Babylon 5 Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

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If we kept to B5 standards in the game for the colonies we could run into logistics problems for creating fleets and such. I actually played a games with the new engines (Q-N ships) and started with Fision engines and it took me quite some time to become 'established' in the game.

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Which isn't nessesarily a bad thing. Wider gaps of space between empires, dotted with military outPosts (not even planets, maybe bases). You need to have a decent buffer zone in order to intercept enemy ships before they can clobber your colonies

That reminds me:
What % of normal maintenance should bases cost? The standard 50% seems high...

Perhaps we could add maintenance reducing components ("Civilian Space - Residential/Commercial" 500 KT)

[Fyron]

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Anyone have weapon sound clips?

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Check out B5Tech.net. They have a lot of sounds.

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Heh, maybe we should give you the job of proof reader

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I could do that.

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I could use some help with the weapon systems, been trying to make them fair and figure out the research criteria.

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Do you have some preliminary damage/kiloton ratios worked out yet? The current beta Version of the mod doesn't have any B5 weapons in it.

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I'm also looking for some help with re-doing the quadrants (adding new ones and modding the current ones to include 'invisible' stars in black hole systems to power the reactors).

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Add to SystemTypes.txt:

Name := Black Hole
Description := Black hole system. A black hole is a star which has collapsed in on itself until it has become so dense that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull.
System Physical Type := Black Hole
Background Bitmap := Blackhole.bmp
Empires Can Start In := FALSE
Mask Background Objs := TRUE
Non-Tiled Center Pic := TRUE
Number of Abilities := 3
Ability 1 Type := System - Movement Towards Center
Ability 1 Descr := All ships will be moved 2 sectors towards the center each turn.
Ability 1 Val 1 := 2
Ability 1 Val 2 := 0
Ability 2 Type := System - Destructive Center
Ability 2 Descr := The center of the blackhole will destroy any ships that enter it.
Ability 2 Val 1 := 5000
Ability 2 Val 2 := 0
Ability 3 Type := Sector - Shield Disruption
Ability 3 Descr := Heavy gravitation causes all shields to be useless.
Ability 3 Val 1 := 5000
Ability 3 Val 2 := 0
WP Stellar Abil Type := Unstable Warp Point
Number of System Objs := 1
Obj 1 Physical Type := Star
Obj 1 Position := Coord 6,4
Obj 1 Stellar Abil Type := Normal Star
Obj 1 Size := Any
Obj 1 Age := Ancient
Obj 1 Color := Purple
Obj 1 Luminosity := Dim

Add to SectType.txt:

Physical Type := Star
Picture Num := 500 (make blank bmp)
Description := Core of the black hole.
Star Size := Medium
Star Age := Ancient
Star Color := Purple
Star Luminosity := Dim

This should cause the black hole to have one object in it. It will be a star. By using the Purple color, you can make it so that this star will always appear in the black hole, because it is the only star color that the black hole can have. Unfortunately, their will be a chance for this "star" to appear in other systems as well.

I have included these in a text file so that all the lines will match up properly:

black_hole_with_star.txt

[Val]

Talk about turn around time

I have an Excel sheet with prelim weapon ranges and damages at 'normal' capacity. Each weapon will have 5 cats right now 1-Prototype (less range, damage, etc), 2-4 Normal (all same range, dmg will vary), 5 - Advanced (Increased everything). I have upwords of 120+ weapon types for all the races, plus I have more to add once we get going.

I've been using excel sheets then merging it into a word doc to make my files to save time.

[Fyron]

Could you post this excel spreadsheet or send it to me? I mean, if you want my help, I'll need to see what you've got and what needs to be done.

So will my idea for the invisible star in the black hole system work? I think that to make it so that the purple star doesn't appear any where else, you would have to make several copies of each system type, one for each standard star color. That isn't too bad for the standard system, but it would be a big problem for those trinary systems. If you wanted to have systems with 4 or 5 stars, then that would get very crazy!

Actually, what does this do exactly?

Mask Background Objs := TRUE

If it makes a regular star become invisible, then i guess that my purple star solution is pointless.

Alternatively, you could give black holes this ability:

Ability 4 Type := Sector - Sight Obscuration
Ability 4 Descr := Light cannot excape from a black hole, so sensors do not function here.
Ability 4 Val 1 := 30
Ability 4 Val 2 := 0

This would obscure the star(s) that you put in the black hole system. Also, it would prevent you from seeing enemy ships in the system, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Fyron]

Also, I'd suggest having the black hole do 50000 damage instead of 5000. That way, a huge, heavily armored ship could not survive the black hole's event horizon.

[tesco samoa]

I would have figured that most races (younger)could only colonize rock planets. Perhaps, the Minbari could colonize Ice and Rock.

[Val]

I was going to eliminate Gas planet colonies - so you can only mine them.

I figured Ice and Rock planets were similar enough, just make it difficult to research the other.

Most (ie almost ALL) races in B5 are Rock, Oxygen races. Vorlon, Gaim and a few non-major races are the only exceptions I can think of. Another reason I wanted to mod the Quad Type files is to make sure every system has a higher chance for at least one O2 rock world.

[Phoenix-D]

"This should cause the black hole to have one object in it. It will be a star."

Also FYI if someone clicks on the sector containing the star, it would show up like a normal star would (err, minus the actual picture) so you might want to force it to appear at 6,6 and describe it like event horizon or something.

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

RE: Gas giants
Rather than letting a gas giant be mined out, we should probably set "remote mining reduces value := false"
You could, of course, get much more out of a planet by colonizing, but remote mining might be viable for those planets out in no-man's land.

Note that the majority of huge gas giants should by Hydrogen/Helium, although the smaller giants can be others. (None of the races can colonize them anyways, so atmosphere types don't matter except for realism)
Also, due to the H/He composition of the gas giants, they should be started with a very low concentration of minerals & organics, but be great sources of rads (fusion reactor fuel )
- Rock worlds should probably favour minerals over organics.
- "Ice"/Water worlds should favour organics.

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Also FYI if someone clicks on the sector containing the star, it would show up like a normal star would (err, minus the actual picture) so you might want to force it to appear at 6,6 and describe it like event horizon or something.

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A raised-bubble distortion of a starfield using an image editor would look really cool for the event horizon "star": star images getting smeared into arcs around the edge and all ...

[Val]

I always thought of the organics and mineral resources on a Gas Giant as the rings/moons around the planet. I know we couldn't possibly add all the moons (ok, you could, but that would make for one heck of a system) for even our solar system in this game, so I always thought of them as lumped with the planet, and the moons that you see around a planet are the largest most colonizable ones.