These look very interesting. Though I'll just note a few things; one is that while mines can have antimatter, shields, and hull, they cannot have weapons (their explosion/detonation is via ability) and two, mines can move/have speed. I'm not entirely sure how your fleet logistics slots thing will work, as fleet slots = ship slots.

As for the mines that shoot stuff, there's two ways that this can be achieved. One is by giving the mine an ability that does so, like the TEC's Railgun, and another is to instead of creating the mines as spacemine entities, is to make them ability-deployed combat turrets (aka. frigates which take up no ship slots). As combat turrets can have abilities, they can also act as mines, set to detonate when mines do or after taking a certain amount of damage.

I'll be watching your progress on this, and good luck!

Either the Advent or Vasari should have vertigo/nano jammer mines. Would be a fairly cheap mine that reduces the rate of fire significantly or disables weapons all together (actually all three factions could have this effect if needed) for a while.

I don't really see the point of a different Grazer and Xaser, just stick it on one mine and effect both targets (with extra effects for one if need be).

Sinperium, During all your mine fixing and such, if you wanna reduce a bit of lag with the empire display spam you cna go into your diplomacy.user and edit the MaxEmpireWindowStackSize 10 to 50 or so, 4 stacks of 50 vs 20 stacks of 10 for mines lol

that aside, I like your ideas =3 and I thought maybe something like the TEC scout and Advent scout abilities could be one direction to pull from for the ones shooting out things. Also along those lines I have an idea for a cluster mine idea, like cluster missiles, one mine kinda "poofs" leaving about 10 or so smaller mines to hit 10 consecutive times vs 1 hit, you could incorporate this into homing mines or maybe use something like that to deploy your mine types(in the advent's case, give the homing mine strike craft unit more abilities besides the one and it's big empty option slots that are ripe to fill) and the Vasari mine layer has plenty of room itself and you could turn it into something like the advent anima controller and give the vasari a "strike craft" like mine unit too, would also save time with the mine-layers instead of them doing "auto-return" to the point they decoded to lay a mine from. As for TEC, maybe replace the mines themselves with some sort of unit the assemblers could build that then, in turn does it's one time thing of building mines here there or wherever, unable to phase jump, unable to attack would keep it within the TEC's bounds for minelaying as well and wow I typed alot more than I thought i was going to, hope you pick or pull any ideas form this you fancy.

P.S. that's alotta run ons that I aint fixin! Ya hear!? lol

lol, I never intended to make a wall!! anyway that explode on creation thing does seem like a possible use with one of the methods i stuck in that wall. As far as building the different types of mines I kinda like my idea about making the mines into strike craft/unit type things built from their original vessels and the built unit takes it from there

I've tried inserting varying ship values into varying positions in varying mine entities.  I've got one that black screens the game for more than an hour, another that minidumps and some that seem to do nothing.

From what I can see, Mines most resemble "squad" entities (strike craft).

I can easily make self destructing frigates by giving them the mine detonate ability but they blow up on impact--including with shots fired at them.  You can make them manually triggerable so they get close enough to kamikaze--kinda fun but these aren't the mines I am looking for

So on today with more experiments.

Well I am interested to see how this turns out...

Unfortunately the AI won't make use of any of this, but should be great for LAN games where people are willing to play the same mod...keep up the good work!  I like some of these ideas, curious to see how they pan out...

Is there any way to fix the Advent AI's stupidity in the way it uses its Aeria Drone Hosts in Entrenchment and Diplomacy, because that would fix some things right there?

Ok...here's the point I am at...I have the "black mine" effects working--just not connected and synchronized.

What happens now is the mine special ability effect is always on with the mine--whether detonating or not.  The mine detonates as normal (actually at the moment I have a 10 second delay) and the ability expires with the mine.I'm futzing around changing values and getting a lot of interesting results but not the ones I want. 

What I need is:

• Enemy ship reaches mine explosive detonation range
• Then the "black mine" attraction and damage buffs trigger and run for  30 seconds
• At the end of 30 seconds, the mine detonates for explosive damage and all buffs are finished.

I'm futzing around changing values and getting a lot of interesting results but not the ones I want. Here's a pastebin link of all the different file contents if anyone wants to contribute. I'm not sure at this point what needs to be connected to what as there are about 8 entities involved overall.  I get conflicting an incomplete results with my poor efforts so far.

It is pretty spectacular watching an entire mega-size pirate fleet turn to atoms but I need to reign it in a little.  If I can "solve" this one then I have something to study and get an example from as well.  It will also allow me a better playtest so I can tune the attraction force and damage.

Thanks in advance.

Yeah--I'm aware of the passive always on at present.  What I have posted is the black hole effects I am using to spring off from--which doesn't really clarify.

So to be more clear, the idea is that if a ship passes near the mine (in detonation range) it doesn't immediately detonate but has a time dealy of around 30 seconds.  When the time-delay count begins, the gravity effects would also turn on and for 30 seconds draw ships in gravity range towards the detonation center.  At the end of thirty seconds it will explode and deal area damage.

The reason the first trigger happens in the smaller detonation area is that I didn't want a barely in-range, outlying ship of a passing fleet to trigger it and only pull  that ship--the idea is to damage a fleet with this.  My other approach (not tried) is to cast the gravity effect onto a ship within a single trigger range and have that ship be the center of detonation.  It would loose all movement and abilities and collapse into a small black hole, sucking nearby fleet members into its dying explosion.

I may or may not leave in the area damage currently there or else I will use it for other things (nanite mines).

Back to the lab.

That's rather hard to do because strikecraft can only really have passive abilities. And even those don't quite work as you'd expect. For those unique ships you'd probably be better off making frigates that are deployed via ability that have fighter movement enabled. I'm pretty sure planet bombing strikecraft are impossible.

Also just curious but are you using custom models? The Vanilla strikecraft would look kind of odd with 360 firing arcs lol.

You could just give the ability to the carriers. Won't work for carrier caps but that's probably a good thing since they are already very good units anyways.

Well if you didn't mess with the model at all (not even to change the weapon point to fire all direction, which can be done in notepad), you won't see it fire period. The damage will still apply but it will only show the particle when firing in a direction with a valid weapon point. If you check the Dev log it will tell you which entities have this problem. Honestly I hope you can make it work, I rather like the gunship idea.

FYI another stupid fighter restriction is that they cannot apply buffs to themselves.

"specialty" craft have my interest raised =3  can I expect some unmanned kamakazi type things? Something like Guided missile drones, 1 per squadron dealing X dmg to whatever target it/you desire? an ability with "deathuponuse" or some such? =3 would give something of a bombardment type weapon towards fleets/structures 14 fighter spots = 14 missiles flying at once. give then 0 def, 1hp and a fighter's speed? you might be able to use the Orgonev's missiles in a scaled down size for the model, make it all match. and alter it's dmg by the hp&speed to balance it out =3

I read all this on my phone while waiting for my second class today and all this filled my head =3 I've been mulling it around trying to figure out the best way to get it out there, alas I have 0 ability and even less time(damn home work) so i give you this idea Sin, though it was yours to begin with I just added something to it x.x

Yep--there are three ways I know off to make suicide bombers (which I have for the Advent) and I'm trying them out.

One is Self Destruct from the TEC starbase, another is the Advent's Martyr and the final is Mine Detonate.  The mine function is not practical for strike craft but is for frigates where it can be toggled when ready--otherwise the ships blow up as soon as a shot hits them.  I am trying a mine approach but its complicated and I don't know if it will work for sure.

I'm working on trying to coax the game into letting me  colonize and capture neutrals as well as planet bomb but it has to be an area effect and I am still futzing with how to make it work.

I'm really liking the gunships and bombers--very striking how they are playing out.  Gunships veer far out in the grav well then swoop in at very high speed with rapid fire at close range.  The bombers slowly turn and roll and almost collide with their targets--pulling out at the last split second and hitting them with a salvo of a half-dozen shots.  The damage seems about right.  It lets hangar defenses have enough punch to defend a system.  Bombers and gunships take longer to rebuild when destroyed but have more hit points.  Bombers take the longest but have a base of 1000 hull and heavier armor vs. anti-air fire.  They have less speed than many of their targets but are quite effective hitting a static line of ships or ones that are changing direction and have slowed.  Very WWII tactic flavored.