Re: Bold lettertypes
 

But of course....corporal http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: B5 MOD General
 

I understand what you are arguing, but my point is actually a bit different.

What I am saying is that one of the signature elements of this mod is precisely that it does away with the whole supply management issue, so long as ships are well-designed. Now, it could certainly be argued that eliminating the "max range from base" consideration adversely effects gameplay, but I have not seen that argued. Ships in the B5 universe literally went years without returning to resupply (remember Captain Sheridan's lust for freash fruit after having been out among the League worlds for over a year?).

Given all the thought and work that so many have put into this mod without changing the supply system, I am very reluctant to change such a crucial design feature without a pretty good justification.

This is not to say that you are wrong - quite the opposite. However, it is to say that even though you are right I don't feel empowered to make such a change. This is really not my mod. If Val wants that change made, he can make it (or, for that matter, so can you by just eliminating the supply regeneration capability of the reactors and increasing their storage - Homeworld hubs and colony hubs provide supply).

Re: B5 MOD General
 

You could try making weapons use much more supplies, in which case if a certain ship sees a lot of action, it'd need to re-supply more frequently as you'd expect...

Re: B5 MOD General
 

You'll probably have to reduce engine supply usage by a lot too.

Re: B5 MOD General
 

Kwok/anyone:
Could you give me some advise then regarding the supply useage of weapons? I'm in the process of making a suitable equation for the supply useage of the weapons.
I would like to base it on damage, the more damage a weapons does, the more supplies it will use. This is couteracted (or balanced) by the ROF (Rate Of Fire). This way you can still have a fastfiring deathspewer and a slowfiring peashooter.

Re: B5 MOD General
 

Before you start on the supply usage for weapons it might be better to establish the amount of supplies you start with and work back.

As things stand you can have as many reactors as you wish so any value you put on a weapon's consumption is almost meaningless.

If you limit a ships design to say 2 reactors then the whole choice of using say 2x 5kT or 1x 5kT and 1x 20kT has more impact on what kind of ship you want. One that can travel far or fight longer.
It might be better to limit the engine choice as well, between the various classes. e.g.

Scouts, Escorts, Corvette : 2 to 4 engines
Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser : 4 to 6 engines
Battleships and Carriers : 4 to 6 engines*

*The Larger Capital ships can have more reactors, say 3 or 4 so that they can act as supply vessels for a Fleet.

Specialist Vessels such as the Repair Tug can have more reactors by default and maybe more engines to enable them to travel further on rescue missions.

If we decide on a mean average supply storage for any particular ship class, which we know is replenished each turn, we can then decide how far a ship class can travel before exhausting all it's supplies by setting the consumption of a mean number of engines.

This might have to be achieved by setting the reactor supply generation to a value less than the supply storage.

Say your Ship has Supply Storage of 5000 , but the reactors only generate enough to replenish 1000 , and each turn, if your ship uses all its movement points it consumes 2000 supplies, a net loss of 1000 supplies result. After five turns your ship would have to rest to refill its supply capacity. This would be your effective operating range. i.e. 5 movement turns from your base.

Ideally it might be better to lower this to say three movement turns or three systems distance. Having Supply Bases in settled systems would act as top ups so that you can operate at full efficiency.

This might simulate the reactor/ mission duration scenario of B5 whilst making local support bases more essential to successful campaigning.
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Now none of this takes into account weapons consumption on any given turn, and as pointed out if you are out of supplies your movement is reduce to 1 space. Is this such a bad thing? Can it be crooked by providing emergency movement points for some vessels e.g. Ancients so that they can out run a Young Race if both sides have exhausted supplies in battle.

Making the Ancient's Slicer Beam and say EA Heavy* Lasers eat up supplies means you can set the number of shots each class is able to make in combat. *They can also then take up less kT so that you can have three Heavy Lasers, not just one. Otherwise what is the point of having Multiplex Tracking . If you fire three Lasers in three directions, you just run out of supplies sooner and are then left with your no supply usage weapons.

Your weapon supply use can then be regarded as your battle fatigue rating. If you have bigger reactors/supply capacity and the lower number of engines, your ship should in effect be able to fight longer with it's capital weapons before having to rely on it's secondary weapons systems.

This creates a better pro verse cons choice for some of the crappier medium weapons some of which can have no supply usage.

I don't know why medium lasers can not be used to target all types of target. After all it still has to hit the target, and fighters and seekers have a "to hit advantage".Makes use of developing Targeting computers.

Other weapons such as point defence can perhaps use no supplies .

Missile and Torpedo weapons can be assumed to have their own supplies and be restricted by reload/range and seeking speed .
Hows that? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gifhttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: B5 MOD General
 

Limiting engine choices would in my opinion be a very bad move. QNP is a great system to keep around. It allows the player to choose how to use ship hulls, rather than being forced into arbitrary predefined roles. Also, it immediately creates balance between larger and smaller ship sizes by making all ships require about the same percentage of hull space devoted to engines to get he same movement rate.

Re: B5 MOD General
 

Engines don't (or at least shouldn't) store supplies.
Don't go breaking the QNP in your quest for supply balance.

Just remember that big ships will be using more supplies per movement point since they are heavier.

Question:
Why do you want to limit the number of reactors per ship?

- One or two big reactors should be more efficient in supplies per KT, and thus be good.
- Small reactors would be less efficient, but can't be killed by a lucky hit in combat. (Remember the leaky armor!)

Thus both big and small reactors are useful.

Note:
On a small ship, "big" refers to the medium reactors.
On a large ship, "small" refers to the medium reactors.
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Re: B5 MOD General
 

Nomor:
Thanks for the info and suggestion to work backwards. Very useful. I think I can do something with that. I already have a nice equation for the supply useage (based on the system Val laid down). Download the weapons sheet listed in my sig to see for yourself.

The only thing not incorporated into this sheet is an equation for the accuracy of the weqapons. I'm busy with that right now and I have some good idea how to do it, but I'm still curious to your opinions. Please feel free to give me some advise.

Re: B5 MOD General
 

Would it be possible to place some gravity wells in the Hyper Space Systems, that acted like the black holes , in that they pulled you towards them.

Rather than being destroyed, could they not just warp you to another system ( ideally another Hyper Space system?)
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