IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS?

My very alpha fighter Mod gets rid of small ordinance weapons and replaces them with one shot full sized ones which require repair before they can be reused. I am also trying to create a repair facility which only fixes fighters and counts as hanger space thus reducing the number of fighters on a given carrier. Non carriers would be able to carry fighters but it is intended that the only practicable types should be cannon armed.

I am also fiddling about with advanced hulls. so far I have stealthy hulls which gain a degree of cloaking at each tl Agile hulls which are harder to hit tougher hulls which have more internal structure etc all have the prerequisite of tl10 in a hull size and are mutually exclusive. each advanced tech has a very expensive 5 tls

I would like to reintroduce multi tracking beyond that which Fallen haven has managed in the IRM so far.

we could have both since I have not actually removed the small versions yet just copied the big ones and meditated one of them so you have the version which goes on ships shoots till it runs out of ordinance and the sort that fits on fighters which is one shot but does not use ordinance. I have tried that and I will have to post a screen short of a group of torpedo bombers losing a salvo at a dreadnought it’s quite impressive especially as they are unarmed after that and so turn away

That will be awesome! Expecially if they return to the carrier to "rearm"

Actually I used the code which is supposed to cause things like stellar manipulation components to break when used (oddly its also hard coded I believe). I did get it to work in combat by appending it to the code which controls a CSM eventually. All the other seekers are works in process. I am still having trouble with the repair facility as I haven’t worked out how to get this to work in combat or if this is possible at all nor can I manage to make the component fighter specific.

It would be even more awesome if I was better at coding

Wanders off thinking about BADGER STEW

Badger stew is actually very good..... (Note: Does not taste like chicken.)

Note 2: You are correct in that it is hard coded.

evilginger

Organic armor can repair itself during battle; can you give that quality to the full size missile? Then after it is fired (stellar manipulation code you used), its broken and would only be able to fire again when fully repaired. Assuming my logic is correct, the fighter would zoom in shoot its missile (which breaks) then retreats because it has no weapon (wont leave the battle though with the Space Combat Allow Retreat = False). When the weapon repairs, the fighter zooms back in. Repeat until someone or everyone is dead.

Problems: I don’t know where the fighter would go, but probable not to the carrier. There would be a set time for reload versus considerations of carrier locations, etc.

Other thought: I think kwok set up in the BM for organic ships to fix structure as part of the hull quality of the ship, I think it can fix internal components. If it fixes internal components could it also fix cargo or components on cargo?

For regeneration on components; See post http://www.spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/1852

Kwok if you see this, could a regeneration boost from a ship hull affect a fighter component (assuming in the cargo)?

Then again for this to work, the fighter would need to get back to the carrier for the regeneration boost. If you can get the fighter back into cargo, then you could probably only put enough ordinance on the fighter for one shot in the first place, then the carrier would simply resupply the fighter.

There are afterburners... Maybe something like that could work. Or just make afterburners for frigates. That could be quite nice.

For the one shot style larger weapon on fighters, why not have a weapon component that is large enough to fill up most of the fighters tonnage, and have only enough ordanance onboard for just one shot. Then the fighter could return to it's carrier to rearm, in the truest sense of the word.

It might take some balancing I guess, but you wouldnt have to muck around with carriers with repair abilities.

One extra question, is there any reason you couldnt convert a fighter hull into a large missile (aka a smart controllable drone)?

And by convert I mean change the tonnage, the layout, etc. to better represent a missile with upgradable individual components.

I am experimenting with cloaked warp points. I'm not sure if it's possible yet, maybe something like it will only be visible if you use gravatic sensors.

Now that I'm thinking of it. maybe there could be a bunch of things that would only be visible with certain types of sensors.

Maybe a sphere world that can only be discovered with temporal sensors...

SEV, more than a feeling.

There are so many people working different angles. It seems sad that there is no way to coordinate the effort to reduce redundancy and expedite available changes/options that can be incorporated into a single mod.

I have not delved into the various group efforts but perhaps that is the path to follow?

Those who have experience doing these sort of things are working together in one form or another. Its the people who are new to this game and or have very little experience with the over all community that need to focus a bit on combining efforts.

This isn't the only forum devoted to this game you know.

"Travel the path of integrity without looking back, for there is never a wrong time to do the right thing." - Unknown.

at the moment the fighter once its fired its weapon retreats of the board just like any ship with its weapons shot out but I am working on that. There dosent seem to be code for recovering units in combat just lanching them which may be a problem.

Maybe ordonance generation during combat.
And balance sizes, ord requirements,(...) so fighter can eg. have 2 misiles, 1 misile and 3 reloads or 1 misile and ord. regenerator, so he can fire more misiles during combat, but much slower than with any previous options.

This way, it would not be totaly self suficient, but would require only suply from carrier, so carrier would have solar colectors to refil fighterss (or big stockpile of suply).

One-Shot fighters: What about designing a "big" weapon that uses 50 ordnance/shot? Ok, you can get one "extra" shot adding extra ordnance storages, but that means 1KT+/shot (at max ornance lvl), and a fighter is quite load limited.

The only problem could be resupply a full fleet of fighters with such an ordnance hunger...

That ordnance hunger you spoke to could be satisfied through some posts I have seen on designing in advanced ordnance modules for ships that have ordnance generating capabilities combined with remote ordnance distribution unless this last one is strictly a facility ability. The alternative for your systems is a facility designed to boost remote ordnance distribution plus generation.

These discussions also bring to mind the question of whether unit sizes should be edited along with fighter bays that will allow capital ships to haul frigate, destroyer or cruiser size vessels. Having the ability to rearam these babies would require that ordnance generation/remote distribution ability. It could lead to the mother of all missile battles as discussed in the Praxis trilogy. Now if we could do that combined with AoE capable missiles it would prove to be a very interesting mod...

Fallen Havens IRM mod has ordinance and suply factorys already and I use these on Bases built in planetless systems as they work a bit like weaker versions of the plan et based resuply depot

I miss one order for carriers and dronelauncher ships, "attack search with fighters" and "attack search with drones".

I´ve read some people asking for ships able to attack at a distance, from their hex to other system hex. Actually, this is possible with current options: You have fighters and drones ableo to do it.

The problem is that the maneuver is slow and tedious (in PBW, at least): You need one turn to launch fighter/drone units, and then another turn to give then orders and make then attack. Not very effective, I´d say.

What I suggest is an order to reduce launching and movement to one turn. I move, select my target, launch fighters/drones to that location (or to seek attack their target, like current attack orders) and continue moving, in the same order queue. In the same turn, fighters/drones seek and attack the enemy.

This should improve current fighters/drones, and the game would be more playable.

To avoid freighter exploits (a freighter with one fighter bay/drone launcher and tons of cargo hold being more effective than a proper carrier), units launched whith this order should be limited to 6 per fighter bay (the amount of fighters that usually store a fighter bay) and 1,5 for drone launcher bays.

I think a proper fix to the "freighter exploit" would be to increase the size of these modules (up to about 400kT or so) such that only one would be fit on a ship at a time, with similar changes to fighter launch speed. Or remove unit launching components altogether and mod the abilities into the carriers and other specialized launching hulls.

heh, I proposed just the same some time ago... It´s nice to see someone that thinks the same.

Each fighter bay can only launch one fighter at a time during combat. I see no problem that they can launch all fighters out of combat, they have 1 month (game turn) to do it. But i slowed down the launching rate of fighter bays in my mod, this make it harder to launch large waves of fighters if you don't have them on a carrier, and the second waves may come too late to help the previous one.

Temporal Cloaking Device - Same as standard cloaking device but can only be detected by the Temporal Scanner. Maybe has the ability to prevent scans like the Scattering Armor. Speaking of cloaking devices, do they have any impact on actual fighting? Do cloaked ships remain cloaked when fighting or do they have to decloak? I've not had the situation arise yet in my games or I've not been paying much attention. I believe that ships in a fight decloak to fire as they don't look any different when cloaked. It would be nice if a cloaked ship were transparent as a visual clue. Kinda like how they are done in Sword of the Stars. Granted, the model size difference is vast and it would probably mean the ships would be difficult to see in a battle.

But the way the game works, they are considered as mere cargo. Game wise, it does not matter if it's a mine, fighter, satellite or troop, it's just another type of cargo. Besides i don't see it as an exploit really. You trade launching capability for extra cargo space. A big wave of fighters is more likely to wreak havoc than a smaller one. A small wave get shot down quickly, a large one offer so many targets that the defending ships struggle to shoot them down (at least, in IRM). Launching 100 fighters at once is much better than 10 waves of 10...

Temporal cloaking device that is undetectable by other means is imo bed idea, becose non temporal race would have NO chance aginst it.
Better would be, if temporal sensors could detect anything without temp. cloaking (but, are there different cloakings, or it is turned only to number how good it is?).

Fighters:
I don't see any option except "including" fighter bays into fighter hull and making separate fighter bays somehow worse (Maybe lauchnging slowly, becose not-carrier hull does not have holes for launching fighters, so they must be transported more complicately to surface of ship).

I disagree with you Alpedar regarding the temporal cloaking. It doesn't grant you any massive bonus, except over the AI of course. Cloaking as far as I can tell, and anyone can correct me on this, only means you can't be seen from the main screen. Battle wise it still requires that you have to decloak to fight. As for the cloaking tech, there is just the 1 style of cloaking available. No phased cloaking...no fire while cloaked cloaking. I also like the idea of a temporal cloaking device as it fits nicely into the temporal racial track. If you have the ability to travel around in time or to affect it in minute ways, you may well want the ability to not be seen thus not affecting the time line. Granted, that has no affect on this game as we can't affect the 'time line' but still...

Heck, I'd even settle for the Tachyon scanner having a 'chance' of detecting a temporally cloaked vessel at higher levels, but only a chance. Temporal sensors should be able to see them if they are at least 1 level higher.

For balance purposes have the space requirements relatively small unless you're modding out all the other fighter seeker weapons.

.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

Which doesn't mean much if you can bypass all the enemy's warp-point defenses and fall upon undefended planets at will..

Which is why I suggested:

and if you browsed through the modding forum, I posted a topic there about doing just this as I don't want it to be that powerful.

Most of the ideas and suggestions I have for the game are UI related. I have submitted most if not all of them to Aaron over the course of time. 90% of them are not going to happen, but 10% or so have been taken and acted upon making the game that much better. I would like to see more of the UI improvements made, and often wonder why Aaron didn't use SE IV's UI as a template for SE V. It is as if he chose to start completely from scratch with SE V and forgot all of the great features that he had created for SE IV. Oh well, SE V is still a pretty good game, even though it is frustrating and cumbersome to play, it is still playable and unique in its own right.

This sounds like an interesting idea so long as it is well done. It would also help if cloaking were available earlier in the game, to make it a viable strategic factor. In balance mod at least, cloaking dosent come along until you've maxed out the physics research tree. Effectively I end up ignoring it because by the time I reach it, enemy sensors will be so sophisticated that I would need to dump an enormous amount of research points into it to surpass their sensor tech and make it viable.

I think the mechanoid trait definitely needs to be modified, unless their is a significant change to how bio-weapons work it is useless (my preference for bio-weapons would be for an infected planet to have a percentage chance each turn to spread plague to another planet in the system, and eventually throughout your empire).

As a racial tech it opens some interesting possibilities, a borg like race that can 'assimilate' enemy populations, turning them into a modified version that has a new unique racial trait would be very interesting. I havent read the berserker books, how would you design that?

Another random idea

Psychic planet capture:

I think the psychic racial trait should allow development of a 'psychic projector' component that would allow planets to be captured without troops. Maybe design them so that each one can subdue about 10m colonists, and allow them to be stacked on ships so they don't get too overpowering. It only makes sense in my mind that a psychic race would be able to take over a planet without firing a shot.

That does sound like a great idea for a more random event type situation. There was some discussion of designing a pirate/nomad race that could exist completely without planets. I'd love to see a mod where there is a random chance of a berserker race appearing in a system with space yard ships, robo resource collectors, ect. They wouldnt attempt to colonize or conquer but move from system to system trying to wipe out all life it encounters.

Building population sounds interesting, I'm not sure if its moddable but could you set it up so that you can research higher 'mechanoid tech' levels and then design different populations. Some could boost research, others production, eventually you could design new pop. units that could breathe different atmospheres.

A racial trait that allows a race to use the max capacity of any planet without regard to atmosphere type. That would be an immensely powerful racial trait.

I remember playing Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain, that game had a similair setup to SEV with regard to atmospheres/gravity/conditions that allowed colonization and there was one race that could colonize any planet no matter the condition, that made them powerful, but they had alot of negative traits like slow research, building, intelligence ops.

I think the only way to balance a 'all atmospheres' racial tech would be to balance it with a lot of negative traits to limit how powerful it would be.

A while back I suggested military installations, bunkers, and fortifications. Military bases/installations would be required in order to have fighters on a planet, or troops. But this was shot down hard and fast. I had spent a significant amount of time formulating the concept and articulating my ideas. It only took one or two posts in the "beta" forums to splash me and my ideas. Since then my attitude has been pretty much to hell with it. No idea is going to get by without someone torpedoing it. So why bother. Additionally, if it isn't already a part of the game, chances are it won't ever become part of the game. So again, why bother?

You mean like the retreat border? Oh wait.

A lot of ideas are going to be shot down. That's the nature of the beast. The ones that don't will generally come out of the process stronger (eg instead of SEIV's no-retreat system, we ended up with an option retreat system with moddable borders).