Babylon 5 Mod

[Ron_Lugge]

Ancient doesn't work? Maybe that was the problem...

Though I could have sworn I tried at least one "normal" race... without the ability to build ships. Will go look harder.

Thanks for the help.

[Nomor]

What is it that determines maintenance costs. I'm thinking mainly of Organics . I don't think I've built another organic producer other than the one that came with the Homeworld, and I'm sitting on a mountain of sprouts with nothing consuming them.

Should not Life Support in ships and Troops and Infantry attract a maintenance overhead. Troops sitting on colonies need to be fed and Life Support should require raw materials.

So far there is little need to produce Organics and thus no limiting factor on Troop/Infantry production. Is it not possible to give these units a maintenance component.


Glad you liked the Tug Maint. Bot thing, but I liked the Drone idea of SJ 's too. Is it not possible to blend the two. I have no experience of drones yet having never encountered them in a game. Drones could be a further development of the former?

[Nomor]

This rar file has bmp's of race portraits that I thought had already been added to the B5Mod. It should be safe to just copy the pictures Folder over the Folder of the same name. Delete any you don't like before doing so.

New Hurr, Abbai, Pakmara, Brakiri and Dilgar

Sorry no can do. I have a rar file 181 KB (185,720 bytes)in size. Is there someone I can email it to for consideration? I have no Home Page

[grumbler]

Nomor said:
What is it that determines maintenance costs. I'm thinking mainly of Organics . I don't think I've built another organic producer other than the one that came with the Homeworld, and I'm sitting on a mountain of sprouts with nothing consuming them.

Should not Life Support in ships and Troops and Infantry attract a maintenance overhead. Troops sitting on colonies need to be fed and Life Support should require raw materials.

So far there is little need to produce Organics and thus no limiting factor on Troop/Infantry production. Is it not possible to give these units a maintenance component.

Regrettably, it is not possible for units to require maintenance, but I agree 1000% with your feelings on the futility of organics production as the mod stands. I have played with the rads production a bit, to require ever-increasing amounts of rads for engines as they get more powerful. This has not made a big difference though as rad production is esential a "freebie" that comes with mineral production.

The maintenance requirement for ships is based on the initial cost and the maintenance requirements in the settings.txt file. Thus, to increase the maintenance cost for organics, you need to increase the build cost in organics.

I am playing with the idea that colony hubs and (to a lessor extent) other facilities are driven by their organics cost, not their mineral cost. this means that a player would need to maintain a high level of organics production early on while he is building his planets up, but those resources do not translate into resources useful for the big shipbuilding campaigns that charactorise the end of the midgame and the whole of the endgame.

Glad you liked the Tug Maint. Bot thing, but I liked the Drone idea of SJ 's too. Is it not possible to blend the two. I have no experience of drones yet having never encountered them in a game. Drones could be a further development of the former?

What i want to avoid is having repairs occur too easily. One of the cool things about the game is the way the lack of shields results in trashed fleets even for the winner of a space battle (unless tech diferences are huge). If it is too easy to repair that damage without returning to a base, then that flavor is lost.

But I don't know where the balance lies, and would welcome a discussion on this.

[Nomor]

Re: Repair Tugs

If the number of components repaired each turn is dependent on the number of Maint. Bots on a ship,
and the number of Maint.Bots is dependent on the Maint Bot CPU tech level, it should be possible to totally disable a ships repair capabilities if say the Maint. Bot CPU is destroyed. If it is possible to require the CPU to be intact for Maint. Bots to work.

Further to this, it word be prudent to allow the Repair Tug to have a hard wired ability to repair at lest one component, so that if its CPU is damaged in a fleet action you can repair the CPU and then repair the rest of the ship. This would be the unique benefit of having the Repair Tug. It should always be able to repair its self unless completely destroyed.

However if we exclude Capital Ships from having Maint.bots can we at lest allow Carriers to have this ability. It is in Carriers that the drone idea might work as a higher tech level. One can always restrict the number of drones a launcher could carry. After all some of the lager Ships can have 20 or more components.

[Nomor]

Re: Ancients and Combat

My understanding of ship combat is that no matter the state of your ships supplies when you enter combat you actually start combat with full supplies based on the supply capacity of the ship.

Would it not be more balanced if the ancients i.e. the Shadows had a heavy power drain if using their "big guns".

e.g. Shadow Cruiser has 3000 supplies. Its "slicer beam" uses 300 supplies each slice, so it can only fire 10 times before it has to quit combat and run. This would balance the battle when engaging a fleet of Destroyers by not allowing one ship to wipe out a group of Capital Ships.

The Shadows from the series always seemed to engage from a position of advantage and hit hard and then vanish. We can infer that the Slicer beam had a great drain on the stored bio energy of the living ship and that a sustained engagement was out of the question?


Re: Organics.
I notice that Life Support (for Troop/Fighters) and Crew Quarters have no Organics cost. This might result in a maintenance increase if they had? Or have you already said that?

[Fyron]

Nomor said:
My understanding of ship combat is that no matter the state of your ships supplies when you enter combat you actually start combat with full supplies based on the supply capacity of the ship.

You have the supply levels you had before entering combat when entering it. You do not get filled up at the start of combat.

However, the B5 Mod causes supplies to be refilled completely every game turn, so running of of supplies in combat in one game turn will not translate to the next. This may be what you are seeing. The first combat of a new turn, especially for a defender, can very easily start with full supplies. But if there are more combats involving those ships in the same game turn, they will have reduced supply levels.

Personally, I do not like this system, as it eliminates supplies from being a necessary strategic consideration...

Nomor said:e.g. Shadow Cruiser has 3000 supplies. Its "slicer beam" uses 300 supplies each slice...

This would also result in the ships being crippled for the rest of the turn. 0 supplies leads to 1 movement both in combat and on the strategic map. Their ships would become sitting ducks for the rest of the combat and game turn, unable to escape. While a human player in tactical combat could keep enough supplies to run, the AI would never be able to handle it.

[grumbler]

"Personally, I do not like this system, as it eliminates supplies from being a necessary strategic consideration... "

But that is the point. In the show, supplies were NOT a major strategic consideration. Ships routinely spent years "out on the rim" and the only apparent supply consideraton was the lack of fresh fruit!

My thinking is that damage, not supply, was the limiting factor that ties fleets to bases. That is why I am so interested in getting the ship-based repair capacity "right." Ancients have self-repair capabilities and thus are not tied to bases at all.

As an aside, I have been playing with the Shadows and Vorlons as non-player races (no research, no colonization, no population growth) and have most of the bugs worked out. My current plan is to have one each of the "full" races and one each "outposts" that are neutral race versions of the full race. The ancients wil;l kick *** locally but will eventually be swampable through numbers. Thoughts?

[Nomor]

Ok, been thinking on this all day:

0 supplies leads to 1 movement both in combat and on the strategic map. Does this also apply to Bonus Movement points as Abilities?

If we treat the Ancients or Vorlons and Shadows differently and make their combat moves more dependant on Bonus Combat Movement Points , we could then use the supplies side for their weapons. The Slicer Beam can then fire each turn, but stops when exhausted, and the Shadow can still retire by using the Bonus Combat Movement side.

We can either make the Bonus Combat Movement part of the Ship Hull, or related to the Slicer Beam, or as a new component: Bio Battery or Cell: that provides Bonus Combat Movement, as long as there are Engines.

Of course if you make it part of the Engine and the engines are destroyed then the ship stops.

This is all meaningless if "no supplies" cancels Bonus Combat Movement.

Grumber: Did you get the new Race portraits?

[Fyron]

Nomor said:
Does this also apply to Bonus Movement points as Abilities?

Yes. Look at the stock game for an example. Design a ship with 6 Quantum Engine IIIs and a Solar Sail. Get it to run out of supplies. Movement will be 1. This ship uses both bonus movement and extra movement points.