stanalonis

however they decide to overhaul the diplomacy system, it has to go both ways. I find it more than annoying where AI opponents expect you to kill X amount of ships from this empire or that, but you can't task your potential allies to do the same. What the computer is able to proposition you with, you should be able to as well. If we see other options of aquiring planets they'll likely be through economic, though this might give TEC a unfair advantage with all the revenue th

haven't been able to find starbase AI in any of the entity files or constants.entity Could be some targeting settings that need to be present in the tech and advent starbase files. I'm not at my computer right now or I'd check them out and see (downloading forge tools not allowed on this computer), but it might be a combination of other targeting settings and some movement settings as well. *shrugs*

I believe phase jumping is limited to ship types. starbases seem to be classified as modules, looking at their entity files. This suggests something very interesting, that we can mod any module to move within it's grav well: research stations, trading posts, even ship factories. I'd probably leave the gun platforms as stationary modules since that's how it's designed for all races, but imagine being able to move your trade posts and research stations to the other sid

Entrenchment isn't the only micro expansion for the game. The next one will work on diplomacy (I think it's too predictable as it is). If they make a 3rd expansion for a campaign, we'll see event scripting then.

Homeworld 2 made a switch to modular parts on mother and capital ships. set up a cloaking ability for your capitals. see if you can create a mine ship before entrenchment comes out. you just need a model for the mine component. combine ship ability. I haven't seen this since Homeworld Cataclysm, but it would allow your frigate fleet to adjust depending on the threat or need. you can have frigates that are capable of forming into different ships, and eve

the forge beta 1.1 is out now, so you won't have to convert everything into text anymore. :D haven't tinkered with it yet as I just downloaded the update and forge tools. I'm hoping to add some extra capital ships though to each faction. at the moment existing ships will likely be used (I'm no modeler), so I can test how AI plays out with new ships.

hopefully when the 1.1 forge tools are released (I don't mean galaxy and particle forge either) the developer exe will be accompanied by the correct dll, or just not require it. I've been to some dll sites that aren't safe places to download before.

wow, lots of stuff and it's not even the entrenchment microexpansion. Should be interesting to see how the AI handles extra capital ships in mods. I really hope entrenchment provides some cap goodies as well. I can already see new early build priorities changing. now that frigates start out with full anti matter, we might see less colony cap ships being used at the start of a game. create 2 or 3 colony frigates, send them out to capture a planet or asteroid nea

Now this is something that can make that first cap ship more interesting. I'm not sure if cap ships can already contain modifications like that short of modding the abilities so thhere doesn't need to be a level requirement. I think this is something that would need to be patched in, as setting stats for cap ships goes against the current design. Every game is a clean slate. Other than the starting template you have to scratch and claw your way to every advancemen

why not up the odds against the pirate menace? imagine if they had battlestations of their own. I'm not sure if pirates are hardcoded to exist with just a few ships or not, I mean do they build more for themselves? but it would make for an interesting team map. I don't know if campaign scripting will be introduced in one of the micro expansions, but imagine several races banning together to face the pirate's new super weapon or space station. I expect there to

Just be more choosy about starting ships that have special abilities requiring research. If I had the time, I'd mod every galaxy map with 2 or 3 scouts to get things moving along. :D you've certainly posted several topics recently. got the makings of a mod in the works Teal? if you'd like a mod tester let me know.

game balancing might start becomming an issue. I mean, is every faction going to get a big ass cannon or does only one get to overcompensate with their big guns? [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

From my understanding, the only chance in choosing a template is which one is desired. there's values that give probability of whether a pirate system shows up, but from playing the different maps several times, there's always at least one pirate base, heavily defended. The template info each galaxy references is from the GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef file. The galaxy files that do randomization pick from one of the templates, and probably put a main pirate base somewh

*peeks at topic* Maybe we'll see some of those ideas (including starting research) in one of those micro expansions. If the rumors about a campaign are true, perhaps we'll see scriptable goodies, events, and other things, with maybe a new bundled editor. I doubt the devs would want to limit the modding community, so here's hoping some of our ideas makes it into future micro expansions. Hope you don't have issues with abilities and buffs in your templates. Since

out of curiosity, do weapons deliver a fixed amount of damage after factoring buffs and abilities being used? what I'm wondering is if weapons do random damage and sometimes miss. My impression of weapon attacks is they deliver X amount of damage and some buffs/abilities will increase this amount, some will decrese it till a calculated value is reached which ends up damaging the target, and random rolls aren't factored in. I've yet to see a weapon miss a target unless it pha

I have little artistic talent, but I'm a decent scripter. coders have the second toughest job next to game testers; making those balancing tweaks that aren't game breakers for the mod. my interest would be in specialized fleets unique to each race. Helps keep gameplay fresh when one race relies on cap ships while another is able to ambush with small frigates and disable cap ships before picking them apart. If you're looking for a coder or game tester, let me know.&nb

not supported by the game right now. see if you can find a copy of homeworld/homeworld 2. There's a few fleet formations for fighters, frigates, and mixed fleets in those games. Also homeworld has one of the best epic stories for any space RTS, but the gameplay in homeworld 2 is also good.

think you'd need different came mechanics hardcoded into the game, or scripted events, and we're unable to do both at the moment. maybe if one off the microexpansions includes an actual campaign, it'll come with some scenario tools. it might be fun to have a last fleet standing scenario where you have a small fleet with a couple cap ships and your goal is to befriend the pirate race and use your combined forces against some new threat in the galaxy.

check to make sure you start with a colony, even if it's on a pirate base. games aren't won by defeating enemy ships, but by removing all colonies from your opponent. look through the scenario file that comes with Galaxy Forge if you want to know how to set up home planets for players, then add the ships you wish everyone to start out with. make sure you cover each race when you add in the new ships, and if your map is just for one race, make sure other players know that too

Okay, is it possible to give research to each player upon starting the game? I was thinking of a small map with just a few planets where you can spit at your nearby enemies. It would be nice to increase fleet capacity from the start. I've looked through the GalaxyScenarioDef file and the galaxy forge for almost every ship you can place next to a planet, but nothing at all for research. I remember reading in the <a title="Galaxy Creation – Reference Guide" hr

The closest you can get to is maybe setting default planet upgrades, or have some small planetoid or asteroid colonized but with no resources nearby, and have the templates start out with a colony ship. I'm more interested in starting research. I've read the reference sticky in the modding section and would like to give this a go, say for a smaller FFA map, allow players to start with LRMs or an equavalent for the other factions. is there a list of what research is allowed

no charge. ;) Much of this info can be found through the mod package download. It'd be nice to have duration info on abilities. I hope they put it in the next update.

from looking at the entity files, it looks like [B]first level lasts for 600 seconds[/B], and [B]next level lasts 900 seconds[/B]. EDIT: in minutes, first level lasts for [B]10 minutes[/B], second level lasts for [B]15 minutes[/B].

do you get an error message or mod failure? is your ship just not showing up?

just about every set of capital letters in the entity files reference the English.str file in the Strings folder for this game. It's one of the few files that hasn't been converted to binary, probably cause the string length is never a constant thing. :D here's a cut of the file put into a code block: EDIT: okay so I don't know how to set the colors in the code format, or maybe just need to use something other than C++ :D here, this should be what you find in E