This will probably work better as a single player mod, or maybe a one-on-one mod. As you said, people will probably lose interest in a mod that tends to run quite a bit slower, so it probably wouldn't work well for a PBW game with 6+ players. I mostly designed it for myself to change a few things around, so there is less consideration to how well it will work for many players. It also may not work out too well for an extremely large galaxy, unless you're playing solo and don't mind it taking years and years to go from corner to corner.
The doubling of the movement speed with just 2 techs gets addressed with the engine expansion I just put in. The first small chart in the picture was more for a reference. It's easier to see how the engines compare to each other and compare to ships below than the 2nd chart, which is what is currently in the mod. With the exgine expansion, it takes until tech 5 before you double the speed of the low end ships.
Carrier vs. Attack Carrier. Carrier comes at fighter tech 3, the attack carrier at figther tech 4. I gave the carrier a +20% easier to hit penalty, the attack carrier only +10% easier to hit, and it only requires 30% of its weight to be fighter bays, instead of the carriers 50%. It's designed to be a more armored/shielded carrier with more firepower, but fewer fighters. It also is faster than putting the same amount of fighter bays on a dreadnaught (which is the same tonnage), so it's an advantage to build in that sense. The biggest problem with having a mod that's slow is it takes
forever to test it
I'm still working through the beginning construction and game play bugs, after I get through that, the big thing I need to test is the balance of the ships against each other, especially with the goofy engine changes.
And as for the goofy engine changes, I think I'll let another chart speak for me instead of trying to explain it:
Movement Formula
The big colums to look at are Xe and EpMv, which are the max # of engines and the # of engines per move for each of the ships. The small box at the bottom shows the
Tonnage,
Standard movement and
Bonus movement for each engine. The first S is the structural damage the engine can take, which is just double the tonnage for all engines. Ion engines are only 5 tons, Quantum are 400, the smallest ships can't even fit a Quantum engine on, and the largest ones only get 1 engine, so a single Ion won't help. Making the Ions mostly standard, and the larger engines with more bonus movement, I was able to eventually get the movement rates about where I wanted them. In a related note - solar sails have been removed from the game at this point.
However - this is not to say that the ships are at all balanced between each other when it comes to available firepower. Tesco's point about the BA is a good one, I didn't catch that. I may have to mod the engines around a little further to get rid of that bug, since it does make most of the ship classes useless, some of that will probably be done by adjusting costs, and the long build times. A BA may be about the same as a CR with movement, but it might take say 3 times as long to build a cruiser, and could cost vastly more resources. I found a similar bug where you could get a small advantage to put a repair bay and an emergency propulsion pack Lv 5 on a ship instead of a quantum engine, saving 230 tons for the same game turn movement on the largest ships. You're dead in the water when combat comes around though I believe.
As for construction, my next changes will be to balance the facilites. To overview construction, I expanded base contruction and ship yards from 3 techs to 9, and went from 3 sizes of space stations to 9.
There are still 3 planetary based shipyards:
SY O constuct with 150 per turn (no SY on planet)
SY I construct with 250 per turn
SY II construct with 500 per turn
SY III construct with 1000 per turn
(Temporal SY are 350, 750, 1500, although I may remove the temporal techs entirely)
and the 9 space based yards:
SY I 150
SY II 250
SY III 350
SD I 500
SD II 750
SD III 1000
OSD I 1500
OSD II 2000
OSD III 2500
these come at techs 1-9, with the planetary Versions currently coming at techs 1, 3 and 5. So, you'll have slight advantages with planetary based yards through the tech tree, until the very end, when the highest end construction facilites can only be built in space. (I figure you can build scouts, maybe cruisers and whatnot on a planet, but it makes more sense to be building a baseship in space instead of on a planet and launching it up). The 9 space SY's are roughly designed to fit the 9 types of space stations, which have tonnage values of:
300
500
700
1000
1250
1500
2000
3000
4000
The tonnage values of the space based SY's are the same as their construction value. (which might increase slightly later)
I plan on changing the facility mineral costs so that the 1st level can be built just a little slower than the same speed you could in an unmodded game with the first SY, and do the same with the 2nd and 3rd levels of the facilities (or beyond if applicable)
I think after I get the facilities "priced" out correctly, I might toss a beta Version up here before I go to Vegas over Thanksgiving, if people want to monkey around with it, but it isn't a Version I'd sit down and play to the end yet.
Re: How soon to post a new mod
It helps iron out bugs before the mod is officially released.
Hybrid Mode
