To All Moders --- Hull Expansion works- You can now Have Heavy versions of Ships with out adding New Vehicles

Fascinating... that reminds me of the Battle Pods component from MOO2, which increased available space by 25%... I wonder if the "get hull size" function works in Components.txt so you could implement that?
Now everyone remember, keep it a secret from Aaron, or else he'll think it's a bug and "fix" it!

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The power of the ancients is now yours to command. You are truly the Master... of the obvious

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it's too "confusing" for the pleebs.

Seriously though, if all the moders keep requesting it (god knows how many times the beta testers have) he might actualy get around to it.
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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

Can you post the complete?
Component
Text

I think this would be best made into a racial trait, where you can then research it. Say a race that specializes in heavy but powerful warships or whatever. i think that would aid balancing something like this. I love the idea though.

You can make hull requirements based on specific names, in addition to abilities. AI Tags are useful when you have 10+ components that you want to be in one grouped requirement. But if you have just one or two, you can use the get specific component count function (I forget the exact name) to conserve AI Tags.

Requirement 4 Description := The vehicle size must be at least 400kT.
Requirement 4 Formula := Get_Vehicle_Size_Tonnage() >= 400

Won't work. This function returns 0 in Components.txt. This will make the component never available for placement. All that can be done is adding a Placement requirement to each hull, restricting components by name or ability. Sadly, all such components will still have to appear in the components list; you will just get a warning after adding an inappropriate component to a hull. More people need to email Malfador about this issue...

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You can add a limiting requirement to each hull, based on ability or component name counts.

Number Of Requirements := 7
Requirements Evaluation Availability := 1
Requirements Evaluation Allows Placement := 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Requirements Evaluation Allows Usage := TRUE
...
Requirement 6 Description := Can only have one Micro Hull Expansion.
Requirement 6 Formula := Get_Design_Specific_Component_Count("Micro Hull Expansion") <= 1
Requirement 7 Description := Cannot mount Macro Hull Expansion.
Requirement 7 Formula := Get_Design_Specific_Component_Count("Macro Hull Expansion") = 0

Assuming Macro Hull Expansion is a similar component targeted at larger ships.

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Not that anyone has reported on as of yet...

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Just a question, correct me if I missed something. What will happen if the hull expansion component is destroyed? You've limited it to outer hull so it won't be the last destroyed will it?

That's a good question.

Also...why not just increase the max level of the ship hulls? Seemed to work for me, so well that on my next game I'm going to increase the max levels more...I wanna create a Star Wars type ship that has a perverse amount of armerment. And the AI seems to do OK with it too, just keeps adding components until the hull is full. Shrugs.

I would assume nothing. Component size restrictions only come into play when designing the ship.

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I like this 'expansion' idea, now the way I've done it at least is make it addable in the ship in the armor spot ONLY. This way a player can add hull expansions at the cost of defense (they are tagged as armor as well so they are destroyed first...) so a frigate could be 'beefed up' to be the size of a cruiser but at a huge cost in protection. (also added speed reduction due to 'bulkiness' of expansion and a civilian/military version so that one is quite fragile and one is heavy duty for real war ships).

Combined with this in the fact that I've got engines, supply components, ordnance components and a few other things that can be installed in the Armor spot on a ship the player has alot more stuff to think about in ship design. (engines are faster/more fuel, components have more supply etc and are cheaper but are destroyed just like armor).

Deathstalker

Hopefully you are overriding slot layout files so that it isn't trivial to cheat with a shipset with excessive armor slots....

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I presume this also works for facilities. I like the idea of using manufacturing power to increase a planet's usability rather than technology, as this makes a bigger different between older planets and newer planets. That is, taking out the enemy's homeworld will hurt a lot more! Plus, it gives planets something to do when they're not building massive warfleets.

It won't work for facilities because there is no way to limit them to one per planet. I suppose you could tie it into the SY, but that will just result in a "free" SY for every planet in existence.

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I don't see that as a bad thing. I'm setting their cost to 50,000 of each resource (though maintenance is significantly lower!), so they offer a means to extend and continually improve planets. Unfortunately these do not scale to the planet's size, though they should (else small planets, even undomed planets, are a temporary hinderence, and ringworlds/sphereworlds are only advantageous for defensive consolidation.

Now the trick is to figure out how to make the AI use them.

Unlimited space is a bad thing. Either you get a net gain of resource production, leading to unbounded production, or the maintenance is greater than what you can build in the space, and they are worthless. Its not a good thing from a balance perspective.

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Ideally, their maintenance cost would be dependent on how many are currently built and modified by technology. So with the basic technology, building 1 would have a maitenance cost of 1,000 of each (easily paid for on a decent planet with a monolith), building 2 would have a maitenance cost of 3,000 each, 3 would cost 6,000 each, or some other scaling formula. Technology would lower this cost, in turn making these more affordable.

Of course, these should also provide less space than a full facility for planets with 15 slots or less, and more space for planets of 25 size or greater.

As it stands, they can be built up infinitely (with a maitenence cost of 1k of each of the 3 minerals) so planets always have something to do manufacturing wise and older planets will be worth a lot more. This mod (smaller than my original design) is also meant to be played on a small map where there are fewer, but more powerful planets. Depending, I might also make the big ships a lot bigger to compensate.

Sadly, scaling maintenance costs are also not possible, due to the lack of ability to get facility counts.

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I know... So I'm just going with the route I am. I have the basics of my mod laid down (though it might need some balancing, like, stuff to spend massive minerals on other than high dreadnought count fleets, like maybe making the big ships bigger), I just need to figure out how to get the AI to build them.

Sorry to bump and old post, but this question is somewhat related... Is it possible for a facility/component to call the planet/ship size? That is, if I wanted to make a facility that makes more room on a planet, would it be possible to make the tonnage related to the size of the planet, such that bigger planets would get more benefit?

There's no functions that return those values yet. Many modders are waiting patiently for Get_Vehicle_Size to be implemented.

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And Get_Component_Count, or similar...

So...... does this actually work or no? and would it be possible to get the ai to use it im talking about the hull expansion, i need to do something like that for my mod and thats alot quicker than building more ships! PS anyone know whats up with Devnull smod maker not starting and displaying an error message even afte rbeing reinstalled?

Not to rain on the parade but I can recall other mods having done this very thing but from a new tech perspective i.e. miniaturization. It was a lot less confusing and you did not have to worry about using a negative value.

In short it would achieve exactly what you are talking about...

so can you post an example???

oh well, i dont need this anymore as i made different copies of all ship and base classes for each race with different speeds prequisites sizes etc.
Question what does this do,

Tonnage Structure Formula := 950 + (([%Level%] - 1) * 25)

it loooks like an unimplemented feature to me as i cant make the structre Stronger using it.