Proportions + Devnull + special ingredients = Derek's Mod Gold

[Derek]

Originally posted by ZeroAdunn:
Why didn't you add a warbase? It would be nice to see larger sized bases.

How about a battle moon??? I love those things.

Hmm, well, I was thinking about it; 2500kT is pretty large, allready. What size do you suggest for a battlemoon or warbase?

Also a problem with the battlemoon is if you use QNP, it will generate a range check error, since the number of engines per move must necessarily be huge, and the corresponding number of movement points will overflow the 255 limit in the hard code.

Of course, you can fix this by not letting a battlemoon use engines at all, and instead assigning a base movement rate, unchangeable.

I'll have to think about it.

As for Pirates & Nomads, I haven't put enough time into understanding it to implement it in Derek's Mod yet. When I do, I'll contact SJ and ask him for permission to pilfer P&N and incorporate many parts of it into my mod.

Derek

[TerranC]

[quote]Originally posted by Derek:

What size do you suggest for a battlemoon or warbase?

Also a problem with the battlemoon is if you use QNP, it will generate a range check error, Of course, you can fix this by not letting a battlemoon use engines at all, and instead assigning a base movement rate, unchangeable.

2000KT for Warbase
1750/2250 for battlemoon

"Gravitational slingshot effect creates natural movement for battlemoon"

[Suicide Junkie]

Yep.
Name := Pirate Hoard
Description := Large, hidden cavern which stores unused resources.
120,000 gold in them thar hills, arrrr!

How about a battle moon??? I love those things

E-yep. Nothing like a Napalm bomb the size of a Battleship (800 KT) to put fear into the enemy!

[Derek]

[QB]Originally posted by tnarg:[QB]
one, I noticed in the readme that the Derek's Mod Gold incorporated some newtonian travel methods. I'm used to the proportions method of bigger ships, slower travel, how drastically different is this from the travel method utilized in the Derek's Mod Gold?

It incorporates quasi-Newtonian propulsion. What this means is that each engine type gives a certain amount of standard movement points. Add up the totals for all engines on a ship and divide this by the enigines per move, and you will get the actual movement rate of the ship. For example, if you have 7 Military grade Quantum engines on ship, each engine gives 5 movement points for a total of 35 movement points. If this ship is a Heavy Cruiser, it requires 6 'engines per move'. 35 divided by 6 gives 5, with a remainder. The remainder is dropped, giving an actual movement rate for the ship of 5.

The engines per move is basically, the kT of the ship, divided by 100, rounded down. The Military grade engines give 2, 3, 4, or 5 from Ion to Quantum, and the Commercial give 1, 2, 3, 4 from Ion to Quantum, but are more efficient in supply usage.

two, I also noticed in the readme that some of sizes of ships have certain amounts of engines allowed. In the colony ships, and smaller, I can have as many as space allows. Is this supposed to be like that?

The max engines per ship is 99; in other words, your ship can go as fast as you can fit engines into it, with regards to space.

three, the PD cannons have the special ability to sweep mines, which makes sense. Can they also serve as regular anti seeker and fighter purposes like the description says.

Yes, of course they also act as normal PD. In the next release, I am putting Mine Sweepers back in and reducing the mine sweeping ability of PD, but not eliminating it completely. There will be some use for both PD and for Mine Sweepers.

Four, gravitic drive is gone? Does the solar sail replace its functions?

Yes; solar sail is from original SEIV. I'm sticking with that for now, although I might introduce Gravitic Drive as a possible combat speed enhancer.

Five, I like how you added a few more advanced trait technologies. Any more up your guys sleeves?

Maybe; it depends on how creative I get.

Thank you for time and patience.

Just for curiosity sake, when do you think that you would be release the next Version.

No problem; the next release Version should be this weekend.

Derek

[Krsqk]

Giving the battlemoon a definite movement rate will prevent Ionic Dispersers from destroying their engines in combat. Of course, Ionic Dispersers probably couldn't take out engines for a ship the size of a tiny planet.

[jimbob]

Also a problem with the battlemoon is if you use QNP, it will generate a range check error, since the number of engines per move must necessarily be huge, and the corresponding number of movement points will overflow the 255 limit in the hard code.

Shouldn't the battlemoon be incredibly slow though? If this is the case then a maximum speed of say 5 would require 250 mp total (50 mp/movement). The best output by a engine is about 5, so make the limit for the number of engines = 50. If the poor sucker doesn't have quantum engines, he'll just have really slow battlemoons.

My preference would be to have mammoth engines that have much larger mass and higher output (but still a max output ratio of 0.5 mp per kT). This would allow the player to design the ship without having to manually put 50 engines on, and then have to go through the whole thing again when a new engine comes along.

my .02$

[Suicide Junkie]

A couple of points:

1) For a relative scale, my BattleMoons are 10,000 KT.
This gives an EPM of 200 for P&N. Since your thrust scale is half of mine, a 10,000 KT ship in your mod would have 100 EPM.
At that rate, your Battlemoons would be able to go 2 or 3 sectors per turn (3 with propulsion experts).
You may want to increase the size further in order to slow them down without bending your laws of physics

2) Adding a large price to the hull of your BattleMoons can help immensely in balancing the tech. Be sure to test their combat effectiveness against standard ships.

3) Mammoth engines are very nice and useful for Human players, but they will FUBAR any and all AI designs. If you intended to make this a humans-only mod, ignore this.

4) You do not need to place any artificial restrictions on the number of engines. If a player accidentally goes over the 255 limit, SE4 will RCE, but will continue running. The player can remove the offending engine and continue play normally.

[Derek]

Err, no. I'll check on that. However, PD also acts as mne sweeping; thats a relic from the early days of SEIV when the AS never would put minesweeping components on ships.

Thanks for the headsup.

Derek

[Derek]

Here is the current summary of changes for Derek's Mod Gold v 1.02

Summary of Changes

v 1.02 05/09/2002

Added Mine Sweepers back in; these were originally taken out in the Devnull Mod, and Mine Sweeping was given to Point Defense. I changed Mine Sweepers to 20 kT as opposed to 30Kt but I added in a radioactives requirement to simulate the methods of mine detection

Reduced the mine sweeping ability of Point Defense Levels 1,2,3 now sweep 1 mine, and lvls 4 & 5 sweep 2 mines

Added in Combat Bridge; 20 kT vice the bridges 10kT and costs much more minerals and rads, along with some organics, but armored and improves offense and defense by 5%

Added in Weapons Platform Command Centers; live human crews running weapons platforms give offensive bonuses, but cost more.

Added in boarding defense to Crew's Quarters; it makes sense that any crew could defend its ship, even if they are only Navy squids....

Added in 10kT Cargo Compartment and 5kT Cargo Niche to fill up ship space

Same thing with Supply Compartment and Supply Niche

Added Deep Station (1000kT) and War Base (2000kT as new base types; changed Base Construction tech to reflect 5 levels of base types, but cut cost of Base Construction in half

Played around with Base Mount sizes to ensure each new level of Base allowed a new type of mount

Added in Gravitic Drives (I, II, III) which increases combat movement, and give combat defensive bonus, but are 100kT. Worth it for larger ships.

Changed Engineering Department to generate extra movement, rather than combat movement. It now does not interfere with Gravitic Drive. Also acts as somewhat of a damage control, as it takes 50kT of space, but is worth 250kT of structure. Also increased radioactive cost

Cleaned up the Facilities.txt, removing all duplicate facilities that are relics from Proportions; they were there so that Proportions could be easily upgraded.

Added in Large Planetary Shield Generators, which are about half as effective, and more expensive than the alien Version, but still provide protection for a planet. Also added in associated technology.

Replaced my quadranttypes.txt with the one from Proportions; rather than doing the work myself, I figured there was no reason to re-invent the wheel, and used the excellent one in Proportions written by PvK

Increased the Combat Bonus of Combat Sensors by 5% each sensor; I felt there were not enough hits at long ranges in combat.

Added in Kaon Torpedos; torpedos made of kaons, a type of mesons with an interesting decay pattern that results in Kaon Torpedos doing more damage at longer ranges. Also put in the associated technology, which requires Physics 4 and Torpedos 6 before Kaon Weapons can be researched.

Increased the Combat to hit of every attack ship size by 5, same reason as for Combat sensors

v 1.01 05/08/2002

Added bomb pumped X Ray Lasers. Long range, low damage, skips armor and shields. They need tech area 'X Ray Lasers' which needs a number of other techs

Changed Capital Ship Missiles speed to 8 from 6

Changed HBM Missiles to speed 5 from 4, and added in Quad damage to shields.

v 1.00 05/07/2002

Initial release as a beta testable mod. If you encounter problems or suggestions, let me know.

Added the Events file from the EyeCandy Mod on the Gold CD, authored by Richard Bradley (Dracus). The events data file increases the number of events from 17 to 55. There are about 10 positive events included. The ratio insures that the lucky trait is not degraded.

Added the facilities of Proportions Mod, along with the economic model and some other minor things from proportions.

Added most of Devnull Mod by Devnull (originally), modified by Geoschmo and Rollo.

Space Monsters courtesy of Rollo.

Added Heavy Sheild Generators from Suicide Junkie.

Added in quasi-Newtonian Propulsion, courtesy of many.

Changed Missiles to 40kT. They were 25kT in Devnull; I thought this was too little.

Changed all the ship sizes; see the attached spreadsheet for a list of the ship sizes and abilities

Most of the ship sizes now include a good amount of radioactives for production, re-emphasizing rads.

Added fighter mountable missiles to help absorb some of the point defense that fighters hate.

Weapon mounts are changed so that increasing classes of ships (scout class, destroyer class, cruiser class, ship of the line, and Monitor) have increasing weapon mounts available to them

Changed many, many other things which I haven't typed up in a readme.

Thats enough for today; some more changes tomorrow, and some more AI tweaking, and v 1.1 should be released during the weekend.

Derek

[ 10 May 2002, 07:09: Message edited by: Derek ]

[Tnarg]

So this is an update already? Wow, where do we download?