Star Wars Mod - II (Sci-Fi Xover Mod)

[Andrés]

In the discussion about the SE4 Image Neo-Standard (Non standard Hulls thread), my Starwars mod was mentioned.
That mod was made some time ago, it was never completed (I was going to add a Force Sensitive racial trait that was never fully implemented) and it was never updated to work with the Last patch.
Of course that I thought about updating and completing the mod now.
But there's this idea that I've been having for a long time. But only now there are enough race styles and mods (completed or in progress) to make it feasible.
The idea is simple, a simple mod that combines Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and maybe some other sci-fi.
Not only the races (shipsets) but everything else that can be modded into the game: weapons, vehicle sizes etc.

This has always been my favorite game theme, I played sci-fi crossover wars since the times of SE3, but creating a mod that adds the actual techs of everyone should give it another proportion.
I know this project is too ambitious and would probably never get the time to finish it all by myself, so I need your help.
Balance will be a difficult topic here.
There's always a trekkie who will point that lasers are useless against their shields and that their superior phasers should be able to bypass sw shields and take down a star destroyer with one shot! (Sorry but trekkies tend to babble more than other sci-fi fans, probably because they think what they hear in the shows is scientifically serious)
That is of course wrong, and our objective must be to make all techs balanced and worth playing. Obviously that every one will have its own advantages and disadvantages over the others.

By now I'm in the research and preliminary design stage.
As you know I'm more a star war fan, and I'm more familiar with that technology, so I may need to be reminded of most important tech of the other SCI-FIs.
A good point of reference will be standard se4 tech. For example the damage/tonnage/firerate ratio of weapons must not exceed that of similar se4 weapons.

In the beginning let's try to keep things simple and use only the most common and representative techs for every race. More exotic technologies can be added once the basic mod is finished.

A good point to start would be the races. The 20 races needed already exist. (There are more, they could be added later but don't think they're really needed right now, and no more than 20 races can be in a game at once):
Star Wars:
1- Empire 2- Rebellion 3- Trade Federation 4- Sith Empire 5- Yuuzhan Vong

Star Trek:
6- Federation 7- Klingons 8- Romulans 9- Borg 10- Cardassian 11- Dominion 12- Ferengis 13- Sp 8472

Babylon 5:
14- Earth Alliance 15- Minbaris 16- Centauris 17- Narns 18- Shadows 19- Vorlons 20- L of N-A Worlds

So the first things I need to answer are these questions for every race.

What weapons they use? What are the most representative ship sizes they use? Tonnage or estimation if possible. How do their shields and armor work? How do they use fighters? What other technologies they have?

Analyzing the answers we should be able to determine which technologies will be available to all players, which will be available to all of the same sci-fi and which will be race-exclusive.

[ June 19, 2003, 05:40: Message edited by: Andres ]

[Atrocities]

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The idea is simple, a simple mod that combines Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and maybe some other sci-fi.
Not only the races (shipsets) but everything else that can be modded into the game: weapons, vehicle sizes etc.

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I have been considering doing a Trek Mod for sometime. I have several options open to me, including improving upon the TREK MOD, but I would rather just start from scratch.

Another option was to do my Trek Mod according to the New Age Theme. That would be very interesting to do as all of the races would be equal and that is explained.

What you are proposing is huge. Your right, balance would be an issue, but that issue can simply be solved by stating that ALL tech have simular levels. IE, phasers would be as powerful as Lasers, but would have an extra accuracy or range. Lasers would have lower component cost. Things such as this.

Develop the tech for each Race type, Star Trek, Star Wars, B5, and then compare and work out them out.

I have a rather complete list that I have been working on for star trek. Tech based off of the all 5 series, the 10 movies, and all of the games.
I do not have the list on this PC, but can get it in 3 to 5 days from my other PC. (It is out at my fathers house.)

[ 25 November 2001: Message edited by: Atrocities ]

[Val]

Sounds like balance is going to be the toughest issue. A group of us are working on a B5 Mod right now, and it would probably save us all some time if we head towards your goal of a fully balanced system. We have a list of quite a few weapon techs and some non-weapon techs. I'll try to toss it all in an Excel sheet on Monday/Tuesday so you can compare ranges and damage.

[Suicide Junkie]

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What you are proposing is huge. Your right, balance would be an issue, but that issue can simply be solved by stating that ALL tech have simular levels. IE, phasers would be as powerful as Lasers, but would have an extra accuracy or range. Lasers would have lower component cost. Things such as this.

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I would really prefer to make them be different racial ages.

IE. Low tech start gives you the bare minimum for B5 tech. Behind Earth-at-the-beginning-of-series tech. Research gets you up to Vorlon-ey tech, then you develop shields and move into a StarTrek type tech tree. At the top end of that, it merges smoothly with a StarWars type tech.

You start at B5 tech, when you have one planet & a colony. As you grow to include many starsystems, you move slowly into TrekTech, and by the time you can control a large portion of the galaxy, you will have StarWars tech.

It seems pretty natural to me.

As a bonus, you could add a required tech "Trek", and "SW". Then by disallowing the tech in the game setup, you'd have a TrekMod or B5 mod.

[Val]

The different racial ages idea is good, and would make for a much more balanced system.

But I think (and I may be wrong) that the idea is to see how the different races square off against each other. Yes?

[Andrés]

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But I think (and I may be wrong) that the idea is to see how the different races square off against each other. Yes?

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I agree with you Val.
What I want are the races portrayed as faithfully as possible going against each other.
I think it’s something many people wants to see and when done will attract new players to se4.
suicide_junkie your idea sounds interesting, but it’s not what we want to do.
Are you implying that ST technology is more advanced to B5’s, and that SW’s is superior to ST’s? That could be true in some tech areas, but not in others.
But your point is good and I see it as a potential problem. In each of the mentioned sci-fi universes some races are portrayed as advanced and powerful while others are weaker and relatively unimportant. Making all of them be faithful interpretations, and also balanced will be difficult.

[Suicide Junkie]

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Do SW ships even have shields? They're certainly very vulnerable to fighter attacks..and I can't imagine a shield that could stop incoming kinetic energy weapons (slug throwers) yet let fighters through.

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Well, in the X-Wing games, cap ships are vulnerable to fighters because it makes the game more fun, but in the movies, fighters can't do squat to a cap ship unless its shields are already down and, even then they can only make pinpoint strikes against exposed targets. I'm not saying fighters are worthless, mind you, after all, once the bridge shields went on the Executor, and a-wing took it out and sent the ship careening into the Death Star. So in response, fighters never got through cap ship shields, they were already down before the fighters started making runs.

[Suicide Junkie]

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Disadvantages are weaker shields, weak ground troops, and no fighters what-so-ever (probably because you can't put a warp core on a ship the size of an x-wing ). Can't speak for B5, as I know nothing about it.

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Actually, trek does have fighters, they are shielded, they do go FTL, and they don't have full size M/ARCs.
Shuttlecraft are light fighters.
Just look at the dominion war (DS9).
There, they have the runabouts with torpedo launchers (medium fighter)
And the military designed-to-be-a-fighter fighters. (large fighter)

You don't actually need a Matter/Antimatter reactor (aka warpcore) to run warp drive, but it requires less fuel and is more compact (size:energy output) than the comparable Fusion reactors. Most ships don't carry enough fusion reactors to move at a decent warpspeed.
Shuttles only go warp 2 or so since they have smaller powerplants.

IMO, Trek vs Wars fighters would suffer worse than the capital ships.
Wars fighters are somewhat stronger than Trek fighters, and the Trek fighters can't use FTL attacks effectively on moving targets.
(I believe that the only chance Trek ships have against Wars capital ships would be "Warp Strafing", where they launch torpedoes at FTL speeds, and the enemy can't see them until they've gone past)

[jimbob]

Well, here's my .026 (Cdn$)

It appears that balance play is going to be a problem... at least initially. However, it seems to me that each of the sci-fi realms is looking at 'empires' at different stages of development. By putting the realms together we need to have a "multi-era" view.

Bab 5 - initial era (growing). Several hyper advanced aliens do have better tech, but not by much. Only a few of the empires have peaked, the rest are still 'coming into their own.'

Star Trek - intermediate era (vigorous). Rising empires are in great conflict due to tremendous growth. The tech levels are starting to peak, but the empires have not become static... yet.

Star Wars - late era (decay). The great republic/empire has peaked in maturation, has become static, and has started into decay.

So what? Well, I think that the relative strength or weakness that appears to be a problem is actually due to us comparing empires that are mostly at tech level 2 to empires mostly at tech level 10. We simply need to "fill in" the lost eras for each genre.

i.e.
Bab 5 - add the more powerful top end techs for when they reach the middle to end game. Maybe they should never get shields, but that's okay, really strong hulls and armor can be developed.

Star Trek - develop more fully the early techs (lucky for us, Enterprise should help) and the extremely late techs. Races from this realm will have the advantage of highly manouverable capital ships (special: dilithium crystals), their weakness will be the absolute lack of fighters (except perhaps the dominion)and relatively slow non-combat speed.

Star Wars - develop more fully the very early techs. I don't think that the SW techs are really all that advanced, I think that much of the 'late era' stuff we see in the SW movies is due to specialized development of a few key technology branches. That is to say, their movement rates are extremely high, but their combat movement is not nearly as high as the Star Trek ships. They have developed excellent fighters, but personally I don't think the turbo-lasers are nearly as powerful as say photon torpedoes and phasers(IMHO). The only time we see missles fired is from fighters at incredibly short range (that is, they have no capital ship missles).

Finally, I think it is important to critically define the ships by relative size, not by the names given to them by the genre. The Star'Destroyers' are late empire ships... they are 1400+ metres in length which is slightly bigger than the Enterprise from Next Gen (intermediate era). Both should be defined as 'battle cruisers' because of their absolute size... this lets players compare apples to apples.

-jimbob

[arthurtuxedo]

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Actually, trek does have fighters, they are shielded, they do go FTL, and they don't have full size M/ARCs.
Shuttlecraft are light fighters.
Just look at the dominion war (DS9).
There, they have the runabouts with torpedo launchers (medium fighter)
And the military designed-to-be-a-fighter fighters. (large fighter)

You don't actually need a Matter/Antimatter reactor (aka warpcore) to run warp drive, but it requires less fuel and is more compact (size:energy output) than the comparable Fusion reactors. Most ships don't carry enough fusion reactors to move at a decent warpspeed.
Shuttles only go warp 2 or so since they have smaller powerplants.

IMO, Trek vs Wars fighters would suffer worse than the capital ships.
Wars fighters are somewhat stronger than Trek fighters, and the Trek fighters can't use FTL attacks effectively on moving targets.
(I believe that the only chance Trek ships have against Wars capital ships would be "Warp Strafing", where they launch torpedoes at FTL speeds, and the enemy can't see them until they've gone past)

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Shuttles are not fighters. As for Tac Fighters and especially Peregrines, well, you can call a boulder a pebble, but it's still a boulder. A tac fighter might be too small to be called a small cap ship, but it's way too big to be called a fighter. Heavy bomber maybe. A peregrine is hardly smaller than the Defiant.

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Star Wars - develop more fully the very early techs. I don't think that the SW techs are really all that advanced,

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Careful, we're trying to make a mod, not start a vs. debate.

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I think that much of the 'late era' stuff we see in the SW movies is due to specialized development of a few key technology branches.

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That's impossible. You can't say someone has extremely advanced weapons (for instance), but everything else is crap. If their weapons are super powerful, they need hull materials and shock absorbers that can take the recoil, you need reactors that can power them, etc. To paraphrase Mike Wong, if you gave Leonardo DaVinci the blueprints for a modern car and explained to him how it worked, he still couldn't build it because technology in a thousand other areas just isn't there.

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That is to say, their movement rates are extremely high, but their combat movement is not nearly as high as the Star Trek ships.

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That's true, Trek ships have higher sublight acceleration because they submerge most of the ship's mass in subspace using the warp drive.

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They have developed excellent fighters, but personally I don't think the turbo-lasers