New SE4 Total ConVersion Mod "SMod" open on PBW

[Snorky]

Ok, I will tweak the costs for ship combat and movement and think about the maintenance problem.

But separating the reworked images is a problem. I don't know on which I worked, which dirty background I cleaned. There are many pictures I just corrected in size and format, but I think the most of them were race pictures. So it should be ok if someone uses the image packs instead of the pictures in my mod, but I still recommend to use the full Version.

At the beginning of the modding I just changed things without writing down where I took them and what I changed. It was only for me and some friends. Just for playing the mod now over PBW with hopefully new players I had to make a distributable Version and it was difficult to search all credit files. It seems I forgot some, so apology and thanks for reminding me. Of course I will credit your mod, Fyron. I put a credits.txt in my Pictures/Systems folder with this content:
The Nebulae and Nova pictures are real pictures from NASA.
I took them from "Fyron's Quadrant Mod" (http://fqm.spaceempires.net/) and reworked them a little bit.
Is this OK for you? I also included a credit file in the sounds directory which includes the sentence:
The sounds are from the "Tampa Gamer Sound Mod" and the "Eclipse Mod Sounds".
But I can't remember where I took the Button and Cursor files. I can't find the Ultimate Mod you mentioned. Can you please send me a link to it? If someone else misses any credits, please contact me. I will include them in the next patch.

[Ed Kolis]

The "Ultimate Mod" was created by Hadrian Aventine a number of years ago and when he gave up on SE4, he entrusted it to Lord Kodos, who has followed through with Hadrian's wishes of keeping it a Really Big Secret (tm), for whatever reason that Hadrian had for that ... so in short, there are no download links available that I know of

[Gandalf Parker]

I snagged the original zip which apparently had the full image pack included in it. But when I finaly got around to running a test game I got errors. One of the reasons I snagged the mod is that it sounded like what I wanted. Lots of races included and lots of general balance upgrades rather than just making the game harder.

One was a "demeanor" lack in confed_ai_general.txt and alot of errors from tholian_ai_research.txt

When I got errors like that before I figured it was from installing races that were not created for SEIV Gold. I thought your mod would have caught/fixed those already. Am I missing something in my SEIV Gold which is causing these?

[Fyron]

- no AI implemented and the mod takes about 500MB disc space.

Note that no AI is implemented. Seems rather pointless to include so many shipsets if they have no compatible AI...

[Suicide Junkie]

Imperator Fyron said:

Note that no AI is implemented. Seems rather pointless to include so many shipsets if they have no compatible AI...

Note: the light Version I uploaded leaves out the shipsets, but does include the default AI files provided. Just copy them to the shipsets you copy to the mod.

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
- Vaccuum Breathers have a big advantage when taking Rock or Ice colony types, and still have a small advantage when all colony types are available. (23.6% resource rate and 24.3% population instead of an even 20% if all atmospheres were equal)

I didn't look at the files - but are you saying they have an advantage even after you factor in Gas colonies?

3) Race design.
The inability to decrease stats is an interesting change.

Yeah, after you buy your colonization type, you have only 1000 pts (in a standard 2k game). I think it is a neat twist. However, how you have it set up will probably result in fairly generic race choices (the only things worth spending points on is maintenance, aggressiveness, and defensiveness -- so you will mostly just see variations on those.

You may want to set the base maintenance rate to 100% instead of 25%, and adjust the hull maintenance modifiers to match.

But be careful of doing this if you have components that reduce maintenance. I found it easier to just stick with the stock method, but to adjust the price of Maintenance Reduction upward (to like 200 pts per Maint Reduction point).

-= Advanced traits =-
Woah! Up to +7 speed (Cost 3500) is extreme yet again...

True, but racial points are scarce. If you take +7 speed, you are going to be very deficient elsewhere. Nice tradeoff. I also like how you broke it up into 3 categories: +1 speed, +2 speed, and +4 speed. Clever.

Storage techniques is very underpowered, on the other hand. +20% for the same price as getting twice as many colonies (and thus twice as many facility slots/cargo space)

I disagree. Colony types are researchable, and fairly cheaply at that(100k). I would consider taking storage techniques before I took an extra colony type (depending on starting bonus, perhaps).

-= Ship Design =-
Propulsion:
I think you went overboard on speed.
...
Even your worldships would be sailing along at speed 12 before racial traits.

It is different from stock, to be sure, but I'm not sure super-high speeds are a bad thing. Makes the game play differently - might make for a nice change of pace. Or might not... Still, I would try it out before discounting it.

Add the emergency propulsion and it just gets even more out of hand.

Though I agree here - emergency propulsion was crazy-high.

Planets:
The homeworld should start out with *some* basic amount of organics & rads production, even on low tech.

Why? Puts the pressure on researching essential planetary development tech, making the early rush less feasible.

Having your first orgs and rads facilities 25 turns up the tech tree is just too much.

Though I agree to this point. These should probably be much cheaper.

[Gandalf Parker]

I didnt add any to the mod. The mod included races dont work?

[Fyron]

Gandalf Parker said:
I didnt add any to the mod. The mod included races dont work?

Snorky did say that no AI was implemented...

[Suicide Junkie]

spoon said:

I didn't look at the files - but are you saying they have an advantage even after you factor in Gas colonies?

Spread over all surface types, yes. EG: Max tech when all planets are colonized, but not atmosphere converted.

[spoon]

Imperator Fyron said:

Note that no AI is implemented. Seems rather pointless to include so many shipsets if they have no compatible AI...

Pointless? I think it's cool. (Speaking as someone who is generally too lazy to download shipsets - it is nice to have them all in one place...)