Modding Space Empire IV Gold

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-02-09 12:38am

brianeyci wrote:
Edit: Brain, that's not unqiue to the Raiders. The Centauri, at least, have that, too.
A match made in heaven.

The EA has accuracy and other mounts, I'm pretty sure the Minbari too, not stock mounts.

Stock mounts with my particle cannons reach about half as powerful as a Shadow gun at max tech. Pretty good for a bunch of space pirates.

Brian

You've got 2 reload. That's not bad, considering most heavy weapons are reload 3 or 4.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-02-09 01:20am

Trogdor wrote:Though the game does certainly feel unfinished. Invisible purple stars, derelict ship worlds that can't hold colonists but the AI feels obligated to colonize anyway, the crazy tech trees...yeah, you can see the rough edges pretty easily.

Also,

* Nobody has shields! There are some advanced armor types that have Shield properties but there are no Vorlon shields or Shadow diffusers.

Basically Kojiro & I have built swarms of glass cannons.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-02-09 01:23am

Basically Kojiro & I have built swarms of glass cannons.

You want a glass cannon look at my light cruiser. Eleven move points, four guns and reactors.

My battleship will be... twenty two engines, reactors, and five heavy mounted guns.

I took one look at the armor and didn't bother. My ships already do six hundred damage per shot and if I can't armor up my ship enough to survive one volley it's not worth armoring them at all. Plus the leaky armor system means you've got to use a mix of heavy, medium and light armors and I'm not fooling around with that.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-02-09 02:31am

As far as I've seen, the medium and light armors are not worth it at all. Too expensive. The upgraded armors don't seem to be worth the research cost, either. They're not much better than basic heavy armor. Basically, once you get the movement 6 engines (the advanced fusion ones), the basic heavy armor, and a reasonably high level of heavy guns, you're done. You still have to research ship construction and sensors/ECM, of course, but the basic offensive, defensive, and movement systems can all be maxed out to the highest reasonable point way early, and given the low maintenance and huge resources of homeworlds, you can use scores (or hundreds) of shipyards to churn out megafleets so large they would make a normal SE4 endgame player piss his pants. So much for this mod lasting hundreds of turns. I'll be surprised if anyone's still standing in another 30.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-02-09 02:50am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:As far as I've seen, the medium and light armors are not worth it at all. Too expensive. The upgraded armors don't seem to be worth the research cost, either. They're not much better than basic heavy armor. Basically, once you get the movement 6 engines (the advanced fusion ones), the basic heavy armor, and a reasonably high level of heavy guns, you're done. You still have to research ship construction and sensors/ECM, of course, but the basic offensive, defensive, and movement systems can all be maxed out to the highest reasonable point way early, and given the low maintenance and huge resources of homeworlds, you can use scores (or hundreds) of shipyards to churn out megafleets so large they would make a normal SE4 endgame player piss his pants. So much for this mod lasting hundreds of turns. I'll be surprised if anyone's still standing in another 30.

Well, if we decided to go to real war, I could roll over at least four players without a loss within striking range. So. Are we going to descend into a 'gamey' kinda thing and just have at each other, or are we going to keep it 'diplomatic' and 'RLish' where some things are taboo?

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-02-09 09:14am

A Vorlon agent wrote:We know at the least that Shadows aren't attacking [Marxis' Raiders] like they are everyone else.

For the record, only the races that told Defel to fuck off are the ones the Shadows have no treaty with. We've at least tried to open relations with everyone. Hardly our fault people hate us just 'cos we're quadripeds.

Kojiro · Post by **Kojiro** » 2006-02-09 09:17am

You gotta look at it through Vorlon eyes.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-02-09 09:21am

Honestly nobody should be having a cow over my huge superfleet.

Minbari have fifty shipyards and one of her ships can kill five of mine.
Narns have forty shipyards and in five turns can have eighty and his ships can kill 3 of mine.
Earth Alliance has 40 shipyards and one of his can kill 2 of mine.
Brakiri has a huge territory, more than a quarter of the map.

I think the fact I haven't gone around killing everything when I had 100 and everybody had nothing is proof enough of the way I intend to play

. It took me a long long time to work up an excuse to attack the neutrals beside me.

This game could have been over already Tux. I could have sent 30 ships to take over the Earth Alliance, 30 ships to kill the Minbari, 30 ships to kill the Narns, 30 ships to kill the Dilgars all about 10 turns ago and none of them could have stopped me. I even had the troop transports and minelayers and three thousand men to do it

. I could have had a dozen extra homeworlds by now.

And I made my ships to be fast too. I can be in Minbari space in four turns, EA homeworlds in two to three turns, Narn space in three turns and Dilgar space in two turns

.

But I've been playing as a minor power so far.

The longer the game goes on the longer the game mechanics turn against me. I only have particle cannons and low -75% maintainence. Swarm is the only strategy for Raiders.

Brian

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-02-09 06:18pm

I still don't have any weapon mounts.

And I, for one, had no idea that throwing up a bajillion spaceyards was the way to go about things.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-02-09 07:56pm

Nor did I. It looks like I'll have to go that way if I want to compete, though, given the pathetically small amount of territory I have.

Post by **Dalton** » 2006-02-12 08:07pm

Who's running this game? Would they mind setting it on Last Player Upload Only? I'm stuck in Jersey again tonight without access to a computer I can play on.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-02-13 01:58pm

Sorry, I didn't see this message before I left and the turn executed. I'll roll it back.

EDIT: Turn's been rolled back. Sorry about that. It should have occurred to me that you not being back in time for the Star Trek game should also apply to the B5 game.

Post by **Dalton** » 2006-02-13 09:18pm

Thanks man. I'm back now.

Kojiro · Post by **Kojiro** » 2006-02-14 12:58am

Do we have to redo our turns or can we simply resubmit out old turns again?

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-02-14 12:59am

If you've still got the old file, then go ahead and re-submit it, unless you want to change what you did, of course.

Kojiro · Post by **Kojiro** » 2006-02-14 01:15am

There's too much work involved...but then I did lose a useful ship. See how I go for time.

Post by **Dalton** » 2006-02-14 01:22am

I think you have to undo the old turn first.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-02-17 01:04am

I'm leaving tomorrow for my cousin's wedding and won't be back until Sunday, so I set both games to last player upload only.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-02-17 05:38pm

Some things I thought I'd like to share about the B5 game, since Tux is going to be away for a couple days...

Here is the saved game I'm using to test this. I have twenty-five ship designs, all battleships that I will soon be building. The good thing about this game's tech tree fuckup is you get all the weapons if you set your game up for maximum technology, so with this saved game Narns and Minbari and whatever can sim against the Raiders and see how well they'll do against my new generation of battleships.

There's four types of armor. For the structural supports that takes 0 kT, I didn't add it into the ship designs at all--it would add six more ship designs and since it takes 0 kT everybody can retrofit them in and it won't change the test results.

I used the following ratios of light/medium/heavy armors

0/0/0
100/0/0
0/100/0
0/0/100
10/70/20

I also created each of these ratios with the advanced armors. There's five kinds of advanced armors you get from researching Physics 2 and Chemistry 2 to get Passive Armor Physics.

Name/Level of Passive Armor Physics/ADU
Scattering Armor/1/15
Refractive Armor/2/18
Channeling Armor/3/21
Conductive Armor/4/23
Emissive Armor/5/25

So it looks like the Emissive Armor is the winner. I have no idea what ADU is, but I think it spreads the damage around multiple components. If a component has 10 kT damage resistance and you do 9 kT damage to it, it is still intact.

The difference is dramatic. After creating the sims I didn't feel like running 100 sims, so I'll let you guys do that, but with just one sim the conductive armor kind versus no conductive armor 100 ships versus 100 ships, I lost two thirds less ships.

Anyway have fun with the saved game file.

<edit>My suggestion is not to research the lower kinds of armor at all, but go straight for the emissive armors. At 100k a pop it'll take a few turns to get there but there's no point going for a lower kind of armor unless you want to save research points. It'll take 1.5 million research points to do it, and everybody has around 100-200k research points already anyway. Just like researching fission is a waste when you can research fusion.</edit>

Brian

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-02-17 06:13pm

I'll be gone until sunday or monday too myself. So seeyas!

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-02-20 12:34pm

I'm back, bitches! I'll leave it on ALPU until the next turn executes, then I'll set it back to the normal 48 hour automatic turns.

Tobor · Post by **Tobor** » 2006-02-23 10:05pm

Just a quick question.

How likely is it that the combat system is going to arbitrarily screw up again?

The only reason i ask is because in a recent engagement for some reson my entire fleet started ~1 hex away from the opposing fleet and despite initiating the combat the other party got the first turn.

Is this a mistake or did i just fall prey to poor luck?

Because i ran a simulator of that fight about fifty times and on no other occasion did that deploymeent happen.

If you want a copy of the replay send a message and you'll see what happened.

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-02-23 10:09pm

Where did this engagement take place? Were the opposing ships (Narn, I assume), sitting on the jump gate that you went through?

Kojiro · Post by **Kojiro** » 2006-02-23 10:27pm

From what I've got from Tobor it was on a planet. Apparently his fleet started ridiculously close to a planet he wanted to attack and the defenses hurt him good.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-02-23 10:28pm

Simulator doesn't accurately represent combat on some minor details.

If you go through a warp point, the defender always starts point blank to you and always gets first shot.

Making chokepoint defense vital.

But if you try to hold a chokepoint with an ally it doesn't work... what happened with me and Neph trying to hold Norpin in the ST game lol.

Brian