Half-newb question here, but didn't find the answer anywhere else. I hadn't played SEIV for awhile, but recently got re-interested. I've been working the past week and a half or so on a SEIV gold mod to make the galaxy work and evolve how I've pictured it from various other games and TV shows. My real question is at what stage would it be recommended to release a mod? I'm to the point where I've put in most of the large scale changes I want to, but I've only done about a days worth of testing on it. I'd like to get it out there for some input, but I'm not sure anyone wants to spend much time playing around with a mod that's far from being polished. Most of the testing I'm at now is to finding various bugs/exploits with my changes and to make sure everything still balances. Suggestions?
As for a sneak preview of the mod; In general, things are slowed down immensly compared to a normal SEIV game. I've found it unrealistic for a civilization that's just starting to explore space to suddenly be able to pop out a dozen ships or more in the first couple years, colonizing half a dozen planets. The first colony ship should take more than a year to complete, for example. The other big thing about construction is it's designed to be done in space, ala Star Wars. The component ship yards are more advantageous than the planetary ones, but you also have to put them on space stations, meaning your shipyards could be crippled in an attack if unprotected. In a minorly construction related note, the mod is going to heavily favor carriers and fighters, they'll be more expensive, but more powerful.
The other major change is in engines/movement, which I probably spend a good 5 days straight getting it to work well. I've always seen larger ships as lumbering and slow, and shouldn't be able to outrun smaller ships at the same engine tech, so I was dis-satisfied with the Quasi-Newtonian method. I invented a new system where the different types of engines are different sizes instead of improvements (which is what upgrading from Ion 1 to 2 is for), each specifically designed to be most advantageous for a certain weight range of ships. That, in combination with exhaustive changes to Max engines, engines per move of all the ships and the standard and bonus movement points for all the engines resulted in a system where low-end ships are fast, and use the lower end engines, but cant use the larger engines. Large ships don't get any use out of the smaller engines, and require the bigger ones to move effectively. The largest ships require the largest engines just to move, and even then are still rather slow, to offset the massive firepower they carry. Here's a quick chart for the movement points for each ship at each engine level that show's a little better what I'm trying to describe.
Movement chart
The first picture is the original set of movement with my design. The second set is with an engine expansion I just added today, which might need a little tweaking. The far right shows at what tech level each of the engines becomes available for the expansion. The first 3 types of ships tend to get the most out of ion engines, the second set of 3 out of C-T, the third set out of JP, and the Last set, plus the baseships, Quantum engines.
ahhh insomnia. Enough rambling about my mod, time to try and get some sleep.
[ November 25, 2003, 10:09: Message edited by: mvstang ]
How soon to post a new mod
It helps iron out bugs before the mod is officially released.
Hybrid Mode
