Babylon 5 Mod

[pathfinder]

The cap ships currently DO have a fighter bay requirement. As for the maintenance bot "abilities", I'll have to check and see.

[grumbler]

Two thoughts:
1. Rather than being concerned to ensure that repair tugs can fulfill the unique mission of black hole rescue, why not eliminate the black hole sectors? This is what I have done with Version 2.0 anyway, as the AI simply cannot handle black holes with early colonizers (speed 2) and just keeps sending them into the black hole sector. Black hole systems aren't part of the B5 universe anyway.

2. You can restict maint bots to larger ships (if you really want to) simply by making them too big to fit on smaller ships and then creating a mount that reduces them back to the "right size" that can only fit on ships above your threshold size.

As an aside, I currently have a self-repair capability in the "unique ship type" hulls that can only be acquired via ruins plus research, but other than that don't have shipboard repair.

[Nomor]

So we've lost Black Holes, we've also lost Nebulae Systems in all but name because it was incompatible with the Reactor supply system we adopted for the Mod. We ended up putting Invisible Suns in them so that Reactors would work in them, because it was argued that Reactors would not be affected by the absence of a Sun.

Could we not have just added a description line to the Nebulae System that read : The nature of Nebulae Systems results in Reactor Shut Down due to Containment Destabilisation. and Do not enter without good supply reserves. .. or something like that and then left them to function as per the Basic Game.

Nebulae System are not the Hazard they should have been and the Strategic Element they provided has diminished. Losing Black Holes is again disrupting the Strategy of the game.

I would have thought that the AI would have had the ability to not send ships with a movement of 2 or less though a system identified as a Black Hole. If the AI struggles to respond to such programming would it not have been better to simply increase the speed of Colony Ships to 3 .

Then the lucky ones that got through unstable worm holes or jump gates would still pass through the system. Only those unlucky to suffer damage would be lost.

The Strategy of the game will likely end up being who can race up the technology tree and make the most ships.

[ May 09, 2004, 19:02: Message edited by: Nomor ]

[Ragnarok-X]

Originally posted by Nomor:

The Strategy of the game will likely end up being who can race up the technology tree and make the most ships.

that, or who can get the faster engines to negate the effect.

[pathfinder]

Nomor: I ain't smart to enuf to figger out those speeds. *shrug*

[Nomor]

Originally posted by pathfinder:
Nomor: I ain't smart to enuf to figger out those speeds. *shrug*

Me neither. The original SEIV game if I remember correctly never produced ships that were too slow to navigate Black Hole systems so passage through them came down to whether or not you took damage entering them.

I image the AI therefore does not allow for speed restrictions for avoiding Black Hole systems. However the game does allow for the Live player to avoid certain marked systems for whatever reason, so it may be buried in the programming somewhere. Just not my area as of yet.

So maybe the solution is to just program for faster engines or as mentioned make the starting point for Colony Ships a movement speed of 3.
This could be offset by making the population carrying starting point as lower.

[ May 09, 2004, 22:03: Message edited by: Nomor ]

[pathfinder]

One would have to totaly re-do the engines in order to do that. NOT my cup of tea thank you. All I ever set out to do was to make this Gold compatible and make the full tech game do-able, That I have done. "Finished" MOD was mailed to Lighthorse (and received), so once he can get it up on PBW....

[ May 09, 2004, 22:45: Message edited by: pathfinder ]

[Nomor]

There was a time when I was happy to just replace the original game aliens with B5 shipsets and leave the original AI and tech tree as it was.
Then I met Val Cassotta.

Time for a cupatea..

[pathfinder]

Originally posted by Nomor:
There was a time when I was happy to just replace the original game aliens with B5 shipsets and leave the original AI and tech tree as it was.
Then I met Val Cassotta.

Time for a cupatea..

Enjoy that tea sir!

MOD became work instead of fun, so me just going on. Let someone with enthusiasm finish it if they want.

[Fyron]

You can easily get past the slow colony ship problem by decreasing their Engines Per Move value by a few points (relative to how big the number currently is, of course). They will then go faster with the same number of engines, with no need at all to modify the engines themselves. Also, no need to modify AI ship design files either.