Balance Mod v1.09 Available!

Time to test right away!

Assertion failure: (d:\myvb\spaceempires5\se5\pgms\common\sound_DSwavefiles.pas, Line 213)

At last!

galactic balance is restored once again

The citizens on Altair IX rejoice once again at the prospect that competent AI will make the game last longer than 10 years!

Haha, for we have team mode enabled and the galaxy will...... attempt to make treaties with us regardless of the fact team mode is enabled and they should all be trying to destroy us.

First bug is mine! Aieee!

So yea, Team Mode doesn't work, the AI will try and make treaties anyway.

Does it solve the problem with massive turn procesing times.

Will the 1.09 scripts AI scripts be made available?

Drushoka Ship Design seems wonky, a lot of them have no weapons.

Can you elaborate on the intel changes you've made? I am about 30-40 turns in producing 3K more intel points than all other known empires and putting it all towards defense but I an still getting messages about covert system scans, communication taps, design theft, etc.

Seemed fairly across the board with the Drushoka ships. All sizes I've seen thus far up to cruisers.
Seems their loading up PD/Armour too much on the lvl 1 ship sizes and ending up without room for a weapon. Once they get the higher tech ship sizes seems to work allright.

3K more is very very little... only if you had something like TWICE their intel points you would be getting very few intel operations succed against your empire.

Just a couple of ideas to do with Ripper beams and incinerator beams...I find it strange that I cannot put ripper beams on fighters but I can put incinerators on them...I would think it should be the otherway round.

I would also like to see ripper beams be able to target fighters, drones and sats but leave incinerators with their current target types(ships,bases & planets) This would at least allow you to use ripper beams as a short range defence beam because as they stand they are not useful at all except in very very limited situations.

Shame, it would have given more use to an otherwise very under used/not used at all weapon. I'll just have to mod it in myself, but thats no fun if I can only use it against the AI.

Anyway keep up the gd work

Hey, the damn Norak are using ripper beams vs me... I tell you they hurt when 50 ripper beam frigates assault through a warp point

Yes they do hurt, but if you want to counter ripper beams just send in the fighters or use sats...as rippers cant target them ...or simply just don't put your ships so close to the warp point...they have a very short range....which is why I think they would be useful on fighters...short range but fighters are fast so they can get near their targets...short range weapons on frigates and bigger ships are not a good idea...but thats just my opinion.

It adds variety to the game! Why otherwise would you use tractor beams, unless to bring the enemy ships in Ripper Beam's range? Being able to put them on fighters and drones would defeat it's purpose of being a really powerful, close range weapon placed on the biggest ships and used against other big targets.

Then why an earth can you put incenerator beams on fighters then? I think it makes more sense to have it the other way around. Also I haven't said anything about changing the range of the Ripper beam...simply giving it a few more uses/targets, so you would still need to use tractor beams if you put it on big ships.

"It adds variety to the game! Why otherwise would you use tractor beams, unless to bring the enemy ships in Ripper Beam's range?"

Or boarding parties.

Graviton hellbores are another possibility.

I've decided to get off my ass and do some number crunching so that we can compare Ripper beams to another Beam weapon...the APB's.
Research wise you can get to APB's before Ripper beams. But of course researching Ripper beams does lead to Incinerator beams...so why use ripper beams at all?

Have a look at both the ranges and damage at 0 and at 60 and compare. Also note that the tractor beam has a range of 100 and an APB a range of 120.

Yes the APB takes up 30K and a Ripper 20K but you'd need tractor beams(1 or 2) so that will take up space! Also if you are a ripper ship and you use a tractor beam to bring your APB target near to you...it will not be a disadvange for the APB ship as the damage at close range is almost the same a Ripper beam!

I have also included small weapons so you can look at them... Small APB's and small Incinerator beams...my idea being to replace small incinerator beams with small ripper beams...here the small ripper beam would have about half the range of a small APB...that being my idea. Please read the small weapon discriptions and note the words medium and short...then compare the weapon ranges. Thanks.

Enough said no?

Aren't incinerator beams weaker, or have more range than the ripper beams?

Nope, they have much more range 120 and do a lot more damage than Ripper beams

Which is why I had the idea to give Ripper beams more target types and to be able to use them on fighters...and get rid of incinerator beams on fighters...so they might be of some use.

Downloaded the balance mod yesterday. So far having a fine time with it but not in very far yet. Was looking at the settings file tonite and noticed under the number of computer players the min max for medium setting is 4 and 4. Is this what u intended or did u intend 4 and 7. Just wondering. Also wondering where is the self destruct device or is it in the mod.

I've been getting some kinda strange error message about the game being unable to load a flag file or somehtin like that, when I've created a new empire. Balance Mod 1.09, SEV 1.44. Loading an empire I'd made previously works just fine, but making a new one or modifying the existing one, and I get that error, and usually just get dumped back at the new game creation screen.

Whenever I try to start a game with your mod i get a "Access violation at Address 004836A0 in module 'SE5.exe'. Read of address 00000000" Exception. It occurs after the "Select Game Type" dialog but before the progress bar fills up. The last thing thats displayed is "Loading Bitmaps"...

Stock works without problems, any idea what could cause this?

Yes, it looks exactly like that.

Edit: I also re-installed it with the rar instead of the zip file and applied the ai patch but it still crashes.

Ok, seems to work now...
I had changed the settings.txt to:
Allow Music := FALSE
Allow Sound := FALSE
So I could start SE5 at all, otherwise it would crash even in Stock as soon as I can see the actual game screen.

I now changed:
Allow Sound := TRUE

and for some reason I can now play your mod.
(I even hear music... SE5 has certainly a few odd quirks)

Don't know if its a bug or a feature, but the Baseship Defence Modifier formula is := -30 + ([%Level%] * 5). So it starts at level 1 with -25 and tops out at level 6 with -0. Therfore a Baseship with 1800kT is as likely to get hit as a Cruiser with half its size and much less then a Battleship or Dreadnought.

Captain, I am getting a strange error...

Trying to start a new game with your mod,

I use the Romulan custom shipset, among others. I am getting an error that the society type setting 'Cunning' (which is valid, isn't it???) is not known. The really weird thing is the error message is stating that the errant data file is in an non-existent folder in your custom mod area in the empires. I didn't move any custom shipsets in there yet, it only had stock in there when I upgraded.

Is there an old config file that is used to determine locations of things, some setting or log somewhere, that is getting confused?

All that is done before the naked stars is remembered