Facilities and Guns

Weapon fields are not "abilities." They are component-specific attributes. The game engine does not define any hooks to read weapon stats from any other file.

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Only thing that I coudl think of which could be do-able is a facility to increase weapon damage done by weapon platforms, or improve their accuracy. Mind you, you can just have a really big Weapon Platform type with a special Really Big mount or some such (e.g. it can't have normal weapons and shields on it, only these special Doom sized weapons) to introduce more variety.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Some Ideas:

1) make the structure of facilities scale with facility level.
I don't know yet how planet shields work in SEV so I cant comment on a change on those.
2) create extra heavy armor for weapon platforms only.
3) make weapon platform mounts stronger.
4) change the amount of damage needed to kill 1 unit of population (that was in SEIV but it has to exist in SEV)

I and several ppl modded slowly moving starbases and satellites (1 move point in combat only mind you!) in SEIV to protect their planets by getting the ability of placing the starbase on the right side of the planet (the one where the attack is coming from). That made things far more interesting even for AI opponents. I hope it can be done in SEV (Haven't looked into SEV modding yet)

This should make for long and hard planetary sieges.

- Getting the AI to build a few units early (3 weapon platforms) before it completely fills up planets with facilities is a challenge more modders ought to address.
- Weapon Platforms ought to be able to shoot Troops. Either their regular weapons have reduced accuracy/damage on them and/or point-defence can target troops. May as well have "Ground Combat only" weapons be invented and put onto weapon platforms too. Once done and enough are built, planetary combat will be much harder.
- Troops should not die so easily from planetary bombardment. At present it's useless having a large troop garrison as any decent fleet will just bomb until there's nearly no troops, then send their own troops in. There's little fear of wiping out the population (though destroying facilities is a problem) as we've already solved how to make civilians very tough to kill.
- Large Troop (or make a new Huge Troop chassis) can be modified to be an extremely slow moving powerhouse meant for defence. How to convince the AI that these aren't meant to be sent on offense - that's more AI programming I guess. There must be some script that dictates how "Load Troops" behaves.

Now if we very specifically want "facilities that can shoot" for the sake of this very concept, then fine this is worth thinking about as it's a nice variety concept. However, if we're only thinking of it as a means to "help the AI make planets more interesting to conquer", then IMO it's unnecessary.

Bases I view as things you place in non-planet sectors and warp points (aside from Base Space Yards of course). Making them have 1 movement so they can get in position is an interesting prospect though.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

Working on this.

I made PD weapons attack ground targets already. But ground only weapons are useless as the main purpose of platforms is to kill enemies in space, not to ward of ground forces. Using tonnage for ground weapons just diminish their effectiveness against enemies in space.