Babylon 5 Mod - Page 16

Suicide Junkie · #**151** January 15th, 2002, 10:12 PM

Hey, why not.
Toss in a tiny asteroid field for the rings, and adjust the tiny planets.

Tiny planets (minor moons) -> 0 facil, 1 if breathable, (but all created as vaccuum worlds). Useful for remote mining, or unit construction + a few million pop.

If you can create a "micro" planet type, which would be even better, that would be great. I had some wierd effects when I tried way back when, but that was on some very old Versions of SE4.

Val · #**152** January 15th, 2002, 10:20 PM

Do you have your original trial 'micro-planets'? What do you mean "weird"?

Suicide Junkie · #**153** January 15th, 2002, 11:24 PM

I didn't keep the files, since I hadn't made many changes (I probably didn't do enough)
The "wierd effects" were null-worlds, with no picutre, null atmosphere (not "vaccuum", but ""), null surface type, and normal resource values.

That was quite a long time ago, though... somewhere around the time when it was still just "Piratesmod", and nomads were something that just couldn't be done

.

Val · #**154** January 16th, 2002, 12:19 AM

SJ:

There are some Nomad races in B5, think they should be added? Raiders could be designed along Nomad ways. Drahk also appear somewhat nomadic - at leaset since Zha'ha'dum was destroyed.

Suicide Junkie · #**155** January 16th, 2002, 01:31 AM

Drahk would need a colony or two to be able to make deals, while raiders could be purely nomadic pirates.
I reccommend giving Raiders some sort of "Capture Ray", to make ship captures easier. It would be a range one, low damage, "only living beings" damage type, Surgical Strike weapon.
IE. it takes out crew quarters, boarding parties & security teams only.

It will be weak enough to only destroy one component per turn, so you'll need to attack crippled/unarmed ships, use a larger ship to cover you, or use lots of raiders.

Aside from those advantages, they will also have the advantage of depleting the "shields" generated by the advanced armor & grav deflectors.

APPEND:
Back to nomadic stuff: Raiders make their money from capture/scrapping, drahk make their money... how?

As for maintenance... what should the values be? (They can be anything we like, despite the 5% rule)
Raiders will need to be in the 0.5% to 1% range, in order to be able to maintain ships.
Also, a "civilian cloak" would be useful as a racial tech. (Hide in plain view, and all that

)

How to give arbirtary maintenance costs:
We can set all ship hulls to give a 90% maintenance reduction.
The raiders take 5% maint, 10% of which is 0.5%
The normal races take 250% maint, 10% of which equals SE4 Classic 25% maintenance.

[ 15 January 2002: Message edited by: suicide_junkie ]

Phoenix-D · #**156** January 16th, 2002, 01:42 AM

""only living beings" damage type, Surgical Strike weapon.
IE. it takes out crew quarters, boarding parties & security teams only."

I'm not seeing this listed in my components.txt file. Undocumented damage type? Or do you have Gold on the brain?

Phoenix-D

Suicide Junkie · #**157** January 16th, 2002, 01:51 AM

Hehe. It IS in the list, but you have to read between the lines

"Only Security Stations"
We simply add one boarding defense point to all the extra items we want it to destroy, such as boarding parties, and crew quarters.

In tests by others, it was found to NOT skip shields.

Fyron · #**158** January 16th, 2002, 04:46 AM

quote:
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.

I know. I meant for the "star" to be in the center of the system. I must have copied the basic info from one of the stars in a trinary system or something. I gave the star a description so that it would have one if a player clicked on it. I called it the core of the black hole, when I should have called it the event horizon. Just some accidental sloppiness on my part.

quote:
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 ...

That would work pretty well. Could you draw this SJ?

quote:
drahk make their money... how?

IIRC, the Drahk do not harvest any resources. They had a large fleet before Zha'ha'dum was destroyed, and they didn't make any new ships afterwards. They couldn't make any of their motherships or battle cruisers or anything without establishing a new colony, which I am pretty sure that they did not do.

thorfrog · #**159** January 16th, 2002, 05:20 PM

Great idea to incorperate pirates & nomads to the game. We could now have roaming Drahk and Raiders. Maybe we could also include the First Ones like this. Six or seven ultra-powerful ships.

How about this for an idea for events. The First One Lorien appears in one of your systems moral increases accross the empire.

Val · #**160** January 16th, 2002, 09:27 PM

As near as I can tell the Drahk are pretty much living like a raider race, and live off resources left over from Zha'ha'dum.

It would be neat to create the ancient ships as wanderers (single ships), though that would probably be easier to create in a scenario situation. Just make them their single super ship and give it nil maint. Right?

If nobody wants to model the star, we could always "clip out" the middle of the blackhole and make that the star pic, so it will look exactly the same as far as anyone is concerned.

One question for everyone: Weapon Platforms in B5 - I don't really recall seeing planet based weapons in any episodes (other than the ancient planetary laser on Epsilon). Should we eliminate them and limit people to orbital defenses? Maybe add an even larger range of Sat sizes/categories that could hold more weapons?