Carrier Battles Mod

[Will]

Just want to stress what SJ said about culture for this mod. I'm a Disposable Society in CB#2 (puke's empire) and it took me about 35 turns to realize that I need to ignore most of what is in SJ's CB School of Design. For everyone else in Carrier Battles, and in most other mods, you want to design ships that will fail gracefully, and still be able to fight with half damage. You can repair it later, and the more battles a ship fights in, the more experience bonus it gets. With Disposable Society, you want a ship to fight at full force for as long as possible, then die quickly Disposable's strength is in spamming opponents with wave after wave of latest-tech ships. Unless a ship has taken very light damage (a few armour components, maybe a weapon lost), it's better to leave them behind, and find a way to destory them yourself, since it's expensive to maintain the ships. It's not worth it to train ships; in the several turns it takes to train, you've spent enough in maintainence to construct another two waves of throw-away ships. And since you construct at double the rate of anyone else, it's a lot easier to build a fleet quickly.

I'm sure I'll be learning even more about it soon... but I'll be learning a different style for the Weekly game

[Kana]

This is actually an SEV question, but I do think it would be appropriate to CBM...

In SE3 you could launch, and recover fighters on your carrier. I haven't played SE3 in awhile and really don't remember how the AI handled that...In SE4 you can only launch with no recovery in combat. I feel that this should be an option in SE5. Do we think that the AI can handle this properly in combat? Do we know if this is being considered in SE5?

Kana

[Suicide Junkie]

The AI didn't handle it in SE3.
Just launch, and fight to the death.

In CBmod, you get to recover the fighters after 30 turns of fighting, so you can reasonably land & relaunch them in a big battle.

SE5 will be fancier, so who knows.

[Slick]

Suicide Junkie said:
...so who knows.

I'm sure you do, but I understand...

[Slick]

Ok I applied to join the CB weekly game. I installed the latest image mod. Somebody needs to make an installer for that beast. I started a test game at home and got some errors with randomly generated AI empires at game start. It appears like these errors won't be a problem, but some of the AI advanced traits, for example, were not recognized due to not being in CB mod. We'll see how bad this turns out to be...

Edit: I got lots of errors and the game crashed hard on the 2nd turn. How do I get the feel of the mod in a single player game?

[Will]

Well, CBMod isn't exactly AI-friendly anyway... even if you did mod the AIs to be technically compatible, I don't think they would do so well in the game.

[ZeroAdunn]

SEV is supposed to have some kind of AI scripting. So, maybe we will get lucky and be able to script it so when a fighter runs out of supplies it returns to the nearest carrier.

[Suicide Junkie]

Edit your settings.txt to make a maximum 10-system game or so (so it dosen't take too long).

Then add two human players, no AIs and play against yourself to get some design, colonization and a taste of combat.

[Slick]

Suicide Junkie said:
Edit your settings.txt to make a maximum 10-system game or so (so it dosen't take too long).

Then add two human players, no AIs and play against yourself to get some design, colonization and a taste of combat.

Rats. I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I was hoping to see some AI designs.

Here's what I have gathered so far:

- Read thru the courses again.
- Scanned the data files
---- you musta used your gridder program on the missiles. sheez. Yup, there are enough flavors.
---- many facilities cause pollution, need to worry about planet conditions
---- mounts are very important, even on units
- QNP propulsion... not very experienced with that. gonna be building some less-than-optimized designs
- leaky shields and armor, same as above.
- found "important!readme.txt" quite by accident, and as the name implies...
- I'll need to start a high tech game to check everything out in-game.
- Counter-Intel = offensive project. Hmmm. I hope intel won't overwhelm game.
- Plagues seem to be likely in this mod.
- Looks like ship repair is to be taken seriously. Looks like reduced repair abilities and large numbers of damaged components (due to leaky armor and shields) requires serious repair planning.
- no quantum reactors; supply will always be an issue.


and now some questions:
- SJ, would it be a breach of your security to post an empire (with saved designs) for newbies to look at? You could make one with just some intermediate level designs and keep your killer designs secret.

- What's a good ratio of mineralsrganics:radioactives to shoot for in this mod? early game especially.

- Looks to me like a stock shipset works even with modified vehiclesize.txt. Any problems using a stock shipset?

- By reading components.txt, I don't quite get the colony idea. Please explain the differences between Rock Colony, Primitive Rock Colony and Advanced Rock Colony