Modding Space Empire IV Gold

[brianeyci]

Heavy Baseships are bugged too, just not to such a great extent. Did you look at Gup's calculation? The math doesn't lie, the Heavy Baseship has the same thrust per tonnage and the only reason it doesn't go 24 but goes 14 is because Heavy Baseship is 2000 kT instead of 1500 kT, in other words 33% more armor and weapons.

Everyone can make baseships. Just not you or the Shadows.

Massive numerical superiority comes by default because cheaper ships are well, cheaper. You should have seven cheap ships for every one of his and if you don't you're behind because of other reasons.

The Vorlons are not super-aggressive anyway and I would think that the ability to permanently defend your warp point is enough. But if it's not and you want to match him in the open field, that's possible too. You haven't looked at it closely enough, especially your 75% maintainence bonus.

He had one reload 600 damage weapons. No big deal--that's all he has. You have your maintainence bonus so you should have more ships than him by default all things equal. Anyway here is my latest warship, 120 x 2000 kT versus his 100 x 1500 kT. For me that's 400000 kT to his 225000 kT. Unfair you say? Not really since I have 75% maintainence bonus to his 55% so I have 45% more tonnage by default anyway, all things equal. That's around 56% there but it's pretty close. I have two reload six hundred damage weapons.



I win. Now I do two times less damage than you, and I still win with only 20 more ships than him, 56% more tonnage when I by default have around 45% more tonnage cause of maintainence. If I can do that with two reload weapons, you can do that with 1 reload weapons even easier.

If you didn't research passive armor physics for emissive armor and got jump drives instead, didn't make Medium Lightning Cannons and instead went for Megas that are more expensive and inefficient and didn't make 150 heavy baseships over 30 turns but instead went for escorts going after really small ships so you could have a quick fleet out to kill the Dilgar, well that's not really Tuxedo's fault, you should be able to match him.

Now the only thing is, your ships are slower. Oh well, they're twice as slow, big deal. He'll just have more anxiety . That you can't make 150 heavy baseships isn't really Tuxedo's fault, you could have easily been building a fleet like that over the past 30 turns or so like Tuxedo did or even use retrofit series instead of building those small escorts. So for now you're going to have to stick with small ships until you can slowly transition to larger vessels, no big deal because there's only one way into Vorlon-Minbari space anyway that can't be bypassed by jump gates. So if you play properly you can't lose.

Brian

[brianeyci]

Anyway Kojiro it's not true that your 1500 kT ships can't win. They can, and they win massively. I made an ancient ship and then made a clone and took out the scanner jammer and replaced it with gravatic cutters. Since I can't simulate 24 move points I made the ancient ship have 6 and the Tuxedo ship have 12. Red is you Blue is simulated Tuxedo.



You win every time, this isn't a fluke. Your medium lightning cannon is only a few single digit kT bigger than Tuxedo's, and almost half the price and has a little more range. You win because you have ancient scanner jammer and get 30% dodge, 30% longer lasting than the leading national competitor! And you'll have more by default since you have 75% over his 55% maintainence all things equal. That you don't is not really Tuxedo's fault if you didn't research the right technology.

You can try yourself here.

Brian

[brianeyci]

Fuck every time I write an RP for Marxis it ends up not being racist enough and I have to go back and edit it .

Brian

[Kojiro]

Brian, I'm not going to equip my ships with med LCs just to take out Tux. You're running all around the point here.

First, I have all the vorlon weapon trees finished. I have med LCs, but I prefer, in fact my entire philosophy up til the revelation that there was a super fast class of giant ship, was that I should use the range advantage I had.

Now I'll say it again. If I build ships that size and arm them with Med LCs, and you use the correct movement, he'll get the first strike every time. Med LCs are half the minerals cost yes but take a look at vorlon costs. We're heavy on the Organics (which makes the Med LC equal in cost).

That means every battle is a warp point defense for him. You can't use the true weapon ranges and half movement for your sims. That's been my whole issuse; it should take a turn to close to weapons range.

Now if I give them larger guns, there's a chance I can get a few shots at range but no more than one turn worth, and at such damage the he'll simply move in and do far more damage. But those few shots are better than simply giving him the first shot and getting killed.

The other thing you really aren't accounting for is that med LCs are a terrible choice against every correct speed ship in the game. Why on earth would I want to get that close when I don't have to, crazy super fast baseships aside?

And let's not forget those things fire every turn.

I could have built, or I could build a fleet to counter Arthur's, but I shouldn't have to. Look at the class of ship immediately below it. Is it as fast? No. You know damn well baseships are not supposed to be that fast. It's a bug and like I said if you don't think it is well there's nothing more to say. Just for kicks I've emailed the creator. Maybe you're right and it is intentional. Either way we'll know soon enough.

Lastly there's no way I can compete with Tux's upkeep. He's spent 90 turns with a quarter of the map. I can't even colonise worth a damn, let alone be fortunate enough to get a massive chunk of the galaxy to myself.

So yeah I can sit on my home planets and spend the next 90 turns making a doom fleet. Hell why not?

[brianeyci]

All YR can create baseships. If you want to survive Tuxedo's alpha strike, you need around 4.2k worth of heavy armor on your battleship, not that hard to do. If you have maximum armor that's 392 kT worth of heavy armor plating. You could optimize your ships to defeat his. The point is you made many game decisions that have nothing to do with the bug that had a lot more to do with why you're behind Tuxedo.

Honestly the intent doesn't matter (although I think it's possible that he wanted a larger ship to be faster, the research to go from super dreadnaught to baseship is enormous). It matters whether it's still playable with the 24 move point baseships. I say it's still playable, because I can field a fleet that if it slightly outnumbers Tuxedo I can win.

If I can do it the Vorlons can or could have. You could spend 90 turns and build a doom fleet your choice (hey it's what I did I spent 20 turns in the beginning of the game making a doom fleet of destroyers only to gift it to Uraniun lol), but I doubt you will be safe that long because everybody has jump gate openers so good luck .

Anyway the reason I don't really care if it's a bug or not is cause it's not a competitive game. I could have killed a lot of people by now but I didn't. I guess I don't really care whether it is a bug or not or whether Tuxedo uses it because I don't care about game mechanics.

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I doubt the baseship and heavy baseship movement was intentional, but that doesn't change the situation in my view. Capcom didn't intentionally make Guile the best fighter in the original version of Street Fighter 2 (you can tell because they corrected their mistake in the Championship Edition), but it's hardly an "exploit" to use Guile. He's the best fighter, so you use him. It doesn't matter whether he was intended to be as good as he is. You just take the situation as it is and pick the best package. This is not at all analgous to an explot, which is taking advantage of limitations in a game's code to gain an unfair advantage.

In any case, Kojiro is right about the upkeep. The 24 movement points aren't my secret to success, the resource miners are. I have the luxury of deploying resource miners on every asteroid and uncolonized planet (which is basically all of them, I realized early on that resource mining was better than colonization in this mod), and since I have a large territory that's easy to blockade off from everyone else, I don't have to worry about someone blasting my miners and wrecking my economy (especially now that those pesky Minbari ships are dust). I feel confident in telling everyone this now, since I know that Nephtys has already figured this out. I didn't want to spill the beans before because her position in space is similar to mine and I didn't want her to do what I'm doing.

[Kojiro]

Guile is a bad example. He was rather broken. Using him as he wasn't intended is in my opinion cheating. The distinction is between balance and actual code errors. Our baseship issue isn't one of balance, it's one of error.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Nice dodge, but I wasn't talking about the exploits possible with him, but rather the fact that his attacks did more damage at longer range than everyone else's. He was badly designed, and it was clear someone plugged in the wrong numbers, yet it's hardly an "exploit" to use him.

Anyway, base ships aren't even the best ships, even with the bugged movement, so I'm not so why it's such a contentious issue. I'd still be mopping the floor with people even with 10 movement, because it's the number of ships that nobody can match, not the quality.

[Kojiro]

Trading ships for analysis to get around the game setting is no better than hacking the game file to win, in my view.

But it's allowed by the game. You seem to think that using Guile, even when you know he's flawed isn't an exploit simply because he's there to be used.

Please explain to me why trading ships for tech is in your opinion cheating but using Guile isn't (considering both are in closed systems with variables)? Either way you're achieving an effect beyond the scope of those who set the 'rules' and are acting against the intent of those that set said rules.

I wasn't trying to dodge, just pointing out that Guile's programmer wasn't top notch. That said, I stand by my view that using him as other than intended is cheating, or at worst extremely bad sportsmanship.

[brianeyci]

In my opinion I don't care much for tech trading, but if it's possible by game mechanics I don't raise a stink, mostly because it takes time out of the game to coordinate it and if someone wants to do it I don't care. In competitive games everybody tech trades, finds a partner who has an opposite colony type and trades for it to get 500k boost. It's annoying and gamey, but so are a dozen other things like opening warp points and going through right away, moving off a planet and going back on to load troops for a "chain" attack to take over several planets at once, using small transports as colony ships to disguise them in stock, so on.

And I have to honestly say that baseships aren't the best ships even with the bugged movement. If I had 1 reload 600 damage weapons I could win with my heavy baseships against Tux's baseships nearly all the time. A properly made heavy baseship can cream a baseship because there's room for an extra 5.3k worth of armor or weapons. Planet killers could slap on another 30k worth of armor (they'll get hit all the time though so that might make up for it not sure).

Brian

[brianeyci]

Defel's dead. At least I think he's dead.

Brian

[MKSheppard]

Have you guys thought about modifying the maintenance cost per ship?

Stock SEIV has it set at 25% the build cost you have to pay yearly; I did some calculations based upon CG-47 Ticonderoga's cost $2 billion and it's yearly operational cost $20~ million; and set my modded version of SEIV's maintenance to 3% (to make maintenance reduction thingys worht it).

The Game is much more cool now; you can have larger fleets now.

[brianeyci]

Babylon 5 modification already has 80, 75, 55, 65 percent maintainence reduction depending on whether it's a civilian, corporate, military etc., ship. Star Trek modification doesn't have it though. Neph's working on a new modification and she'll probably include maintainence reduction components.

I'd be interested in seeing how good you are Shep, given that you are the armchair general .

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Trading ships for analysis to get around the game setting is no better than hacking the game file to win, in my view.

But it's allowed by the game. You seem to think that using Guile, even when you know he's flawed isn't an exploit simply because he's there to be used.

Using him as a normal fighter, yes. You keep trying to change the subject to using him and taking advantage of the exploits you linked to, but I've said already that those weren't what I was talking about. He has longer ranged, higher damaged attacks than the other fighters. When they came out with Championsihp Edition, they toned him down, especially his blade kick and strong sweep. But before CE came out, it was not an exploit to use him, even if he was better, and even if they didn't intend him to be that good. He was simply one of the choices available to the player.

Please explain to me why trading ships for tech is in your opinion cheating but using Guile isn't (considering both are in closed systems with variables)? Either way you're achieving an effect beyond the scope of those who set the 'rules' and are acting against the intent of those that set said rules.

Wrong. Exchanging ships to trade tech in a game where trading tech is disallowed is clearly an exploit, I think we can all agree on that. Using a badly designed ship size, even if the bad design was unintentional, for its intended purpose of mounting components to fill a variety of roles in a navy is clearly not an exploit, especially when that ship size isn't even the best option for most people.

It all comes down to magnitude. If there's a ship that should be slower than it is, but it's not completely overpowering, then you shrug your shoulders and get on with the game. If we were talking about a massive mount that divded weapon size and cost by 4 instead of multiplying, I'd agree that it's too broken to use, but I simply cannot understand the volume of words that are flying back and forth over something so minor. To be perfectly clear, there is not one battle that's been fought so far that would have turned out differently if my ships had been slower. The first fight that involved large numbers of Vorlon escorts would have been the same, since their weapons only do ~200 damage and another free shot wouldn't have meant much. The fight against the Dilgar fleet was a warp point defense scenario, where movement is completely irrelevant. The problem that's facing you right now is not that my ships have 24 movement, it's that there's a hundred of them, and unless you want to claim that resource miners and having a large territory are exploits, too, I really don't know why we're still arguing.

[Nephtys]

Shep should play with us. I can use my evil ways to destroy him then. EEEEEVIIIIIIL!

http://seiv.pbw.cc/Download/filelib/1345/Apr17.zip

that's the current Alpha. Trying to get more changes done. It plays like a hybrid of Adamant and ST at least in ship design.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Babylon 5 modification already has 80, 75, 55, 65 percent maintainence reduction depending on whether it's a civilian, corporate, military etc., ship. Star Trek modification doesn't have it though. Neph's working on a new modification and she'll probably include maintainence reduction components.

I'd be interested in seeing how good you are Shep, given that you are the armchair general .

Brian

Speaking of mods, if we're ever going to have another B5 game, we really need to fix this mod. I don't think it would necessarily be that hard or time consuming to do as long as we decide beforehand what really needs fixing and what we can live with.

First of all, the extremely slow pace has got to go. It's just another case of mod authors including their favorite thing into a mod where it doesn't necessarily fit. I say that build rates should be reset back to a default of 2,000 for starters.

Secondly, the weapons are just a box of confetti with no organization whatsoever. There doesn't even need to be half that many weapons in the game in the first place, as I fail to see the need to include every weapon that's ever been seen in the show. Second, there needs to be a plan regarding them, a template. For instance, say that light weapons are a certain size and damage by default, then decide that medium weapons are twice the size and 1.5 times the damage, with 1.25 times the range (for instance, those are just example numbers), then do the heavy weapons from there, so that every weapon's stats are related to the template, and if there's a balance issue, it's very easy to figure out what went wrong and fix it across the board instead of locally. Use of a spreadsheet here would help immeasurably.

Third, set the cost of all useless techs to 1. We could re-do the whole tech tree into something better and more sensible, but that's a lot of work for very little gain. This, on the other hand, is easy.

Fourth, import the ship sizes from Adamant mod. The names are better, the progression is better, everything about it is better.

Fifth, antimatter and gravitic engines should not be more expensive than fusion, since right now it's optimal to use all fusion and then 1 prototype gravitic stuck on the end for the bonuses. This makes no logical sense. Similarly, cost of reactors should not increase with the tech level, and they should not jump dramatically when you go to massive size reactors, which are currently useless because they're too expensive. Apparently the authors have never heard of economies of scale.

Sixth, the range formulas have clearly been monkeyed with, because you might notice that a ship with no combat sensors can hit escorts with ECM at close to max range, thus making the entire ECM tech tree only useful for the multiplex. Whatever was done here should be undone.

Last, jump gates should grant 1 extra move point so they can actually be used.

If all of this was done, I'd say we'd be looking at a pretty decent mod.

[brianeyci]

Shep should play with us. I can use my evil ways to destroy him then. EEEEEVIIIIIIL!

http://seiv.pbw.cc/Download/filelib/1345/Apr17.zip

that's the current Alpha. Trying to get more changes done. It plays like a hybrid of Adamant and ST at least in ship design.

I'm looking at it again and it doesn't work queen of the underworld. The components.txt is fine but the racialtraits.txt doesn't seem to be yours, it has "Klingon, Romulan,..." etc, is that right?

Brian

[brianeyci]

Honestly starting from scratch is so much better, like Neph is. As soon as my exams are done I'll spend a weekend putting together a modification, but my idea is for components that cost only one type of resource, two types or three types. The game is played with gifting and trading disabled. Then, you could make resource freighters to send to opponent's homeworlds and they can scrap for their kind of resource. The best components would be made up of all three resources, probably at least 100% better to make up for the hassle of trading ships. The freighters themselves will have cloak and there will be a special raider race that can see through it from the beginning and attack frieighters, otherwise nobody can see them.

It would probably encourage power blocs of threes, maybe fours if you add in the raider race. If 100% better components isn't enough to encourage diplomacy, I'll make it 200% or 300%. Basically as soon as you see someone with an opposite resource you don't have, if he isn't already allied it'll be a losing battle to fight him compared to the rest of the galaxy since you'll both lose out.

Brian

[Nephtys]

I haven't touched racials or facilities yet. Just components. All of the tech has been shifted to use 'general' trees and I'm removing useless stuff.

The idea in this mod is: The various types of weapons all have uses, and nothing is useless. they're all just useful vs different defenses an opponent may have. Costs and fluff info isn't finished yet, but I hope the engine model works fairly.

Edit: It SHOULD run. It runs fine for me and I just altered a few AI files and the files in that subdirectory I zipped.

[brianeyci]

Well it looks pretty but there's only resource ship for one . Can't sim yet.

It works, I was just thrown off by the Star Trek stuff appearing when I created a race. But I only have resource ship, which tech area do I need to select, general race?

Brian

[Nephtys]

Well it looks pretty but there's only resource ship for one . Can't sim yet.

Brian

Oh. Oops. Select general race as your trait. That's the only one that works for shipclasses so far.

[brianeyci]

Cool.

Beam cannon's maximum damage is 69. Lol.

Ionic pulse missile needs a different picture, doesn't mesh with the other realistic pictures you're using. And I like the big button self destruct lol.

Brian

[Nephtys]

Cool.

Beam cannon's maximum damage is 69. Lol.

Ionic pulse missile needs a different picture, doesn't mesh with the other realistic pictures you're using. And I like the big button self destruct lol.

Brian

Things with no picture are not yet done. That includes most 'special' weapons. Hrm. My problem is, are the components too hard to tell apart?

[brianeyci]

Some of them are. You could make it modification specific and include a pictures folder in your mod I think, and add backgrounds to the weapons with paint's fill . Quick and easy and they still look good but with snazzy colours.

I can't find a shield generator. I can make a 40 move point boarding ship that could get through unless someone put interceptor turrets on.

There's a 10 limit on armor so for the dreadnaught I basically put on 10 armors and 40 weapons. The battles are really lopsided.

Brian

[Nephtys]

I'll probably make armors unlimited except special armors. There are no shield generators aside from ablative armor, and PD guns.