Star Wars Mod - II (Sci-Fi Xover Mod)

[Andrés]

I'm thinking about the facilities.

It has been pointed before that killing planets and pop is too easy. Some ideas about that were adding planetary shields, increasing power of weapon platforms and increasing hitpoints of pop.
Now IIRC you were considering appliying some of these ideas in the B5 mod, right?

But in starwars killing pop seems to work very similar to SE4.
It's easy to kill all pop using standard weaponry, and if the planet is shielded,bombarding it is completely useless.
Many attack on planets depend on sabotage missions to take down the planetary shields before the attack. Eg Camaas, and even Endor (although the attack wasn't on the planet itself)

But neither Bab5 or Trek have planetary shields.

This is what i was thinking, Bab5 and STrek have some shields as a second ablity in normal facilities, while SWars have special facilities. That way SW planets will be more vulnerable and easy to kill if unshielded but better protected shielded, while still having their "unique" planetary shields.
Putting numbers to all planetary shields would be the ral problem.

[Andrés]

BTW what happened with Terran's and Fyron's interest in the Trek part?
Are you trying some things?
Don't feel intimidated by our opinions/suggestions. Not enough time?

[Val]

Whichever idea y'all like would be good.

I was thinking about upping the pop damage, but haven't done anything as of yet. I had also wanted to make it so you would need to use planetary weapons to attack planets, so normal lasers couldn't do anything. Maybe the planetary shields built into all facilities are the best idea, then upping the damage on planetary barrage weapons. Meshes pretty well with the SW shield idea.

[QuarianRex]

Hey there, I noticed that you are a little light on the Trek side of things so I figured that I might as well toss in a couple thoughts.

I saw some very good ideas on trek propulsion a few pages back that seems perfect (posted by SuicideJunkie I think). Only problem was that those designs were based on standard movement (more appropriate for trek I think)not Q-N. Is that a problem? Can you have multiple propulsion types like that in the same mod?

The way you seem to be doing things (with each race having its own tech trees and such) this doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. Then again, what do I know, all I have to play around with is the demo (at least until gold comes out). Though, if you could maintain both types it would go a long way towards giving a unique star trek feel to their races.

I was also wondering if there was a way to have central tech areas where each of the individual races could branch off of instead of having multiple redundant tech areas for each race. For example, instead of having Federation ship construction, Empire ship construction, etc., you could have every race research "ship construction" (modifying the tech area so that it is empty, ie. provides nothing for researching it by itself) and have each ship require the appropriate tech level of ship construction *and* a single level in "Klingon Tech", "Rebel Tech" or whatever.

These race techs could be limited to only one level (or more) that is automatically given to a specific race (starting level 1). This could also be used to tie other techs together, like beam weapons, propulsion, etc.

By now you may be asking yourself "Why in Hell would I want to do that?". Well I'll tell ya. So far as I've seen you've gone to a great deal of effort to balance out the various techs while allowing each race to maintain its own style. This is good and is the entire point of doing a crossover mod. The problem that I see is that with the current setup one of the key aspects of the game has been removed. You can no longer trade/steal/reverse-engineer tech. If all tech areas are racial then they cannot be shared with other races.

I have heard that if you remove the racial number from a racial tech area then it can be learned by anyone who gets their hands on it ( though they can't initially research it). While this option might be a good idea for certain techs I think that it would be a bad idea for the basics. After all, having Ferengi cruising around in star destroyers of their own design is just wrong. Not to mention that you could wind up having ten different ship construction areas in your research areas. That could get annoying.

However, if you have things based off of a single tech tree (as I tried to describe above) you could have the Narn analyze a captured galaxy class ship to give them ideas on how to create bigger ships of their own. Also, I figured that beam weapons could also be a good crossover option. After all, the main difference between lasers, bLasters, and phasers is aplication (phasers slow and accurate, bLasters fast though less accurate, etc.). Granted, I know that the actual tech behind them may differ quite a bit (I haven't read the tech manuals or any such) but that is less important than you might think.

Some of you may wonder whether this applies "story"-wise. I think it does. Take Star Trek for example (mainly because it is one of the few shows that tried to show adaptation or integration of tech). Many times has the crew of the Enterprise (or Voyager, etc.) encountered a new, previously unknown tech (or a more advanced Version of a known one) and, after analysis, have used this knowledge to upgrade their own weapon systems without changing them (they didn't change their phasers to disruptors, just cranked their phasers).

Please consider this option, I think that it would add a lot to the mod. Though I may just be acting out of selfishness, since I am working on a Borg mod (they currently have a -80 on research and some racial techs that are appropriately lowered in cost) and if they have nothing to assimilate then what is the point?

Joking aside, I do think that this is a good idea. I just hope that I said it coherently. It is very early in the morning...

[Andrés]

There's no problem in having multiple prop types. Unless someone "cheats" when selecting racial traits, you'll never see b5 engines in trek hulls.
I admit I'm tempted to abandon q-n movs for the sw ships in order to be able to restrict standard movements more easily.

I like your idea of common tech trees and I admit I had thought about it and discarded it as too complicated (what means that I was too lazy to implement it at that time)
But I’d go for a mixed system, it works nicely for “ship construction”, but I’m not sure about beam weapons, it’d sound strange to research “Energy Stream Weapons” to get phasers, disruptors or turbolasers.

[Val]

The tech tree that is setup in the ever evolving B5Mod is actually setup so the initial trait to start researching any racial tech (other than Ancients) is Racial only, but then that is a requirement for the other techs within that race (weapon, special facilities, bioengineering, etc.), this way another race can capture a ship, reverse engineer, and then start building them. The only exception to this are the Ancients. Right now their technology is restricted to their specific Ancient race - though I made add another racial trait called "B5 Ancient" and have some of their generic stuff (for all Ancient Races) in there. Even with that being said, both the Vorlons and Shadows have a special Tech called "Vorlon/Shadow Based", which will allow races to build things like a Shadow Omega or White Star. Once all the weapons I am currently working on are done, I plan to go back and add some more "Shadow/Vorlon" specific weapons for the other races (right now any race can get them, but I would like the current ones limited to EA, Minbari and IA).

I had originally thought about making the tech tree in such a way that all races theoritically had the ability to research along any given tech path. But, that kind of took away from the feel of the B5 universe - so now it is done as described in the first paragraph.

[Andrés]

I just rendered this pic:
http://se4kdy.cyberwars.com/temp/intro.jpg

It's still work in progress, I want to add another capital ship behind the Omega (I'm not sure wich, choice will also depend on the models I can find). I will add small explosions, more beams and some torps everywhere, not only that lonely X-wing but lots of fighters from different races.