Um, yeah.

First off, which carrier are you trying to change? The frigate ones, or the cap ship ones?

If the capship ones, remember that the number of fighters changes with the ships level, and is called "command points" or something to that effect (I did some research). So you aren't just changing a "2" to a "4", your changing the delta value as well (how many does it gain per level, when less than 0 it effectively becomes how many levels per squad).

Cheating to test this sort of thing is pretty easy. Look in PlayerTech.entity, under the "galaxyGeneratorInfo" section. This defines the ships you start with at your homeworld. "kingCapitalShipDefName" is, of course, for your Kol flagship, and changing this to specify a carrier is easy. Also, "frigateDefNames" defines the members of the group of starting ships you get whether flagships are enabled or disabled. Despite the word "frigate" in the name, you can put capital ships here, too. For testing, I have one of every kind of ship listed here, so I can just load up a new game and test away.

Can anyone say WING COMMANDER MOD!

It has taken you more effort to be a jerk than it would have to do nothing. Why on Earth would you use your energy in that manner?

Adding an ungodly amount of fighters/bombers will make (most) frigates and cruisers much less effective. However, it would put quite an interesting spin on the game.
Edit:
I would love to see some screenshots of the ensuing madness.

I know, but I figured that joke was obvious enough to not need them. Apparently I was wrong.



I accept. No hard feelings

you too buddy!

pffffff with all the things the devs say about the Iron Engine, I am expecting it to make me those waffles!

God I love waffles....

I'd say "oh, just dive right in, this code is _very easy_ to change." But then so is the GalCiv2 code, so ...

What I will say is: this code is easy to change, just make sure that you back everything up before you mess with it. Seriously, copy your entire "gameinfo" folder onto your desktop before you do anything. That should keep you from messing up too badly...

Bah, you pansies.

Ok. Some messing around indicated that I could:

Edit CAPITALSHIP_TECHCARRIER and set their command points start value to 8, and their incremental value to 2.

Then I went to PlayerTech and set as kingCapitalShipDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHCARRIER"

That gave me a starting carrier w/12 odd fighter slots. Bah. I can do worse.

So I also looked up FrigateTechCarrier and gave the cruisers a good 4 command points each.

Then I looked up FighterTechBomber and FighterTechCombat and was disappointed that I couldn't do anything really abusive.

Then I noticed SquadTechBomber and SquadTechCombat. And what do we have here? A "baseMaxNumFighters" value? Lets just tweak that from 5 to 20. Oh, and so I don't have to wait around all day, lets drop their construction time from 20 to 2.

The result can be seen in the screen shot below. This is all with the starting carrier only, mind you. It was actually tricky to take a decent screen shot that managed to capture all the fighters. This one has about half of them in the shot.

Linked for size.

The unfortunate thing is that right now the fighter/bomber combat AI has them beeline straight at their targets and a tightly packed mass of a hundred or so fighters makes for a pretty crappy screen shot. Everything they point at just explodes in a hail of missiles half a second later and it makes the combat pretty dull. I may play around with the balance. Looking at the text files suggests one could do some really abusive things with flak cannons.

EDIT: Hot damn I suck at imageshack. Uh.... images in a second.

Heh, I just figured that out. I kept trying every variant of BB code I could and never thought to look for an "insert image" button. Sigh....

Since I can no longer edit my original post (what, twenty edits is too many?), the other image I took was this one:

Linked for size

ok this is a stupid question but how did u guys get the gray box on the left side of the screen to disappear?