A few questions |
Hi all,
I have a few of questions for anyone with talent for modding (which is certainly not me!).
1.) I don't like the sizing of ships in SEV... I find baseships are too impractical - the model is just too damn big to be used en-masse (fleets of 10 or more baseships seem to be just too difficult to use in tactical combat mode). Has anyone produced a mod that changes *only* the scaling values for ship models, or can someone give me step by step instructions for doing this myself please?
2.) Has anyone ever looked into a way of combining the outputs of construction platforms? As in, if i have a planet with a Space yard, and have 10 spaceyard ships in orbit, i want to be able to combine the outputs of all 11 of those producers to build a ship or facility super quick. I'm getting really frustrated while trying to exploit a 15 system empire's resources to produce fleets of very advanced and very expensive warships and having it take 40-50 turns to produce enough to satisfy my megalomania 
which leads into:
3.) Id love it if it were possible to introduce a new way of designing ships... I was thinking that someone could introduce a new tech that comes in after the baseship tech has been researched - one that lets the player create a ship hull of any size they like, from a minimum level (even as low as 150-200kt - an "ultra-light" ship) up to some large but arbitary figure (say, 15,000kt or something). I was thinking that if someone designed a method of calculating the starting costs of such hulls, it'd elliminate the balancing issues a 15,000kt hull could create (especially if the scale was exponential). This way, you can make it so that a player with a really strong economy can create an equivalent of, say, the Death-Star (to use Starwars examples) or the Vorlon planet-killer (for the B5 fans), and have these ships represent a MASSIVE construction and maintenance expense, but be an AWESOME combat platform... (hence the need to combine production outputs - a 15,000kt ship loaded with lv100 components would take forever to build normally)
Just an idea 
Thanks be to anyone who puts any time into this!
shaz
Re: A few questions
1) You can scale individual ships by opening [Racename]_Ships_XFileClasses.txt and looking for the lines:
Starting Scale X :=
Starting Scale Y :=
Starting Scale Z :=
and changing the values specified there. I remember reading somewhere that Strange Things happen if you don't use identical values for the X, Y, and Z scaling, but I've never tried it.
3) Probably not possible. All of the ship sizes are predefined in VehicleSizes.txt and I doubt you could change them dynamically. Of course, you could add additional sizes to VehicleSizes.txt, but you'll need to update all the races and their AIs to use them.
Re: A few questions
The Balance Mod has re-scaled ships. If you download the mod, in each race folder found in the Empires folder there is a file "[Race_Name]_Ships_XFileClasses.txt" that you can copy over to the stock game's individual race folders in the default Empires folder.
Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod