Starfleet Battles Mod (SFB Mod)

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by Kana:
Can the Combat Area be made bigger or smaller?
I didn't think I could...just thought I would ask...

No. You can change the duration of the combat round, but the combat map is fixed.

Do the weapon ranges only go out to 20? Can they be increased? Will they appear in the interface?

I believe 20 is the max. It's hard-coded in, and you can only modify the damage done at each range in the textfiles.

Does Demeanor do anything? Can you add more?

You might want to take a look at the Star Trek Mod. I know they've added several.

[spoon]

[quote]Originally posted by General Woundwort:

quote:

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Originally posted by Kana:

[qb]Does Demeanor do anything? Can you add more?

You might want to take a look at the Star Trek Mod. I know they've added several.

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In other words, yes, you can add more but no, they don't do anything.

[Fyron]

Do the weapon ranges only go out to 20? Can they be increased? Will they appear in the interface?

Yes, you can. The extra ranges do not show up in the interface. For seeking weapons, adding a 21th damage value (assuming you have all 20 ranges doing damage) will cause the seeker to have infinite range, and do the damage listed in the 21th damage slot. I am not sure what happens with direct fire weapons, though I don't think that extra damage values work.

Check out:

http://se4modding.spaceempires.net/

[Kana]

Ok new round of questions...

While messing around with Dave G' modder, and considering my mod, I would like to delete components and tech areas, and add my own from scratch.

What components/tech areas are permenantly part of SE4? Are they the ones with the listing of 'Removable: False'?

Supply Cost for Component usage--Tied to Ship size or Mount? One Component...IE Cloak...that uses up different amount of supplies based on Ship Size...I assume a cloak mount could be used to increase the amount or make seperate components and some how restict them to a certain size of ship.

Restricting Weapons/Components by Ship/Unit Size?
I might have asked this before...but basically want simulate certain weapons being to big or ship size not big enough to provide a stable platform for the weapon/component.

Thanks,

Kana
Modding while waiting for PBW to be revived...

[Atrocities]

Finally someone to take on the challenge.

[Alneyan]

You can remove about everything in the data files, as long as you provide an adequate replacement, so you would be able to remove *all* tech areas and components. The line you mentioned means that you can (or cannot when set to false) disable the technology at game setup.

Mounts should be able to alter supply usage (the Large/Heavy/Massive weapon mounts do this as a side effect in the vanilla game), so you would need to make one such mount per vehicle size.

Lastly, there are a few ways to prevent a given weapon from being used in, say, a Light Cruiser and below:
- You may make this weapon too big to fit on any ship below Cruiser, while increasing the size of the hulls above Cruiser. For example, this weapon could take 500kt, and a Cruiser would have more tonnage available. The problem is that you will have more tonnage on some of your ships that you would like, unless you intend to make a dedicated ship acting as a weapon "platform" for these powerful weapons.
- You could make the weapon too big to fit in any ship, and design a mount reducing its size to acceptable levels for a ship of at least 401kt in tonnage. While this way is easier, you wouldn't be able to apply any other mount to this weapon, which may be a problem if your mod requires a lot of such mounts.
- If you do not mind doing a lot of copy/paste, you could make two series of mounts: one for the "regular" weapons (as usual), and a second one for the "restricted" weapons. These would be the same as the first, but would reduce the size of the "restricted" weapons enough. This way, you would have an easy way of restricting the use of a given weapon to certain ships without preventing the player from using other mounts for this weapon.

[ May 18, 2004, 16:18: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Kana]

Ok quick question...

I asked what the lowest number was for tonnage size. Answer was 0...and no fractions allowed. I believe the highest number is somewhere around 65000.

Does this apply to all numbers in the game? I do know that 255 is the max for number of planets. Are there any other weird restrictions?

Reason being I was considering really simplifying research by basically having each Research Faciliy providing 1 RP. An various Tech Areas being anywhere from 1 to ???? RP. Basically not the 5000 to 1000000 range that we see now.

Kana

[Phoenix-D]

If you make research facilities give 1 RP, you're going to have some rather funky rounding errors. I'd recommend not going below 100.

eg, 10% racial bonus to research gives:
1 RP facility, either 1 or 2 RP produced
100 RP facility, 110 RP produced

[Fyron]

Are there any other weird restrictions?

There actually aren't any "weird" restrictions. 256 (2^8) and 65536 (2^16) are commonly used sizes of various programming language data structures. Depending on how exactly Aaron chose to store the data for a various object is what determines the seemingly weird limits. Resources stored/produced can use much larger numbers. So can population. The exact upper limits are unknown, but you probably won't ever reach them, unless you make your mod use really huge numbers for some bizarre reason.

If you make research facilities give 1 RP, you're going to have some rather funky rounding errors. I'd recommend not going below 100

I'd second that.

[ May 24, 2004, 05:57: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Kana]

Ok...Question for Modders familiar with SFB...

Expanding Sphere Generators...ESG's basically energy shields that damage mines, sats, drones, fighter, and even ships. Can be used at range 0, 1, 2, and 3. This is basically a ram attack, but an object/target can run into it the ESG's range as well...

I was thinking of setting this up as some form of DF weapon with a short range, and the PD tag to automatically target items in range. Add in to hit bonus, and possibly low amounts of shielding...Does this sound all right? Any other ideas...?

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Stasis Field Generators, SFG's....Is there a way to make a weapon do more than one damage type? Ideally this weapon would stop a ship, and not allow it to fire any weapons or move...The push and pull, and Distrupt/Increase reload times would probably work for this...If I could include all 4 it would be the most ideal situation...I don't believe I can though...which sucks...Also again any ideas? If not I might not include it...or if it is, it will have some effect from above...

Kana