ZenLunatic

Check out the stickies in the modding forum. They'll tell you everything you need to know. Edit: Oh yeah, make sure to read the pdf that comes with the modding pack.

Are you patched up to 1.02, empirecitizen? At this point, it's the only reason I can think of that your results would vary so much from ours. Maybe you're running into a bug that's been fixed.

I've tried building trade stations before stabilizers. I've tried stabilizers before trade stations. I've also tried building trade stations, then building stabilizers, then scuttling and rebuilding the trade stations, like you said, but I couldn't reproduce any of your results. Phase stabilizers don't seem to effect the longest-route calculation at all.

This is my general strategy for TEC vs. AIs: * Buy 100 crystal first thing. Possibly 200. Use it to upgrade your capital. It's better to upgrade the planets you have before colonizing more, or your economy will fail. * Build a capital ship yard. Start building something as soon as you queue the building. I like the Kol or Marza, but it's up to you. * Build extractors. At this point you're probably broke from buying crystal, so you might not want to queue up all those extra

1) I like to go heavy on fighters, because fighters counter the kinds of things that planets typically have to worry about (mainly siege frigates, but also scouts and bombers). If they show up with the kind of thing you need bombers to deal with, you'll probably need a mobile fleet to help defend anyway. I always like to keep a couple around anyway. 66%-75% fighters. This could change if your opponent is, say, spamming heavy cruisers. 2) I like loose formation. When you are attacking an

Every other person on this forum as already expressed their disdain for the AI diplomacy in other threads. A lot of people (myself included) just play on locked teams with the AI until it gets patched (hopefully in 1.03)

Well, this is from the gameplay constants file: HullPointPercentageIncreasePerArmorPoint 0.05 And I did some testing. Giving a ship 20 armor makes it take about half damage. Which corroborates with what I've read in other threads: the "effective" HP of a ship goes up by 5% for every armor point. Which makes the damage reduction formula something like: [B]1 / (1 + HullPointPercentageIncreasePerArmorPoint * armor)[/B]

[quote]But to answer your question, the damage mitigation would only affect the shield - Once they penetrated the shield it would be full damage again.[/quote] From the manual: Once the primary shield has failed, emergency generators are brought online to maintain this last line of defense throughout the armor of the hull.

Fighters are good against siege frigates, LRM, scouts, and strike craft. Anything heavier than that you're better off with a bomber. Since siege frigates, pesky scouts, and enemy bombers are prime concerns for planetary defense, I tend to go a little heavy on the fighters. Usually at least two fighter squads for every bomber squad.

Did you know you can stack up to three refineries? Other than that... Conquer more volcanic planets. Or like Kyro said, black market. It's that or start recycling your Quafe cans.

I doubt such a large change is going to be made to the jump angle at this point, but if you want to mod it, it couldn't be easier: just change the "JumpAngle" in Gameplay.constants. (Check the modding forum for instructions on how to do that). The variables for gravity well size are in the same file.

Awesome chart. Advent LRM Frigates have light armor, though (although they do Capital damage).

If the devs posted all this information up front, what would I do all day? /tonguecheek

Hm. Maybe it just means they won't auto-target them, but they'll still fire back if no other targets are in range. Worth looking in to.

Some planets will have a bonus to trade income. Placement within a a grav well and total roundtrip time for individual freighters doesn't seem to have any effect.

[quote] Thats slightly misleading. A fighter squadron carries more strikecraft than a bomber squadron in all factions. So a fighter squadron also does more DPS against very light than bombers. [/quote] Good call. I pulled up some numbers for reference: Vasari Bomber Squad Size: 3 Vasari Fighter Squad Size: 4 Advent Bomber Squad Size: 7 Advent Fighter Squad Size: 9 TEC Bomber Squad Size: 5 TEC Fighter Squad Size: 6 It looks like fighters alw

msoltyspl: That chart is spectacular. A couple things, though: you obviously got the data from the TEC ships, might want to label that, since weapon damage varies greatly by race. Also, Flak Frigates don't do 21.25. They do 21.25 [I]per bank[/I], and there's four of them. That's 85 damage per volley if all the guns are firing. And although I've never played around with the CanFireAtFighter variable, I'd bet that it's exactly what it sounds like.

Well, after modding and testing it a bit, the 5% increase in effective HP per point of armor seems more or less correct. Volley damage definitely has nothing to do with armor.

Actually, the weapon cooldown time is in the entity files, under "PreBuffCooldownTime". The DPS stat given in the game is calculated by Damage / PreBuffCooldownTime. For the record, fighters are 12 seconds and bombers are 13.5. Also: I don't know anything about armor, but why would there be seperate tech paths to increase armor and to increase hull strength if all armor does is increase hull strength? It seems like there has to be more to it than that.

Instead of timed quests, the diplomacy screen should tell you something like "yellow AI hates green, likes blue, and wants metal", and you get a small bonus every time you give him metal, or kill a green ship or structure, and a penalty whenever you kill a yellow or blue ship. That was alliances would slowly form based on mutual enemies.

A TEC light frigate has one bank (front) that does 52.25 damage on a 5.5 second cooldown. A flak frigate has four banks (one on each side) that do 25.25 damage each on 4.5 second cooldown.

Oh, does the manual actually say there's more autocannons on the Starboard side? That'd do it. (I think I forgot to mention that block of bank weapon damage was from the autocannon section of the data file).

I get the same thing when I try to open the files in the game directory. I'm not really an experienced modder so I can't tell you why, but the files that come with the [link="https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?forumid=443&aid=176875"]modding package[/link] work fine with Wordpad.

Your first capital ship is free, and none of the capital ships require special techs to build, so yes, I generally have two or three capital ships (at least) before I get cruisers. In fact, the second thing I do in every game (the first is build scouts) is to build a capital ship factory and start a battleship (or whatever ship you happen to like).

The difference in capital ship weapons seem to be: 1. Tech. Different tech will upgrade different weapons on the same ship. 2. Location. The Kol, for example, has a big beam weapon on the front (I don't think it can be upgraded) that does damage over time. It has autocannons mounted on all sides, and one bank of lasers in front. This is pretty interesting: From the TEC Kol file: DamagePerBank:FRONT 27.000000 DamagePerBank:BACK 49.500000 Damage