Modding Space Empire IV Gold

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-06-14 03:36pm

Well good luck to Gups maintaining the Corporate starfleet if he's doing it with the Shadows' cash, since it looks like Tux plans on opening up a serious can of whoop ass on the them.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-14 03:41pm

Ah well forgot about that.

Anyway the Minbari are still my friends? Right?

Damn. At least I still have the Narns.

Or not. U235?

Brian

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-06-14 03:46pm

brianeyci wrote:Ah well forgot about that.

Anyway the Minbari are still my friends? Right?

The Minbari were never your friends.

brianeyci wrote:Damn. At least I still have the Narns.

Yeah, I'm sure unloading a bunch of your obsolete ships onto them when they were desperate has totally endeared them to you. Your constant xenophobia has warmed their non-humans hearts as well, I'm sure.

brianeyci wrote:U235?

I'm sure the EA Senate will get over you leaving and declaring independance eventually...

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-15 12:12pm

Called HP again, ETA non-existant but they said at most one month for the part

.

I could find a solution sooner and I think I'll try to....

Brian

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-06-20 07:40am

Arthur took Tress'Na. The last Shadow homeworld.

With ground troops.

Jesus Christ, how many troops did you drop? The AI built *1500* troops with Shadow Polarity Cannons on that world.

EDIT: Those were tanks, not infantry. I mostly play Stock now, so I'm used to calling tanks troops.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-20 10:25am

Heh heh I know but I'm not telling. You can tell from the RP that Tux's troops aren't your standard infantry though... "hull grade armor".

Anyway my own homeworlds have at least 5000 troops a piece and I'm planning to slap on a thousand heavy vehicles as meat shields. Well when I get back at least. Me personally I researched the largest or second largest troop.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-20 12:53pm

GuppyShark wrote:Arthur took Tress'Na. The last Shadow homeworld.

With ground troops.

Jesus Christ, how many troops did you drop? The AI built *1500* troops with Shadow Polarity Cannons on that world.

EDIT: Those were tanks, not infantry. I mostly play Stock now, so I'm used to calling tanks troops.

I had 6 baseships full of medium tanks (15 kT), with defenders in front of attackers. 360 tanks per ship * 6 ships = 2160 tanks.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-06-20 09:04pm

With what those Shadowspores cost me you'd think they'd be able to handle that. Live and learn, I guess - Ground Combat being invisible it's impossible to figure out what works better than what.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-20 11:23pm

The advantage my troops had is defensive. The shadowspores were glass cannons. They could dish it out like nobody's business but they couldn't take it.

Your troops had the cockpit and this weapon, but no armor:

Shadow troop weapon

My defensive troops look like this:

Brakiri Defensive Troop. The armor is 50 kT resistance heavy armor.

The offensive troops look like this:

Brakiri Offensive Troop.

Brakiri Offensive Troop weapon.

Three of the weapons are matter guns, while the fourth is an infantry matter gun. The armor is 10 kT resistance light armor.

The Shadow troops were able to dish out 80 damage per round, while my defensive troops could only serve up 64. However, your troops are destroyed by 5 points of damage (1 kT for the cockpit and 4 kT for the weapon), while my offensive troops take 31 damage, and the defensive ones take 101. Since the defensive ones are in front of the offensive ones, I can soak up the first wave of losses without it impacting my ability to dish out damage.

If you had been using 15 or 20 kT vehicles with some armor on them, I would have been creamed. Of course, then my ships in orbit would have glassed the planet, so I suppose it's just as well.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-06-21 12:27am

I really hope they fix that in SEV.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 12:34am

SEV will have fully 3D modeled ground combat, like this:

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-06-21 02:08am

Hurrah!

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-21 10:27am

I am not a fan of the 3D combat. It looks like shit and is half assed. I personally think it would've been better done with a Risk board-game style map, and you picking the drop zones for a planetary invasion the month before with urban centers, industrial centers and military installations color coded. And being able to choose what parts of the planet to glass. You could reinforce landing points between turns or just glass whole continents if you were bored (or if they had planetary shielding you'd have to break through that, and planetary shielding should be customizable to allow either dropships to go through or not).

The combat should've stayed spreadsheet with more strategic control, not tactical control. Tactical control for a 4x game on the planetary scale seems stupid.

You just know the scale will be fucked up... four dinky units taking over a homeworld, it's just not believable.

Well living on gas giants isn't believable either...

Brian

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-06-21 11:05am

brianeyci wrote:Well living on gas giants isn't believable either...

Brian

What, you never saw "The Empire Strikes Back"?

I agree though, that ground combat looks like ass, and hopefully there's a way not to have to deal with that 3D system.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-21 11:30am

Uraniun235 wrote:I agree though, that ground combat looks like ass, and hopefully there's a way not to have to deal with that 3D system.

At the least you know it's going to be 3D for space. That might or might not suck but after playing HW:C I don't see how SE:IV can do well there.

If the 3D ruins it... I might not even play SE:V.

I would do ground combat like this. A planet should have three kinds of defense... a planetary shield, shooting the dropships out of the sky and tanks and planes. The planetary shield would just be a quick calculation whether there's enough firepower in the orbiting fleet to bring down the shield. Ground combat should center around designing an appropriate artillery/missile platform and a MBT. Depending on how good the artillery is it might be able to shoot into LEO or be sub-orbital. Depending how many you have and where you put them on the planet they might shoot down a few, many or all of the dropships. More technology means better artillery/missiles that can shoot farther and kill more dropships or kill more maneuverable dropships. When they get to the ground depending on how "fanatical" your population is either they fight to the last man or they don't join in... and your own tanks drive out of hardened underground bunkers for a big rumble.

Taking over a planet would be a big deal and if you didn't have enough soldiers you would only control part of a planet at a time. Simple graphics, just color coded over a wireframe randomly generated continents. When you mouseover over parts of the planet you'd get vitals for starports, urban centers, military bases, etc. And parts of the planet where there was a "beachhead". Strategic movements of billions of troops at a time from continent to continent and direction of air power. All abstrated, all strategic.

Everything would be customizable... how good the shields are (or if they exist), whether dropships could penetrate shields, how good the artillery is at shooting down dropships...

Brian

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2006-06-21 11:38am

brianeyci wrote:If the 3D ruins it... I might not even play SE:V.

Weren't you a beta tester for SE:V? Did they not have the 3D combat up and running yet or am I just remembering wrong?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-21 11:39am

Trogdor wrote:
brianeyci wrote:If the 3D ruins it... I might not even play SE:V.
Weren't you a beta tester for SE:V? Did they not have the 3D combat up and running yet or am I just remembering wrong?

No there was a contest for SE:IV to be a beta tester for SE:V and I lost the game

.

Just as well too. When I lost I quit SE:IV, I thought forever, and if I hadn't quit I wouldn't have found SD.net. Lol.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 11:49am

That would be a completely different game, Brian. Anyway, the 3D ground combat could be good or could suck, but there's a huge advantage inherent in that modders can control the results much better because you don't have to guess at what the hell's going on behind the scenes. You can actually see the tanks shooting at each other, so it's a lot easier to mod it the way a person likes. Of course, there are pitfalls to be avoided with this approach, and I'm not sure that the 3D ground combat will be a big improvement.

The worry over the 3D space combat is completely unfounded, and has been spread around by forum rats. That's my term for fans who hang around on message boards before a game comes out, and then get so upset when information about the game doesn't match their own personal vision of the world's perfect game that they start bitching and complaining, causing other people to lose interest in the game for no good reason. Forum rats killed Fallout Tactics' chances of commercial success.

More to the point, the space combat won't be like Homeworld. It's 2D combat in a 3D plane, so it's like SEIV except with pretty 3D graphics (well, maybe not pretty) and the ability for a ship to pass through another ship's space by going over or under it. The main advantage isn't the 3D-ness, it's the real time nature. By going real time, you avoid the ridiculous "first shot wins" nature of SEIV combat. No more getting your entire fleet shot to pieces at a warp point while your fleet just sits there with its collective dick in its hands. No more missile dancing, no more a lot of other stupid shit besides. Why forum rats are bitching and complaining about it, and why people are listening to them is beyond me. The most retarded complaint I've heard from that camp is that Aaron (the creator of the SE franchise) is so focused on graphics with SEV that the gameplay will take a dive, even if you can list pages and pages of gameplay improvements over SEIV.

So basically, aside from other improvements, SEV brings to the table a 3D ground combat system that may or may not be an improvement, but will at least be easier to mod even if it's not, and a faux-2D space combat system that's a huge improvement over SEIV's piece of shit system.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-21 11:52am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:So basically, aside from other improvements, SEV brings to the table a 3D ground combat system that may or may not be an improvement, but will at least be easier to mod even if it's not, and a faux-2D space combat system that's a huge improvement over SEIV's piece of shit system.

Maybe. We'll wait and see.

I don't hang out on any forums except here and a lot less here too. I'm more of a forum mouse than a forum rat, a little more domesticated

. It's the first time I commented on the pictures I saw anywhere anyway.

I plan to buy SE:V anyway so no worries.

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 12:22pm

I didn't say you were a forum rat. I said that they were responsible for that particular brainbug.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 03:13pm

Anyway, I think it goes without saying that from this point on, people are going to bulk up on planetary troops, so capturing homeworlds will probably need to involve heavy bombardment first, although I'm unsure whether there's an elegant way to do that and still make sure to have enough ships on site to take out defenses. They should have increased planetary HP by an order of magnitude. It should take several turns for a full fleet to glass a homeworld, not just 1. Especially considering that the Centauri only managed to cause 6-7 million casualties after 4 days of bombardment with special weapons on the Narn homeworld.

But that's just a relatively small item on a long list of things wrong with this mod. What about the hot patch idea, again? Did we find that it's possible?

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2006-06-21 03:31pm

Hot patch? Ugh. Let's see..
90+ percent of the weapons are utterly useless and should never be built under any circumstances. See the 'repeater' gun? It's twice as powerful as an ion cannon, half the range, twice the size, and about ten times the cost.

Planetary economies in b5mod work alright, but sizes are still bugged, and the game doesn't reward 'balanced' ship designs, but rather 'all guns and armor video game designs'.

I'm more or less done on my custom mod though. No idea on it's balance strategically, as the research system right now is based upon finding alien artifacts.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 03:57pm

I was thinking of a smaller scale patch. One that limits itself to fixing base ship and heavy base ship movement, builds in 1 movement to jump gates, and perhaps reduces the cost of planetary facilities and / or the penalties for having low population. The last one would probably cause me to lose, since I've been using remote mining on all the planets in my territory instead of colonization, but I advocate it anyway.

The other problems are much more deep-seated and need an overhaul to be fixed.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-06-21 06:34pm

Nephtys wrote:90+ percent of the weapons are utterly useless and should never be built under any circumstances.

Actually... all the crappy weapons do have a kind of use...

...although I'm not sure how well it works and you have to get good intel on your enemy... if your enemy just uses normal armor and 1 piece of advanced armor, you could research all the weapons and say build a boarding ship that does exactly the amount of damage their shields have to bring 'em down... so if they've got 25 shields you need say 1 15 damage weapon and a 10 damage weapon... lol.

For the hotpatch I'm not sure what to do. To be honest I'm a powergamer so now that I know exactly how to play raiders... they're frankly boring. And Marxis's a one trick pony. I'm finally giving in and using my brother's computer, installing stuff on his computer now... the sacrifices I make for you people sigh

. (j/k lol thanks again Tux, Cov, Gups.)

Brian

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-06-21 07:19pm

Yes, most of the weapons are garbage and most research paths are dead-ends. However, I have noticed that all of the races being played in this game do seem to have at least one good weapon. I've been messing around a lot with the different weapons today, so here's what I've learned:

The Centauri have the Battle Laser and the Mega Plasma Cannon.

The Narn have the Mag gun and the Mega Plasma Cannon.

The Dilgar have the Quad Pulsar.

The Minbari have the Neutron Laser.

The EA has the Trans-Phased Plasma Cannon, the Mega Plasma Cannon, the Heavy Pulse Cannon, Heavy Particle Cannon, Heavy Laser, and Heavy Laser/Pulse Array, as well as the light Shadow weapon if they capture a Shadow ship.

The Vorlons and Shadows of course have the best weapons, and I don't include their weapons in the comparisons below because they are the clear winners in every category except cost.

The Brakiri have the Gravitic Cutter and Gravitic Pulsar.

In terms of Range, the Centauri have it good with their Battle Laser, as do the Minbari and EA. The Dilgar and Brakiri get semi-screwed with Range 12 and 10 weapons respectively, and the Narn really take it up the ass.

In terms of Damage, everyone has a 1k+ damage weapon except the Brakiri and the Dilgar. High damage weapons are important for taking out ships with emissive armor piled on like there's no tomorrow.

In terms of reload rate, everyone's in the same boat except the Brakiri with my 1 reload Cutters, although the tradeoff is reduced range and damage.

In terms of cost, the EA, Dilgar, Minbari, and especially the Ancient races take it up the ass. The Narn, Centauri, and Brakiri are the clear winners here.

Overall, the Minbari seem to have a moderate edge over the other Younger Races, with the EA second best. Then I'd say the Centauri, Brakiri, Narn, and Dilgar follow in that order.

If you haven't researched the weapons I've mentioned for your race yet, you might want to take a peek at their stats and see how much better they are than what you might be using now.