Babylon 5 Mod

[narf poit chez BOOM]

The movement and destruction parts of a black hole system are seperate abilities, so you could do the first part. However, I know of no auto-warp ability.

[Timstone]

Sounds very cool, but I think it can't be done with SE IV.

[Ron_Lugge]

Too bad, it sounds cool.

[grumbler]

The problem with black hole-type effects in this mod is that colony ships are usually too slow to escape them, with the AI will continue to send colony ships into the black hole until its entire population has been sent down the drain. A black hole that the AI could escape from (i.e. one with a pull of one) seems too trivial to bother with.

[Nomor]

Imperator Fyron said:
Limiting engine choices would in my opinion be a very bad move. QNP is a great system to keep around.

That's fine, but using grumbler's current mod as a test bed I find that the margin for engine choice has been reduced anyway to the options I gave.
If you go over the higher number I listed you basically have a ship that is all engine. Which I suppose makes my limiting things a bit meaningless.

Suicide Junkie said :
Engines don't (or at least shouldn't) store supplies.Don't go breaking the QNP in your quest for supply balance.

I was not implying engines store supplies. My figures were based on the supply capacity of the reactors. But by making the generation of supplies within each size of reactor less that its supply capacity , you have a ship that will eventually run out of supplies if it uses more supplies than it generated in a particular turn.

If however the ship does not use all it's movement points in a turn then it will have more supplies when it starts it's next turn.

This will still allow a ship to travel right around the map, only it would need to rest whenever it was over stressing the supply management. However looking at the reactors again one is more or less restricted by available ship space to throw reactor limitation out. However this might be an opportunity to make the efficiency of the reactor size more telling.
(Of course this only really applies in systems with one star.)

grumbler said:
A black hole that the AI could escape from (i.e. one with a pull of one) seems too trivial to bother with.

Not if your fleet is suffering from battle damage. It would allow some players to form strategies for capturing other races ships if they could use one fleet to damage engines and then move in with another fleet to board ships that suffer from the movement penalty. (But this is not such a priority at the moment.)

[grumbler]

Nomor said:
That's fine, but using grumbler's current mod as a test bed I find that the margin for engine choice has been reduced anyway to the options I gave.
If you go over the higher number I listed you basically have a ship that is all engine. Which I suppose makes my limiting things a bit meaningless.

Well, my version assumes that you want to devote 30%, 40%, or 50% of the space on most ships to engines. Given that the rest of the command and control stuff generally takes about 10% of the hull (and tha6t is why some small hulls don't need Crew Quarters or life support) that leaves you with 60%, 50%, or 40% of hull space for everything else.

Some ships, like scouts, will probably be unarmed and unarmored, and so have more speed, but by and large the tradeoffs between speed and everything else are pretty linear. With a few classes, minimum requirements for, say, cargo or fighter launch facilities limit engie choices more severely, but this was intentional, as the human player can exploit the speed versus capacity tradeoff more than the AI (and a ship with twice the speed but half the capacity is generally much better for the human than one with normal speed and capacity, at least for hauling cargo and pop). Extra speed is of very limited utility to ships that will e in fleets, of course, unless you give every ship the additional speed.

Still, there is always room for tweaking. Any thoughts in this area are worth looking at. In particular, I am wondering if the early-game advantage of propulsion expertise (which increase your colony ships by a full 50% in speed) is not unbalancing.

[mottlee]

I have just D/Led this mod and have found that some tech is not there, is this for a reason or have I just not researched enough to see it? also seams like a long time to build anything.

[Ragnarok-X]

Exactly what most ppl are bragging about...

[Fyron]

Ragnarok-X, that is nowhere near the truth...

[grumbler]

mottlee said:
I have just D/Led this mod and have found that some tech is not there, is this for a reason or have I just not researched enough to see it? also seams like a long time to build anything.

Examples would be useful. Everything is researchable or findable in the version i am running myself, except a few non-active race techs and some leftover SE4 techs like crystalline which i left in because I didn't know if they were to be used.

The ancients are not active, and you should not use any of the ancient races. However, anything other than that should be available and i would appriate feedback on techs that seem not to work.