More newbie questions
 

Soo...Do you get enough of these? I have more I could throw at you, if anyone ever wakes up in the middle of the night wondering about poor ignorant newbies. For now, tho...

What is the difference between weapon families and families in the components file? I don't see a reason for the weapon families, but there they are, so they must be important, I suppose.

Patrol/ Sentry...I understand WHAT they do, but not why I would ever want to use them. any ideas?

AI ship design...I have created my own ship set based on the Sauron dominium (war world, pournelle) but am getting stuck on the AI. could anyone tell me where I could find a document or webpage explaining that file? most of the AI files i understand, but the entire ai design file is greek to me.

oh..one Last thing. would anyone be interested in alternate speech files for the races that come with SEIV? I have been modifying all of them to sound more individual, have about 5 done. worth posting?

Re: More newbie questions
 

"What is the difference between weapon families and families in the components file? I don't see a reason for the weapon families, but there they are, so they must be important, I suppose."

AI use only, in the case of weapon families.

Component families work like this: if you have a group of components of the same family, they are assumed to be replacements of each other. That is, when you use the "only latest" button, only the lowest of that family shows up. BUT this only applies if they are all in a row. If there's a break, more than one will show up.
Ex:
Antimatter torpedo 1 (family 1
Antimatter torpedo 2 (family 1)
Ripper Beam (family 2)
Incinerator Beam (family 2)
Wave-Motion Gun family 3)
Antimatter torpedo 3 (family 1)

Now, if you hit "only latest" it would display:
Antimatter torpedo 2
Wave-Motion Gun
Antimatter torpedo 3

Patrol/ Sentry...I understand WHAT they do, but not why I would ever want to use them. any ideas?
"
Sentry- good for marking ships as "done" in simulantious games. As in, you don't want to move a ship, but if you don't give it SOME order it'll show up as not having orders and maybe confuse you. Use the sentry command, and it won't show up as having no orders.

Patrol: again more useful in simultanious games. Say you're defending three planets. Defending the warp points into the system is out of the question, and splitting your force would just let you be defeated "in detail". What do you do? Use the patrol command. Order your forces to patrol the three planets, and there's a chance they'll arrive right before the enemy does, or intercept him on the way in. Note that they won't actually go after him in strategic mode, they'll just follow their patrol patch and attack if they run into an enemy force. But at least it's a chance, AND it'll keep your opponent guessing.

Phoenix-D

Re: More newbie questions
 

Weapon families are used in the AI design file to tell the AI wich weapon to use.

Sentry is used to skip ships that are supposed to stay where they are when you use the next/prev ship buttons. Some people like to manage their ships that way.

Take a look at Atraikius 'Cheat Sheet' here

Many custom races have their own speech files. It can add a lot to the game. Please post them.