New Mod: The Art of War Mod

[LGM]

I have never liked the fact that you have to know how to build mines in order to clear them. I propose mine clearing devices available outside of the mine building tech tree.

I would like to see mine clearing technology in a separate tree from mine building technology. Make Mine clearing components avail in their own tree with something like a 50K base. Perhaps in order to get a more effective mine clearing device, you need to have at least level 1 mine building.

Secondly, give the common direct fire weapons intrinsict mine clearing ability of 1 mine to DUCs, MC, Point Defense Cannons, and APB).

Third, there should be some sort of scanner that can detect mines.

Keep mines cheap enough so the counters above still give players an incentive to develope special mine clearing devices.

[Taz-in-Space]

While you're modding weapons you could add a little variety by adding weapons that only damage at certain ranges.

for example: 0 0 10 20 40 70 40 20 10 0 0 0 0
or
0 0 0 0 0 10 10 20 20 40 40 70 70

I know that the AI's might not handle this kind of
thing well, but in a non-AI game...

[LGM]

Here is another suggestion that I have seen other propose: Change the Supply Container to be recognized as a Cargo container for freighers (Allow Fuel Ships on Transport Hull). Do this by giving Supply Cargo a Cargo capacity of 1 unit on top of the 500 units of Supply space.

Create 5KT Versions of Cargo, Supply, and Armor so that space is not wasted early on when you have that odd 10KT you do not know what to do with and later, when you have that odd 5 KT when using a large mount weapon that has a size that is a multiple of 5.

[Baron Munchausen]

LGM:

I've already made most these changes to mines in my own personal 'mod'... mine sweepers are a seperate area from mines, and mines have only level 2 cloaking so you can see them once you get advanced sensors. I've still got to test whether the 'stealth armor for mines' works or not to improve their inherent cloaking ability a little bit. I have considered putting mine sweeping ability into PDC cannons but I'm afraid the AI might then use those instead of true sweepers in a mine sweeper design, or might start treating other ships as mine sweepers.

Geo:

Multi-unit launchers may cause the same problem as mine sweeping on a PDC. The AI might get confused about the roles of certain ships. Other than that, it might be considered a 'cheat' of sorts that reduces the value of the specialized bays and makes some aspects of the game too easy. It's worth a try. Only play testing will tell.

As far as armor piercing weapons, I've been requesting a 'lesser' weapon ability than the 'skips armor' since before the game was released. Simply have a 'double damage to armor' ability like the 'quad damage to shields' ability. I'd give this ability to the DUC (Mass Driver) because it's a solid projectile rather than a beam. A few simple extra abilities like this would make the game so much more fun! We can only keep asking for them. :-/

[ 30 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[LGM]

Make weapon research costs higher. The 5K base for most of them means you do not bother deploying them until you max out the level. Does anyone ever deploy a ship with a PPB I? The always research to 3 to 5 before actually deploy it.

It seems silly that you sepend 155K of research to get PPB I but for another 10K you get PPB II. The weapon improvement should be much more difficult. Make weapons something like 15K or 20K and racial weapons 30K or 40K instead of 20K. Especially make the good weapons like Null Space and PPBs be larger bases.

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Taz-in-Space:
While you're modding weapons you could add a little variety by adding weapons that only damage at certain ranges.

for example: 0 0 10 20 40 70 40 20 10 0 0 0 0
or
0 0 0 0 0 10 10 20 20 40 40 70 70

I know that the AI's might not handle this kind of
thing well, but in a non-AI game...

---

Not the AI, the combat system itself doesn't handle a weapon that does 0 damage at any range before its final range. You'll have to start with some sort of non-zero damage. And yes, others have already modded weapons that do increasing dmaage with range. The DUC is a logical choice since the projectile gains momentum with range.

[Phoenix-D]

"Armor - Regular armor is really not viable in the longterm: It's damage/kT ratio is lower than shields and it requires repairing after combat. I have always thought it should have a better damage/kT ratio than shields *because* it needs to be repaired. Hopefully armor can be improved so that there is a real choice between shields and armor in the mid to late game."

Easy enough to do..

By that same token, I cannot think of any non-racial armor-skipping guns except for the null-space cannon and of course the special weapons (engine/weapon/computer killing). The problem with nullspace is that it skips shields too. It would be nice to have some more armor-skipping weapon choices. They should be at least as expensive as PPB's. And consideration must be made for crystalline/organic races. If everyone gets armor-skipping weapons real easy then these races would suffer."

Yeah, they would. I like having more armor (and shield!) skipping weapons though.

Geo: this is like what I was doing for techmod, only explained better! Hopefully you can pull it off better. I got bogged down in the missiles section of the tech tree (5 missile levels, 7 warhead types, ~50 entires PER WARHEAD TYPE.. ug)

Phoenix-D

[Sinapus]

Re: armor.

I created some extra standard armor levels for Armor 4-6, though am still tweaking the amount of protection to give them.

Oh, and I made a "lvl 0" armor called "basic armor" that takes up 10kt and has 10kt of structure. Like I said, basic armor that everyone has.

I also have a "lvl 0" point defense weapon called a "point defense cluster" that has pathetic performance, but is better than nothing.

Other things I'm testing are some lvl 0 facilities. Mainly an intelligence center and an atmosphere converter. The intel center has a low cost and low amount of intel points generated. The converter takes 200 turns to convert an atmosphere. Both are mainly for the AI since I've noticed they just don't build those things on their worlds very well, so I might as well use them as place holders.

Oh, and I'm still testing what I like to call the Seekers From Hell suite of seeker weapons. Basically, more levels of CSMs, Plasma missiles, seeking parasite and crystal torps with higher damage and higher seeker damage resistance so those designs w/tons of point-defense cannons aren't completely invulnerable. Muahahaha.

[geoschmo]

LGM, I think I see what you mean. Give the weapons techs higher tech costs but take them out of the higher branches of the theoretical sciences. To put some distance between the levels, but keep the higest levels from becomeing astronimcaly expensive?

Baron,

quote:

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The DUC is a logical choice since the projectile gains momentum with range.

---

Not that it matters for game purposes, but wha? How does a projectile with no internal propulsion gain momentum with range? Projectiles won't decelerate in a vacuum, but they won't acelerate either.

Phoenix, I remember your "modular" missles. I was disapointed when you couldn't complete that, it sounded way cool. I may add a simplified Version of it. I don't have to teach the AI to use them, so that helps a lot.

And now for an idea of my own, sort of. Devnull mod has tacheyon armor that protects weapons from the weapon damaging wepons that skip normal armor. I will be adding something similer that protects the engines, if I can pull it off. I think I have it figured out, just have to test it.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by geoschmo:

Baron, Not that it matters for game purposes, but wha? How does a projectile with no internal propulsion gain momentum with range? Projectiles won't decelerate in a vacuum, but they won't acelerate either.

Geoschmo

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Well, my physics is not up to snuff at this time so it's hard to give the correct technical explanation. But this is a fact of armor and armaments from armor-piercing anti-tank weapons down to 'bullet-proof' vests and ordinary handgun bullets. The closer you are the LESS effective the round is in penetrating the armor. Granted, beyond a certain range there is a drop off in power due to loss of velocity to friction. But momentum is somehow related to the distance traveled before hitting the armor and it does make the weapon more powerful to travel a greater distance.