RolePlay Mod

[Jmenschenfresser]

Maybe that is the problem, and now that I reread my post, it does leave out certain things.

The mod would be for exclusive PBW play. No AI whatsoever.

Space Empires exists within a homogenous galaxy as it is. All these different races basically, apart from a few facilities struggle to unlock identical secrets of the universe, through tech. Just as in some older boardgames, certain countries or personas or roles would have benefits and advantages, so I want different races in SE4 to compliment how they are to be played. At present, when you role play in SE4, about the only way in which you approach it, is through communication and, if you choose, limitation. But in the end, a capital missle is the same to a religious race, as it is to a temporal, as it is to a group of anarchists, etc.

Let me state an example:
I'm now trying to put together a Toxic race between spurts of actual work at work; it's an idea I stole from a voyager episode, I only half remember.

The toxic race will have no population growth, so it will have to capture the pop of other worlds in order to grow. Their ships are going to be big, bulky and expensive to maintain on account of their dirty inefficient fuel. Same with engines. They will have extremely powerful planetary bombardment weapons. Strong troops to capture planets. They won't have cloaking devices because their ships leave such an exhaust trail (exhaust on starships? Believe it, baby). The same with their mines...they cloak at a lower level because they leak radiation. Going to give them a plague bomb by another name, which will kill population in droves by radiation poisoning. I plan on giving crew quarters of most races a security station ability, and the Toxic race will have a weapon which takes this out...other little stuff like this. Like a crew converter, which isn't really a crew converter, it kills everyone aboard with a bLast of radiation. And although their ships are expensive to maintain, they will be cheap to build, costing as much or more in radioactives as in minerals.

With each race I hope to come up with enough traits manifested in the components and hulls and tech that to play a certain race, feels like you are playing them, as best as it can be done.

And like I said, it would be no problem to add other races after the fact. So if someone wants to design an aquatic race, or a liliputian race, or a bug race, or a race of witches that fly around outerspace on a broom...the more the merrier. That is until we hit the limits of the data files

[Taera]

RP mod is a great idea i've always supported.
You have my vote or whatever, plus all the support you could need.
If you need my help with the mod, e-mail me at trouble11@hotpop.com and i'll be more detailed.

[Phoenix-D]

"That is until we hit the limits of the data files"

heh, that might take a while. I just did an experiment with components.txt; I QUADRUPLED it's size, and nothing bad happened. OK, SE4 was running a little slow, but other than that..

You can have 64k weapon families, 64k component families, a crapload of components, and I imagine the limits on the other files are similar. Now, implimenting that many new and *functional* ideas might be a bit difficult

Phoenix-D

[Prophet-PBW]

Yeah, that's it J. In fact, I am working on my own mod with similar race-specific goals; some will start with 'Eliminate (race).'

Whoo-hoo! Imported races! Most likely I will come up with one too. Hmm.. maybe a Communist race bent on uniting all 'Worker' cultures against any imperialist races. Workers of the World, Unite!

[Jmenschenfresser]

Excellent!

Then by the way I am doing it. Every racial trait number gets a corresponding 1000 level family number, I can have 64 races, and still keep it simple. Well, 63 and not have to use the 0's place, so that they all line up. Hell, I have a hard enough time remembering that the 19th century is the 1800s. Wouldn't want to have to remember that the 6th race has 5000 level components.

No I have no intention of making 64 thousand components. Many components will be duplicates with just slight tweaks. I've created more of a copy and paste nightmare for myself than anything.

[Jmenschenfresser]

Well, Prophet, I had this idea late Last night while watching Neil Young on Leno (don't ask about the connection here).

Mod in a bunch of limited races with one or two super strong abilities each. Like amazing organic, mineral or radioactive harvesting, fast building SYs, some bad-*** weapons that are race bound and not steal-able or research-able...whatever you can think of. However these limited races can't conquer the galaxy on their own because of other serious disadvantages. The idea is that the larger races, in their course of conquering the galaxy have to take in as many of these limited races under their wing as they can, because of the great benefits derived from them.

It's not really a goal, but it does add another facet to winning the game. Hopefully, this mod can eventually provide this.

Taera...thanks a billion for the support. I was really close to giving up on this mod. Biggest problem I am having right now is visualizing several of the stock racial traits as complete races w/ their own tech, weapons etc. The Temporal and the Psychic. The psychic less so, but both I am having a hard time seeing what their empires would look like. Here is where I could certainly use some help.

[Taera]

Very well.
Things i can do:
HTML, 3d graphics, 2d graphics, SE coding (havent modded yet, i prefer to play the standard game with TDM races, but its not a problem), ideas (my strongest point). I tend to balance things too.

I am not sure about the idea, but it can work.
E-mail me if you want with any thoughts.