Highliner Mod discussion thread

[Ed Kolis]

Could someone please send me the *old* Version of the vehiclesize.txt? I installed the new one and now I can't run my turn - guess I was supposed to wait till next turn to install it

edit: never mind, I just unzipped the new one in the wrong folder, I was supposed to install it after all

[ May 31, 2004, 03:43: Message edited by: Ed Kolis ]

[tesco samoa]

its alot quicker than the Last one. But I have no gage on how i am doing since i have not met anyone yet.

[Gandalph]

Some thoughts and observances I have made;

1)Colonizer Hostile is unusable without putting 2 colony modules on it due to 50% requirement. I figured a Colonizer Hostile would be a colony ship with weapons that can charge into a system and then colonize. This cannot be done and I see no use for 2 colony modules unless/until you have 2 different types (ie rock/gas etc.).

2)Gigant seems almost useless. Once you meet the requirements for fighter bays and give it enough engines for 4 MP's, your left with only enough room for 1 weapon, 1 PD, 1 shield, and then either 1 CS or 1 ECM but not both. (Perhaps by design, I am not sure) The end result is that my Archon costs less, moves more, and basically does the same thing. What's more, the Gigant design then takes 1.2 years to build with a SY 1.

3)Combat (at least in simulator) seems unbalanced towards riders. (Again, this may be by design.) Highliner PD does not target fighters, only standard weapons do and, again because of the offense/defense bonuses in favor of the rider, the Highliner cannot hit the rider. In my tests, I pitted 5 Gamma Riders against 10 Highliners of various design. The best outcome for the Highliners was to only lose 5, but without ever hitting the Riders.

That's it for now. I really like the concept here, but would like to see better combat balance and a little better build times. I agree that you should not be able to crank out a new ship every turn, but I don't think 1 every year is right either.

[Ed Kolis]

You can use missiles against riders in this mod, did you notice? Missiles always hit! Though I think it was intentional to make riders the primary combat vehicles; highliners are just too big and bulky

I would like to see someone make some shipsets with Highliner pics... maybe Highliners should be added to the next NeoStandard Version?

I took Colonizer Hostile to mean colonizer for colonizing hostile environments. If you look at the colony modules, the non-native colony modules are twice as big as the regular ones, so they do fill up half the Colonizer Hostile.

[mottlee]

My only thought on this is it takes a long tome to build any ship then (colony) the pop is small and as said below the time you get a fair MP you can not carry anything I have yet to meet anyone so I do not know how I am doing as to build up etc.

(Edit: Typo)

[ May 31, 2004, 20:17: Message edited by: mottlee ]

[General Woundwort]

OK, in no particular order...

1) The "Colonizer Hostile" is meant for colonizing non-starting planet types. I really liked the idea of splitting the colony techs by world type (aka EKolis' Colony Mod), and just took the idea one step further by making the "hostile enviroment" colony modules bigger.

2) The Highliner sizes were extrapolated by progressive leaps i.e. guesswork. They're not carved in stone. Given your playtesting, how big would a Gigant have to be to be worth the extra research and construction?

3) Perhaps there need to be more weapons for Highliners capable of hitting riders. But I wanted Point Defense to be strictly anti-missile (after all, these "fighters" are the size of regular game starships!!!). And I did intend for combat to be skewed towards the riders, but not totally so. Perhaps some sort of enhanced targeting (either by component or mount) for Highliner weapons?

4) Highliner build times are a killer, I know, but I'm trying to strike a balance between keeping rider build times down without making Highliner build times too long. I'm open to tweaking the amount of kton per pop unit, however...

Great imput, guys, I appreciate it greatly.

[General Woundwort]

As long as we're all here and talking, could you all please give me your sense of how the mod is working so far? What's good, what's bad, what's just plain ugly? Any suggestions?

[tesco samoa]

i think a resource converter early in the game would fit nicely. say at 90% loss on the space ports...

[General Woundwort]

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but one thing that this mod *does* allow for now is much more economical Remote Mining. The maintenance costs for having Remote Miners on Riders makes them very profitable to use, and can really help alleviate the beginning-game resource crunch.

[Ed Kolis]

Could you then please put in a "Recon/Miner Rider Bay" component, much like Adamant's "Recon Satellite Bay", which launches only one rider per game turn - it seems like such a waste to have Groups of four riders flying around doing mining when only one of them actually gets to do anything...

BTW, where is the Cloaking tech? Did you remove it?

edit: oh, no long range scanners for riders? what, doesn't the ability work?

[ June 02, 2004, 01:45: Message edited by: Ed Kolis ]