Hello All,
I am new to SE4 and this is my first post on these forums so first of all nice to see so many people love games like this. I wish I discovered SE4 many years ago because it seems to be EXACTLY what I was looking for all this time.
Oh well, to the topic:
My fiancee and I have been looking for an even longer time for a Bab5 inspired strategy game. Basically we where very enthousiastic when stumbling into this mod!
Now remind I am new to SE4 so don't take the following offensively as I might simply not know what I am talking about, but when I loaded the mod ( downloaded from:
http://www.xmission.com/~rstulce/B5Web.htm ) I have been mighty dissapointed right at turn 1. I got very enthousiastic by the ship pictures and other B5 additions but when the game started (tried a few races) I just had too much resources to my liking. One of the big joys in a game like this is building up your empire yourself, and the continues "battle" over resources and planets. Here the races start with such insane resource production (and even more insane storage) that building any other planets seemed useless. On top of this the start weapons seemed a bit powerfull and the research output would make me skyrocket trough the research tree.
I hope this was not intentional as this simply takes the joy out of a good game, the original game seemed fast paced enough. Also although I have not actually gone trough and play it as this already put me off, the races seemed to have a far too massive difference from one another resource and research wise. I believe this could lead to massive unbalance in the game.
Anyways I basically didn't feel like continueing to play even tho I absolutely love B5 and have been looking for a B5 game since years.
Now apoligies to the original creators of the mod as your work is vastly appreciated, it's just a pity it was discontinued. I really love the ship & race pictures and intro screen and I spent a whole day trying to get my hands on a download for this mod to see what it would be like.
To the people who just picked this mod up again:
I am very very excited about this mod and hope it will be well balanced and made in such a way that colonising other planets and struggling for resources becomes fun (and a must). Now it might be asking a lot but the original mod has a very very bad idea about what the actual races are supposed to be like in terms of racial bonuses and penalties. For example a penalty in offense for the Narn Regime would make J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Bab5) scratch his head a couple of times and wonder if people actually watched all episodes of B5. Narn are very good fighters due to years of opression by the Centauri. They are also good in covert ops, tho not even vaguely close to the Shadows or Earthforce. A better penalty for the Narn would be construction speed as their infrastructure is/should be shattered at the time.
Basically I am praying for a mod where the people making it are looking for balance (as far as u can balance such a thing that is) but also keeps an eye to the original B5 universe and tries to stay in line with the races at least.
I know balancing the races AND following the series is impossible, so it would probably be much better balancing the races and creating the differences in the tech trees instead.
Anyways enough ranting
I am looking forward to see the results of the work you guys are doing and will most definitly try it out & post my findings.
If I can do anything to help please let me know. I have 200 or 300 mb of free webspace on my server and about 10 GB monthly traffic left which I am happy to contribute.
Thanks for reading and apoligies for the long first post