Modding Space Empire IV Gold

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 02:53pm

I'm still not following how pulses are bad against shuttles. Is it because of shuttle agility? Or is there something more useful about them? They seem rather pointless--a wasteful purchase and a limited resource, should anyone shoot at them. Best case I imagine they'd survive one round of fire. Unless you wager that round of fire is the difference between life and death (perhaps using a shuttle screen at a wormhole breach attempt) I can't really see a reason for the rest of us to want non-pulse weapons. The damage is less, the accuracy only slightly better, and the ability to hit ground targets is a secondary concern. You might as well create one vessel just with big non-pulses and use it as an effective bombardment ship, and have the rest optimized for space superiority.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 02:59pm

Okay Covenant since I like you. Nephtys will probably kill me.

Multiplex is expensive to research. If you can get enemy ships to shoot fighters, that's one less shot hitting your ships. So stick on 10kT worth of cargo space on cruiser+ ships and in a 100 ship fleet you have 100 extra targets. Depending on the enemy's firing strategy, they may or may not target the fighters before the ships. And if they don't have enough levels of multiplex you may make them waste entire broadsides on puny fighters.

If you don't want to be ganked like that--use something that can't hit fighters. Beams can only shoot planets and ships. But the risk is less damage. I'm half torn between doing it and not doing it myself, but for Federation the extra 20% to hit is pretty clear cut. I'll be using beams a lot.

You could use fighters for a traffic jam. If you can launch enough of them, a few hundred at once in units of 1 or 2, the 2D map gets blocked and you could use superior range to pick off enemy ships if you have it.

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 03:08pm

Hm... an annoying exploitation of the AI, to be sure. Lots of decoys. I wonder how effective making one single screening vessel, set to target fighters and weakest, mounting nothing but beamers and PD's would be? That could perhaps allow us to use our shuttle bays as decoy-spreaders, but not spend all day gunning down little worthless ships.

I appreciate your openness though. I find things like that to be closer to frustrating and exploitive than good clean fun, and hope the dirty tricks are restricted to clever ship design, and don't extend to lobotomizing the AI controlling them.

The problem is making fast little shuttles that have lots of armor so they can be good cannon fodder. This is antiethical to the role shuttle take, but probably the natural conclusion for anyone using them. I'm not sure they can mount heavy enough weapons, even en-masse, to be useful as attack ships, but they will block people and cause a lot of fire directed at what are essentially little bricks of armor.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-04-21 03:13pm

brianeyci wrote:Didn't Nephtys tell you the changes. I guess she didn't, she's evil. Anyway the main change is enhanced energy weapons do double damage. So there's honesly no reason to research torpedoes if you're strapped on research points, and even then there's no real reason since compressed energy + neutrino beams > torpedoes.

This is why I argued for diversifying weapon abilities instead of making it so one-dimensional, but I digress.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 03:14pm

Cruiser+ ships have the 1 shuttle launch per combat turn ability (which wasn't added by your friend) built in. So I'm pretty sure shuttle swarm was meant to be used. Just add a 10kT cargo bay and you can fit two shuttles in. Not that it makes much sense in Star Trek, you don't see ships launching shuttles every time there's a fight but oh well.

Dirty tricks happen a lot. I am using a lot of dirty tricks right now and I bet others are. We found a lot of dirty tricks last game.

As for the bricks of armor, Nephtys limited it to one armor per shuttle, one of the other main changes. Tuxedo last game made fighters that took 2 pulse hits each time to kill. He massed thousands of fighters and was basically immune until we got 100+ ship fleets with enough shields and pulse since it took 3 PD guns to kill one fighter since they had 70+ hit points

.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-04-21 03:20pm

Covenant wrote:Hm... an annoying exploitation of the AI, to be sure. Lots of decoys. I wonder how effective making one single screening vessel, set to target fighters and weakest, mounting nothing but beamers and PD's would be? That could perhaps allow us to use our shuttle bays as decoy-spreaders, but not spend all day gunning down little worthless ships.

I appreciate your openness though. I find things like that to be closer to frustrating and exploitive than good clean fun, and hope the dirty tricks are restricted to clever ship design, and don't extend to lobotomizing the AI controlling them.

The problem is making fast little shuttles that have lots of armor so they can be good cannon fodder. This is antiethical to the role shuttle take, but probably the natural conclusion for anyone using them. I'm not sure they can mount heavy enough weapons, even en-masse, to be useful as attack ships, but they will block people and cause a lot of fire directed at what are essentially little bricks of armor.

Shuttles are good in the ST mod in large numbers. I used to have every planet that didn't have a shipyard build 3 per turn when they had nothing else to build. 50 planets x 3 shuttles per turn per planet x dozens of turns without being at war = a ridiculous number of fighters. I destroyed an entire Borg invasion fleet with only shuttles in the first ST game. It's true that you can only mount 1 armor in Nephtys' version of the mod instead of the metric fuckton you could do before, but you can still mount shields to your heart's content, which is only slightly less effective.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 03:27pm

Do they even have any damage capacity, or are they just used by the truckload to slowly whittle away things? It seems like no matter how many weapons I put on them they're never a cost effective purchase. The only advantage seems to be that they are maintaince-free so you can simply stack them as defenders.

Given that I'm generally less worried about what someone is doing to protect themselves than what they're doing to breach my defenses, fighters don't really figure into my worldview.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 03:29pm

Yeah, it looks like tons of shields are still a viable defense. I never thought about that--to be honest the shields should be limited to one per unit but meh, we'll see how it goes.

Anyway it's time to reveal my trump card against shuttles. Ramming. If you mount beams then they'll shoot at ships but when they can't hit the fighters with their main weapons they'll resort to rams. So whoever's thinking about using shuttles, forget it. Shields don't do shit to ramming, and it's one of the reasons why I was pissed about the armor last game

. In stock I usually deal with huge fighter stacks by ramming my 1300 kT dreadnaught on it, insta-kill.

So don't rely on shuttles this time unless you want to get creamed. I note that later I brought in 100 ships and any number of fighters couldn't stop me since by then I had just too many shields, and I was using nearly glass cannons compared to real capital ships like Trogdor's super Warbirds that had 16 shields because the Romulans had 2 reload armor + shield skipping torpedoes.

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 03:35pm

That's pretty funny. Ramming into fighters! Hehe! I never realized you could ram a fighter. That's not a bad idea at all. I ran a simulation and it seems that even with armors and shields and such the fighters are just not much good at anything. Which is, you know, kinda sad. Still might be worth 10kt, but hardly worth the 1500 minerals and such to build it. That's a third of a turn of production, but you can't produce one fighter AND a ship. In two full turns of ship production you can get an actual warship though, and barring more designer-side oversights I see no reason why they shouldn't be effective defenses as well.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 03:37pm

That's because the sims are bugged. They give the shuttles only enough supplies for one shot.

Tux figured this out, and went on a huge fighter binge. Should have seen the hundreds of pms that went between me and Nephtys that day we found out... we tried fucking everything. In the end we just resorted to containing him (since fighters have no projection, you need carriers and you can stop carriers with a warp point defense) and killed Trogdor while Tux stewed.

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 03:38pm

I opened up a max tech game and built them on drone chassis that approximated the loadout of a fighter and gave it fighter attack strategies. Same basic thing, plus drones are dropped into Sims individually, not in stacks.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 03:47pm

That won't work. Why fighters are so hard to kill with a lot of shields or armor is if they launch in stacks of 50 so their armor stacks. Like if you give a fighter 70 shields and you make stacks of 50, that's 3.5k shield points and point defense guns do a puny 24 damage. Plus they have no maintainence so the longer peace lasts the better it is for whoever's making fighters.

Anyway if you want to see real fighters in action, take a look at this game from original unmodded Star Trek mod, load up the Ferengi and the password's ferengi1161 . You can see it takes the combined firepower of a hundred ships just to kill one stack of 300, two shots of pulse to kill 1 fighter. Plus you might see something else from the saved game, who knows. Everybody in this game is there, Nephtys was Borg lol.

Brian

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 03:58pm

Covenant wrote:I opened up a max tech game and built them on drone chassis that approximated the loadout of a fighter and gave it fighter attack strategies. Same basic thing, plus drones are dropped into Sims individually, not in stacks.

Oh you're talking about the fighter decoys. Well then you don't make 1500 mineral fighters, you make small snubs with minimal weapons and just a bit of armor. Cargo Bay I just has 51 kt of space anyway so you could only fit a couple. They get 1 hit KOed individually so what's the point of putting armor or shields on it.

But the way Tuxedo used them, he used them in stacks of 50 like this.

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 04:01pm

...that's terrifying. What a horrible method of handling fighters! Heh. They should be set-up in order, not turned into a huge amalgamated ultra-ship. I can see why this was a problem. It's like making a vessel the size of a worldship with 99 percent of it's mass as defenses, and making it FAST.

Plus, it's immune to the widest variety of weaponry. I'm hoping we won't see a repeat of that. Ramming aside, it's a blatant abuse of the game mechanics. :p

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 04:07pm

Like I said ramming. I think ramming is the only way to deal with it. So if you want ramming, got to use weapons that don't target fighters. Primary optimal or point blank, Secondary ram. When the ships are gone they'll ram the fighters.

So whatever, I pointed it out, anybody's free to try stacking shields.

To be honest we should have restricted shields to 1 shield per fighter too like we did with 1 armor per fighter. But oh well. (Couldn't ram last game cause of the fucking armor lol).

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 04:12pm

No reason we can't have a gentleman's agreement not to do that. I don't think anyone is looking forwards to fighting something with 10k shields and can't be targetted by heavy weapons.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 04:16pm

Well then. They'll have to be a grandfather clause. Whoever is making them now should stop. Hahahaha I bet Tuxedo's glad he opened his mouth.

No seriously, I don't think it's possible. Some people may have made long term plans by now to defend their space with fighters, and if we gip them in the middle then people who've invested in ships could curbstomp them. I'm not looking forward to a 10k hit point fighter stack but I don't see any way to make a rule in the middle of the game without punishing people.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-04-21 04:28pm

I would have mentioned the shield oversight when I noticed it (which was immediately), but I wanted to unexpectedly curbstomp you with fighters again. Now that I see that fighters aren't really figuring into my strategy, I figured there'd be no harm in mentioning it.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 04:29pm

They should just stop now. If there are other broken mechanics in the game then we shouldn't allow those either. Besides, as you have said, they appear to be useless against a heavy-armor vessel packing ship-only weapons and ramming, so people who are counting on using multi-mega stacks of 4, 5 or 10 shield fighters should not only be asked to stop, but should volunteer it, since otherwise their vessels will be massacred because of a game bug.

Thanks Arthur, that's the way to be. Unexpected technicalities like that are just frustrating and make the game needlessly infantile. Are we here to see who can abuse the game more, or who is clever-er with the same set of fair rules?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 04:31pm

It takes research to get fighter weapons and hulls. A lot of research in fact, you need advanced ship construction for the more advanced fighters and hangar bays for any projection ability at all.

Someone may have already dumped a million research points into it. Ship construction goes up 100k each time I think.

Anyway I think it should come to a vote. I don't want to gip someone off a million points. And I honestly don't give a shit either way because I know ramming kills 'em, unlike with a zillion armor.

Brian

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-04-21 04:34pm

Well, if they want to use fighters, I have nothing against that. But what can a wall of shields do besides annoy people and mess with the game? Torps can't hit fighters, beamers can't, and most advanced energy weapons can't either. The only thing that can, it seems, are PD's and pulses. It's like throwing a gigantic heaving mass of shield energy at me which can't really do damage but which I'm almost not allowed to fire back upon.

So let them make fighters, but they should be built for ATTACK. Attack fighters, with one armor and one shield, will get torn apart much faster, and more fairly.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 04:41pm

I dunno. There are many other so-called "exploits" I could mention. Not the least which was this piece of shit,

One of which managed to kill 30 1200 kT Borg cubes. Take a close look and I think you'll figure it out, I can't say more than that it'll give so much away. Nephtys knows why, you should ask (knowing her beg ha) her to tell you

.

Do we ban this too, or ban other things like retrofitting, warp point attacks, chain attacks on planets, double minefield stacks? Experience pays off, I'm sad to say everybody has an edge over you Covenant. I don't know what else to do except PM you and tell you everything I know, but then I'd be messing myself over wouldn't I? Do we also ban the swarm of 100 shuttles to fuck with the AI? Where does it end?

For fighters specifically... if it comes to it I'll vote no, but I'll just keep my trap shut for now. You're Nephtys' friend, you could get her to ban it haha. (But there should be a vote I think).

<edit>In practise it only killed 30 cubes since there were only 30 there. But in the sims the ship was immune to our early designs.</edit>

Brian

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-04-21 04:47pm

Eh. The Romulan weapons aren't so bad. I'd personally just limit them to like, 4 per hull. Then no problem. We managed to figure a counter eventually.

I have no issue with fighters. Shields are a LOT less efficient than armor for defense, and ramming does work probably. But they are a maint-free weapon that remains effective, armor or not.

A huge stack of gun fighters still is brutally deadly for those unprepared.

Oh, and Brian? Don't worry about Covie. He may be paranoid, but he does know me. And no, he doesn't trust me either.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-21 04:52pm

We figured out a counter. Everybody else knows the counter. Covenant doesn't, and when someone kills 100 Galors with 1 ship he's gonna be pissed and call it an exploit I bet. When it really isn't, it's just the way the game's set up.

You should really give Covenant a quick run down on what we learned last game. Or not. Depends how evil you are

.

As for the shields a lot less effective, well for 5 kT you can put on 12 shields, before you could put on 20 armor. So instead of two pulse... it takes one. Wow, big difference. Honestly, PD guns should be able to kill 3 fighters a turn. But like I said I don't care, ramming probably takes care of them and if it doesn't I don't want to gip people out of research points. Like you Nephtys lol.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-04-21 04:55pm

I don't think we ever agreed that admins can unilaterally ban things, anyway. Neither you or I ever did that.

Anyway, it's hard to know where to draw the line with SEIV, sometimes. The way the rules are set up are sometimes so divorced from reality that you can't authoritatively say something's gamey or an exploit just because it doesn't make real world sense, because that category would include just about every effective tactic. That's why a person can't get too bent out of shape when you see someone else doing something you wouldn't do yourself, unless it was specifically discussed beforehand. For instance, I wouldn't use retroseries construction or double minefields, while other people wouldn't use 24 move point base ships.