The Rage Collective 1.1

Alpha Kodiak · #1 March 23rd, 2001, 10:07 AM

After receiving great feedback on the Rage 1.0, I have fixed a couple of bugs and improved both the AI and the ship set.

I posted the zip file in the Mod Forum. Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Master Belisarius · #2 March 23rd, 2001, 03:40 PM

I must agree with you Tampa!
The Rage is a great race, in fact, is the only race that can fight with the race that I'm doing for the AI tournament!

Seriously, congrats Alpha and thanks!

Tampa_Gamer · #3 March 24th, 2001, 02:29 AM

Alpha - great race! I was just getting ready to give you my comments on playing it Last night against my upcoming Piundon mod and voila! you have a new Version already. I will see if you covered my comments already.

Q · #4 March 24th, 2001, 10:04 AM

Alpha Kodiak I had a look at your new Version of the Rage and I would thank you very much for your great work. I love the Rage very much (no of course I hate them and want to destroy them

).
Some feedback or suggestions:
I am not sure if the advanced storage technology is really that important for a very aggressive expanding race like the rage. I always see empty planets in reach that could be colonized and I play in a small quadrant with initially 16 empires, 10 planets each! Due to the heavy fighting colonies are destroyed, leaving room for new ones. And keep in mind, that the more colonies you have the more you can construct!The advanced storage technique IMO is more important for neutral empires, who do not expand beyond their system.
In the fighter design there is still the wrong "combat sensor" instead of "combat to hit offense plus". The combat sensors seems quite important to me for fighters.
In the design for the attack ships and bases you have supply storage and solar supply generation components. I agree that this may be helpful in the beginning, but as the designs are now they will still be included in the design when quantum reactors are used. I know it is difficult to avoid this completely, because until now we have no possibility to make a design obsolete when a certain technology becomes available. But it helps if you put the low technology items at the end of the component list of the design.
As for the mortal enemies: Think of a race with religious and organic technology together! Organic weapons, armor and religious talisman would be tremendous. If I had the time I would do this e.g. with the Earth Alliance and make them a rather peaceful empire, but it will be lot of work to create the research and design files!
Sorry for the long post and thank's again.

Dracus · #5 March 24th, 2001, 09:35 PM

I have added Rage as a quick pick for the game and have added it as one of the random races. If anyone wants the modified file to add them as a quick pick let me know.

Alpha Kodiak · #6 March 24th, 2001, 11:37 PM

Thank you all for your kind words! I have thoroughly enjoyed the work I have done on the Rage so far. Since they seem to be working well, with no real glitches, I am going to let the 1.1 Version ride for a little while so people play with them. That will give me a chance to play around with some new attack designs I have been thinking of, possibly changing a racial trait, or anything else I can think of to make them even nastier.

Please continue to give feedback here as you play with the Rage. The points mentioned so far are excellent and many will be incorporated in one form or another in the 2.0 Version of the Rage (release date not set

), or possibly as part of their arch-enemy, the <<REFERENCE DELETED FOR SECURITY PURPOSES>>.

Thanks!

Q · #7 March 25th, 2001, 09:03 AM

Alpha Kodiak here I've got some more feedback for you:

In my game with full tech it's now about turn 110 and the Rage are doing fine after they had a hard time fighting against multiple stronger empires. For a while they ran out of resources but I play with no computer bonus. The resource problem was solved after I persuaded them into a Trade Alliance with me (United Federation of Planets). Now they are again constructing attack ships like mad!
In the combats I realized a major problem of the Rage: They use now as specified from you phased polaron beams as main weapon but you gave them maximum weapon range as strategy. This works not well. After I changed it to optimal weapon range they did much better. Maximum weapon range is good when you use missiles or if you have 100% hit chance by the religious talisman.
In another topic about minesweepers I proposed the inclusion of a minesweeper component in attack ships, because the AI (as the Rage) build minesweepers but they send them unprotected on mission so they got easily killed before the can sweep the minefields. I did this now for the Rage because many empires in my game use mines (including the Rage themselves) and the Rage lost many ships in the minefields. I seems to work very well!
One Last minor point: should a very aggressive race like the Rage not get angry about allied planets? Now they have "false" in the settings file.
Thank you again for your great work and I look forward to see more of it!

dumbluck · #8 March 26th, 2001, 02:56 AM

Well, i decided to take the plunge and add some of the mods out there. My question is if they will interfere with each other. so if i use the rage and, say, modpack 1.61, will they use the same files or anything like that, or do i not need to worry about this.

Also, any helpful hints for a newbie modder?

Alpha Kodiak · #9 March 26th, 2001, 04:20 AM

quote:
Originally posted by dumbluck:
Well, i decided to take the plunge and add some of the mods out there. My question is if they will interfere with each other. so if i use the rage and, say, modpack 1.61, will they use the same files or anything like that, or do i not need to worry about this.

Also, any helpful hints for a newbie modder?

To the first question, the Rage is compatible with the modpack, and should be compatible with most mods because it only adds AI files for the Rage race. It does not change any other data files.

As to getting started, what I did was figure out what I did when I played that seemed to be effective against the AI. Then I came up with a plan for making a race that would a) do as many of those things as possible, and b) as impervious as possible to those things. After that, it became a process of looking at the AI files for some of the stock races and comparing them to the files for the most effective mod races. See what you like and what you dislike from each and try to put together the best combination possible.

It's mostly trial and error, and it takes a lot of time, but it is a lot of fun.

Alpha Kodiak · #10 March 26th, 2001, 04:39 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Q:
Alpha Kodiak here I've got some more feedback for you:

In my game with full tech it's now about turn 110 and the Rage are doing fine after they had a hard time fighting against multiple stronger empires. For a while they ran out of resources but I play with no computer bonus. The resource problem was solved after I persuaded them into a Trade Alliance with me (United Federation of Planets). Now they are again constructing attack ships like mad!
In the combats I realized a major problem of the Rage: They use now as specified from you phased polaron beams as main weapon but you gave them maximum weapon range as strategy. This works not well. After I changed it to optimal weapon range they did much better. Maximum weapon range is good when you use missiles or if you have 100% hit chance by the religious talisman.
In another topic about minesweepers I proposed the inclusion of a minesweeper component in attack ships, because the AI (as the Rage) build minesweepers but they send them unprotected on mission so they got easily killed before the can sweep the minefields. I did this now for the Rage because many empires in my game use mines (including the Rage themselves) and the Rage lost many ships in the minefields. I seems to work very well!
One Last minor point: should a very aggressive race like the Rage not get angry about allied planets? Now they have "false" in the settings file.
Thank you again for your great work and I look forward to see more of it!

The range issue presents an interesting problem. When I put together the plan for the Rage, I wanted them to be heavy missile Users to start, so if you start off with low tech, they use missiles for a long time. Until they get phased polaron beams, they don't currently use any direct fire weapons except for point defense. In that time frame, maximum weapons range works great.

I don't know how to change the strategy once they get direct fire weapons, and it seems like optimal weapons range leaves them more susceptible to the missile dance early on. I noticed that when I tested them in full-tech games they had a harder time than in low-tech-start games, and the range issue is a big part of the problem. I also noticed a drop off in performance in a low-tech game once most of the Rage ships were predominately direct fire.

If anyone knows how to shift the strategy with the new tech, I would love to hear how to do it.

Currently, the allied planet anger is close to a non-issue since they won't make treaties above non-aggression in v1.1 and not many of those. I set the anger setting to false early on because I hate it when I get an AI race to make a treaty, then they get mad because of the planets I own. I am thinking about letting the Rage do trade alliances again, so I'll have to decide what to do about the anger setting.

I do like the point about mine sweepers in attack ships. While I was testing the Rage, I was more confused than anything else, trying to figure out what it thought it was doing with mine sweepers. I saw it completely ignore a known mine field, even though it had sweepers available, then saw it send sweepers across enemy space trying to get to a minefield that didn't seem to be much in the way, at least to me. (The sweepers were killed in transit, so I never found out what the purpose was supposed to be.)