Have been playing a lot of the balance mods the last few days, very very interesting, it looks like we are headed in the right direction. 
I would love to see the community rally behind one or all of them, they seem well thought out, and put together well, and they do change the game into a more evenly handed way.
But today i thought i would take a break from that and get back to a little modding of my own. I took a clean copy of Entrenchment folders and have wanted to create a mini races mini mod, basically a smaller set of ships and perhaps one capital with lowered supply points. Something perhaps along the lines of Nexus, where only a handful of ships actually battled it out. That is still in work, i was hoping i could put it together rather quickly, but have run into mini dumps, so some files i am working with, perhaps the 1.17 MaxCapitalShips and the MaxShipSlots files are doing me in, I have run them in the past in 1.03 mods, so i am doing something wrong and just need to go slow and double check myself.
Other than that, i have been playing the 'Forever War' mod and have run across some interesting behaviour that I didnt realize was there. Basically, my ships are running above and below the planet alot, off the horizontal plane, they move from one side of the planet to the other that way, and when chasing bad guys, they chase them out of the well and into open space. Not only that, but one of my jumping scouts moved out of the well and into open space to another planet to jump to the next!! I mean at gravity well speeds, what i suppose you could call sub-space speeds, because it certainly isnt phase jumping yet, all the way to another planet!! Haha, this is marvelous!!! It feels like real open space!! Well, i mean in game, you know? But it is so cool!! I am assuming of course this is coming as a unexpected side effect of the particular sizes that i made the planets and stars when i resized them for my XLarge Planets mod, and all i did there was to try to get them as large as i could without having the gravity wells so big that the frame rate of the game killed it, you know? Which is what happened to me the last time i tried a large planet mod.
This time i tried to be a little more civilized, and instead of going for 20 times the size on planets and stars, i broke it out as 4 times larger for planets and 10 times larger for stars. And adjusted the gravity well sizes manually by hand up through the different levels til i could get something that worked.
The wells themselves are much smaller than a normal well, but then again, they are functional, they dont give me grids when i show the grid and they dont kill the frame rate. So im happy. But i didnt expect the wonderful side effect of having open space travel and over and under movement by the ships so very often.
It is wonderful. I have a couple of screen shots but havent got them put up on filefront yet, but will as soon as i can. And wanted just to let everyone know. If you are into that sort of thing, or just want to try it out, let me know and i can take the ultimate invulnerable ability out, so it is stock with just the ships and the XL Planets. That way it may play more to your liking. With the added fun of over and under well movement and open space battles and well... i dont know if i can call it a jump if a ship moves to the next planet out to make a jump. But its cool!!
Take care and keep modding!!!
-Teal
