Hi again Pathfinder
I'm now reaching the closing stages of my first B5 game - it's been a long haul but generally speaking very entertaining.
Fathoming out the tech's has been a game in itself as I deliberately didn't read through the data files in detail to find out what research lead to which devices; that meant that I went up a few blind alleys before the scientist types sheepishly owned up that they'd wasted all the funding I gave them
:!
A few oddities have shown themselves as the games progressed and I have a couple of more general Queries too:
1) Anti-Matter engines and reactors didn't show up in the 'available kit' list when designing ships until I developed the engines up to Prototype V - then they suddenly popped into existence. The technologies would be reported as discovered in the 'start of turn' news but they were nowhere to be found - curious.
2) Multi-warhead missiles don't seem to be able to target seekers - I wonder if this is because they're not actually Point Defence weapons?
3) Only Jump Drive I seems to be available, no matter how many tech levels you develop in it - is this a deliberate restriction or simply that the other stages aren't in the Components file yet?
4) There are no pictures for War-Stations, which gave SE4 a headache when I tried to build one
. I transplanted a suitable pic and all was fine again but it would be nice if a race specific image was available (I don't have the artistic skill to do this for myself
!).
5) Despite there being a tech tree for them, there aren't any Advanced Matter Weapons - this was one of the 'blind alleys' I spoke about earlier
.
6) I can understand the reasoning behind Ionic Weapons giving a negative bonus to ships with crews but I'm not sure that it makes sense for them also to give a minus when fitted to satellites (tho' I suppose it's possible to argue that as the satellite is so small the radiation has a negative impact on it's electronics).
7) The "One Space Yard per planet" restriction works fine in the un-modded game but it was an unpleasant surprise in the B5 mod to find out that once I'd built a Space Yard III on an outpost I couldn't then construct an Advanced Military base (which had been the whole point of founding the colony). It might be an idea to put a little warning message on the Space Yard to let players know in advance that this restriction is in effect.
As before, don't take these minor niggles as nagging criticism - it's a great mod you chaps have developed with a lot of interesting ideas that take the game in whole new directions. I hope you take my comments in the spirit they're intended i.e. a form of play-testing report.
One Last question ... I understand the concept of 'leaky armour' inherent in the mod and think it's another one of those good ideas the mod's stacked full of ... but ... isn't it a bit too leaky
? I was going up against Destroyers (with fairly puny particle weapons) in Battle Cruisers with maxed out Refractive Armor and was getting big holes shot in my ships!
I guess I was just surprised that the armour was so ineffective and surmise that I must have been doing something wrong on the design front. I was mixing up the various flavours (i.e. Primary, Alternate and Addtional) as well as including ten or twenty units of Structural Supports - does that have a negative impact on the efficiency of the protection? Or did I have unrealstic expectations of how much protection the amounts I fitted (five or six 'slabs') would afford me?
Any clues from the designers as to how to properly construct the 'armour belt' for ships will be gratefully received
.