ship designs boring and too similar

[Phoenix-D]

It might, but you can't minic laser-heads except with fighters, and they wouldn't be destroyed when they attacked. Nor can you emulate rolling ship to interpose the wedge between you and incoming fire.

[spacerat]

well i have the full verison and theres nothing as simple as playship.txt or anything to edit. Most the files arn't readable in notepad so i dono what to do. I'm sure some util will come out in a few days to do it but till them apparently im SOL.

[Phoenix-D]

Actually, most of the files -are- readable in notepad. You want the Campaigns folder, not the .x files.

[macjimmy]

I agree that the ships are too similar, but not because of weapons or firing arcs. I think that it is odd that the Fazrah cruiser is billed as the king of fast attack ships, while the Abbidon Crusiser 2 is described as slower than its Terran counterpart. However, top speed, acceleration, etc, are same for all cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and carriers (within the classes I mean). I am messing with modding some of this stuff to be different, such as making the Fazrah ships faster than the others, adding built-in armor & hull regeneration to Amonkrie ships, making the Abbidon ships slower, but maybe with increased resistances, and adding extra base cargo capacity to pirate ships. Only race I am having trouble coming up with an idea for is the Xiati... maybe added shield regen? Hopefully, these kinds of modifications would make the ships a little less generic.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by macjimmy:
I agree that the ships are too similar, but not because of weapons or firing arcs. I think that it is odd that the Fazrah cruiser is billed as the king of fast attack ships, while the Abbidon Crusiser 2 is described as slower than its Terran counterpart. However, top speed, acceleration, etc, are same for all cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and carriers (within the classes I mean). I am messing with modding some of this stuff to be different, such as making the Fazrah ships faster than the others, adding built-in armor & hull regeneration to Amonkrie ships, making the Abbidon ships slower, but maybe with increased resistances, and adding extra base cargo capacity to pirate ships. Only race I am having trouble coming up with an idea for is the Xiati... maybe added shield regen? Hopefully, these kinds of modifications would make the ships a little less generic.

All of the AI ships need some sort of 'base' level repair to compensate for their lack of a 'character' with skills like you get. Different races could have different levels of ability in various areas, of course, like the Amonkrie having higher armor regen.

The nearly identical maneuverability is a problem, as well as the arbitrary caps on speed. The only reason a destroyer is faster than a battleship is that the battleship has been capped. Both of these factors need to be adjusted, but hopefully MM will find a way to tweak the propulsion system to make it more realistic.

The Xiati could be given a 'unique' ability with some weapon modding. They already use Meson BLasters and Plasma Missiles, which are both relatively fast-firing weapons but do less damage per hit than others of similar type. You could speed them up further while decreasing the damage proportionally -- then a Xiati attack would consist of a hail of little fleabites that would be very hard to stop and add up to serious damage over time. This in itself is an advantage of sorts. The big, hard hitting Graviton Hellbore does lots of damage if it hits (it should do more, though... another mod needed) but you can hit that single torpedo with your PDC and make it useless. A huge number of little bullets from Meson BLasters and quick-firing Plasma Missiles is much harder to stop.

[ October 10, 2003, 22:42: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Phoenix-D]

Speaking of bullets, I really hope MM makes bolts able to miss in a patch; right now they're tracking is so pathetic they always miss, but when they're able to lead, not being able to miss might be a bit unbalanced. And strange!

And can you adjust the length of beams anywhere?

[macjimmy]

While I'm here, a quick question about guns...
I've got 2 PDC on my ship. When I get shot w/ 2+ torps, only one is shot down because both of my PDC target the same seeker. I don't suppose there is any way to make the PDCs target different seekers?
Are beam/bolt weapons allowed to be heavy? Can you make light torps? I suppose I could mod it and find out, but feeling too lazy