Babylon 5 Mod

[QuarianRex]

I just finished reading through this entire thread (what an undertaking that was) and have been following the progression of the mod. I noticed that your original idea was to make every component regenerating and up the damage scale by a factor of 10 (10!), but gave up due to a bug that negates regeneration in every component when a single component type gets wiped out. I believe the example used was when a ship equiped with, say, organic armor I and organic armor II receives enough damage to completely take out OA I (but still having OA II remaining) this would negate the regenerative capabilities of OA II.

Do I have that right?

Well, I was fiddling around with the Gold demo and it seems that this bug has been fixed. I ran through several combats with mixed armor (OA I and OA II) ships to see if regeneration would continue and indeed it did. Even when reduced to a single OA I or OA II component regeneration continued normally.

Now that that is said, please do not go back to the previous design! While I can see that you were trying to capture the desperate feel of a drawn out space battle, this is not the way to do it. If all a ships components are set to regenerate this completly negates the concept of after battle combat damage. Either a ship must be completely destroyed during combat or it is fully healed upon combat completion. The inability to cripple a ship would take so much away from the game that it makes me shudder to think about it.

No more suicide missions to cripple the engines of the advancing Uberfleet, allowing your struggling empire the time to crank out a Last ditch resistance force as the said Uberfleet repairs itself. No more hard fought running battles to return a crippled cruiser to a repair base so that its heroic (and experienced) crew might fight on another day.

These kinds of situations are just as much a part of B5 (perhaps a greater part) than the actual battles themselves (which are handled quite nicely already). Not to mention that it would completely nullify any chance of a sci-fi cross-over (and that would be a terrible shame, the Centauri have as much right to be assimilated by the Borg or crushed by the Empire as anyone else).

Please do not think that I am trying to slam anyones ideas (they are good in theory) but I do enjoy B5 and would like to be able to use it in conjunction with other mods, and the standard game as well, without sacrificing other aspects of the game for the sake of prolonged combat (and since I myself wouldn't have the time or pateince to retrofit all the work that you guys would have done).

I do agree that the use of repair crews and such could make things more interesting. how about a 60kt component that repairs 1,2, or 3 components at levels I, II, and III. Granted, this does seem a bit heavy but makes it comparable, though a little less efficient (as it should be, less centralised facilities and all) than the standard repair bays (and so not making a key piece of game tech obsolete - 1 repair bay = 150kt-repairs 8 components/turn, 3 repair crews = 180kt-repairs 9 companents/turn). This would allow most capital ships limited self-repair capability yet not removing the utility of a dedicated repair ship in your fleet. As you can see, I like things to be balanced overall.

I hope that this can be of some use.

[ 27 February 2002: Message edited by: QuarianRex ]

[Fyron]

Regenerating components do not heal after a battle is over. Any that were still destroyed on the Last turn of the combat will be destroyed after the battle is over.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

Now that that is said, please do not go back to the previous design! While I can see that you were trying to capture the desperate feel of a drawn out space battle, this is not the way to do it. If all a ships components are set to regenerate this completly negates the concept of after battle combat damage. Either a ship must be completely destroyed during combat or it is fully healed upon combat completion. The inability to cripple a ship would take so much away from the game that it makes me shudder to think about it.

---

Organic armor should not be completely regenerated after combat, unless the code has changes much more...
What we expected to happen was:
- During combat, repair teams can fix one light gun every 3-5 combat turns, say.
- Anything still damaged at the end of combat remains destroyed
- Between turns, those repair dudes could fix 2 or 3 of any component.

<BETA TESTER MODE ON: Version=1.60>
...
...
I now have a ship with 2/11 Organic armor III's remaining.
It did regenerate the armor during combat.
It did NOT regenerate between attacks from two separate ships.
It did NOT regenerate after two turns of waiting.
...
Mixed OA II & III repaired completely after the loss of all OA II.
The order of repairs is very odd. (Not nessesarily left to right)
...
Organic Armor gets to try repairs at the end of turn 30!
...
Regen is independent of component family, so any OA can heal any other OA component.
<BETA TESTER MODE OFF>

That second-Last item might be what confused you: the unmodded OA is so freaking powerful, that most of the time it regenerates fully in one combat turn. If you waited until turn 29 to bLast the armor down to one surviving component, it would all regenerate on the stored up OA points.

Looks like we can implement combat repair teams in the gold Version only.

[oleg]

I don't think Soul Hunters should be a neutral race.
Can you imagine them to stay put in their home system and not venturing all around Universe in hope to salvage allien souls ?

In fact, they should be modded as a nomad/pirate race. Is it possible to incorporate Pirates mod into Bab5 mod ?

[Suicide Junkie]

Pirates And/Or nomads should not be very hard to add to the mod. The only difficulty comes in the large number of races/racial techs. It will be somewhat tedious, but entirely possible.

[thorfrog]

I like what you are doing with the soul hunter race. But in Babylon5 they really just lay in the background. Not a bad idea as a nomad race though. That would be a good way of handling the Drahk. They are really more of an event. They are kind of like the techno-mages. Not really envolved. Now that's not a bad idea. How about a techno-mage race. Their specials will be cyber related.

[Val]

SJ and I had already talked about making the Drahk a pirate/nomad race and limiting the ships they build in the AI. Soul Hunters as Nomads would work pretty well, would be great if we could get them to keep their homeworld and build a "Well of Souls" facility Technomagi can almost be built along the line of the Space Monsters mod - having them wander about the universe

Edit - Also posted the new components and sounds on the webpage.

QR:

As SJ had said, the actual intent of increasing the values and adding the OA ability to repairable items was to give it even MORE of a desperate B5 feel, with cripled ships limping away from fights while the crews work on repairing what they can. Not all items would be OA repairable - larger more complex devices would need to be repaired at a base station still. Not sure if we are still doing this though.

SJ (and anyone else interested):

As above - are we going to go for the OA ability in the Gold Version?

[ 28 February 2002: Message edited by: Val ]

[Val]

B5 - and others - E*Cards

Thought y'all might enjoy a bit of humor in this otherwise serious forum

Some of the quotes are pretty good

[Suicide Junkie]

I blew away your transfer limit on the B5 site, but I managed to get all of the data, and some of the other stuff.

Paste this fancy link code in anywhere on your page:PS: Regarding the images; aren't a lot of those in the imagemod already? You could just link to the imagemod, and save yourself a lot of bandwidth. Saving bandwidth for modders was one of the primary reasons for creating the imagemod in the first place.

EDIT: Codeblock was mangling the format of the entire thread

[ 01 March 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Val]

I'll post the code later today, thanks !

I actually planned on editting in a line under the Components/Planets portion of the mod saying that they could link to the Full Image Mod at your site, which would include all of the B5 images and MORE!! Just haven't had the chance yet. On the other side, the reason I did post them is so someone could just get the 'bare bones' if that is what they wanted - though it does have your latest Components.bmp to tease them on the new components they don't have... yet