Space Empires V PBW game?

[Covenant]

I just want to know, cuz mining a warp-point was such a big strategy before.

[brianeyci]

Actually it was not really a big strategy, at least against a prepared opponent. The reason was, mines were limited to 100 per sector. So let's say a three man alliance decides to team up against your uber fleet of doom. At most 300 mines. A cruiser with minesweeping V can carry that much in SE:IV. In fact, mines are a negligible threat in SE:IV and are only effective if your opponent neglects to build minesweepers. Mines are a delay tactic.

The problem is to invade and conquer an empire whole, you need a whole bunch of utility.

• Troops.
• Point-Defense.
• Sensors.
• Minewsweeping.
• Repair ships.

Add that all on top of the usual hull/shields/armor/weapons and you need at least mid-game to mount a successful invasion against a skilled opponent. At the very least you needed destroyers in SE:IV to make a half decent fleet. I think this is true in SE:V as well. Fighters are difficult to shoot down without PDVI+, and in SE:V add to that utility list fighters and a variety of hull sizes, since you need combined arms. Not only that, in SE:V we warp in blind: need high level of sensors to see a system instantly.

While on the defense you just need to research a decent level of mines, and say medium fighter. But it doesn't last.

I'm probably going under the assumption pure defense loses. Units in SE:V have maintainence too and I don't like the idea of stationary explosives that are useless later in the game that cost me money. I'll probably mass tier 0 fighters on warp points to start out with, and build smaller tiny fleets to skirmish and make people nervous. If I see an opening of course I'll go for it, but I don't expect anybody to be defeated by 10 frigates with capital ship missile I.

[Covenant]

I can't even get my shipset to load anymore! Gaaaagh. This is retarded. Nobody will tell me how to do this, and I'm obviously missing like one dumb file or something. I also am not getting other shipsets to load, except for the Colonial Shipset. I don't know why that's doing that.

Update!~

Okay, the Borg one wasn't displaying because it's Empire folder name was borg .2, which apparently offends the game. The name of Attribute_X and the folder need be the same. If only I knew what Attribute_X was! Since I can't even get my Hiigarans to show up at all, despite the ships working, I wager it has some error like that in it somewhere. If I only knew what the crud to change! Where are you fellow modder folks? People are even ignoring PM's. So frustrating!

[Alan Bolte]

I'm going to assume this is part of why we only see a handful of finished shipsets.

[Covenant]

Hah! Screw all ya'! I got it working. I just had some Hiigaran battleships (destroyer model, in-game battleship weight class) blow the crud out of a Norak dreadnaught. It also gives me a relatively good idea about ship scale. I'm going to have to yoink the weaponlayout file thingie from one of the stretched out species, as Hiigaran ships tend to be long. Does anyone know a good way of setting up engine flares, or will I need to do it by eyeballing and Trial-and-Error?

[ColonialAdmiral]

It can't be that hard can it? I was planing on making a shipset of my own this summer....

[Covenant]

Don't worry, I'll divulge my knowledge if people ask. There's a few finicky things, but the way I'm doing now is slowly replacing the Norak shipset with my Hiigaran one, and the final step will be to rename the folder and all the files (ugh).

The thing is, since there's no authortative text or anything that tells you what you need for it to work, you have no real idea what you're missing. My Hiigaran shipset has a racefile, all the texts, even their own compiled scripts and flags and such. But it won't even load at all. But my fake Norak one does. So there's something that the fake Norak one has that it needs that my Hiigaran one doesn't have.

As for making the ships, I dunno how hard that'd be. I'm making the Homeworld shipset by ripping them with some Homeworld 2 modding tools and them compiling them in Deep Exploration, which I highly recommend for Homeworld modding and which I realized also exports .X files. Since I used to mod Homeworld, it's not that big of a deal. This would also let me rip the Imperial models from the Warlords mod, which would give us Rebel and Imperial shipsets. It should also give us Kadeshi shipsets and I'm playing around with a Bentusi shipset. There's not an awful lot of Bentusi vessels though, so they might end up being mostly kitbashes and resized versions of the Bentusi Harbor and Bentus models.

The Taiidani and Vagyr have a few similar issues, but they also offer some advantages. The Vagyr have several starbases that make for good spacestation models, and the Taiidani have a lot of structures from their campaign, which would also work, if someone chose to make a Taiidani shipset.

Also, while I've gotten the models in-game, there's a few remaining issues. Number one is the need for Portraits, which means you need something that's able to render out shots. Deep Exploration does, so you're in luck. And if you're especially lucky and/or lazy, you can even find the Homeworld schematic icons that they use for the research tree.

Number two is the need for setting up the slots. This is a pain! But there's a few things that let you set it up, and worst case you can always just choose a slot setup from another race, along with the top-down slot inventory pic. Right now that's what I've got. It's not perfect by any means, but my opponent never sees my build screen, so the only one it breaks the immersion for is the player. So it's not a big pressing thing.

Number three is firing arcs. Because new ships don't have special turret firing arcs set up, you gotta do that yourself, or let them fire out from the center of the ship, which looks kinda dumb. If you play with it a while though you can set up the hardpoints correctly. The most obvious examples of where this is cool are on the big Fixed Beam ion cannon ships or on battlecruisers and such, where there are big heavy turret hardpoints that just look cool firing out beams. The turrets won't move, so I just left them off, but beams coming out of the hardpoints still looks cool.

Lastly, there's the extra fun of the engine lights. You gotta mess with those to make them turn out right. But honestly, if you really care that much about the firing arcs and engine light effects you're already past the point where the shipset works. It may look a little goofy, but the rest is polish.

[Alan Bolte]

Funny, I started by trying to change a copy of the Terran empire into a GTA empire, but SE5 would just crash when I tried to start a new game. I never did identify what the problem was, so I was forced to switch over to modifying the Colonial empire, which I knew I could more easily replace if I screwed something up, and wouldn't break any existing games of mine.

What I'm still really baffled about is why on one of my Fenris attempts the game would give me four error messages that read "could not open c:\program" every time I started combat.

[Covenant]

It's fussy. Here's some proof that I actually got it to work though:





As you can tell, we still got some scaling issues to attend to--our ships are way too tiny for the space that the game expects them to take up, so I'll need to play with some of their stuff. And they're flying upside down! I suppose in space, what does it matter? But still, I'd like them to fly the right way. Right now, trying to get them to do that is a real pain in the butt. But I'm gonna test with it a bit to figure it out. Neph wants a Vagyr shipset, so I'll be pumping out a bunch of .X files for her, along with the relevent textures, and hopefully will be able to pass on that knowledge. In exchange I want her to open up the .dds and .bmp files and add some color. Hiigarans should be blue, and the Vagyr should definately be red!

But until then, gunmetal grey works alright. It's a little bland, but it's hardly as bad as if it were white or something.

[GuppyShark]

Okay. Let's see.

My lil' bro was at a friends' birthday party today so I couldn't visit him like I'd planned.

I've put together a custom flag set and racial portrait for House Davion.

I've created a .emp for my empire for the game. I just want to make sure I've got it right - latest SEV patch, latest Kwok's Balance Mod, 2000 points (plus 500 for -intel)?

[brianeyci]

1.06 is still from April.

I think Tux has a direct line to Kwok, are we waiting for a balance mod update that's compatible with 1.35 and not 1.33?

[ColonialAdmiral]

It will probably be out this weekend...
We are probably going to start monday or tuesday...

I could do earlier though:
My tip got canceled....

[brianeyci]

I just tested with the latest patch, the mine exploit is still on.

Apparently you can make say a frigate with mine launchers. Set its strategy to don't get hurt (or optimal firing range and make sure it's got no weapons.) It launches mines, that aren't detectable in the combat map. So ships run right into them and get annihilated.

Is that how mines are intended to be used?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

1.06 is still from April.

I think Tux has a direct line to Kwok, are we waiting for a balance mod update that's compatible with 1.35 and not 1.33?

No, I just read what he said on the SEV Universe forum, but he also recently said that 1.06 is fully compatible with 1.35, so we won't have to wait if 1.07 isn't out by Tuesday.

It will probably be out this weekend...
We are probably going to start monday or tuesday...

I could do earlier though:
My tip got canceled....

I think two different people needed Tuesday, so Tuesday it is.

I just tested with the latest patch, the mine exploit is still on.

Apparently you can make say a frigate with mine launchers. Set its strategy to don't get hurt (or optimal firing range and make sure it's got no weapons.) It launches mines, that aren't detectable in the combat map. So ships run right into them and get annihilated.

Is that how mines are intended to be used?

The mine exploit is supposed to be fixed in the 1.07 patch.

[brianeyci]

They had better fix that mine exploit. Mines are higher dps than anything in the game, so if you can drop invisible mines in combat that's basically a missile that can't be shot down.

The two ways to fix it are to make it impossible to launch mines in combat, or make them visible in the combat map for PD and beams to shoot at. The former can probably be fixed by a mod, the latter would take a new SE:V patch so let's hope 1.07 bans launching mines in combat.

Otherwise we should seriously consider banning mines. It's an exploit because it takes advantage of the stupid AI. In combat sensors should be trained on an enemy ship, there's no way you should drop an explosive and not have them see it right in their path. Not to mention fighters are raped by mines, when a fighter should "realistically" dodge stationary mines with no engines.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

We could also play with a custom version of BM that nixes combat launching. The downside of banning things is that people tend to ignore the ban. For instance, we've banned tech trading in every single game, and in every single game people have traded tech. Hopefully this one will be the exception, but the point is that it's better to make something impossible than to ban it.

[brianeyci]

Point taken.

Better check nobody has ancient race either, just to be on the safe side. Can start everybody in the same solar system (lol) and check their racials.

Is there a way to outright disable tech trading and technology sharing through treaty.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Tech trading is disabled already, but treaty sharing is still possible, I think, as is gifting and analyzing. That one would be more work to properly disable than is worth it, I think, so we'll just have to hope people respect the rule. If we're going to customize the mod, we could easily just remove Ancient Race completely.

[Covenant]

Okay space-fans, I figured out why they were rotated funky. This game treats rotations in percentages rather than degrees. A rotation of 90 is 90-percent rotated, not a right angle rotation. 180, therefore, is nearly two full rotations, and had my ships acting bizzarely.

That said, my battlecruisers now fly right-side up. I've got a few questions though--how obnoxiously big are some of these shipset ships? I'm making my Hiigarans more-or-less equal to other ingame nations, but I could see some jackass making an ISD the size of half the screen and not realizing that his guns don't even have that kind of range.

Are all 'bullets' so big? It seems like my battlecruisers are firing missiles big enough to put a dent in the sun or tug small planetoids out of orbit through sheer gravitational effects alone.

[brianeyci]

Hahaha well. That's right up there with making a "blank" shipset or invisible shipset just to get some mediocre advantage.

Having a hugeass ship whose guns can't shoot that far is pretty stupid, just a bigger target. But can some dick make a lot of "hardpoints" all over the ship for the guns to shoot from, so an ISD half the size of the screen could actually work?

That could be pretty cool actually.

[Covenant]

Hahaha well. That's right up there with making a "blank" shipset or invisible shipset just to get some mediocre advantage.

Having a hugeass ship whose guns can't shoot that far is pretty stupid, just a bigger target. But can some dick make a lot of "hardpoints" all over the ship for the guns to shoot from, so an ISD half the size of the screen could actually work?

That could be pretty cool actually.

You could. The way you'd really want to do it, for maximum cheese, is to also set the thing below the image plane. I'm probably going to do some minor tweaking to that effect so that smaller ships are higher and bigger ships are lower, for greater cinematic effect, but if you went X-TREME with the idea (instead of a subtle difference like I intend to, to reduce clipping) you could make a giantass deathstar that took up the entire lower plane and had guns dotted across it's surface and spun incredibly quickly on it's axis so that any enemy ship it targetted would be under fire by it's entire gun rack as it spun around like a chaingun, letting the dry barrels reload.

Here's a pic of my Battlecruiser. It's right-side up now (proving that I do know of what I speak) and it has engine flares.



Anyone have a Kwok-ready shipset? I'd like to be able to set up my .X files appropriately, but none of the shipsets I know of have a Kwok-standard shipset. I want to know what name the game will look for when it searches for my Baseship or medium fighters. The baseship is obviously going to be the mothership, and I'd like to be able to modify the engine flares on that sucker before it goes in-game. The battlecruiser's engines are obvious and therefore a good subject for messing with, whereas a small ship doesn't need that level of detail since you'll never zoom that far in anyway.

I'm not sure if I should bother with the turret arrangement or not. I might just grab one of the long-and-thin race set's turret setup. There's a lot of cheese you could do with that, like making a pile of 360 degree turrets, and I don't even want to TOUCH that. I've got a serious hangup when it comes to game balance modification, and I'd rather say that my shipset is totally fair than say totally accurate. I know one of the Star Trek shipsets, from Neph's account, set it up so the guns fire out of the saucer section and only along the strip and it's arcs. I'd love to do something similar with this but I'm hesistant to get too literal with the turret placements.





Pretty spiffy, eh? I gotta remove that dumb little micro-enterprise decal there and make it look like a homeworld ship, but that's okay, it's progress nonetheless. I think they look nice. I used to have the flag icon being nothing but a disembodied Hiigaran icon, and that looked pretty cool, but I decided to throw the frame back on it so that people don't seem confused. Also, when rotated in front of the sun, you could tell it was surrounded by a tiny black halo, so instead of drawing attention to it I felt it was better to stay understated.

[MKSheppard]

When you're done with that, PLEASE upload it to Spacempires net or whatever!

BTW:

I've been having ideas for a slightly different layout of hull progression:



Basically, you can either go to the next hull level; or keep on refining your existing hulls; to sort of represent how over time things just get bigger over time; at the end of WWII; the USN had light cruisers coming in at 17,000 tons; as big, or bigger than our first dreadnought battleships 8O

[Covenant]

When you're done with that, PLEASE upload it to Spacempires net or whatever!

BTW:

I've been having ideas for a slightly different layout of hull progression:



Basically, you can either go to the next hull level; or keep on refining your existing hulls; to sort of represent how over time things just get bigger over time; at the end of WWII; the USN had light cruisers coming in at 17,000 tons; as big, or bigger than our first dreadnought battleships 8O

I prefer that kind of hull setup, personally. I like anything that encourages people to find a niche and specialize. If I really like my destroyers, I wish I could research something like 'Advanced Destroyer Design' that gives me special destroyer hulls or something. I'd really like it if there were less redundant classes of ships, but more variation among them. Ah well, whatev'! My old research modification changed the way you even got hulls. It went Frigate, Destroyer, Battleship, then down to Cruiser. The idea was that those first three are 'basic' and simple hulls. You get them first, and that way you need to decide if you want to research the 'advanced' hulls or not. The 'advanced' hulls had other benefits, like the cruisers gave you a higher thrust-to-mass ratio and longer endurance. The idea was that the more complicated hulls were more than just boxes of weapons, and would encourage a wider degree of strategic maneuver and such. But by giving people the best hulls right up front you remove the mad dash for Dreadnought hulls and put more of the emphasis on deciding what to do with them rather than just making them bigger and bigger.

I might as well upload it once I'm done, sure. I want Neph to finish the colorizing, since I don't want to do ALL the work myself--there are so many shipsets one could make from Homeworld stuff. The HW1 and Cataclysm sets would be a bit harder since I'm not positive if they use the same file format. Anyway, sure, I'll upload it. I just need to set up the engines on a few more ships.

I do have a question though--the ship models for some of them are pretty tiny. That seems wrong! But making them too much bigger looks really bizzare. Think it matters? While it does making clicking on them harder, I'm not sure it hurts gameplay. If you're playing multiplayer, isn't it impossible to do the realtime combat? I doubt the computer cares what size the model is. I have no reason to believe it simulates particle fire. Doesn't it just do roll tables?

[GuppyShark]

Hi Shep,

While you're here, I noticed when I was looking at your Flagtastic set that a lot of the filenames were incorrect. Most noticeably the Nation_Flagset.bmps should be Nation_Flag_Set.bmps.

Might want to fix that and reupload it.

[brianeyci]

The problem with that kind of setup is frigates have a fixed acceleration and fixed speed. The larger a vessel is the more engines it should need. but a 375 sized frigate moving at maximum speed is extremely powerful. Because of speed issues, if the hulls were like that, I might go to light cruiser and never research dreadnaught. Why get something that's half as slow when you can get twice as fast and two of them. Before changing a "balance mod" that's gone through six versions, let's just go on and make changes we have to. Like ripping out ancient race, and ripping out technology trading treaties.

As for the different kind of ships, I too would like the ability to focus on one kind of ship, but that's only because I'm from SE:IV. But it looks like mixed fleets rule: I'll probably be doing a 3:2:1 ratio. For example if I have light cruiser, I'll have one light cruiser for every two destroyers and three frigates. If I research dreadnaught, I'd have a handful of them because they're slow as shit, and a lot more of the smaller classes. And I kind of want to see that in action. For every ISD there should be hundreds of smaller pieces of crap. Frigates in SE:V are necessary, you can't ignore them (thanks to Nephtys for that!)

As for the size, to me they're kind of small too. I don't think people will complain if you make yours bigger, as long as it's not something cheater like that ship the size of the whole combat map spinning like a top lol.