IRM suggestion thread.

1. My suggestion is to improve relationsships system. I think it is pretty good done in lastest Balance Mod.
If am strong AI is affraid of me and relations are better. In that case am equal partner. If am weak AI is more agressive toward me. AI makes more demands.
Just like in real life...
2. Fix "expected results field" in research mode to have it worked it like in stock mode/balance mod.

It is however worth letting the AI research it as far as getting access to stellar utilization or making that dependant on physics tech level rather than stellar Manipulation.

Suggestions

1 An exploration minister would be a nice feature to allow exploration to continue when you are focused else where.

2 implementing the cargo minister or getting rid of the mention of it in the ministers list if it cant be got to work as it looks useful but doesn’t do a thing

3 limiting the refit minister to newest of preferably class name but I would settle for ship type

4 The fear idea is as good one and I am all in favour of it indeed I am trying the latest BM to see how it works so far it looks interesting

5 making the small flags optional as they are irritatingly small in the BM or at least making them a bit bigger ok so this is pandering to the elderly but that’s only fair (declares interest as I am technically retired)

6 if you stabilize the tech tree I would be quite happy to do an interactive spreadsheet for those who would want to plan their research more precisely.

7 Spreading out the arrival of research centres over the tech tree so they don’t come one per TL up to 20 as they do now.

Is it impossible for the AI to be scripted to use stellar manipulation? I know that the SEIV AI used it quite effectively (except for ring and sphereworld building)

A small suggestion - have you considered making the Cargo Facility 500kT rather than 1000kT while halving the storage capacity? It would be a good use for the 500kT of facility space you can have left over on a planet when you place the 750 and 1500 facilities and I think storage makes sense.

As mentioned, minister improvements would be great - any and all things that could be achieved along these lines would be brilliant:

* Exploration minister for recon ships
* Cargo Transport minister to spread your stockpiles of Satellites and Troops across your empire
* A "defensive" minister which could deploy Satellites or Mines over Warp Points since that can be a fairly effective crimp on the human players' invasion plans.

A "Fear" mechanic would make the diplomacy section much more satisfying!

Given that the AI is now up to using the running fight tactic on a player I dont see the need for that and I would add that PD is geting better since the last stock patch an Unit hunter will now mince fighters and be fairly well imune to seekers.

Hmmm... another problem no one has mentioned is the ridiculous amounts of missiles a planet can launch when it´s full of weapon platforms. Attacking even a small planet can easily cost you large parts of your fleet, unless you use about 50% of unit hunters. Yes I know, "you should use bombardment ships blah blah blah" but I think things are not balanced, secondary weapons almost never hit a seeker; the only viable anit-seeker weapons up to the midgame are PD weapons. I´ve already reduced the cargo space in planets, specially on unbreathable ones to reduce the amount of WP, let´s see how it works.

That´s why I like this game... if you don´t like something, you can always change it yourself =)

I like the sound of missiles getting shorter range, nerfing parthian shot will simultaneously make direct fire weapons, larger ships, and especially direct fire mounts more useable. 'Course you don't want to make missiles too weak, perhaps they should get more structure to compensate? (i.e. takes more damage for point-defense to destroy them). Anyway, thanks for your hard work Fallen, am looking forward to testing the new balance of weapons in your next version.

Edit: what, exactly, are shields for? At first glance, armor has more total protection for the same tonnage, plus the invaluable damage negation, vs. the rather negligible regeneration of shields.. I thought shields might still have some hidden benefit not mentioned in the description, and tested them against a variety of weapons.. every time ships with armor win over otherwise identical ships that devote the same tonnage to shields instead of armor (same tech level). Have tried missiles, mounted and unmounted direct fire, autocannons, fighter weapons, even meson cannons which supposedly cause half damage to shields (this isn't working). Of course these are the basic shields, I have not tested phased or any other type - what incentive is there to research 20+ shields when the lvl 10 ones are so terrible? It is convenient that shields can regenerate without the need for repair, but there's little benefit to this if the ship doesn't survive a fight against a superior armored ship - and any fleet of armored ships will bring along a repair ship, of course. I don't know what your vision for shields is, and far be it from me to tell you what they should be good for, but they need some kind of improvement to be useful for anything.

At each grade of shielding, they apply an additional 10% damage reduction. So, the high level shields (Null space, I think?) you're only taking 60% of the actual damage of the attack. This is all summarized under the damage type help info from within the game.

I would sugest leaving missiles alone but by all means bring their mounts into line with that of the direct fire weapons.

As for the problem with weapon platforms I think the wrong way to go about it is to reduce the cargo space on planets I personaly finfd the fdrequency with which this runs out with the BM an Stock silly why not make the platforms larger say 500, 750, and a thousand without increasing thir capacity or introduce biger weapon platform weapons after all the precident is set for having a diferent TL for each type of weapon there is already one for fighters and for troops

It's possible to code stellar manipulation,
sys functions are there , just
they are not used (which should mean they do
nothing) according to scripting documentation.

Greetings, Branimir.

Well, increasing the tonnage of WPs is another viable way of solving the problem. As for reducing space, I´ve never runned out of space in my planets because I prefer ships for defense (through the real reason is that i´ve never found necessary in any game I´ve played to fill the capacity of a planet with WP and sats).

The question is, something has to be done, because conquering even tiny planets is troublesome, and it´s bad for the AI too. After the early game, I´ve never seen a ground combat by the AI being processed...

Fallen ------> I have a question. What is the main diffrence between Zero G Weapons (like Depleted Uranium Cannon) and Gauus Tech like Mass Drivers and Rail Guns? I think those second are not much better than old ones. It should be much more balanced.

Second thing is AI. I wonder why AI loves to attack my 5 or more ships with only one ship?
So it should be improved. Before AI attack it should calculate its chances in fight. Never send 1 ship on 5 and so on...

Is is possible?

Currently single ship attacks, if it has at least 50%
strength of enemy force. But routine that is currently
used for single ship attack mode, does not counts how many
ships are in same sector
Will correct that. However, fleets defending own systems
disregard enemy strength as player with one strong fleet will never be attacked then.
How many ships per fleet and fleets there
will be, depends on number of available ships ai has.
If it has to defend then no point in calculating odds.

Greetings, Branimir.

*nods* I'll be waiting as usual then. Hopefully in 1~2 weeks' time when you get the next version out, I'll have my life more organised.

---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.

Diplomacy is pretty good done in Balance Mod. Reconsider taking it from BM.
Also I hope you read my suggestion about weapons rebalance.

IMHO, this is not a very attractive fix to the problem. Missiles should have much longer ranges than direct fire weapons - they do so both inreality and in SciFi books. Why not rather address the issue with a movement penalty attached to missile ships (technically, the missile itself would convey a movement penalty)? In that case, missile ships would be slower than direct fire ships with the same number of engines so that the direct fire ship would eventually catch up with the missile ship.

Are drones still more expensive then fighters?

Agreed, the fact that a larger battle is actually task force vs. task force makes it more difficult. If you follow down the path of my suggestion, you would have to make the AI form "close attack task forces" without missile ships. On the ship level, it is probably no problem to define a "close attack ship" and make the AI build this type without missile armament. I am not sure (and can't test it right now as I am aways from home) if it is possible to also make the AI form task forces with only a certain ship type, i.e. these close attack ships.

RE fighters
it has occurred to me that there should be two fighter techs standard fighters which would have high tactical movement as they do now but no strategic movement requiring a support ship in the same hex which would if researched to the top and with an extra level of military science and construction system fighters which would be fighters as we have them now. I would also increase the amount of supply these system fighters used making them fairly short ranged without a lot of inbuilt supply. It would make getting fighters to current capability expensive in research terms and limit them in a game enhancing and I think mod spirit compatible way.

At least it digs up interesting but forgotten threads...

Hmm... IRM mod. This is still being worked on? Some documentation would be good; I was wanting to try this mod out for my next game, as I'm a new player and the game is obviously terribly balanced as far as techs are concerned.

I liked Master of Orion's tech setup the most out of any space game I've ever played.

Really miss those inertial dampeners... and the miniaturization of technology to put out drastically upgraded frigates in the future.

How about differentiating torpedoes from missiles a bit more, make torps faster and less susceptible to PD than missiles?

IRM mod was abandoned a few months ago. It should still more or less work in 1.44 though.

For reference, IRM isn't really a "balancing" mod, so much as a mod that adds and tweaks a bunch of stuff (alongside efforts to make the game more balanced). For a mod that just seeks to balance, check out the cleverly named Balance Mod.

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Still works with 1.44 though it dosent use the new functions produced after 1.35 not dead just resting. I for one am fidling with it to try to give my old figher mod a decent AI and to finish it off as it was almost there when FH & Bmaxa left it at 0.99c

0.99c? The latest version on the FTP is 0.99b3. Was this c uploaded elsewhere?

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The ship speed doesn't progress fast enough with engine levels IMHO. This is even more critical because of the +2 movement you can get with the appropriate racial trait.

Make it so you can get AIs to surrender simply by impressing them with the sheer size of your empire.

you can already have done it a few times mostly with neutral players.

corection I meant 0.99b 0.99c /0.99c (f) is my attept to bring it up to 1.44 and incorperate my partial fighter mod respecivly. These are not finished so not posted.