Carrier Battles Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

I'm thinking of starting a long turn-time CBmod game for those who want to try the game, but don't have reliable access or time to play.

Probably a weekly turn limit.
To speed things up, I'll make it a small map and a 5 or 10 planet start.

How many people would be interested?

[kerensky]

I'd be interested.

[Will]

I would probably sign up for it, too... I'm already playing in CB#2, but I just took over from puke, and am most likely just riding on his momentum right now. It would be nice to have a good slow game so I can figure out the beginning of the mod, rather than slogging through the late-mid game with all the preliminary bits taken care of. Plus I want to get a closer look at the different cultures. I think I'm familiar with Disposable Society (puke's empire), and somewhat with Berserker (everyone else in CB#2). I see the data files for the other cultures, but you can't really get the feel for it until you see it in-game.

[Suicide Junkie]

"Carrier Battles Weekly #1"
Is now open to join.

[Captain Kwok]

I'll give it a shot, I'm also envious of these large fleet actions that SJ posts.

I signed up as the Azorani Alliance, using Alpha Kodiak's Azorani race style.

[Suicide Junkie]

Extended from SE vs Galciv thread.
----------------------------------

Atrocities said:

Let us know what we can do to help.

----

Graphics, and AI are my weak points.

What I suppose I need *most* is AI guys, but that is naturally a beta-only thing. Second to that would be a hearty set of LOW POLY shipsets which have nice fighter and troop models.

Also handy, and much more generally accessible would be some weapon animations / effects that look cool in bulk. Samples can be run through starfury to get an idea of how they'll look. I can take screenshots of them in action if you don't have starfury. Real rendered missile animations would be supersweet, although they will need to lack any sort of directional external lighting.
For example; having a flickering engine glint off the metal is great. But you can't have a sunny/shady side, since the missile will be rotating in flight, and missiles flying in different directions would look stupid.
For reference, the CB weapons are DUCs, Plasma Bolts, Laser beams and Torpedoes. Plus about 7-9 varieties of missile, which come in light and heavy versions of the kinetic/explosive/nuclear warhead types. Plus planetary bombardment missiles.

I should be able to scale the animations to match the mount size myself, but if you want to make separate animations for each, that's good too.


Some custom component portraits would help as well. A little grittiness is great, but they should preferably remain unique, colourful and iconic like the stock SE4 stuff.
Carrier Battles dosen't have too many components, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a full collection. In fact, if there are multiple full sets, then I will probably give you the option to choose between the image collections as a racial trait.


Back to shipsets:
I want to have about the same number of ships & units as CBmod for se4, so there will likely end up being many hundreds of ships and many thousands of units in mid-to-late game battles.
That's why LOW POLY is a requirement You should probably keep a high poly version as well, so that you can make beauty shots for giant portraits, and for a big intro battle scene. Glow points should probably be limited too, although creative use of one or two would be nifty... a doughnut topology ship with a ginormous glow point filling in the hole, for example.

For reference, there are in rough order of tech:
- Basic Fighters (Medium Fighter)
- Heavy Fighters (Large Fighter)
- Micro Fighters (Small Fighter)
- ER Fighters (ER Fighter, alt = Medium Fighter)
- Stealth Fighters (Stealth Fighter, alt = Small Fighter)
- Heavy ER Fighters (ER Fighter, alt = Large Fighter)

Ships will probably come in at least five generic hulls, possibly up to 10. Carriers will probably be +1 hull size bigger than the generic ships.
Use the se4 ship names for now, and start from the middle. The mod isn't going to need most of the ship hulls you'd expect of stock; colony ships would be made using the generic hulls, for example.

[Captain Kwok]

Do you think that Carrier Battles Weekly game will actually get enough players?

[Will]

It's going to be cool to one day be able to experience an epic battle with hundreds of ships, and thousands of fighters, in full 3D glory...

We gotta figure out a way to have the game force a 30fps render to a video file, because that will just be too much fun.

[Suicide Junkie]

Yeah. If there aren't any more players in the next few days, I'll join up myself and get it rolling. CB#1 was four players, and it was awesome.

[ZeroAdunn]

You in luck SJ, I a made a fighter with less than 20 polys yestearday, with SE5 CBM in mind. I think I will try for a full collection that just needs to be exported once SE5 comes out. I'll some images when I get it textured.