Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

Idea for a "slightly more epic" mod

So, I was thinking... well, I have been thinking for a while... I have been doing a lot of thinking at different points in time, and whatever...

And I came up with a few ideas that together, might make the game a bit more... epic? Basically... I wanted to try to make each unit (with 100+ people on board) slightly more important... slightly harder to kill, and slightly more painful to lose.

Maybe a bit more balanced too.

So...

Ideas:

1. Mess with the fleet supply.

a. double the fleet supply of every ship.

b. increase the starting fleet supply from 100 to 200

2. Mess with the ships

a. make every ship a capital ship... no new abilities, exact same ships, but they level up (gaining hp, armor, shield, antimatter regen, and all that good stuff) and take up a capital ship slot.

b. mess with the capital ship limit... at tier 1 it should be around like 10-14ish, at tier 8, it should be 500 (enough for 2000 fleet supply of scouts)

basically here... the capital ship limit is now the number of ships limit, and the fleet supply limit is the quality of ships limit... so basically for Tec, if you want your lrm and flack spam you have to pay more to upgrade your ship limit than if you invested in carriers and heavy cruisers... it would also make planet bombers and anti-structure frigs a bit more appetizing due to their large fleet supply cost, but low total ship limit cost... and you might actually have reason to build a third or 4th (real) capital ship.... and best of all it makes scout spam hurt. (Sorry Amish)

c. switch illums and disciples... switch their armor and damage type values, and ranges and put the disciple where the illum was on the tech tree, and so forth.

Basically here... I want the 4 fleet supply unit to be the lrm and the 6 supply unit to be the lf... so that lrm spam is discouraged, because you would be hitting the capital ship limit faster...

3. mess with the shield mitigation

the biggest thing that kills ships is the shield mitigation system... if you’re doing 12.5 dmg or 125 dmg, the shield mitigation goes straight up to the max... basically... instead of a linear shield mitigation system... I want a system where low damage doesn’t raise it much, while higher damage raises it a lot... something where on a graph of damage dealt vs. damage taken, the line looks like the function of y = sqrt(x), where x is the raw damage taken and y is the damage dealt to the ship.... BASICLY.... I want a system where focus firing is discouraged. (now... the function of the sqrt(x) is WAAAAY too harsh... 100 dps would be reduced to 10 dps... something closer to y = x^(3/4) or y = x^(4/5) would be better... at less than about 100 dps the damage dealt to the ship would actually be HIGHER, (ish) but as the focus fire increases, things take more damage slowly...

this would of course be hard to do, because you have to mess with what the shield mitigation of the cap ships is vs. non-cap ships... and what do the advent shield mitigation bonus mean.. And so forth.

SO...

Thoughts, ideas, comments? I really think a non-linear shield mitigation system needs to be in the normal game... not just a mod... so that cap ships don’t pop so fast... are some of these things even possible? Did I miss something stupid?

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IF this was possible, it would be cool, but i think that only the cap ship factory can make cap ships, and as such you are limited in the number of types. (i may be wrong here though.)

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

well, what exactly controls if a unit is labled a capital ship or not?

or more importantly what causes a unit to take up a capital ship slot? cause thats all i need (and turn haslevels to true)

or maybe haslevels is the thing that makes it take up a slot...?

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capital ship and frigate entities are actually two different 'file' types. Both are .entity files. Both have an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT structure from each other.

hasLevels is used in reference to, if a ship is spawned, it gets better with the leveling of the ability.

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

well... what if this:

capitalShipInfo

Page:0

count 5

blablabla

frigateInfo

Page:0

count 6

blabalbal

Page:1

count 5

blablabla

NotOnPage

count 3

blablabla

is changed to:

capitalShipInfo

Page:0

count 5

blablabla

Page:1

count 6

blabalbal

Page:2

count 5

blablabla

frigateInfo

NotOnPage

count 3

blablabla

and reformat all the frigs to the capital ship format?

(i dont know, i am not a modder... i am an idiot with ideas... but if you have ideas on how to make my ideas work, that would be awsome)

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if that worked i don't think anybody would have had objections

unfortunately it doesn't

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

well, maybe thats not possible... what about messing with shield mitigation?

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how about make the capital ship REALLY POWERFUL

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Pbhead,

reply 6

well, maybe thats not possible... what about messing with shield mitigation?

do be careful with shield mitigation, it is a straight across cut in damage, in others words if you get 100% shield mitigation then you will have no damage reaching the ship, In the upper 90% due to shield recharge rates you would have so little damage coming through that the shields would recharge too fast. We on the Distant Stars Mod found this out. The Advent (which have research for shield mitigation) would become invincible at end game. I once had 3750 pts (we modified the supply) of ships pounding on one Advent Capital ship for over 20 minutes before it was destroyed (it had 98% shield mitigation). Upon more testing, where I played Advent, I took one lvl 10 fully upgraded Radiance Battleship into the pirate base (our pirate bases are not for the faint of heart, they have caps and a Vasari Starbase) and wiped out the base without losing a single shield point. I had reached shield mitigation of 102%.

Just some friendly advice on the shield mitigation

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Shunmaha,

reply 7

how about make the capital ship REALLY POWERFUL

Check out Distant Stars Mod for those babies

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

awsome... hehe.. but my idea means that the shield mitigation present would be... different... from the current system... the "max" shield mitigation would change depending on how much dps the ship was taking... so... playing with a few random numbers...

(note, these numbers are totally picked from the sky and mean nothing, so just cause i didnt do any balancing and game theory and so forth... its just an idea)

if the function between damage absorbed (y) and raw damge done (x) is y = x^.8...

at 100 raw dps... the ship would recieve... 40 dps... a displayed shield mitigation of 60%

cute little chart:

x y displayed shield mitigation

100 39.8 60.2%

200 69.3 65.3%

300 95.9 68.0%

400 120.7 69.8%

500 144.3 71.1%

750 199.5 73.4%

1000 251.1 74.8%

that seems like a nice curve for frigs... now for capital ships (oh, wait, thats everybody, right... heh.)

could use y = x^(.8-.005*level)... and for advent shield techs...

herm...

y = x^(.8-.005*level-.005*"shield mitigation increase"(from culture/research)

so... a level one (game computes as level 0 iirc?) something would take...

100^(.8-0-0) = 39.8 (60.2% displayed mitigation) (LOWER than current!)(for caps at least)

1000^(.8-0-0) = 251 (74.8% mitigation)

a level ten...

100^(.8-.045-0) = 32.4 (67.6% mitigation) (about what a current level 10 cap ship gets for mitigation)

1000^(.8-.045-0) = 184 (81.6% mitigation)

a level ten advent in its own culture with max research...

100^(.8-.045-.05) = 25.7 (74.3% mitigation) (slightly less mitigation than a current level 10 advent gets)

1000^(.8-.045-.05) = 130.3 (87.0% mitigation) (so... taking about 1/2 the damage of a narb ship... not too broken?)

sooo all that ^^^ means, is that in my own little reality... at less than 100 raw dps, the shield mitigation would be LOWER than current values... (currently at 12.5 dps and up its all the same... so between 12.5 dps and 100 dps, your getting your doing more damage per damage done) and at >100 dps the shield mitigation would slowly creep higher than current mitigation... so dividing up your fire power between a few targets just might be better than focusing on one target.

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One way of looking at your shield mitigation, might be how i think Kiedjor did it in the Epic Mod, basically, lower level caps, were at normal hull and shield, upper level caps, which were enhanced versions of the others were at three times the hull, shield, with all the frigates lower than they are now, by quite a bit.

Lower frigates on page one, mostly had hull and shields reduced to like 35-45 and 1 or 2 pts armor as well as lowering their damage output possibly by as much as a third or half in some cases, which meant they could only be a force to be reckoned with in Very Large Numbers and for a Short Time.

Caps largely could ignore the lower frigates which were probably more distraction on the battlefield than anything, giving the enemy more targets to target and not focus fire on a smaller group. The mid-level frigates had their shields and hull decreased as well, though their damage output was raised, so they were more of a threat, both to caps and to the lower level enemy frigates, but not for extended amounts of time. A single cap could take them out with fairly hard fire over a shorter amount of time, preventing as you say the tendency to spam LRF and Illums, which although still powerful, now were more fragile.

But in this way, by adjusting shields and hull and damage for the frigates and capitals, you have lower level frigates popping everywhere except in large large numbers and the mid level frigates with hard firepower, but not lasting as long, and not getting spammed as much, a good way to keep a balance, at least in Kiedjor's mod, was to adjust costs, so that the LRF's and Illums which were more deadly anyway, were more expensive, either in more supply points or in costs.

The idea of converting all ships to caps is not a bad idea, but yes the numbers in research would have to be changed. The fleet supply could be left where it is, or raised slightly, so as you say, the supply becomes a determining factor in how many ships we have and which ones we choose. Good idea!!

Anyway, just wanted to add what i thought was an interesting way that Kiedjor looked at balancing some of the frigate / capitalship battles with what you said about adjusting values to get a capital to really be a capital.

Take care and if you have a chance do a search for Kiedjor's Epic Mod, he also is putting a Entrenchment Mod call Unknown Darkness, which uses the same ideas. Very Cool!!!

-Teal

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i like the idea of everything being a capital ship. make the fleet supply less in my opinion. less ships means ship choice is more important. make bomber strike craft much more powerful.

maybe give at least one unique ability to every new cap ship. perhaps, if choices are the key to epicness, try to see if its possible to fork the research tree. so like the player has a choice between two researches (which may or may not lead to other researches) and once theyve chosen one, the other is greyed out and unselectable.

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Nice idea, i like that, then we can go back in the next game and try something else, for different results. Very cool!!!

Thank you!!!

-Teal

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

very intresting, thanks for the input, and i will have to check out that mod.

but...still, how much can we mess with the shield mitigation... I know we can turn it off... i know we can change its value, but can we change the formula that calculates it?

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Hmmmm...... dont know, you would have to ask the devs, or as a general question out in the forums, like this, only make a post with that question as the header. It may be in a file, like galaxydef, or the gameplay.constants, im not sure. But im sure somone knows.

-Teal

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You can turn it off by messing with gameplay.constants. Someone suggested making it negative, but that doesn't seem to work, which is a shame.

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my only problem would be focus firing. as it makes sense that more ships shooting your one ship means its going to die. Other then that Id really like to see this kindof mod.

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Isn't focus firing an option in the entity files?

Thought it was, if so, then de-coupling it, would mean perhaps longer battles? Or perhaps without focus firing it may mean a chance for smaller fleets to NOT necessarily be wiped out by larger fleets? Questions because i dont know yet. Would be interesting to mod it and see what happens.

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Whether weapons prefer to focus fire is an option, I believe.

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