Making Sins play more like Honorverse - ideas?
Sins Forums
I've searched the forums and there have been very few mentions of Honorverse-like mods. It seems the consensus is that the property is rather tightly held for Honorverse ship designs, so doing a complete conversion for David Weber's Honor Harrington series is unlikely. Plus, looking at the ship designs for the setting, all the ships would mostly end up looking the same anyway, since they're all kind of cigar shaped. That wouldn't be very interesting visually (at least not to me).
However, that doesn't mean the game couldn't be play like ships from the book series. It doesn't really have to be changed as far as the models themselves go to make it play that way. And, it wouldn't intrude on the intellectual property of the setting just to try to make it play similarly. What would this mean to the game, then?
- Every ship type would have missiles. Missiles are the primary weapons used in the setting. Tech tree changes would be needed to make missile improvements more important, too, as range and power increase.
- Missile pods could be modeled by using the Missile Barrage ability. It would be a research option to add on to some of the larger non-capital ship classes.
- I don't know of any ability or capability of Sins to model anti-missile defenses. That's a big part of the book settings. I'm not sure how to model this part of the setting.
- Ships weaponry is mostly located on the sides, which makes sense with the more area there. This requires moving most of the weaponry to the left and right.
- Beam weaponry in the setting is short range and highly damaging. However, given the range the game has available, it probably makes sense not to greatly increase beam damage.
- Fighters already exist, as do carriers, so that's not a big change. However, the carriers in the setting are pretty much defenseless other than their fighters. Fighters are pretty strong against large ships, so there may be some changes needed there. Also fighters were a later addition to the setting as far as technology goes, so they will require research to attain. Most likely only carriers would be able to bring the fighters into battle and not capital ships.
- One problem is that the Honorverse setting has battles with large numbers of "ships of the wall". Capital ships in Sins don't really model the setting capital ships properly because the game tends to have only a few capital ships per side. This would mean a rework of the existing ship classes to allow much larger non-capital ship types. They would actually ramp up to the size of a capital ship at the high end and have similar hull and damage numbers to at least a starting level capital ship.
- So what are capital ships, then? I'm thinking they represent your heroic characters, such as Honor Harrington herself. They're your flagships of your fleets and thus have supporting abilities to inspire greatness during combat, just as the heroic characters in the books do. Of course you'd be starting out with the largest ships early with a capital ship, but you wouldn't get the large fleet ships until they're researched, so it comes close to representing the setting. This fits right in with the original Sins design, too, so that makes it easy to work with.
I have no experience with modding this game (or any other), so if anyone has any input or suggestions on what to do, please speak up!
I know both sides at least had limied intel on the other. (Bigger gravity wells would probably better simulate jumping 'on the edge of a system'.
) I will have the graphics mod all figured out and I will be able to continue work on a larger version of the Honorverse Map which actually uses star systems. The only possible problem that could arise comes with Alleigence issues over a huge map and multiple star systems (though I need to look into this before I make a definitive statement).