Babylon 5 Mod

[Timstone]

SJ:
Thanks for the suggestions. If I/RagsX encounter problems, we'll post them here.

RagsX:
I've received your e-mail. I've read it, but haven't done anything yet. I'll do that tonight.
And absolutely no hard feelings, all is worth it for this mod. I'm glad you took a good look at it. And my apologies for the errors. I forgot to mention my obsolete techarea.txt.
I'll send you e-mail when I'm done at work.

[Ragnarok-X]

Well as mentioned, it wasnt your failure. It was more mine, since i didnt send you "my" techarea file. Anyways, good work !

[Timstone]

I've taken a look at your files and tomorrow I'll write a comment on it (at work).
This evening is reserved for a potential GF.
Keep your fingers crossed!

[grumbler]

Imperator Fyron said:
Wasn't the idea to make the ships take a while and a lot of resources to build, but not be insanely expensive to maintain?

[/b] yes, but when one doesn't need to expand resources at all to support all the ships one could want, the balance is not "insane' in the direction of expensive. I think the first Version of the mod went to far in the direction of believing that a turn really represented one tenth of a year. While the game could survive the idea, it proved too slow in testing. If you really want to spend 30 turns building a battleship, you can adjust all the values, of course.

It was quite coherent and valid... another way to look at it would be a statistical representation of more shots missing at longer ranges. Combat bonuses are far, far too powerful in SE4 for them to be a very good way to try and balance weapons out... Even something as small as a 10% penalty to hit is not really a 10% penalty to hit. It often ends up being more like a 40% penalty to hit, or more, depending on the exact circumstances.

I would accept "valid" but not "coherent." We are not talking, in actual combat representations, about "statistical representations." Shots hit or miss. They do discrete damage or not. They impact the next tactical turn or they do not. Combat in the game is mechanistic, not statistical.

I understand the desire to avoid the accumulation of unrealistic modifiers, and the point of the "point of diminishing returns" representation of armor, ECM, and sensors.

However, I don't like the representation of game effects that are frankly counter-intuitive as "subtle effects" that only make sense to the initiated.

[grumbler]

Suicide Junkie said:
Since when was it really planet-based?
I don't know about the other players, but when I was playing in the PBW B5 game, at least 95% of my construction power was from BSYs.

It seems like most other people shy away from the idea, but when you have 30-50 bases over your homeworld, you can produce a hell of a lot of ships in no time.

Yeah, but that left you with the idea that it was realistic in B5 terms to have 30-50 ships in production at a time... but that space-based yards were much less efficient than planet-based ones. Which lead to the old problem of planets being restricted artificially to one ship at a time. The space-based yards basicallt just completed "hulks" to be finalized by "modernization" upgrades. Made the whole design system suck, since the bulk of designs would be obsolete when finished.

[grumbler]

RagX,

It soundslike you have some good "racialization" ideas, and that is what has been missing in the components and facilities. I agree with Tim that you need to forget the First Ones for now. Get the basic races down pat and you will have gone a long way.

My ideas on the races, in general:

1. EA is good at diplomacy but is poor in research (witness the use of the same Sensors that failed in the EM war ten years later, plus look at the fleet that went out in Into the Fire and not that ONLY the EA ships still had rotation for gravity).

2. Minbari should be better than EA at telepathy and economics (b/c money never enters into any minbari decision-making) but ships should be much more expensive to build and maintain (after all, the whole race knew about the destruction of ONE FLIPPING SHIP!)

3. Pak'ma'ra should have cheap ships and great intel, but poor research. No one "officially" notices the Pak'ma'ra.

4. I think the Drazi would be diplomatically limited but economically advantaged.

5. The Narn semed a bit militarily hapless, but bred like rabbits.

6. The Centauri, on the other hand, should have little pop growth except under the most favorable circumstances, but plenty of bite when pushed.

[Suicide Junkie]

grumbler said:Yeah, but that left you with the idea that it was realistic in B5 terms to have 30-50 ships in production at a time... but that space-based yards were much less efficient than planet-based ones. Which lead to the old problem of planets being restricted artificially to one ship at a time. The space-based yards basicallt just completed "hulks" to be finalized by "modernization" upgrades. Made the whole design system suck, since the bulk of designs would be obsolete when finished.

Actually, I only had very minor upgrades to do by the time I finished.
Most of the time it was not worth the cost to upgrade once complete, but still nice to build new ones with the better tech.
I'd rotate ships off the front line and upgrade -A mods to -D mods and such, though. Whatever my repair capacity could handle.

PS:
The artificial restriction to one ship per turn did not factor into it. The ships I was building took about a whole turn to complete at the planet anyways, and the sum total of 50 BSY way outstrips any possible population modifiers and the larger base rate from the facility.

[TNZ]

Is there any intention of looking at the components that change size and the effects these components have on the upgrade design feature?

On ship construction, I would suggest a maximum of 20 turn for ship production by the best shipyard facility or component.[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Flag_NewZeland.gif[/img]

[Timstone]

Okay RagsX, I've taken a look at the work so far.
It's a good idea to post the whole mod here at the forum, it isn't that big. Add a little text file with instructions and voilá!
This way everybody can say something useful about your work so far.
I'll kick off with some comments. Please don't take these comments the wrong way, I never intended to scorn your hard work and impressive effort you've put into The Mod. I only want to give constructive advise. Don't be mad with me.

1) Reactors
Why did you implement a biomatter reactor? I mean, It's okay for bio races (Vorlon, Shadow, not Giam (they aren't advanced enough)), but it isn't very in it's place for the regular techs. You might consider adding it only to the races with organic tech.
What happened to the Hyperspace Tap? Where did it go?

2) Sensors
I'm no biggie on this subject, so I'll give my oppinion, but it isn't very professional (I don't have to pretend I know all of this subject). I like the way you've split up the offensive and defensive sensors. Also the adding the general sensors is a nice touch. I haven't lookad at when they are introduced into the techtree, but I assum you first have to research all the offensive and defensive sensors and then the general sensors. A minor fix would be to make the general sensors a little bit less powerful than the fully offensive and defensive sensors.

3) Engines
I fitted a dreadnought (or dreadnaught, what is the correct spelling of it?) with as many engines as I could (the best fusion engines), but still the ships could only had 2 movement and the the imfamous flip-over pouint came, I couldn't go further than 31 engines. More than enough engines I think, but still far too slow to be of use in the game.

4) Buildings
Nice buildings, almost no complaints here. But I don't think you've fully tested that bit. There is one starting building (I think it's called the Megalopolis) and the description of that building also states it's only found on homeworlds. Unfortunately I found it nowhere. This is caused simply because the computer looks at the different functions it needs to include on a startingplanet. The Megalopolist doens't have any of those things.
I'll give a list of what the computer always tries to implement:
- Ship Yard
- Resupply Dock
- Space Dock
It searches for those things according to researchpoints. So if the computer has to chose from two buildings with the same stuff on it, it choses the one wich costed the most researchpoints.
Maybe the problem is easily solved by giving the Megalopolis one of these qualities, the best one is the resupply quality. I'll do some test with that tonight.

5) Fighters
Where are they? Haven't you implemented them yet? I also missed the fighter reactors. Or is this because of the limited stamina of the fighters?


I hope these little bits of comment help you.

[Ragnarok-X]

Reactors

Well i simply felt like it I thought there should be something between gravimetric (younger races advanced reactor) and hyperspace tapper (first ones reactors). So i hadded biomatter reactors. They are indeed ment to be used by shadows and vorlons, just that tech requirements arent done yet.


Sensors

Tech requirements are setup yet, too. But it SHOULD work in a way that you have access to general sensors. You develop them until level 3 or 4 and get access to standart offensive and defense sensors. Each one needs a different sensor tech area, and at level 6 each of them can be enhanced by a second tier, called "AI-Addon" which gives another offense or defense or both bonus.


Engines

Oh well. Firstly, Dreadnoughts come at the end of the techtree. They are DEFINITLY not meant to be used with superior fusion engines. Doing that would mean to try to load a western-gun with an ak-47 magazine.
Dreadnoughts should be used with antimatter or gravimetric engines. Those are more effective. In addition im planing to create hyperspace-jump-devices for capitalships, like i mentioned in my above post. They work like a solar-sail or warp-core and given an immediate 1,2,3 movement bonus. Capital ships should move slow anyways, i think movement 5 is quite fast for them.


Buildings

Well, the starting buildings DO work. Just not with a full tech game. I know about the requirements for homeworld facilites and set them up the right way. When using full tech though, standart research buildings and stuff are more efficient than homeworld complexes. Do a normal tech game and it WILL work.


Fighters
Not done yet, apart from Engines and reactors. They are no vehicle-sizes yet.



About your points that certain reactors, namely hyperspace tappers dont appear. I have attached an updated DATA folder to this post. Indeed you were right, a few things didnt worked due to overlapping family numbers, now they do.


p.s. About that 31-engines thingy you mentioned. I dont understand. I just created an dreadnought with 50 engines without any problem at all. Then when i went to add the 52th engine, it lost 2 movement points ??! Bug ?! Could someone explain the deal here ?!




Edit: Uploaded PROPER data files which fixes the reactor problem with hyperspace taps and families in general. In addition sensor families were corrected as well. I recommend everyone to download the new zip, its only 160 kB