New ancient unique techs

[KnidVermicious]

Is there a newer Version of the Eye Candy Mod? The one on my cd doesn't have any component or tech changes, just colonytypes, and name changes.

[Fyron]

Whoops! Wasn't the Eye Candy Mod. It was a "Unique Techs" mod that is for classic SE4 (easy to convert to Gold, just find/replace Vehicle Types and Target Types entries). I have uploaded it to SpaceEmpires.net *here*.

[KnidVermicious]

I originally started thinking about new uniques because I wanted to add a planetary defense cannon to the Planetary Assault mod.

Currently I'm thinking of adding:

Planetary Defense Cannon (weapon platform and nasty long-range but slow recharge anti-ship weapon)

Ancient monolith-monoliths, hopefully not unbalancing

Advanced missiles-'cus I think they should be tougher

Ancient cloaking device-powerful, but large, expensive and supply guzzling

Some kind of scanner coupled with a minesweeper

Any thoughts?

[Arkcon]

A good one would be some sort of super engine -- mabye 24 movement points, that had a kt such that it almost completely filled a ship. Yes, it's a blantant ripoff of Larry Niven's Quantum IV hyperdrive.

But then there's a balance problem -- how big should it be. If you needed a baseship, then you'd be waiting forever to use it, making it useless. But if it were smaller, you could build a fleet around them.

[Ed Kolis]

Scale mount it! Just make it really huge so you can't use it unmounted on ANY ship, then make a series of scale mounts, one for each ship size, where each ship size has a mount that makes it take up a large amount of that particular hull's space. So if you want it to take up 50% of any ship's hull space, and the size in Components.txt is 2500kT, then your scale mounts would be 1% for every 50kT of hull size, so you get a 75kT (3% of 2500kT, since an ES is 150=3*50kT) engine on an Escort, a 200kT engine on a Light Cruiser (8% of 2500kT, since a LC is 400=8*50kT, and similarly for the other ships. Just tweak the numbers for the particular sizes you want - if you want the engines to be more space-efficient on larger ships, but still not a constant size for every hull, you can reduce the mount scales for larger ships.
Now what would we have done had Aaron not put in mounts in the first patch???

[KnidVermicious]

Does the AI ever use unique techs? Is that even worth considering when creating new techs?

[capnq]

Does the AI ever use unique techs?

Some of the TDM-ModPack AIs do.