Mod: Silveressa's Empowerment UPDATED v1.1!

from Sins Forums

This mod is a more in depth alteration to the races, placing more empathasis on fighter/bombers in the offense/defense roles and making things a bit more empowered while still keeping the core gameplay elements the same.

The changes are as follows: (inspired in part by some other mods I've seen around)

-Orbital Defense platforms: doubled the Hull points, range and damage for all of these, making them more effective for planetary defense. but still not the only thing you'd want standing between you and the enemy.

-Orbital Defense Hangars: increased capacity for orbital hangars to 6 for Tech and Vasari to 9 for Advent. This way you can more easily defend a planet with only one or two hangars  as opposed to a half dozen.

Cruiser Carriers: Increased fighter/bomber capacity to 4. This makes them more viable to use when attacking a heavily defended planet since the planatary defense hangars have been increased, and makes having a few flak frigs part of your fleet much more useful.

Capital Ship Carriers: Increased fighter/bomber capacity to 3 initially + 1 per level. This makes them a serious force to be reckoned with at higher levels, and very useful when assaulting a planet with lots of defense hangars.

Pirate Attack Ratio: Slowed down their attacks to once every 30 minutes, giving you mroe breathing time between assaults.

Mission assignments from npcs: Doubled the time inbetween missions, making it take longer to increase loyalty and friendship, but also longer to lose it.

Capital Ship Colonize special ability: Reduced antimatter cost from 90 to 1, making it easier to colonize a planet after defeating the attacking forces.

Ship Training Research: Increased number of times you can research this from 1 to 3. Now after researching the max trainable level you can pay to train your ships up to level 6. Be forewarned however, the higher level a ship is, the more it costs to train the crew to the next experience level. (Around 4000cr from level 5 to level 6)

http://files.filefront.com/Silveressas+Empower+v11zip/;9730364;/fileinfo.html

modding
9,608 views 21 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Looks like a nice mod, quite a few of the changes are for the better in my opinion, but after some play testing I'm sure the feedback you'll get will balance a few things out. Not too sure about the 4 fighter squads per cruiser, that may be too many for their Supply cost, but who am I to say...

Capital Ship Colonize special ability: Reduced antimatter cost from 90 to 1, making it easier to colonize a planet after defeating the attacking forces.
End of quote

A very risky move. As much as I can see where your coming from, a colonisation rush may bugger up this adjustment's main purpose, but testing and feedback will be the judge.

All in all, a nice mod, hope it goes well.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I agree with what you're saying about the colony rush, but it was only the captial ship I did this with, not the colony frigs, so hopefully it will prevent a colony rush by the limit of the number of captial ships you can produce at a given time. (and producing all colonize caapalbe cap ships would leave you woefully underpowered vs other cap ship fleets.)

As far as the carriers go, I hadn't thought much about their cost vs. hangar capacity, I might increase the cost x2 in resources. Although since they're unarmed and pretty vulnerable, they are tempting targets, especially now they command 4 squadrons as opposed to one.

Hopefully I'll get some good feedback on this over time.
Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Maybe you need to increase the base squadron number on Fleet Carriers. Really unbalanced with those higher capacity cruisers, IMO.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
Good idea, currently they;re set to 3 at 1st level with +1 per additional level, so by the time you've level one up to 5 or 6 it's got more squad capacity than a carrier, not to mention it's higher shields, hull points and offensive/special abilities.

I originally thought about having cap ship carriers start off at 6 with +1 every other level, which would equal out in the end to the same as it is now, just making it more powerful at lower levels.

With powering them up further as far as squad cap goes I'm a bit hesitant to increase them much farther since I don't want to make them over powered compared ot the other cap ships. I could lessen their shields & hull by 30% and increase their squadrons to 6 +1 per level, but it could make them a but too weak in a stand up fight against other cap ships, especially those that have high leveled anti fighter/bomber special abilities.

Some more suggestions on this is definatly welcome, (as well as feedback on how it plays currently of course.)
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
Cruiser Carriers: Increased fighter/bomber capacity to 4. This makes them more viable to use when attacking a heavily defended planet since the planatary defense hangars have been increased, and makes having a few flak frigs part of your fleet much more useful.
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Um. Wow. I know Flak Frigates needed to be made more important, but 4? - With this mod on, I could play as Advent, and win the game the moment I get my second Hostility Temple up. Nobody could stop a carrier rush of this magnitude.

Capital Ship Carriers: Increased fighter/bomber capacity to 3 initially + 1 per level. This makes them a serious force to be reckoned with at higher levels, and very useful when assaulting a planet with lots of defense hangars.
End of quote


Yikes. Just Yikes. I mean. Yikes.

Why would anybody use anything but Capital Ship Carriers and Cruiser Carriers after this change?

They were powerful enough before - now they're godlike.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

This makes them more viable to use when attacking a heavily defended planet since the planatary defense hangars have been increased, and makes having a few flak frigs part of your fleet much more useful.
End of quote


I think you truly overestimated how good flaks are, by a significant margin.

In its current state the mod makes all frigs and cruisers except carrier cruisers useless.

heres two replays thats equivelent to if it was your mod and under 10 carriers jumped in, and the enemy has 2 flaks close to edge and 10/16(second replay is 16) in the middle.

39 bombers vs 12 flaks, which is not balanced at all.
disable your mod before viewing the replay.

http://files.filefront.com/flaksvsmassbomberrecord/;9710520;/fileinfo.html


heres another
39 bombers vs 18 flaks.

http://files.filefront.com/18flakvs39bomberrecord/;9710636;/fileinfo.html


if you want mass fighters/bombers, just make it so bombers/fighters are 25%-33% as effective and make 4 per carrier cruiser.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
I'll give them a look and reevaluate, a work around I'm thinking on is beefing up the effectiveness of flak frigs vs fighter/bombers and dropping the damage of the fighters/bombers by 25%.

I'll be setting up a few scenarios to test the current (and changed) balances this weekend and see how they stack up under fire.

Edit:

After some testing against the AI I've noticed a huge swarm of carriers is indeed a force to be reckoned with, especially if it;s composed of carriers and carrier cap ships with the fighter boosting specialties focused into.

Another problem I ran into that was somewhat unexpected was a fair amount of lag during a really large intense battle. (then again I have all settings set to max, although this is a dual core machine with pci-E card which has handled everything else I've thrown at it without trouble)

Currently I'm tossing around a few of concepts for fix it.

Definate: Add in orbital point defense guns for anti fighter/bomber planetary defense, similar to the ones seen in the Mars mod. (This seems to be a necessity given the icnrease int eh # of fighters, and will help balance out a planetary assault with mostly carriers and further diversefy your planetary defense options. (More strategy options is always a good thing.)

#1 increase the value of fleet cap cost and unit cost x2 or 2.5 (so there will be fewer of them built)and decrease the # of fighter/bombers per cruiser carrier to 3 or 2

#2 Decrease the cruiser carriers capacity to 2 or 3, lower fighter/bomber damage by 25%, and increase the damage power and range of flak frigs x2.

#3 Combine both option #1 & 2

I'm leaning more heavily towards option #2 since it feels more like it would bring things into line balance wise, whereas #1 mostly just hits you in the economy and does little to balance out the power of the ships and #3 might be too excessive and remove any benefit from increased fighter/bomber capacity making it all a moot point.

I'm not sure if the cap ship carriers will be over powered still after these changes, if so I'll probably give them 4 squads to start and one squad every other level for 8 total when fully leveled up. (the more I think on this the more likely I'll be doing this, but not until some more feedback and testing)
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
Update:

I've currently made the following changes to the mod:

-Lowered the cruiser carriers fighter/bomber capacioty from 4 to 2

-Increased the power level of anti-fighter/bomber frigates by 25%

-Added in buildable anti fighter/bomber point defense turrets for planetary defense

So far this seems to correct the lag and balance issues quite nicely. I'll be updating this with a link do download the 1.1 version later on today. (File fronts being a pain about the upload right now)

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
I gotta tell you, I love this mod, it has everything I was looking for. Literally, every single change is perfect, especially with your updates (cruisers having 4 fighter squads was definitely too much lol 2 is perfect). And you adding add-ons for defenses to have anti-fighter turrets is just genius.
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks, I'll give file front another go this evening when I've got access to the pc the mods on, and have an update for you then. (my lover's busy kicking the AI's tail at the moment on that pc lol)
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
oh, okay, so those changes are pending in the version you've yet to upload, thanks for telling me/us. I'll be checking here every couple of hours for it, can't wait to try it out :)
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Alrighty, here's the link for v1.1 of my mod, enjoy and feel free to post, pm or e-mail me with feedback

http://files.filefront.com/Silveressas+Empower+v11zip/;9730364;/fileinfo.html

as a quick recap the changes from v1.0 are offically as follows:

Anti Fighter Frigates: 25% more powerful across the board, this lets them handle the increased number of fighters/bombers more easily.

Buildable Point Defense cannons: From the popular Mars Effect mod. (used with permission, thanks again xXAequitasXx! )- These are anti fighter point defense cannons that will primarily engage fighters/bombers if available, but will also fire on regular ships if no fighters/bombers are in range. (although they will do no where near as much damage to a larger ship as a normal point defense cannon)

Note you must research the rapid fire guns tech in the military tech tree in order to be able to build these weapons (and unlock the antifighter frigate research.

NEW! Cruiser Carriers: Reduced fighter/bomber capacity from to 2. (this fixed the lag and the imbalance 4 were creating.)

Everything else is as it was in v1.0, hope you all enjoy.
Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
Chicks rule.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
Love your mod, the increased carrier and hangers make the defense against AI siege rushes tolerable to say the least. However I wasn't able to try your new version due to the game update. SO with the new update and the supposed weakening of the siege ships and the AI tweaking will this cause a delay in getting a working version?
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, I was gonna ask, will this work properly with v1.03, or do you have to retweak this? Or can I just install the new mod data files, and then reinstall this mod over those?
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
The current version of this mod will not work. The "string not found" thats caused by the new way map names are loaded (which is quickly fixable yourself) among other differences cause random game crashes. From reading the change log for the new update all mods are rendered practically useless.

Heres hoping Silveressa is working on a new version, and that its not to much work. :)
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
Aye, I;m currently in the process of making a new updated version, although it's slow going as real life has been keeping my extremely busy as of late.
Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
Well I actually combined your mod with Uzi's Sins Plus recently (file merging and such). I haven't tested it yet though (that real life stuff you're talking about is a pain, isn't it?), but I only transfered like the point defense files, and the changes you made to the fighters, defenses, and research (seeing as the patch gives you pirate options and stuff). Will this still crash the game?
Reply #19 from Sins Forums Top
Well I actually combined your mod with Uzi's Sins Plus recently (file merging and such). I haven't tested it yet though (that real life stuff you're talking about is a pain, isn't it?), but I only transfered like the point defense files, and the changes you made to the fighters, defenses, and research (seeing as the patch gives you pirate options and stuff). Will this still crash the game?
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
Whoops! sorry for the DP
Reply #21 from Sins Forums Top
np, I'm not sure if it'll crash the game still or not, but if someone feels like updating my mod to v 1.3 then by all means feel free to do so. If you e-mail me a copy of the updatred files I'll be happy to host it.