Modding Space Empire IV Gold

[MKSheppard]

One thing is in SE:IV once you have one big battle it's game over.

Usually because of the following:

25% maintenance costs; this measn that a dreadnought that cost you 25k minerals will require 6,250 maintenance a turn in minerals; meaning that you can't keep building ships to keep your shipyards busy like before WWI and during WWII.

What this means is your fleet numbers are artifically low; and in the later game, it can take five years or so to complete a single dreadnought, so if you suffer a catastrophic defeat, you won't have any reserves (because of their huge maintenance cost), and you would not have any dreadnoughts in construction because of maintenance costs eating up a huge fleet; and when your fleet maintenance costs are hacked down due to losing a huge battle, and you can afford to build dreadnoughts again, the five year construction time means that by the time the dreadnoughts are ready, you've pretty much lost a lot of systems against a competent enemy.

[brianeyci]

Well then. Maybe maintainence costs should be zero, and orbital shipyards only able to be constructed by homeworlds (so they can't construct themselves and get 500 bases) but they can build ships.

It would guarantee ships always under construction.

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Usually because of the following:

25% maintenance costs; this measn that a dreadnought that cost you 25k minerals will require 6,250 maintenance a turn in minerals; meaning that you can't keep building ships to keep your shipyards busy like before WWI and during WWII.

What this means is your fleet numbers are artifically low; and in the later game, it can take five years or so to complete a single dreadnought, so if you suffer a catastrophic defeat, you won't have any reserves (because of their huge maintenance cost), and you would not have any dreadnoughts in construction because of maintenance costs eating up a huge fleet; and when your fleet maintenance costs are hacked down due to losing a huge battle, and you can afford to build dreadnoughts again, the five year construction time means that by the time the dreadnoughts are ready, you've pretty much lost a lot of systems against a competent enemy.

Good points. Perhaps a way to promote reserves is to make shipyards (or some other facility) give a huge maintenance reduction to ships that are orbiting the planet. If you simply lower the maintenance, people won't use reserves, they'll just take more ships in their attack force, but if it was nearly free to keep older ships in reserve as defence forces, while ships that are "on the move" cost maintenance, that would change player behavior.

[brianeyci]

Good points. Perhaps a way to promote reserves is to make shipyards (or some other facility) give a huge maintenance reduction to ships that are orbiting the planet. If you simply lower the maintenance, people won't use reserves, they'll just take more ships in their attack force, but if it was nearly free to keep older ships in reserve as defence forces, while ships that are "on the move" cost maintenance, that would change player behavior.

That's a really good idea. B5 does this with 30% (I think) but even 30% isn't enough since offense is always better than defense in most cases. If it was 99%, it'd be hard as shit to take out a defensive opponent.

I don't think you can do it orbiting the planet, only the whole solar system--that's the real problem, that someone could turtle up a warp point. Maybe tier 0 warp point openers could solve it.

Brian

[MKSheppard]

Good points. Perhaps a way to promote reserves is to make shipyards (or some other facility) give a huge maintenance reduction to ships that are orbiting the planet.

Then the ships are eseentially useless, because once they leave the planet, their maintanance costs go back up to normal; meaning you once again can't afford them unless you lose most of your fleet

[brianeyci]

I think 0 kT 500 LY warp point openers that could be built from the beginning of the game would radically change the game. It'd be brutal and fast. Worlds would have to have better defenses to make up for this maneuverability, but then you'd get ships that could outrun larger battleships and speed would actually be strategically useful.

Brian

[GuppyShark]

I was going to suggest you guys take this modding talk to a different thread, but then I remembered this WAS a modding thread and we hijacked it for the B5 game.

[Covenant]

I'm not a fan of planet-ganking, and I don't think making them into giant turtle worlds is an appropriate solution to it either. Passive defenses tend to lead to bad gameplay. I don't even like mines, to be frank. I think they encourage people to bulk up around their borders, close off entryways, and do nothing until they have such an overwhelmingly large fleet that they can slam through unhampered.

So, why would I be opposed to wormhole openers? Because wormholes, unlike FTL travel, allow you point-to-point travel. It's one of the most moronic aspects of Star Wars style warfare. An empire is only as strong as it's production yard's defenses since naval warfare never truely happens--it is just a continuous battle between defensive fleets that stay in orbit and attack forces that fly out on one-way missions to tear up the enemy's shipyards. It's ugly and not very much fun.

So, no, I don't like that at all. It would be brutal and fast, which I like, but it would be brutal and fast in a way that doesn't encourage grand strategy--but backstabbing and luck. Sure, faster ships are indeed important, but the distances you travel would be short anyway--from one hole to another.

Why don't we just drop maintaince costs across the boards? Make it a fixed 10percent rate for every ship in the fleet? I've already proposed an odd scaling, where bigger ships are much, much bigger than smaller ones, so we don't need a maintaince penalty as well. We're balancing them in terms of combat potential, so we don't need to add an artifical penalty in terms of high-percentage big ship maintaince.

The advantage of defensive fleets is pretty obvious--ships fight well and can be redeployed. We don't need to make their maintaince costs funky. People will build cruisers and frigates as defensive vessels (we could even give them 5percent maintaince penalty rather than the 10percent for everyone else) because they can quickly redeploy along the border to intercept an incoming enemy. If we weaken mines, satellites, and weapon bases to the point where they provide a little extra defensive leverage rather than actually block enemy attacks with an impetentrable wall of pain then defensive fleets and drones and fighters will fill that void out of necessity

[brianeyci]

Mines, satellits and weapons platforms are already pretty useless even early game in stock SE:IV. Any thirty ship fleet can plow through fixed defenses. If anything I would toughen them up a little.

Brian

[Covenant]

We want to make it so people fight more active defenses than passive ones. Fighters and drones and defensive fleets of low-maintaince cruisers and frigates will require people to spend supplies to shoot back at them. Mines just sit there until they are cleared, and then people churn right through them. They're not very fun if you ask me. Breaking through a wormhole is hard enough as-is, we don't need to add mines to the equation. I'd be for removing them completely if I had a better idea.

What I would really enjoy is making wormholes mess with ships somehow. Like, wormholes push ships in a random direction, or damage craft that sit on them, or remove all shields. So there would be no wormhole camping anymore--and you'd want to deploy minefields AROUND them, to catch people as they come through. I'm not sure if this is possible though.

[brianeyci]

Damn then I guess you won't like my idea of tier 0 storm creators, 1 million shield point planets, 500 light year warp point openers and 0 maintainence ships. Ha .

Well for the wormhole defense you could make ships just really tough, enough to survive an alpha strike from a fleet its same size and technology level. That'd make wormholes less of an advantage. Usually it's just an annihilation.

Brian

[Covenant]

The idea of surviving that first wave is an idea I really do like, since I think the whole concept of the first-strike is just a silly byproduct of the game's turn-based gameplay. In real combat the ships could fire as they reached firing range, there certainly would not be a range advantage for stationary defenders.

It's troublesome, yes, but I don't think insurmountable. Cruisers and other support ships could be used for breaching and then return back to patrolling your space after the push has been made. Hm. It's annoying, really, but I don't think it's a problem without solution.

And I don't mind planetary shields much--all those do is prevent people from flying up with a single bomber and wiping out your planet. That sounds fair to me--I don't mind a prolonged siege of a planet. I want to encourage people to take worlds from the enemy rather than just wipe them clean. Requiring them to stay supplied-up all the time would help, since now people need to take land from the enemy so they can resupply and keep their supply chains short and easy to defend. That also buys a defender time to move his forces around.

Patton may have been adverse to holding terrain, sure, but that doesn't mean nobody did it for him!

Why would you want storm-makers? To hide ships? Again, not a real fan of passive defenses. I'd rather have people need to make clever use of existing terrain than manufacture their own. Thermopalie wouldn't have been nearly as heroic if the spartans had been circumvented by some jerk with a 0 tier 500 mile road creator.

And zero maintaince ships, not a lot of debate there. Costing -something- is pretty standard. It's the only check against a fleet of infinite size that the game offers us. The Max-Ships thing doesn't look at what size of ship it is, and nobody's gonna say 5000 frigates are the same as 5000 deathstars. But low maintaince costs, you you look above, seem fine to me. I see no reason to increase maintaince costs for big ships.

I say we give them all a 10% cost across the board, give cruisers and frigates (your patrol vessels) a bonus, and maybe the super doomstars a penalty. Maintaince, as we've said, is crippling in a lot of ways. But fighters cost nothing, and we can make people have access to 100kt 'fighters' as well as a variety of low maintaince vessels. No reason to make maintaince the stupidly crippling thing it is now, it gives too much power to a decisive battle, as we've said.

[brianeyci]

Well when I make my mod it'll be a fast brutal game. Storm creators can make nifty effects like shield disabling storms, sensor disabling storms, and I'll alter the storms to make really unpredictable things happen. Fleet battles will have a lot to do with luck, and you'll be able to build ships really quickly. It'll be balanced out because weapons will do really little damage and you'll have to hover ships around for an entire turn to go through 6 combats or 180 combat turns to destroy an average ship your tech level. I might even make it 500 combat turns worth of hit points just so you can bring reinforcements to reinforce a huge battle in progress. Maneuver warfare will come into play because you'll have to batter down planetary shields (which will also have tens of millions of hit points) and glass planets because taking and holding them will be nearly impossible given the defensive bonus I'm going to give planetary militia. I might even remove troops entirely. Small ships will be useless and I'll probably go KISS with one ship size, one kind of weapon that scales up 5% each time.

But since you guys are going smaller sized fleets, that's great too .

Brian

[brianeyci]

Well I uploaded.

Next time no, I'll wait for the e-mail and it doesn't come until 12 hours left .

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Good points. Perhaps a way to promote reserves is to make shipyards (or some other facility) give a huge maintenance reduction to ships that are orbiting the planet.

Then the ships are eseentially useless, because once they leave the planet, their maintanance costs go back up to normal; meaning you once again can't afford them unless you lose most of your fleet

That's the idea. Nobody said you had to like it or agree that it's good.

Anyway, I'm certainly not too keen on spending a bunch of effort modding SEIV, with all of its limitations, when SEV is less than 2 months away. Greater modability + real-time combat will make it much easier to realize some of the stuff you guys are talking about. Back a few years ago when I tried my hand at modding SEIV, I found that when you try to change the way the game plays at a fundamental level, it won't work.

For instance, I tried to make it so that large ships had a large attack penalty so they couldn't hit small ships, but also had a defense penalty so they could hit each other, only to find that the game calculates the to-hit roll by subtracting the penalty last, so if you have an attack penalty of 50%, you can never have more than 49% chance to hit, even if their defense penalty is a million percent. I also tried to structure techs in such a way that each new level was much more powerful than the old, only to find that it started throwing range errors when I tried to take shield and damage values beyond the normal SEIV scope.

SEIV is designed to be lightly modded, but it's not designed for a total reworking, and that's what this mod sounds like to me. SEV, from what I understand, will allow deeper mods that can be made more easily.

Also, the real time combat is a huge deal, I think. It will really improve things like warp point defense and ships with high movement that happen to end their turn just beyond max range, both of which can lead to ridiculous results in combat. The more I read about it, the harder it is for me to keep coming back to turn-based. That, and the improved tech tree, the hex-based grids, etc. really make me question whether modding SEIV at this point is time well spent.

[Covenant]

Next time no, I'll wait for the e-mail and it doesn't come until 12 hours left .

You're not a nice person.

And the idea of having ships that actually endure a round of fighting so that they could have reinforcements show up... that's intruiging. We could make the hitpoints of components much higher so ships can survive battles with some systems damage but without being totally gutted, and this would give ships a chance to fight and disengage without completely obliterating the enemy fleet. This would really help reduce any of the risks of an unwanted decisive battle. Sure, if you had 2x the number of the enemy and they just tore you apart, you lose. But in a big Helms Deep battle situation, like you have expressed concern over, this would allow one side or the other to choose to fight the last man, while the other side decides it's not worth the cost.

This would also again improve the value of defensive forces. If a big tumultuous battle could be fought over the span of 3 turns, that gives a defender time to move forces into alignment AND it gives our supply idea more relevance, since fleets will exchange blows more often without getting wiped out, will go through nearly all their supplies within the course of a single massive 3 or 4 turn battle, and require mid-battle resupplies to continue fighting at maximum potential.

Hmm. I do like that. I like games to star off pretty quick myself, which is part of why I want to offer all the basic pieces to a battlefleet quickly, and to cut out unnecessary crap. This would also reduce my annoyance over things like minefields and wormhole defenses. If a big battle could be expected to 2 or 3 turns, then whoever got the first volley off won't really matter.

[brianeyci]

You're not a nice person.

Hahaha we'll see what you think after billions of Cardassians are dea--er, alive and well and prospering, under the benevolent rule of the Bajorans.

It's not that difficult to do for three turns. Take the average number of weapons on a ship and the average number of armors. Like 30% armor. Then you'd need to figure out how much armor to give a ship so it can last say, 90 combat turns or so. If there's a fight every five days and thirty days, every turn is six combats of thirty turns...

Well, Nephtys is already well on her way with her modification so it's not that difficult Tux. If you're a student on summer break .

Anyway how is the real-time combat going to work in SE:V. I'm looking at the control interface and it looks like there's a clock button to stop and start...

Brian

[Covenant]

Stuff...makes me question whether modding SEIV at this point is time well spent.

This is true, but what I'm really dreading about SEV is the fact that all the shipsets are going to go the way of the dodo. While I do appreciate quality 3d graphics (as my screenshots should attest to) I'm afraid that it'll rather disheartening at an aesthetic level to have my highly detailed ships turned into, well, flat little dudes. Sure, I could re-model everything and port it out as a .x file, I believe, but bleh. It doesn't help that I'm using Maya eiter, and I've forgotten the arcane method of turning a maya file into something used by that clunker called Max.

If I can find an easy way, I'll be overjoyed. Vanilla SEIV is so painfully boring that it's not even worth playing, and going to Vanilla SEV will be like two steps forwards, one step back. It'll have a lot more potential, but still less actual STUFF. And unless I want to play the Purple Lump race or the Green Tube race, I'm basically stuck once more at where I am now, making my own shipsets and working with a mod buddy to make something better. I'll assume the mods are easier to make. But the ships... are going to be painful. I bet there will be a limit on the Polys as well, and that's going to make everything look like, well, like it's made out of polygons.

[MKSheppard]

The big problem with SEIV's AI is that it's well, so dumb and highly reliant on the .AI Files.

For example, if we lowered the maintenance costs of the ships to like 4%; of course the human players will build more; but not the AI!

[brianeyci]

Ah Shep, I don't think anybody's interested in AI. Once you taste PBW, you never go back.

AI's won't ever be able to compete with a human player even if they did everything right--they don't use gamey tricks like retrofit series, chain attacks on planets, riot troops on planets to raise happiness, technology trading, stacking minefields, and of course the mother, warp point openers. You basically have to make them cheat with high bonus for them to even stay competitive. And of course they don't adapt--you can make them prefer a certain weapon tree, but a human player would change what he's building to match the AI while they AI would keep using the same design.

Brian

[GuppyShark]

No, I didn't close that gate, my jump drive ships are still under construction.

[Trogdor]

I got a message saying that the Dilgar did it, but their jump ship seems to have disappeared.

Meanwhile, mine doesn't work. D'oh!

[Dalton]

You know, I do recall seeing a Dilgar ship heading in the general direction of the jump gate...

[Trogdor]

You know, I do recall seeing a Dilgar ship heading in the general direction of the jump gate...

There was, and it was a gatecrasher. Thing is, the ship's disappeared. It's not like they could've just zipped into a system that I have no presense in, either, since me and Tobor both have a partnership treaty with the Lorkan.

[Dalton]

You know, I do recall seeing a Dilgar ship heading in the general direction of the jump gate...

There was, and it was a gatecrasher. Thing is, the ship's disappeared. It's not like they could've just zipped into a system that I have no presense in, either, since me and Tobor both have a partnership treaty with the Lorkan.

Could he have hoofed it up to that Shadow colony north of Nakaleen?