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

[Andrés]

AI seems to handles warp openers and closers in a very chaotic way.
At least you have jump gates in B5.
There's nothing similar to warp points in star wars. You have hyperlanes, known and well cartographied routes where hypredrives can be faster, but you can basically move freely in any direction if you're craeful to plan a route that does not get too close to large stellar bodies.
I can't make an Interdictor that doen not allow enemies to jump warp points or use emergency movement "hyperdrives". Since the only way to block a warp point is by closing it I'll make it a warp closer (and opener at higher level), but the wp won't automatically re-open once the interdictor is destroyed.

[Val]

Check out the B5 Mod thread for a vote on what we are doing with racial/weapon techs. Would like y'alls input

[Andrés]

Death Star Superlaser and weapon mounts Q:
Besides its planet destroying ability, I want the death star main weapon to be the strongest possible weapon, able to destroy almost any ship in a single shot. Maximum damage allowed by the game is 65k. But to avoid overflow (specially if I want AI to handle it) it will have to be 65k using the best weapon mount available.
Since we have many ships that will be larger than baseships, it makes sense to have more weapon mounts. I was temporarily using the weapon mounts from my "ultimate vehicle size" mod, but I think those are too much and too big. At least in Star Wars very big ships carry an impressively large number of relatively small weapons.

Capturable Techs Q:
If you give a tech area a race exclusive requisit, but don't add it the racial number, only those who have the racial trait can start to research it, but others can gain it by analyzing captured ships or using intel.
In a full tech start all will have it.
It would be nice to have a few "capturable" race-exclusive tech areas, something that is not too alien to another race or sci-fi.

Wished Abilities List:
A list of all new abilities (and damage types, restrictions, changes to existing abilities, etc.) we'd like to have to make this mod more complete and realistic. And then send it to MM, I understand some would require major changes and are not worth it, but IMO at least some of them would be relatively easy to add.
These are the ones I can recall now, but I'm sure there a lot more:
* Limited reactor ability: Like Solar Supply generation, it generates a limited amount of supplies every turn, but independent from the number of stars.
* Make the "cannot be repaired except by a space yard ability" in emergency pods, a separated ability from the pod ability, so it can be removed or used in other comps.
* Repair bays that can only repair a specific type of components. (Probably by specifying custom group)
* Open Temporary Warp Point: A wp that automatically collapses after the ship has crossed or at the end of the turn.
* Spatial Anomaly ability: it works like the Spatial Anomaly "Ship - Moved" event type, but it can be triggered on purpose by activating a component or something like that. At lower levels your ship ends up anywhere, but later you start to learn how to control it and you're able to specify system and even sector you want to go.
* The ability to use non-damaging weapons such as tractor beams against your own ships. If possible even to pull a damaged ship or a station outside combat.
* Warp Point Interdiction: When a component with this ability is turned on in the same sector of a warp point, the WP is unusable. No ship can cross the WP from the side, until the interdictor component is destroyed, turned off or leaves the sector.
* Disable damage type: Normal damage against shields, once shields are down it disrupts all ship functions leaving it dead in space (the ship can't move, can't fire weapons and can't regenerate shields) but without any real damage. After the combat finishes, the ship will be fully functional again, maybe it loses all supplies or something like that, but components are not damaged.
* Space Cities / Populated Stations / Artificial Planets: Something between a planet and a space station. It holds population not only as cargo, it needs population to run resource-generating small facility-like components.

[Val]

To get around the limited reactors problem of needing stars, we were going to include "invisible stars" in Black Hole and Nebulas - even made a center piece from the Black Hole BMP to overlap.

Would love to see the "Can't be repaired bit" as an ability.

Temporal one turn Warps would be great too - or even the ability to set the number of turns as the variable.

Wouldn't the interdictor just stop a ship as it enters it's gravity well? So ships could warp in, but they couldn't warp out

[Andrés]

I know about the getarounds, to work properly mod all systems to have 1 and only 1 star.
But adding that ability should be really for thosue that can alter the source code. And would make reactors something different from strong solar colectors.

[Suicide Junkie]

Acutally, you just need "at least one star", since the reactors have generation = capacity, and the generators are the only supply storage on the ship.
You can still have binary & trinary systems.

[Andrés]

Laser colors:
Apparently the color (wavelength of the visible part) has nothing to do with strength of the weapon, but it's only used as an ID method.
Rebels use red lasers and Imperials use green ones in all sizes and weapon mounts, from a fighter or mechanized troop small cannon to the Death Star main weapon.
The question is: is it worth it to make different Versions of the same weapon that only fire in different colors?

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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The question is: is it worth it to make different Versions of the same weapon that only fire in different colors?

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Is it worth it in order to get really cool looking battles?
Since its only a cut-and-paste thing, I'd say go for it.

[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?