[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by Loser:
Since Units do not respond to damage, at all, until their entire structure has been destroyed any sort of X only Weapon would be almost completely ineffective against other Units.
The same should be true for other X only Weapons: they could be used against Highliners, but not other Unit-Ships.

This is true in the abstract. But the way I modded the weapons, most weapons can hit any target, so while they may be more effective against one or the other, they will work on all to some degree, and it's simply a matter of designing Riders that are optimized to specific tasks. Not that I didn't make some weapons effective only against one type of ship or the other - but you'll have to play the Mod to find out which...

I forgot to mention Plagues, Radiation, and Smart Weapons in the X only Weapon list. But since it's targeting something other than a Unit-Ship I think it would work..

Again, this hasn't yet occured in the test games, but I don't see any reason why anti-planet weapons won't work from Riders.

As I understand it, both Armor and Shields on a Unit just add to its total Hit Points (kilotons). The only difference is that you get an little animation when you hit Shields.
Perhaps regeneration would still work, though. It could be tested, as well. Design a Unit-Ship with enough regenerating Armor to 'soak' 5 kt of damage per round and a weapon that only does 1 kt of damage. Switch over to another empire and there design a Unit-Ship of roughly equal Hit Points with a weapon that does 5 kt of damage. Run a simulation between them and see who wins.

I'm in the middle of just such a task right now.

Another thought. While Shield-skipping weapons could still destroy all the Hit Points of a Unit, I don't think Armor-skipping weapons could. Since the Armor-skipping weapon does not hit Armor it will never destroy the whole Unit..

This is something to keen an eye on for later revisions, but I'm trying to stick with more basic questions at these early stages. Such as...

Weapon rate delay works when fired from a Unit at a Ship, I think, but does it work against other Units?

Definitely. That's already been determined in my alpha tests.

I seem to recall (perhaps from this very thread) that Allegiance Converters will work from a Unit against a Ship, but I don't think they work against other Units. There's your Boarding Party, but there is not way to Security Station against it. I think this would be an unbalancing element, since any Highliner could be easily lost to a stack of Boarding Unit-Ships (but it's your mod, of course).

This was something else I gave a pass on, using "mod scale" as my out. Allegence Converters can only be mounted on Highliners and Bases.

I think I see what you mean about the Supply-related components. Since they're not traveling between systems, anyway, I don't suppose the Unit-Ships will have great need of endless Supplies. Or perhaps, for that very reason, they should have more limited Supplies, much like Fighters.

Again, the "intended scale" factor comes in. Highliners have the size and complexity to handle long-term space environments for their crew - Riders do not. Thus I envisioned Riders as short-range (and short-duration) ships, and jacked up the supply cost per turn.

My biggest fear (in actual playtesting by people) is that some joker would create googobs of Riders and park them in the orbit above his planets, thus sidestepping the cargo-on-planet limitations. That's another reason why I made the supply-cost-per-turn for Riders/"fighters" so high. They'll have to come down to resupply sometime, somewhere, or you lose them. This way, it's sooner rather than later, and it'll make it that much harder to pull off a stunt like this.