New Mod: The Art of War Mod

[DirectorTsaarx]

quote:

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
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I will also be modifying the racial attack and defense characteristics to make them much more expensive<snip>

Comments?

Geoschmo

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Don't forget that you can get attack/defense bonuses using various cultures, and those are free. You may want to either reduce the bonuses in the respective cultures, or just eliminate the cultures that provide attack/defense bonuses...

[geoschmo]

Yes, I wasn't planning on eliminating those, but I was planning on reducing them and adjusting the culture file to make them a little more painful in other areas to choose. Just so it's not basically "free" like it is now.

IIRC someone put out a "balanced" culture file a while back that calculated the number of points that would be needed to get the advantages from the culture files and assigned negatives that were equal in value. That sounds like a good thing to me. I'll probably do something like it for AOW.

Geoschmo

[Quikngruvn]

I like the idea of multiple hulls, but could you retrofit, say, a Frigate Inefficient-1 to a standard Frigate? My gut tells me no, but I haven't tested this.... I like the idea of having multiple, progressive hull types, but I don't like the idea of being stuck with an inefficient hull if I build it.

Otherwise... this looks to be a really nice mod once it's fleshed out and finished.

Quikngruvn

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Quikngruvn:
I like the idea of multiple hulls, but could you retrofit, say, a Frigate Inefficient-1 to a standard Frigate? My gut tells me no, but I haven't tested this.... I like the idea of having multiple, progressive hull types, but I don't like the idea of being stuck with an inefficient hull if I build it.

Otherwise... this looks to be a really nice mod once it's fleshed out and finished.

Quikngruvn

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As I recall, the 'modified maintenance ability' is effective when placed in a component. So, rather than have various hulls with different maintenance levels, have all hulls with higher maintenance costs initially and have an 'engineering' tech field that produces crew quarters with increasing levels of maintenance reduction ability. Just retrofit your old ship with the newer crew quarters (standing for newly trained engineers who will save your resources).

[geoschmo]

Nope, once you build a hull you are stuck with it or you can scrap it. You can retrofit components, but not to different hulls, even of the same size. You can see this youself in the stock game if you try to retrofit a smal transport to a colony hull.

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

"As I recall, the 'modified maintenance ability' is effective when placed in a component. So, rather than have various hulls with different maintenance levels, have all hulls with higher maintenance costs initially and have an 'engineering' tech field that produces crew quarters with increasing levels of maintenance reduction ability. Just retrofit your old ship with the newer crew quarters (standing for newly trained engineers who will save your resources). "

Very good idea. One thing to keep in mind is that the hull selection window has NO obselete function. In other words, if you have a tech area that gives 10 ships, each a replacement of the Last.. those ships will always show up. It gets really cluttered, really fast.

Phoenix-D

[geoschmo]

Ok, I muddled around with this idea for a couple days waiting for inspiration and I think I came up with a combination that I like.

The plan as it is now is to allow all the ship hulls to be built at level one of ship construction. Instead of adding a bunch of hulls though I am doing what was suggested and adding a component that modifies maintenance. I tested this and it does work fine. This will allow designs to be upgraded.

For those that are interesed in the details, I have changed the exsisting Life Support component to "Primary Life Support" and added a One per ship restriction to it. I then am adding a component with life support ability called "Engineering Deptartment" that is also one per ships and is larger and more expensive than the Primary Life Support. In the component description I state that this is required for ships and bases larger than 500Kt. Since the pimary life support can only be added once, people should use the enginering dept for cruisers and above for the second life support comp.

Then I am adding an "Auxillary Life Support" that is also larger and more expensive than the primary life support and Engineering section for the larger ships/bases that require more than two life supports.

At higher levels of ship construction the engineering dept and auxillary life support will be smaller and less expensive, but in the early levels they will be large enough and expensive enough to significantly restrict the effectiveness and efficency of larger ships. Also they will never be as small as Primary life support so they should never be used in place of Primary life support, although there is really no way to prevent that if someone wants to be contrary.

Also at higher levels of ship construction the Engineering Dept will offer progressively larger reductions in maint, which will make the bigger ships much more useable later in the game.

I am also considering furhter penalizing the larger ships early in the game by giving the hull a maint penalty which will be offset later in the game by the engineering dept.

Geoschmo