Babylon 5 Mod - Page 61

Joe Public (#7) · #**601** April 15th, 2002, 08:55 PM

quote:
I can't recall, but the Earth Force fleet was incredibly HUGE in the 'official' storyline - some ridiculous amount! So I think adjustments will have to be made to maint... What's the opinion of Joe (or Jane) Public?

Now I'm not sure of Jane's opinion, but I'm thinking that the ship numbers have got to come down a bit. 10 000 ships is just too much micromanagement, at least the way the game interface is currently set up, for one person to follow.
Of course Joe Public is hoping that B5 and Sci-Fi mods will one day fuse, so for his sake, consider bringing the number of ships in B5 to lower values (or make the ships weaker, but that's a poorer option).

PvK · #**602** April 15th, 2002, 09:12 PM

Hmm. I'm just popping into this thread and reading a few Messages back, and have almost no Babylon 5 knowledge, but here are some thoughts on the question of trying to mod based on a universe with 10000-ship fleets.

1. The latest gold patch actually allows 20,000 max ships and bases in space, per player!

2. How many inhabited systems is the B5 populated part of the galaxy supposed to contain? Perhaps a game of SE4 could just represent one part of the whole region, so the player isn't supreme emperor, but a regional governor?

3. You could just assume that in reality, each ship would be about ten, fifty, or a hundred actual ships in the B5 universe, but is numerically simplified for sanity's sake.

4. If B5 has a large difference in size of ships (for instance, the 10,000 ship fleet consists of 10 flag ships, 100 capital ships, 1000 medium ships, and 8,990 comparitively tiny ships, then you could define ship sizes (and/or fighter sizes, and/or drone sizes) that represent squadrons of smaller ships, especially if they tend to operate that way in the B5 fiction.

Just some ideas...

PvK

Val · #**603** April 15th, 2002, 10:16 PM

Engines:
The engine thing has been pretty much resolved, by knocking all engines down to the same size (roughly). In all my tests this seems to be working very well

10,000 Ships:
Heh, I wasn't actually hoping for that many ships, not without an equally large fleet of administrators to watch over them. I was just hoping for slightly larger fleets with less maint cost. As PvK said, we don't need fleets of 1000s of ships - and ships can represent squadrons. In my test games I only had a few fleets of no more than a score of ships. As SJ said, we get it working first then scale the maint.

Joe Public:
Well, I did ask for your opinion

Yeah, the goal is to make it easy, fun and ultimately mergable with other mods.

Suicide Junkie · #**604** April 15th, 2002, 10:27 PM

quote:
2. How many inhabited systems is the B5 populated part of the galaxy supposed to contain? Perhaps a game of SE4 could just represent one part of the whole region, so the player isn't supreme emperor, but a regional governor?

Earth Force is just that. Earth. Maybe a little trade with Mars, and the occasional scientific outpost.

[ 15 April 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

Fyron · #**605** April 15th, 2002, 11:44 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Sounds like mothballing to me

Something like a -98% to maintenance built into the hulls of ships, and -99% for bases?
In that case, purchasing racial maintenance bonuses can reduce your maintenance from 2% down to 0.5%

A ship would be good for 50 turns before you've paid enough maintenance to buy a new one.

Mothballing would require the Shadows to have a large storage of resources to use to unmothball their ships, which they just don't have.

And they'd need space yards on all those random planets and moons where they kept their ships.

That system could work, as long as you can also reduce the number of colonies that they make.

quote:
Earth Force is just that. Earth. Maybe a little trade with Mars, and the occasional scientific outpost.

The Earth Alliance has 24 worlds in 14 star systems.

Suicide Junkie · #**606** April 16th, 2002, 02:59 AM

"The Earth Alliance has 24 worlds in 14 star systems"
Ah, I had no idea.
From the descriptions there, they all seem to be very small. Can any of them make a serious contribution to the space forces?

ZeroAdunn · #**607** April 16th, 2002, 03:54 AM

Most of those colonies aren't very developed.

Colonists aren't moved around that easy too either.

The shadow ships require very little support, one survived on mars for how long and still came back Online fully functional?

Val · #**608** April 16th, 2002, 03:56 AM

Even though EA has 24 worlds in the alliance (many are independent colonies that are only part of the EA for military protection and still have a great deal of independence), Earth is the only 'homeworld' class world. Mars comes a close second and only had something like 3Mil people, and the planet still relied on domes for atmosphere.

This is what I'd like to reflect more of in the facility/colonizing side of the game. I see colony ships costing more and different facilities being added, also going to something more like the proportions Cultural Centers for the homeworlds to increase their importance and contribution to founding the colonies yet maintaining a level of superiority that colonies could only hope to achieve in many, many, many years.

pathfinder · #**609** April 16th, 2002, 04:24 AM

Val: Is this why it takes 2.5 - 4.0 years to build space ports, resupply depots and shipyards? just wondering, as I thought that might be the case when I was testing stuff...

Fyron · #**610** April 16th, 2002, 05:39 AM

quote:
The shadow ships require very little support, one survived on mars for how long and still came back Online fully functional?

~1000 years. They had hundreds (if not thousands) of ships in the exact same situation as the one on Mars.