Balance Mod v1.06 Available!

Very nice...I'll download this tonight and be playing it for like 5 full days...on hols till Thursday...I wish...bet my wife wont let me

Thxs Cap...great work!

So far, work VERY WELL.

And have updated it to FQM 5.10, no problems also.

Waiting for 1.34, 1.35, etc

Well good work kwok. Unfortunatly I'll probably have to wait till 1.07. I've just got to many games now running on 1.05...

Ok, After several turns (the only thing that slow it is the memory leak...... GRRRRRRRRRR), it works better thank 1.05 and the separation of ship / unit minister is a godsend.

I like to build / manage mi ships, and don't care for units (but want they build ), and right now it works very well, let you decide if want to micromanage or not that area.

For me, is a plus.

BTW, a small plea.:

Don't let the AI to sell you so easily the Techs of ROCK/ICE/GAS, it is a no fun way to 'negotiate' with the 'AI'.

What is the

scrap minister: 1 cargo items were scraped from pppp for xxx,yyy,zzz.

In that case, no ship, facility or unit is apparently scrapped in that planet.

And this happens several times a turn, almost every turn.....

Problem is.......

Is model MK I in all units.........

No obsolete......

Is one of the mysteries of the mod

Is possible to put info about what is scrapped in the scrap minister report ?

Like

scrap minister: 1 cargo items (2 WP, 3 SAT) were scraped from pppp for xxx,yyy,zzz.

That help to know what is running in the background....

Second that its always worring when you see a vague report from a minister and it would help debug if what they where up to could be visiable

Hey Captain are those small flags in your mod copyright? I mean, can I shamelessly steal them to put into my own mod?

Question..: If i put the build vehicles minister off and the units on, what the base yards / shipyards do in auto ?

I find a problem.....

If i don't build ships / bases (minister is off, player must do the thing), the AI don't build units (minister is on).......

If i build ships/bases, minister start building units.....

Is not logical.. i don't need to build ships for the 'other' minister to build units (i think) it defeat the purpose of separating....

I'm not building ships in the last 10 turns. And on theses turns the ministers don't build units.

Also, the new planets that i colonized, don't get WP nor sats....

In my present game, some empires are doubled and some have started with no facilities. Is this a 1.06 bug?

I think there is a mod for just changing the small flags over at the shrpnell forums...

I design in the same turn 2 med fighters (one energy, other missile).

Only one of then is build by the minister.

Why ?

If i change the DesignTypes.txt, adding the design names that i want (fighter-bomber, tactical-fighter, etc), it work until 1.07 ?

Also, it can affect (add the names) a game already started ?

- If I upgrade a 1.05 game to 1.06, will all the balancing changes be applied, or I have to start a new game?
- When will PBW be upgraded to 1.06? Who usually updates it - you, the PBW admins or one of the players? What version will be on PBW - the one with or without FQM? Can you have FQM not installed on PBW, and play a PBW game with BM with FQM installed on your computer?

There are no custom shipsets and 18 other empires, with only four being neutral empires.

Sure

Hey Kwok (& Fyodor) ... 1st off, I'm enjoying the mod greatly ... but I am having a problem.

With a map set on the largest size, when I process a turn (cmd line or GUI) i get a 'DirectDraw out of memory error'. It specifically blames skyboxemptyspace.bmp, although I;m not sure if that is just the straw that broke the camel's back or not.

Now I'm betting that this might be because of the inclusion FQM in your mod. I re-saved that problematic bmp with IrfanView, though it didn't fix it. My next guess would be to re-save all the bmps using that program to strip the photoshop headers out ... but that doesn't sound like much fun.

I am wondering which version you used. I notice that there is a new FQM version, which wishes the inclusion of the Multimedia Pack. Which version of the FQM is in the 1.06 Balance Mod? Would installing/copying new versions bmps into the existing 1.06 mod work? Will the mysterious Multimedia Pack help? Am I just playing with too big a map? Will you fetch me a shrubbery?

Thanks.

CPU: XP 2500+
Mainboard: A7N-8X Deluxe Rev 2.0
Mem: 1 GB Samsung DDR400 - 2*256 & 1*512 Dual Channel
Video: eVGA GeForce 6800GS CO Edition
OS: WinXP SP2
Page file: 3056MBs
all directX tests passed easily

... even so, I'm still loving the game.

It happens also if you use FQM 10 with bm 1.06 .....

Thanx ... I'm doing my wage slave impression right now, but I will test that out tonight and let you know.

... even so, I'm still loving the game.

I got distracted last night and didn't end up with much time to test. I deleted the bitmap, processed the turn and had the same DirectDraw error, except this time with the default bmp instead of the one in the mod.

... even so, I'm still loving the game.

Sorry, don't quite get that. Systems?

... even so, I'm still loving the game.

Auughhh! I hate intermittent errors.

This time it processed fine, memory usage never topped 600Mb for either RAM or pagefile. It's a PBM game, so it'll be a bit before the next turn can be processed, but I will monitor the memory usage again.

Thanks for the help so far.

Hey, great mod. I just d/led SEV from steam a couple days ago and felt like the game was good, but needed a few tweaks to be great--luckily, you agreed and tweaked what I would have.

That said, I think I found a few bugs with your mod.

First, organic armor seems to be a tad bit bugged. I have a game right now where I am playing an organic ship race. It is a very intense game and I'm fighting a war on two fronts. Anyway, I have organic small satellites deployed on my end of all warp points leading into my systems. I have noticed that these satellites are almost impossible to kill? Why?

Well, there are two bugs. First let's deal with the regeneration itself. Whenever my satellites are near death and all organic armor has been depleted, they start taking damage to their hull structure (as is normal), however, once this happens the regeneration skyrockets. Literally, in 2 secs I can go from no armor to 100% once the hull has been breached. The hull structure then starts flying in the negative value direction. What i mean is, it is not uncommon to see my satellites with -200 life, yes negative two hundred (even if their max structure is around 100).

The other bug with this is that the ships firing on this satellites believe it is no longer a threat since they have damaged it halfway (and the ai swaps to a more dangerous target w/ guns). So, this makes my satellits nearly unkillable. When they're almost dead not only do they have insane regeneration, but the enemies swap targets off of them, giving them a free pass.
*I can include a game save if you'd like*.

The other thing I have noticed (which isn't really a bug--more of an ai thing) is that the AI is completely oblivious to the value of fleeting ships. At the same sectors where I have my satellits guarding warp gates, I notice that I must fight ten battles a turn where the ai sends one stupid ship through the warp gate to be torn up by my bases, ships, and satellites waiting. Maybe one in 30 battles is there more than one ship, and when they do send multiples, they actually destroy half the defenders, or more. If this was regular, i couldnt lock down the warp gates.

I was going to complain that the ai doesnt try to lockdown warp gates, but I started noticing they are now that i'm in the 10th year of the game.

Next, this may or may not be a bug, but the game I'm playing in right now is against 9 ai, NONE OF WHICH HAVE -ANY- INTELLIGENCE. I believe the reason my *hard* game right now is so easy is because my intelligence is sucking their resources dry, but this is only possible because none of the ai have any intelligence what so ever.

Finally, the game I am playing in is toooo easy. I am playing on hard, but it seems like a pushover as far as my ability to control the game (which i blame on intelligence). I am not able to go planet to planet conquering or killing, but there's no question i am going to win. And I would if all 9 players attacked me. The ai doesnt seem to understand the value of ground invasions or the use of troops. I often drop 80-100+ ground troops on a planet and not once have i encountered more than 5 enemy ground troops. They're so cheap to build and so effective at thwarting attacks, but the ai rather build ships and send them through the warp gate one at a time:(

I can say one thing immediately: Anything less than easy just switches off certain scripts of the AI, so we always always play on Hard. AI bonus is how you affect "difficulty" (faster construction, extra resource/research/intel) - I'd even argue going to Settings.txt and customising just how much of a bonus "High AI Bonus" really means (why not try x10 instead of the default x4 point generation?). Note that the extra points (resources/research/intel) won't show up on the Score comparison screen, but they are applied.

Since this is BM, I also suggest you try "Team Mode" which allies all the AI against you, the human. Not all mods (ok, I only know of BM and IRM) have Team Mode ready but BM does. I may recommend you switch off Intel if you do this and give a custom High AI bonus (repeat: go to Settings.txt), unless you want to learn that the AI is capable of destroying you as you destroyed them with Intel.

---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.

In the upcoming 1.07 is possible to add the following control.:

The Colony ships that are damaged and can't colonize because of that, clear orders of colonize and go to nearest repair yard ?

Right now, they don't know that and try and try and try.....

Lol seems like Aaron has a tendancy to release it earlier than you expect Captain Kwok.

But anyways, keep up the great work with your patch, it really makes my PBW games fun.

Cap, what we can expect for 1.07 ?

Haven't patched to the new SEV yet but ....

processing turn for 1/2 hour with cmdline. CPU usage is at 100%, physical memory never topped 413Mgs (even with firefox on this page) and page file never tops 566MBs.

The second I switch to the minimized process turn window I get the error, CPU down to 4% and no change on either memory usage.

... no love from the GUI either

Could you please up the maximum intel attacks per turn from 5 too at least 100? Because right now when the defendig player reaches more than 25k defensive intel points (with the defensive bonuses and maluses), there is no more point in trying to get him with Sabotage - Ships & Fleets or Espionage - Planets & Colonies, and most of the intel projects become useless when he reaches 50k. (Or maybe I misunderstood how intel works?)

Oh? I'll have to run some tests again... I wonder why I was sure they were limited to 5 per turn...

I like this idea for intel.

Just to make sure I understand it correctly:

Attack points = Sum of points the attacking empire spends alltogether on attacking intel projects?
Defense points = Sum of points the defending empire has for defense?

How many defense points are depleted if the blocking is successful?
Are any defense points depleted if the defense fails?
Is there a way for the player to see how many intel points for defense have accumulated for his own empire?

Actually that reminds me: Defence points could accumulate according to an earlier post. This leaky system would ensure we'd still have a chance even in those situations, but is there some check to prevent it being massively unfair if an empire happened to be in isolation for 50 turns and thus had a vast stockpile of accumulated Defence points? Somewhere I read of the suggestion to have "Defence Intel point decay" such that ultimately, you couldn't store more than 10 turns' worth of Intel at any one time.

---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.

As I said I like the idea.
But if there is no accumulation of defense intel points the defense might turn out too leaky with your formula especially for cheaper intel projects.

---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.

Is 106 compatible with 1.35? Or do we need to wait for 1.07 (and wait with our PBW games aswell for 107?)

~Myrath

Kwok are you sure that there is no accumulation of defensive intel points?

Dunno about the mod, but I know in stock the Intel points accumulate.

I think he was talking about the accumulation of offensive intel points...

That corresponds to my observations.

What is really strange however that you can't see as a player how many accumulated defensive intel points you have. May be not a bug but certainly something that shoud be added IMO.

But you said previously:

and

I'm confused... Or did you mean that since in Sabotage: Planets and Colonies there are projects that cost less than 100k, if you have less than 100k in attack, this project will never get "selected"? But points will still accumulate until you can afford to launch the cheapest project?

Kwok

Can you look at Pys ship expeience bonus facility and make sure its working as you intended, im finding its pushing out stupifing amounts of experience per turn to all ships in system.

On a realted note, ive found adding 4/6 more storms per system does not impact on perforemce on my rig, and vastly mpoves visual and game play expeience, do you consider doing something in BM to be a an advantage?.

Here some ideas to make fighter upgrades more interesting, and make fighters a little bit less powerful:

http://spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/3290#comment-21340

Question: If I have already started a BM 1.06 game on the 1.33 patch, then updated to 1.35. Do I have to re-install BM 1.06?

question for you captain kwok in your bm mod does the ai use steller manipulation correctly yet? I'd much rather play without warp points if so.

I am speechless. Granted in SE IV the AI was weak using stellar manipulation, but at least it was possible. This is very disappointing

Hi Captain Kwok, I REALLY love the way the game plays with the BM installed, it is infinitely superior to the stock game however I really don't like some of the graphical changes in the FQM mod that you've incorporated into recent versions of BM.

Is there a version of BM without this, or are you planning on releasing future versions without it?

Many thanks.

I don't forsee Kwok removing FQM at any point..

SpaceEmpires.net | Space Empires Wiki

FQM Rules!!

Javaslinger

I have contacted Fyron and he has given me instructions on how to remove the planet glows, thanks for your replies.

Keep up the good work on the BM Kwok.