Modding Space Empire IV Gold

[brianeyci]

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.

Nothing for the Raiders? Sigh.

The only good thing about Raiders is their tier 0 boarding parties.

You're missing "swarm" weapons... things like the EA's Gatling Gun, Minbari Molecular Disruptor (or pulsar I forget which one) you can slap onto a 400 kT ship and make a 1000 of...

Brian

[Uraniun235]

Don't forget though that a massive advantage some races have over the EA is that EA's big guns can target Ships only. Fighters would be a heckuva lot more decisive if everybody and their brother couldn't swat them down by the dozens with their main guns.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

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.

Nothing for the Raiders? Sigh.

The only good thing about Raiders is their tier 0 boarding parties.

I knew I forgot someone! But I just checked, and you don't really have anything good. You just use those crappy Particle Cannon 8's, right?

You're missing "swarm" weapons... things like the EA's Gatling Gun, Minbari Molecular Disruptor (or pulsar I forget which one) you can slap onto a 400 kT ship and make a 1000 of...

Brian

What good are swarm weapons when ships can ignore their damage with emissive armor?

Don't forget though that a massive advantage some races have over the EA is that EA's big guns can target Ships only. Fighters would be a heckuva lot more decisive if everybody and their brother couldn't swat them down by the dozens with their main guns.

True, although it's a weakness shared by a few other races as well. That's one area where the Brakiri have an advantage. My heavies can target all but seekers. Still, if you managed to capture a Shadow ship, you could use the Light Molecular Slicer to take down fighters (as well as anything else, for that matter).

[Trogdor]

Nothing for the Raiders? Sigh.

The only good thing about Raiders is their tier 0 boarding parties.

Oh, yeah, and that component you have that reduces the maintaince cost of ships by 75% and only gives a 5% combat penalty isn't worth mentioning.

Whoever designed this mod clearly thought that the raiders should have sheer numbers and little else on their side it seems.

[Nephtys]

If Minbari get a Vorlon ship, the tech tables have an 'improved neutron laser'. Unfortunately, that doesn't work.

A pity. That laser cuts all targets as well. Normal neutron lasers don't target fighters.

[brianeyci]

What good are swarm weapons when ships can ignore their damage with emissive armor?

Not all of them.



I think the Gatling X is around that... maybe 500 damage

Brian

[brianeyci]

Don't forget though that a massive advantage some races have over the EA is that EA's big guns can target Ships only. Fighters would be a heckuva lot more decisive if everybody and their brother couldn't swat them down by the dozens with their main guns.

Should see Adamant. Point defense is a real bitch there... missiles can't hit fighters, beams are inaccurate as hell and you need separate flak and PD guns for anti-missile and anti-fighter...

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Not all of them.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a362/ ... mdxmsv.jpg

I think the Gatling X is around that... maybe 500 damage

Brian

I'm not sure I would call that a swarm weapon, though. And it's an Ancient weapon besides, so it doesn't count. The Gatling X is only 250 damage or so. A heavy baseship can almost completely soak that, and it's not all that compact. I'm a much bigger fan of hard hitting weapons, although for small weapons that hit hard I did notice the Solar Cannon and the Improved Blast Laser, though I can't remember who has them.

Should see Adamant. Point defense is a real bitch there... missiles can't hit fighters, beams are inaccurate as hell and you need separate flak and PD guns for anti-missile and anti-fighter...

Brian

Missiles are almost too good in Adamant, I think. Actually they're not almost too good. They are too good.

[GuppyShark]

Solar Cannon's a Drazi weapon.

[Nephtys]

Adamant missiles take up a lot of ammo to fire. A ship finishing one combat with them uses up almost all their supplies if you have the 1:1 ratio of engines.

[brianeyci]

Adamant missiles take up a lot of ammo to fire. A ship finishing one combat with them uses up almost all their supplies if you have the 1:1 ratio of engines.

They only go once every 3 turns? So if you hold 5k supplies you're only using 1k of that?

It's worth it I personally think.

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Adamant missiles take up a lot of ammo to fire. A ship finishing one combat with them uses up almost all their supplies if you have the 1:1 ratio of engines.

True, but that only changes the way you construct fleets, it doesn't necessarily constitute a real tradeoff that makes missiles less attractive. What I mean is that such a large tactical advantage is worth any strategic price. Now, if missile ships were incredibly expensive in comparison or much larger sized, that might be a better tradeoff. The way it is now, PD guns take up more space than the volume of missiles they're asked to shoot down, and the high damage of missiles will easily blast through the damage soak of all but the biggest ships. The only way to counter missile ships is with missile ships right now, and that's a sign that they're broken to me. If they had shorter range that would also fix it.

[brianeyci]

The only way to counter missile ships is with missile ships right now, and that's a sign that they're broken to me. If they had shorter range that would also fix it.

Maybe in early to early middle game where we are missiles are powerful. But once you get to the higher levels with fanatical commands, psychotropic drugs, artificial intelligence bridges, the direct fire penalty goes away.

And then... wormhole defense gets potent.

Missiles are pretty useless for wormhole defense since it lets them shoot back.

I like uber missiles. Missiles always lets the other guy shoot back so there's less emphasis on getting a first shot, wormhole or not. No cheesing.

Missiles can't hit fighters .

By the way is anybody researching wormhole openers? I look at the score and some of you people's research scores are terrifying... the player with 150k research blows my mind away...

Brian

[Covenant]

I like Adamant's potent missiles, since I think that not only makes for a more even game (two ships firing missiles can kill each other's missiles) but also make PD's and special screening ships more useful and fun. Extending the ranges also helps some fleet strategy stuff.

What I'd also like to see are anti-missile missiles that move about a space or two slower than normal missiles, intercepting them as they cross. So two ships with missiles and antimissiles would have this field of death in the center of their battle. And antimissiles could shoot down other antimissiles, so you'd be able to cause all sorts of missile-loving havoc.

I just like missiles more than super beams. I get sick of racks of thousands "ULTRASUNKILLER RAY X" ships. What I -do- hate, however, is when things like PD's are not only wicked huge, but ineffective at their job. Seriously, one anti-missile device should be able to shoot down at least it's equal weight in missiles, if not more. That doesn't make missiles 'worthless' it's just a 'tax' on their potency.

Afterall, you can't intercept DF guns, so they're automatically like instant-fire missiles that have a chance at missing but no chance of interception. That's waaay off, if you ask me, especially since they fire more rapidly and often cost much less supply. Sure, the missiles right now are good, but they're hardly broken. What -is- broken are the EIGHT BAZILLION SHIP CLASSES. If I can field a ship with two missiles or one missile and a flak gun, I -need- to make it carry two missiles since one flak does nothing. So yes, at that point, it's just offense versus offense.

Bigger ship sizes allow for more mixed firepower. These incredibly tiny increases in ship size make me want to tear out someone's lungs through their nose. Not only do they hamper the effectiveness of a retrofit (incredibly necessary in Adamant due to the relative inability to continually pump out new vessels with no maintaince problems) but they doom your low level ships to complete uselessness later in the game. Everyone wants the biggest ships, by and large, when it comes to fleet combat. Smaller ones are perfectly good, but the tiny, tiny, tiny ships are garbage without big ships around to carry some of the bigger systems. Otherwise I frankly will never be able to mount more than one weapon on a ship, let alone a mix of weapons.

It's like my scientists come up with this ship idea, and it's the size of VW bug. So I say "C'mon guys, this is a little small." And they go "Well alright, I guess we can make something bigger," and they come back with a Ford Explorer. And I'm like "Uh... how about something that I can mount a GUN on. Like a BATTLESHIP?" And they go "Battleship!? Hold your horses! We may be able to design a variety of potent warship hull sizes eventually, by trial and error, but just going back to the drawing board and doing the exact same thing as we did but making it twice as big... that's insanity!!"

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I like the Adamant ship classes, myself. Just goes to show that you can't please all the people all the time. I do agree that PD guns need to be less effective than in normal SEIV, I just think they took it a little too far, to the point where it doesn't make sense to put any PD at all on smaller ships.

[brianeyci]

I like the Adamant ship sizes too. Escorts, frigates and destroyers are pretty useful and when someone finally does get a battleship it'll mop the floor with anything smaller.

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Back on the subject of the B5 mod, I think the best starting place for a B5 mod is actually the Star Trek mod. They've already got racial technologies done correctly. Just change the names and stats to B5 weapons. The rest is easy by comparison.

Also, I think with so much "stuff", it helps to define some basics. The B5 mod labels almost every weapon as tiny, light, medium, heavy, mega, or ultra, but there's no consistent pattern between. One medium weapon might be ships only, while a mega weapon can hit fighters. I think it would help immeasurably to ask oneself before starting what exactly constitutes a heavy weapon. What can't it target, and of the things it can target, what can't it hit without a large combat bonus? Then set up the ship sizes so that heavier weapons will have trouble hitting smaller ships.

Once we know what it means for a weapon to be light, medium, etc., we will know how much damage armor should be able to soak up, how fast ships of various sizes should be able to move, etc. Filling in the stats of the weapons themselves should be pretty easy at this point.

For the ship sizes, I'd use something similar to Adamant, but with steeper penalties for the biggest ships. Every B5 race uses moderately sized ships for the bulk of their fleet, so there must be a reason for that, and it should be incorporated into a faithful B5 mod.

There are a few ways to "nerf" big ships. You can make them slower, make them unable to hit smaller ships, or make them expensive. I dislike the first option because it means no one will build big ships, or at least won't use them in a fleet. This begs the question why the mod author even bothered to put them in in the first place if he/she was going to turn around and make them useless. I dislike the second option because it doesn't make that much sense conceptually. I can certainly envision a big ship with big huge guns not being able to hit smaller more nimble ones, but the idea that they can't put smaller guns on it for that purpose is not sound. It's also difficult to implement properly, given some of SEIV's idiosyncracies (I've tried). Therefore the best way to proceed is to make it so that a big ship costs much more than a cruiser. It can do things smaller ships cannot (like smash through a warp point defense, impervious to satellite weaponry) so a competent player will build a few of them, but a fleet of nothing but juggernaughts will not be able to win a war of attrition.

I could go on, but I think it's clear how I think a proper B5 mod should be constructed. Nephtys you said you were working on one? What's its design philosophy?

[brianeyci]

Well there's two kinds of weapons IMO. Fixed axis and variable. I think fixed axis weapons shouldn't be able to target fighters. B5 is all about the fighters anyway.

For a balanced modification it'd all start out with the math. IMO it should take 1 turn for an escort, 2 turns for a frigate, 3 turns for a destroyer, 4 turns for a cruiser, 5 turns for a battlecruiser, 6 turns for a battleship, 7 turns for a dreadnaught, 8 turns for a ... you get the idea.

I actually think smaller ships should have more firepower than bigass ships but cost more resources overall. Since there's no shields in B5 I think spamming lots of small ships should be a viable strategy, the optimal size being around destroyer. The bigger ships would take longer but cost less...

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

In that circumstance people would build large fleets of nothing but big ships in peacetime when they have all the time in the world, which would lead to a very un-B5 result. I do agree about the fixed axis vs. turreted, though.

The no shields is a good point. The B5 mod really shoots itself in the foot with passive armors, because it makes large numbers of small ships ineffective, the opposite of what we see in the show. My ideal B5 mod would have no shields or shield-armors (except for Ancients) and would not make the armor leaky. I could understand having a primary passive armor plate that ignores x amount of damage, and then additional that's just normal armor. That would be much better than what they did.

As far as ship sizes, one thing I've always wanted to see in a mod is a ship size hierarchy like this: There are three sizes of ships, destroyer, cruiser, and battleship. Sword of the Stars has this, but their implementation is a bit different than what I'm about to propose. Destroyers are fast and inexpensive. They're good against fighters, but bad against cruisers and battleships. Cruisers are your general purpose ships, forming the bulk of your fleet. They are good at taking out other cap ships, but vulnerable against fighters. Battleships are good for smashing through warp point and planetary defenses, as fighters and satellites don't do much to them. They can also dish out the big damage against planets, but cruisers with heavy weapons can take them out.

You can build all three sizes at the beginning of the game. Destroyers are about 150 kT in size, cruisers about 400, and battleships 1,000. When you research ship construction, the size of all three classes increase. At the end you've got cruisers as big as the battleships were at the beginning of the game, but they are nimble and cheap like cruisers and much better than the old battleships were. So you solve the problem where ship construction yields bigger ships that need to be better than the older ones to be worth researching.

There are a few settings for which this paradigm wouldn't fit at all (Star Trek for instance), but for most settings I think this is the best paradigm, and I'm actually puzzled by not having seen it in mods before.

[brianeyci]

What would make me happy would be a brutal mod. No research warp point openers. Infinite speed and range colonizers. One turn setting up a powerful industrial hub with 1 facility with a zillion specials. Warp point openers opening to anywhere in the galaxy. No research nebula creators. Units really cheap, a trillion satellites. Ships really cheap. The game's over in ten turns. Homeworlds not important at all since you make one in a single turn. No sector limit for fighters, satellites or mines.

I might make it when I get my laptop back. I might even call it brutal heh heh.

If we could figure out time zones we could give Neph's modification a whirl with the real time client. Two or three minute turns, play for a couple hours. Better than setting up a game and having it go on for half a year and making corrections then. I doubt Neph wants to wait that long. Only problem's the timing. We could coordinate through a real-time IM like MSN.

Brian

[Covenant]

The problem I have with the shipclasses is that they have no real special purpose for the varying sizes. This one's 450kt's. This one's 490kt's, and has a 5% maintaince penalty. This one's a 530kt ship and has an 8 percent maintaince penalty, etc etc etc.

So, really, it's just arbitrary, and that annoys me. Neph and I were making a big mod for either original content or B5 (thus my Vree set) and we were going to make shipclasses actually have functional differences. Scouts could carry big scanning arrays other ships wouldn't. Frigates were able to travel long distances without refueling--as were Cruisers--and there weren't many ways to refuel in flight. And battleships were the third ship size you got. It went, like, scouts, destroyers, battleships, frigates, cruisers, battlecruisers... or something like that.

And each class does one thing or another better. Destroyers get to mount PD's with special Destroyer mounts, increasing their range, accuracy and potency or something. Scouts could carry excellent long range targetting arrays. We considered giving everything a passive cloak of 1, so ships are always invisible unless you either have scouts to pick them out, nearby spotters, or you just happen to get within 4 spaces or so of the enemy.

Battleships would be kinda just the 'normal' ship. Frigates, Cruisers and Battlecruisers are the long-range specialty ships. They're all 'advanced' and have maximum efficency and self-sufficency. Frigates are good defenders and escorts for convoys. Also good for countering fighters, but lack the anti-ship capacity of destroyers. Cruisers are fast, long-legged and carry some decent sensors, but are thinner on armor than battleships by far, but carry better guns than a destroyer. They're big ship interceptors, patrol ships, and raiders.

Battlecruisers, the hated near-worthless hybrid of WWI, is nonetheless the only decent designation for the last ship, though I was just thinking we could call them escort carriers instead. Their role is heavy hitting, long range power at a good speed, but at the cost of most of the extra bells and whistles of a conventional cruiser. A good heavy raider, the 'battlecruiser' concept used the biggest guns, but I kinda prefer making them carriers now that I think about it. That makes them not only different than cruisers or battleships, but also a bit flashier, and fighters are a unique sort of weapon capable of doing horrific damage to an unprepared foe.

The idea being that you could quickly begin fielding a variety of low tech large ships and medium ships in a mixed navy, but that the advanced shipclasses like cruisers and frigates had more specialized uses as picket ships, long range raiders, etc, and would flesh out a navy and allow you to 'evolve' it. You start off just using the basic shipclasses and doing basic fighting, and then slowly add the fancier ships and making things more complex. This avoids the meaningless, arbitrary size increases, makes all ship-sizes useful throughout the game, and encourages people to find the levels of synergy they find useful.

And then different races have other special stuff. Vree, for example, had excellent scout vessels (their scouts were freakin' huge) and great frigates, but otherwise pretty small craft. And if there was a Dreadnaught class or whatever, I know Vree didn't get it. I remember trading the biggest ship size for their antimatter beams.

We also were going to put a heavier emphasis on in-flight refuelling by using transport-type ships to fly on efficent engines, run over to a fleet, join it and share their supplies, then run back as the next one headed over.

In this way, you needed to secure a supply chain--not just send forces through. This made small raiders and long-range ships like cruiser and frigates useful, they could become commerce raiders and disrupt supply chains, and slow down or stop an offensive.

Battleships can move as fast as anything else, and carry any guns, but have horrible fuel efficency and require a ton of gas. They are a strain on the infrastructure and can quickly sap a fleet of it's supplies, thus making them flagships by default. A fleet of them would require such a large resupply convoy that it becomes kinda pointless. But you need them in a fleet to batter down defending battleships (which have the advantage of not needing a lot of supply chains) and to crunch up cruiser forces...

Anyway. I liked that form of balance better. Doesn't require us to nerf anything, just makes it so they become more difficult to keep fed, which is quite realistic and understandable.

[Nephtys]

What would make me happy would be a brutal mod. No research warp point openers. Infinite speed and range colonizers. One turn setting up a powerful industrial hub with 1 facility with a zillion specials. Warp point openers opening to anywhere in the galaxy. No research nebula creators. Units really cheap, a trillion satellites. Ships really cheap. The game's over in ten turns. Homeworlds not important at all since you make one in a single turn. No sector limit for fighters, satellites or mines.

I might make it when I get my laptop back. I might even call it brutal heh heh.

If we could figure out time zones we could give Neph's modification a whirl with the real time client. Two or three minute turns, play for a couple hours. Better than setting up a game and having it go on for half a year and making corrections then. I doubt Neph wants to wait that long. Only problem's the timing. We could coordinate through a real-time IM like MSN.

Brian

We could try that. Me and you, Bri, playing a 1v1 game of this on a small map of perhaps 10 systems. We could get the match done then in a few hours, and get a good feel of balance.

The mod I have anyway (which I haven't touched in a while, I finished it pretty much in a week), is more of an arcadey, faster game, where the central themes are

1. Not everyone has the same technology, and some people will be deficient in one area, strong in others..
2. A few ships (hero ships perhaps) with expensive components can turn a tide with a fleet, but are insanely hard to replace.
3. Very odd components change stuff up, like system-wide shield ships, or ships that pull all ships in a system towards the center of the system, or an engine that can go infinate speed anywhere in the galaxy... once. Then it's stuck. Etc.


If anyone wants to work on a new mod for fun stuff like balance, ships, B5iness... ask and I'll send you the datafiles of one I tweaked around.

[Tobor]

Hi there. The SEIV site is down to me so i can't submit my turns right now. Will try again in a few hours or so.

-T

[brianeyci]

Battlecruisers, the hated near-worthless hybrid of WWI, is nonetheless the only decent designation for the last ship, though I was just thinking we could call them escort carriers instead.

Why stick with wet navy names? After all the Omega's a destroyer and it's a capital ship in the EA. Even in modern times the frigate's completely useless and battleships were useless since string and wood Swordfish brought down the Bismarck's rudder.

Brian

[Nephtys]

In most space games, 'Battlecruiser' refers to 'Super Heavy Cruiser' or 'Light Battleship' anyway. Not the traditional use of the thing.

I guess actually it's about the same as the WW1 deal actually. Speed and armor of a cruiser, armament of a battleship... that's about right often. But it's more useful in space. ;P