Improved armor model thoughts

[Suicide Junkie]

1) The AI may have some difficulty with mounts that have downsides. They will always use the last mount in the list.

2) Beware the overpowered Stock mounts.
I suggest, as a maximum, +50% damage/kt on your very largest mount.

3) In carrier battles mod, I have the weapons range from around 2kt to 50kt, with only a +50% damage/kt modifier on the biggest ones. Accuracy bonuses range from +40% to -20%
As a result, the smallest mount is good against missiles and small fighters, while the middle mounts are good general purpose, and the largest couple mounts are required for damaging shielded ships (due to the higher damage per hit vs leaky shields and armor).

[Emperor's Child]

AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

Not nessesarily.
You could make special copies of the mounts for AIs, that only fit on specific sized ships and are last in the list.

You still can't get two different mounts on the same ship unless the mounts are component-specific, but you could still get medium mounts on big ships.

[Fyron]

Take a gander at Deathstalker's Mount Mod for all sorts of crazy mount ideas. It has the AI tending to use specific mounts on specific hull sizes.

[Emperor's Child]

Imperator Fyron said:
Take a gander at Deathstalker's Mount Mod for all sorts of crazy mount ideas. It has the AI tending to use specific mounts on specific hull sizes.

Actually, I'm playing a mod that uses them at the moment. But what I was trying to do is perhaps impossible: Get this dual-mount issue working in a way that would not impact the "standard" AI design. I'm pretty sure that the concepts discussed above would work pretty well, it's just that they would need lots of overhauling of AI build profiles to make work correctly.

One problem is that the AI's themselves normally only build bigger and bigger ships... they construction files would ALL have to be changed to force a mix of ships to be built.

Secondly, the AI ship design routine is not really set up to select a "main" gun and then a "secondary" battery. You could tell the AI to select from several weapon options, and then gear certain of the mounts to work as "main guns" on one type and then "secondary guns" on the other, but this does not "scale" easily to multiple races since it is possibly some races will select weapon options that you have decided are only available as "main" weapons, or the reverse.

I guess you could come up with a small mod on your own: You could force the AI to build ships with a mix of main guns and a secondary battery without a great deal of work. You would need to add a new weapon that does what you want as a secondary battery weapon for the AI (say, based on the old reliable gun profile), and then add that to all AI files and construction routines, and add a mount mod that only applies to it.

It comes down to this idea is workable in certain situations, but would not work well across the board.

[Nodachi]

You could always tie mounts to both weapon tech level and ship size.

[Phoenix-D]

Emperor's Child said:
AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

You can fix that by making the mounts researchable. Then, only have the AI research the specific mount its going to use.

[Nodachi]

Emperor's Child said:
AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

There is a way around this but it requires some serious work from the modder, a well-done AI_DesignCreation.txt and AI_Construction_Vehicles.txt. With these two files you can really fine tune an AI to only build what you want it to build. It will still use the last mount listed but you'd be able to force it to use a better mix of ships.

[NullAshton]

You could use diffrent sized armor. Bigger armor would have less hit points, but a larger emissive ability. Smaller armor has more hitpoints, but less of an emissive ability.