to give the older YRs a slight edge than damage and reload times, IMO.

You've got more experience with SE:V tactical combat than anybody here, save maybe Arthur and maybe IB.

We could make the difference less prominent. Like, 1000 damage 2 second reload versus 2000 damage 4 second reload. YR could have differences in damage too, but again not so much. I suggest dividing all the races into tiers. The EA, Minbari, Narns and Centauri would be first tier weapons. Next down the line would be say league worlds, and at the bottom maybe worlds only mentioned in B5Wars. The difference should be a few percentage points of damage at most, but if the weapons do a lot of damage to start out with, say 10000 damage, and ships are really tough, if a Minbari ship does 10200 damage it looks like the Minbari are more powerful when it's really not that big a deal. The really obscure races like Brakiri could have five percent weaker weapons. Nothing that actually matters, but it's enough of a difference.

But yeah, supply, ordinance and size would be easier. The problem is when you change supply, ordinance and size you indirectly change damage. Like if you run out of supply, no more damage, and same for ordinance. If a gun's smaller but the same damage, they'll stuff more in the same ship and do more damage. Etc.

Anyway what I need now is a canonical list of races and weapons. I could just rip it out of the Babylon Project, but I don't want to. I'd like to cover the EA, Centauri, Narns and Minbari first. The only site I really trust is seans site for B5 info, so if anybody has any place else I can go, point away.

The B5 Wars game (which Babylon Project was obviously based on) is the canonical source for B5 starship information. According to JMS' introduction, they actually used B5 Wars as a reference for working on later seasons of the show.

The problem is that it is out of print - Kojiro has a copy but that's the only one I'm aware of.

If you're not after the statistics (there's a few typos like the Gravitic Cutter ROF) you might as well grab them from Babylon Project, they're official names and descriptions.

Oh, and on the BTech front, I'm waiting for most of the bugs to be sorted before I start working on it.

BT would be another fun game of this sort. The same sorta deal, with diplomacy at it's core.

I can't wait for us to get a stable game going. Maybe another patch or two, and give everyone a break. We've been playing at least one or two games for over a year now after all.

I would not mind as well. Plenty of other things on my plate. SE has been kind of part of our lives for over a year and a half now, and frankly no matter how good a game is, eventually you need a break.

One month, two months, maybe three months. Then we'll storm back, if anybody's still interested. Once you've tasted, you never go back. I know .

I'm going to weigh in here, but let me preface by saying that I probably won't be willing to spend time making the mod. I have too many other things going on right now. In any case, when planning and making a mod, there are certain elements that are absolutely necessary, or I can 100% guarantee that it will never see the light of day.

1. Set reasonable, attainable goals. Sure, we'd all like to see extensions of SE V's diplomatic systems and ways to make a station like Babylon 5 important, but I don't really know how to do that and I doubt anyone else does. Trying to change the fundamental nature of how SE V is played is a recipe for never getting off the ground.

2. Work on small, functional pieces. The B5 mod for SE IV tried to include every weapon and every race under the Sun, and this is one of the major reasons why it failed, IMO. Start out modeling just the major races and the most important concepts, and then worry about the rest later.

3. Have a project leader who has a clear vision and makes sure everyone knows what they're working on. This is crucial. Go look up the thread where a bunch of SD.netizens wanted to make a mod for Oblivion and see where that went. No leader = no mod.

As far as suggestions for how to do things, I do have a few that I think would work well.

1. Use the 3-tier system for ship sizes, meaning that you have destroyers, cruisers, and battleships (you can call them whatever you want) that are all available to build from the start, and have clearly defined advantages and disadvantages. The destroyers are fast, harder to hit, and more accurate, the cruisers can carry weapons that destroyers cannot, and battleships can really lay down the heavy firepower or carry a large amount of cargo, but are vulnerable to larger numbers of smaller ships with heavy weapons that they cannot hit reliably. I'm thinking +100% to defense for destroyers, +0% for cruisers, and -100% for battleships.

When you research ship technologies, it increases the size of all three ships proportionally while keeping their advantages and disadvantages intact. You could have a tech for ship size, one for turn rate, one for acceleration, etc. At level 1, destroyers might be 150 kT, cruisers 400, and battleships 1,000. Vorlons and Shadows might get a PK of 5,000 or so that can crack a planet easily but have a very poor cost to performance ratio compared to smaller ships. No fucking PK's for younger races.

The easiest way to differentiate the different types of weapons is with mounts. For instance, instead of having a billion different types of laser for the EA, you just have one. Then you have the destroyer mount, a medium and heavy mount for cruisers, a massive and bombardment mount for battleships, and a planet-cracker mount for PK's. If you wanted bigger ships to be able to use smaller weapons, you could have a small mount for cruisers that doesn't have as high accuracy bonus as the destroyer mount, and a small mount for battleships with even less of a bonus. The idea is that the destroyer mount can hit fighters, seekers, and other destroyers. The medium cruiser mount can hit other cruisers and sometimes destroyers, the heavy cruiser mount is for taking out battleships and can sometimes hit other cruisers, the massive mount is for other battleships and stationary targets, and the bombardment mount is for large stations and planets. The planet cracker mount is, of course, for cracking planets. It should not be possible to significantly damage a planet without bombardment weapons, and even those should not be able to glass a planet in one turn unless the number of bombarding ships is very large. Fighters would be separated into fighters and bombers, the first for taking out bombers, seekers, and each other, and the latter for anti-cap ship work. There would be a low damage, high-accuracy fighter mount and a comparatively high damage, low-accuracy bomber mount.

This paradigm would most closely replicate the show, and I believe is the best way to go for just about any mod, regardless of universe. In the show we saw mostly cruiser-sized ships, destroyers lacking firepower and battleships being useful but not cost-effective in large numbers.

2. The races should be differentiated substantially, but the more powerful ones should have more maintenance to deal with. After all, the Vorlons, Shadows, and Minbari were all vast, rich empires, and it's doubtful that they could afford all those fancy ships if they were stuck with the resources of the EA, for instance. Make a ship that can beat another's against 3 to 1 odds cost roughly 3 times as much to build and / or maintain. But for god's sake, don't mess with the weapon ranges. They should be dictated by how heavy a mount is being used or perhaps simply be constant, and should not vary by race.

3. Formulas for the stats of all weapons, armor, etc. should be worked out in advance and then modified based on the observed capabilities of the show. For instance, instead of designing each race's weapons in a vaccuum and then being surprised when it's an unbalanced mess, come up with a template for accuracy, damage, fire rate of a basic weapon. If you feel that Minbari weapons should be 25% more accurate and 50% more damaging than this base, you make them that way and keep the other stats the same (and keep the weapon mounts the same across all races, modifying only the base weapons themselves). This way, it will not become unbalanced easily and the balance will be easy to eyeball and adjust accordingly, yet the races will still be unique.

4. Passive armor should not function like shields, but should negate a certain amount of damage. Perhaps you could have the passive armor weigh 50 kT or more and design it so that you only use one slab of it with the rest inert instead of making it the same size and declaring using only one slab an 'exploit'. Or make it something that simply replaces inert armor as tech advances and is the same cost and size. On that note, costs should not balloon for more advanced stuff, making earlier tech more attractive like in the SE IV B5 mod (and which we partially fixed for engines).

5. Any race should be able to get access to Ancient weapons by capturing and analyzing their ships, but make those weapons cost 10 times as much for younger races to build as for Ancients. So that if you have Vorlon weapons on your ship, the whole ship will cost 3 times as much, meaning it can still be useful (especially fighting against the Ancients themselves), but you wouldn't want to equip your whole fleet with it. If there's only one or two weapons for each race that are modified by mounts, this is trivially easy to do, and not the Herculean task it was in the SE IV B5 mod.

So those are my suggestions. I would strongly recommend following the first 3, as I've seen many mod projects, roleplaying games, and other projects go precisely nowhere when they fail to follow them, and I think the second 5 would make the mod the best it could be.

The 3-tier system is excellent for B5. Most of the races mass two or three kinds of basic designs. Like the EA, they have their Hyperions, their Omegas and their Novas. The Minbari, Sharlins, Whitestars and... uh something else. The Centauri, their heavy cruiser, their Vorchan, and uh something else.

For the mounts, I'm not sure whether SE:V allows mounts to change target types. We'll see.

I'm not even sure if passive armor should be there at all. Whitestars, Warlocks, Sharlins all had some kind of advanced armor, so maybe it should be a racial for Minbari and Shadows only. Other races don't really have powerful armor on their ships and have to rely on interceptors.

Most races should have seeker weapons, so they can be intercepted. The big difference between most YR and the Minbari/Shadows/Vorlons in the show was interceptors couldn't really deal with their direct fire weapons. They don't have to look like missiles, they can be glowing balls of shit. Even the Centauri shot glowing balls of shit instead of a beam, and we could model most YR based on the idea interceptors aka point defense works, except for Minbari/Shadows/Vorlons who would have direct fire. That could be the Minbari/Shadow/Vorlons's main advantage.

I agree that YR should be able to produce Ancient weapons if they capture one of their ships. This would make the Ancients a little wary about going around destroying everything. But the kind of ships they produce should be vastly inferior to real ancient ships, while at the same time more powerful than their domestic ones, but only by a little bit. A fleet of Warlocks after all were annihilated by Whitestars.

Thanks for weighing in Tuxedo, it's understandable. Time constraints will obviously put everybody at odds, and I'm not sure whether anybody will devote the time necessary to do this. Someone has to do all the calculations with a spreadsheet and so on, which could take one or two weekends, but even that kind of time is sparse, and it's not exactly fun. We'll see who antes up first doing the most work before a "team leader" is assigned, or anything like that. It might be a month before I spend real time on it anyway.

Not sure whether you can do that with mounts or not. If not, you might have to duplicate a weapon's entry but change the target type for a few different types of mounts. It should be possible to only have 3 or 4 entries for each, regardless. No big deal compared to the SE IV B5 mod's hundreds upon hundreds (maybe thousands) of entries.

That's a good point with the weapons. I'll probably end up plucking one or two weapons for each race. The key to this idea not dying is getting a working mod up and running as fast as possible, probably in a month or so, or even as short as a couple weeks. Otherwise I think people would lose interest.

To guarantee there's no serious balance issues, I'm probably not going to do 1 Minbari ship as powerful as 10 Earth Alliance ships or anything drastic. There will be maintainence differences and cost differences, but I don't think they should exceed +/-20%. That way we don't get a situation where 10 Minbari ships fight 100 EA ships and the EA ships win because of n-squared. Maybe we'll have 100 Minbari ships versus 120 EA ships. The exception should be the Shadows and Vorlons, who should get +200%-300% costed ships.

EDIT: Maybe 20% is a bit much. Might go as low as 5%.

I'm not so sure that the Minbari had advanced armour. The only races we've seen with an actual ability to shrug off damage are Vorlons from shields and Shadows from diffusers. The Minbari have superior ECM but if you do manage to hit them, they are toast.

Indeed; even one of the White Stars got big holes punched in it when an Omega managed to nail it, and IIRC they were specifically stated to have new, advanced armor.

The real-time combat makes it possible to model the physics. Finally we can have ships firing at each other from five screens away. I'm thinking of that scene with the Centauri heavy cruiser dropping out of hyperspace and shooting at B5 and another ship at the same time. The balls kind of take a long time to travel, and B5 fires its interceptors.

I like the idea of the +100/0/-100 to defense. With the real-time combat we can change the acceleration for small ships like White Stars and make them look incredibly maneuverable. Larger ships could move like bathtubs.

I'm going to look over all the B5 fighting on youtube again before I even start just to get a feel for things.

Hopefully after all the grunt work's done, the calculations and data files, we can attract a 3D modeler.

Only needing three warships designs per faction will definately help with that. There might be some we can gank out there already, though I did look into the .x format and it scared me off.

What happened with that B5 game that got canceled? You know the one where they had all the sets, all the props, even the actors hired, and half the program and physics modeled, but they ditched it at the last minute? I don't remember what it was called or I'd google for it. Wasn't a demo released, or even the entire game put into public domain? The game probably uses directx, and we could probably rip something from that. Just a Nova, Omgea and Hyperion for starters.