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Tkins

Join Date 10/2008

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Ideas for A Complete Conversion Mod

Questions regarding different ideas for a new mod.

The topic has changed considerably from the original post so I'm giving a little update (I've left the original post below for anyone interested in how the discussion arose).

This thread discusses different ideas and possibilities for an upcoming mod I'd like to create. As time goes by I'll update it with more details but here is the main overview:

The Plot

The first three are the New Earth Order, The First Republic of Earth and the Liberatis. All three factions are fighting over Earth. The Republic was the original global government that set out to colonize worlds as a united race. Recently a Civil war broke out between the ex general, now self proclaimed Empress and the Republic. Since the Republic had lived in relative peace, the sudden attacks by the Empress were quite successful in overwhelming the remanants fo the Republic. Due to a coincidence of events, The Empress fell near fatally ill and the Republic managed to sign a peace agreement.

The Liberatis are a rebels faction who disagreed with this peace agreement and continued to fight in order to free earth from it's imperial masters and even the Republic when they get in the way.

After nearly 5 years of sickness, the Empress is healed; However, this time the Republic has managed to build a fleet to fight back. The three factions continue to strugle over Earth.

Far before the civil war over earth, one of the Republic's expeditions deep into the Milky Way galaxy encountered a sentient Silicon based species (name pending). They would appear as robots to us but are actually considered a life forms with emotions and individual thought. They in a losing battle to their distant cousins though, another silicon race that lives with a hive mentality. They are of one mind and have set out to conquer all the stars.

Against orders from Earth, the expedition fleet managed to help the Silicons in driving the Hive from their home solar system. Enraged by their loss, the Hive attacked the Republic killing millions of people across Human settled planets. To stop the invasion, the Republic withdrew it's support for the Silicons and the expedition fleet. Eventually the Silicons and this fleet would encounter many races under siege by the Hive and help to unite them into one Federation.

In this mod I'm hoping to develop a number of changes beyond just the different races. Each race will have a unique style of play based on their story based situation ie. the Rebels will have ships, bases and abilities based on hit and run guerilla warfare. ALso to note, there will be 4 ship sizes, in order of size S->L: Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships. The cruisers now in sins will be more like the Destroyers in this mod. Cruisers will then be used as a solo war ship to attack behind enemy lines, usually taking on dual roles (sniper/raider, interdictor/tackler, anti ship/building. Battleships will then take on a fleet support role having abilities like the Akkan range bonus. Almost all of their abilities will be area of effect ie. increased damage, fleet heal, weapons jamming etc.

The New Earth Order (N.E.O.)

Fleets will be based on raw force. They will be slow moving heavy hitting ships, mostly battleships, cruisers and some destroyers. Their frigates will be reserved for spreading culture, colonizing and scouting. They will have a strong economy built on slow but strong progression.

Liberatis

Fleets will be be based on speed one hit abilities. They will have fast frigates and destroyers, some cruisers and few battleships. Example of their tactics: cap killing destroyers, these are destroyers that have only one large laser that can only hit capital ships. They will also have an ability that does heavy damage, but with a long recharge time, meaning they will have to jump into a grav well, use their abilities on a capital ship and jump out. Their economy will be based mostly on using non colonizable resources and stealing resources from other races.

The First Republic of Earth

Fleets will be more midranged. They will excel at using cruisers and strike craft (light, medium and heavy carriers). They will have a very strong economy and excel at rapid development of their empire to sustain their fleets.

Federation

A well rounded race using technologies fom all different races. Their main asset will be adaptability due to their wide range of available ships and technologies. Aesthetics, they will be comprised of all different looking ships, except a captial ship fleet that has been designed specifically for the new federation. They will have a strong economy that can change quickly from production to trade.

The Hive

Their fleets will consist of mainley mother ships. They will have no frigate factory and will be completely dependent on their mother ships to generate frigates and destroyers. This race is all about spamming as many ships as possible and overwhelming their foes with numbers. Their economy will excel at producing metal and crystal but will lack the diplomatic capabilities for trade and will have a penalty to credit generation (credits, for canon reason, will be man hours).

Page 5 for more details: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/329761/page/5/#replies

Combat Mechanic

Battleships: These will be the heavy hitters that support their fleets through passive ability buffs or area of effect modifiers. ie. an attack battleship might improve damage and rate of fire. A support battleship might improve shield regeneration and mitigation. A electronic warfare battleship might reduce chance to hit on enemy ships and lower their shield mitigation.

Battleships will do a lot more damage for their costs compared to frigates and destroyers, but have a low chance of hitting them. ie 80 avg dmg (on each side, F,L,R) but 20% chance to hit frigates and destroyers. They will have higher chances of hitting cruisers and battleships ie 80% (cruisers will be built out of capital ship factories to make this work). I'm thinking they may need one gun each that does damage and chance to hit equal to a frigate*

Cruisers: will do have high damage with high chance to hit. ie. 50-60% chance to hit frigates at 50 avg dmg 80% chance to hit battleships and cruisers. They will be faster than battleships but much weaker in structure. Their abilities will be more self centred (gause gun, ion bolt, planet bombardment, shield regen). These ships will be good at raiding behind enemy lines in solo attacks, or hunting down enemy frigates/destroyers in a fleet.

Destroyers: these ships will be support vessels to the battleships. They will be good at killing strikecraft, repairing, hosting small squadrons, They will do low damage but have high chance to hit for their cost ie 5-10 dmg 80% CTH. They will be fairly fast and well armoured/shielded.

Frigates: Frigates will excel at either killing other frigates/destroyers, or infiltrating enemy lines. ie they will have the speed to get into the middle of an enemy fleet and drop an EMP bomb that stops enemy ships from using abilities for x amount of time.. Their damage will be low against battleships and cruisers although with high success of hitting. ie 5-10 dmg 80% CTH.

My hope is to create a fleet structure where Battleships are great at killing other battleships and cruisers while being the main support for entire fleets but lacking accuracy enough to kill the smaller ships. Cruisers will be weak to battleship attacks due to their low HP, but excel at killing enemy frigates/destroyers because their guns will be small enough to hit them. Frigates and destroyers will then hopefully do low enough DPS that they won't be able to focus fire kill battleships in an efficient manor but serve their role by killing one another and supporting battleships directly and distrupting enemy fleet abilities.

*This would be to avoid having a battle where battleships can not defend themselves at all versus smaller ships resulting in a complete stale mate. Hopefully having one gun that can hit will make those battles possible but not all that efficient.

I'd really like any and all feed back. If you have any ideas that might fit this please share them here.

Cheers!

EDIT

These are some links that Relate the topic and discussion below.

Another link for future use

Moving Battles:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/317641/#1941610

Ships Creating other ships:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/330426

Modelling (XSI) and Particle Effects:
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/311916/page/2/#replies

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/305381/page/3/#replies

Link to Teal's Mod and Research Ideas

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/331735/#1961737

Justin's Mine mod

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/331698

Rescaling in XSI

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/331790

Making Battles more about Fleets rather than a Fleet

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/332389

Modding Pirates

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/332236

Modding Research

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/328126/#1970149

Galaxy Forge stuff

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/174739

Combat Mechanics

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/305565

StarGates

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/334176

ConvertData

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/320363

TXT files for Entrenchment

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/334188/#1990795

*following is the original post*

Hey All, I'm just looking for some feedback from some informed Sins players so that I can then start a modding post and hopefully change the "focus fire" syndrome I experience in most games.

As I understand now, Shield mitigation climbs the more damage is being delt. After the shield mitigation caps out, all further damage is in essence unrestricted. So if you have 10 ships causing damage and you add another 20, there is no penalty beyond the already maxed shield mitigation. Also, since ships regenerate, any low level damage being dealt to ships is negated.

What I'm wondering is, if shield and armour regeneration was turned off, would this make spread fire more useful?

To help direct this thread a bit to the final purpose, modification, I'm gonig to ask this: Is it possible to:

A) Turn off ship self regeneration so that repair ships and repair stations can still repair, but ships no longer regenerate. (this is the easiest solution I can think of)

B ) Make ships only regenerate when not being attacked.

C ) Make ships do less damage when under fire. i.e. if under attack ships damage output is -10%

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A) Yes, it's in each ship's entity file:

MaxHullPoints 425.000000
MaxShieldPoints 225.000000
HullPointRestoreRate 1.000000
ShieldPointRestoreRate 1.000000

As an example, from the Vasari Scout's, which regens 1 hull hp and 1 shield hp per second.

No, not that I can think of. Planets are done that way by some stuff in Gameplay.constants which doesn't apply to ships.

C) I don't think so. I don't remember all the ability triggers off the top of my head, but I don't think there's a way to check for damage taken. If there was you could just make a passive ability that kicks in when the ship takes damage, but yeah I don't think that exists.

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I remember reading some math people did on here back in February. It calculated it out that Focus firing in the end is better because you eliminate certain damage amounts earlier on and because the shield mit. capped out. Do you know if removing regeneration would tip the balance the other way?

ie. 4 cobalts vs 4 cobalts. One group focus fires, the other spread fires.

I guess if I get some time over the next couple of weeks I can just test it out. See if taking away the regeneration abilities would change the outcome.

I really wish I could implement C). That I think would completely tip the scale so that focus fire is only good for hit and runs, but long term battles would be best done through spread fire.

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Bumpity bump bump.

I could use a bit more feedbackbefore going over to the mod forums.

Thanks in Advance!

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I think that even if spread fire makes mathematical sense, you'd need to change the interface to make it easy to spread fire before it becomes good gameplay.

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Quoting DeadlyShoe,

reply 4

I think that even if spread fire makes mathematical sense, you'd need to change the interface to make it easy to spread fire before it becomes good gameplay.

Well, you can alter the ships' default behavior, which is set by default to "prefersToFocusFire TRUE" so that the ships themselves would spread their fire much more

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That sounds like a good idea.

I was thinking about it though and shields are meant to regenerate, so I think I'll be leaving them with the regenerate ability. Otherwise what would be the difference between armour and shields?

I'm thinking of making a hit and run friendly mod instaed. With the new abilities for resources coming out, I think I'll make it so that all repair abilities will require somethin glike 10 cr 1 m 1 c to repair 1000 armour/hull. Not sure how it'll turn out, but it would make it interesting if armour doesn't regenerate and you have to pay for any damage you take. I might have to up the resource intake though because a lot more ships are going to blow up.

Any tips on this?

Do you think the AI would be able to play well in those conditions?

Would it be possible to make shield regenerating cost antimatter?

I really wish I could implement B ) for shields and C) all around. We'll see what the modders say when I start a thread in the mod forums.

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Do you think the AI would be able to play well in those conditions?

The AI doesn't build a whole lot of repair platforms, but it does tend to build the repair cruisers, which generally autocast their repair spells when enough damage is taken (for all the repair abilities you can adjust when they auto-cast in the ability files). So, it should do ok. Hard/Unfair AIs tend to do fairly well on resources too so overall it shouldn't break anything horribly. You can also tweak the repair abilities on those cruisers to be a bit better.

Would it be possible to make shield regenerating cost antimatter?

Only as an ability

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Yeah I figured it would be an ability. Could you make the ability only target self?

LOL I should just start my thread in the Mod forums. I'll get my ideas together first though before asking exactly how to mod it all.

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Could you make the ability only target self?

Sure can.

I'm 99% certain B and C in your OP aren't doable, though.

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You can actually almost get what you want in by changing two values in the gameplay.constants file:

InCombatHullRegenerationPenalty 0.5
considerBeingDamagedTime 10.0

Setting the first to 1.0 will give an in combat hull regeneration penalty of 100%, or no repairing in other words. Bear in mind that in addition to a duration since last damaged (as controlled by the second value), entities are considered in combat if they have any weapons that are cooling down, so ships that have recently attacked won't regenerate hull either.

C) is not possible at this time.

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There isn't an InCombatShieldRegenerationPenalty?

if not, is it possible to create one?

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if not, is it possible to create one?

Only by IC, but probably not until they need such a thing for something

I did miss the hull regen thinger though when I looked through the file the first time.. it's so cleverly hidden

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Yeah that's what I figured.

Hey Blair, Craig, I'll pay you $5 to add:

InCombatShieldRegenerationPenalty 0.5
considerBeingDamagedTime 10.0

LOL!!

Well, I guess I could just turn the shield regeneration off completely, then add an ability to all ships that regenerates shields for antimatter and add that to Repair platforms too. Is that possible?

Do you guys think I'd need to increase the income rates to keep the pace of the game up? And is that possible? I'd actually prefer to increase the amount of astroids per planet, but I'm not sure how I'd even that out with credits, so it might be best to just increase resource rates across the board.

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Yeah, all of that is possible. Capital ships already have 4 abilities though, so if you turn off their shield regen they can only be patched up by other ships/repair stations, unless you dump one of their existing abilities to make room. Can't have more than 4.

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OK, continuing on.

I thought of changing the deceleration of all ships in the game so they continually move in battle. Turns out there are a few people who have done this. Anyone know how well this works? Does it affect gameplay? How is it done?

I was also wondering, is it possible to eliminate phase lanes? I'd like to create a mod where ships can jump to any place on the map, preferably only those that have nothing in between them. So if they run into a star's gravity well, they will drop out of hyperspace. Would using the Vasari "stargate" ability work? Maybe having a neutral star gate on every world or something. or making ships and planets all have the ability.

This would pose some challenges though as how would you find new planets and how would the AI work? The only solution I can come up with is making all planets visible at the star, but shrowded in "fog of war".

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I don't have the time to read all of the above right now, but as long as the shield mitigation is kept maxed with only 12,5dps incoming on the ship, spreading fire will be useless.
Why?
Let's say you wanna spread fire over 50 cobalts and you have enough firepower. You want the shield mitigation not maxed. This means you gotta deal less than 12,5dps. Let's say 11dps.
Ok so you're dealing 11dps to the frigs and they're prawning your frigs one by one, reducing your damage output.

When will the cobalts blow up?
Cobalts have 950 total hull+shield points. The player made level one upgrades to hull and the shields regenerate a little, so let's round it up to 1100 total hit points to overcome per a Cobalt.

How long will it take to kill a ship with 1100 hit point with 11 incoming dps?

...

100 seconds.
Almost two minutes.
...
Come on, you will be turned into scrap metal before those 50 Cobalts happily blow up together.

Try to put any other ship in the place of the cobalt (ravastra Skirmisher with 1140 BASIC total hit points or any advent ship with shields regenerating like there's no tomorrow, not to mention any cruiser or cap) and it will turn out that keeping shield mitigation below max equals to doing nothing to the target.

If spread fire was to be made useful, shield mitigation buildup rate has to be decreased, so only a really strong incoming fire is capable of maxing it.

If "shield mitigation increase per point of damage taken" is divided by 2 or 3, it would still make massive focus fire max the shield mitigation on the target AND make the ships vulnerable to scaled but not exaggerated fire.

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If spread fire was to be made useful, shield mitigation buildup rate has to be decreased, so only a really strong incoming fire is capable of maxing it.

And before you ask, Tkins, this part is easily doable

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Great input N3rull!

Annatar, do my last post!! Any comments on that?

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Okay

I don't really know the specifics of what he did. But in theory, it goes something like this: when ships move, they can fire, when they stop and pick a target, they don't move unless it's out of range. But if you make it so they can't stop in time and "overshoot" their target, they'll have to turn around (which accelerates them) and again overshoot because they can't stop in time - thus you end with the ships constantly moving around getting shots on the target.

How well it works? I have no idea, I haven't tried it or played with someone else's mod that does it. But it's done (in theory) by changing the acceleration/deceleration values for the ship entities with the idea being that you want to balance how fast they move with making sure that they can't actually stop in time.

This would be incredibly complicated.. I suppose you could make a map with no phase lane connections (the only way to remove them) but then phase gates and the like only work between two points. With no phase lanes, you can't discover anything and you can't (to my knowledge) start with everything explored.

So, I offer you an alternative: why not connect every planet with every other planet with phase lanes, then turn the display of phase lanes off in the game's interface settings? This will give you a map where you can fly from anywhere to anywhere, and you won't have any visible lanes and nothing funky with phase gates.

No idea how the AI will treat it though. It might do ok, but also realize that doing it means your homeworld can be attacked from absolutely anywhere, there won't be such a thing as a front line anymore - so how fun that is to play will be for you to see

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I gave a high five in another thread, and you're gettin one here!

Yeah, that's the idea. I'm hoping it will force the AI, and myself to have mutliple small fleets rather than just 2 or three really large fleets. Each fleet protecting their own world. Might have to up the tactical slots, or increase the range/power/fighter slots on defense structures though. I've noticed if I attack the AI with a bunch of smallfleets it tends to break up into smaller fleets as well.. or maybe I'm just insane.

Is it possible to make hangers produce frigates/cruisers that can't warp so they are a militia bound to the planet's gravity well?

With your example, culture spread will be pretty quick won't it? Or will it be similar because phase lanes are so long? Allegiance will be affected for sure though, so is there a way to change the allegiance from "number of jumps" based to "length of phase lane"?

As for mitigation, I guess changing it to max 100% would eliminate focus fire on a grand scale, it just wouldn't be very realistic though.

What if shield mitigation didn't kick in until say 50% or something? So any damage it takes upto that point has no mitigation, but when it reaches a certain level, it kicks in at 50% shield mitigation and climbs to 75%. That way it's kind of an "all or nothing" type of deal. If damage is low enough, it can avoid shield mitigation, but if it gets too high damage will cut down big time. There would be that optimal point of damage for ships. Hopefully a point that allows some focus fire but eliminating constant focus fire of.. say a battleship or something. But if you wanted to pull a home one maneuvre, you could still do that, just at the expense of destroying other smaller ships.

Thoughts?

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What if shield mitigation didn't kick in until say 50% or something?

It's always in effect though.. even with the ship not taking any damage it's got 15% mitigation. N3rull's comment is pretty sound though, right now shield mitigation climbs relatively fast so with spread fire it'll still climb up to max relatively quickly and because you have much less total incoming DPS, it will take ages to kill the ship. Just dropping the rate at which mitigation increases should help a lot there. Alternatively, you can also drop the max mitigation percentage.

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So we can't change the start of climb? So at ie 0 - 30 dps mitigation doesn't change. At 31 dps it jumps to 40% and climbs at the normal rate until 75% mitigation (hypothetical, I'd have to find the right numbers later).

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Nope, it's done on a increase-per-damage-point-taken basis. So every point of damage has to increase mitigation, the only thing you can change is by how much You can also change the base mitigation that's 15% right now but you can set to whatever.

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I'm thinking of creating a race that uses capital ships as mother ships. They would still build their mother ships out of cap ship factories, but all other ships would be built out of the mother ships.

I have two approaches,

First idea is that the ships would spawn with the advent carrier ability (thanks Annatar), so that they would all be tied to the mothers ship and work as squadrons. Would this enable them to dock for phase jumps and exit again after phase jumps?

Second idea is that they would just be built out of the mother ship (with the new abilities for resources) the same way missile platforms are built out of the TEC Carrier.

Now would the AI be able to work with this? I know they require a scout of some kind to function, so I might have to either:

I) make a frigate factory with just the scout available

II) make the scouts automatically spawn from planets similiar to construction ships.

III) have the spawn scout ability on all mother ships in hopes the AI uses that ability

Thoughts?

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Well like I believe ManSh00ter pointed out in the other thread, abilities to spawn ships is not the same thing as ship construction as far as the AI is concerned. That's what he tried to do, make mobile carriers that can "build" ships through abilities, and the AI didn't know how to work it properly.

Like I said though, Entrenchment *may* offer a way out of this. We know that the starbases can be upgraded to build frigates the same way as a frigate factory. If this upgrade can easily be attached to any entity as an ability, your plan should work quite well because as a factory the AI will know how to handle it.

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