Sounds good to me. If you have any modding questions, specific ones would be good. For suggestions, release the mod as beta and then let people respond.

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"Notice ye a strange man of odd temperment racing through here?"
The Taming of the Psycho
Sir Spectrespeare

Sounds very good! Nice idea with the battleships etc, slow guns and stuff. Little help out immeditately - gotta make those capship weapons unmountable by fighters - so either outclass or make them non-transferable etc. Otherwise you have what i got, a potential starflier with one hell of a battleship turret - which of course swamps the ship totally!...........lol

To ensure ships can only mount weapons they are supposed to I will be completely changing the weapon class system. eg. All fighters will be able to mount any level of weapon (1-10) BUT each mount can only carry certain types of weapons eg. missile, energy weapons etc. As a result battleship turrets may be class 10 weapons, and only battleships can mount class 10 weapons, as class no longer dictates the power, but rather the type of weapon. It simply means that rather than being stuck in a light fighter with only 2 level 4 weapons agains a heavy fighter with 6 level 10 weapons, the light fighter can have weapons of equal power to the heavy fighter, just not as many!

Excellent ideas.

Are you making your own ships too?

Hi TD:

First of all. I am a total newbie so I have no way of suggesting to you
how you would do anything I describe below.

In old fashioned terran-sea battle terms, even capital ships are mounted with some tertiary armaments that are meant to provide some form of protection against aircraft (AA and Flak guns). A capital ship with no means to defend against aircraft is an investment of an awful lot of resource in very high stakes.

Not allowing LF to VHF class fighters to mount primary or secondary class captial ship armament is an excellent idea. But the capital ships need that tertiary defensive armament capability unless you intend to make capital ships shielded so that they are almost impervious to all smaller sized vessel weapons except, maybe, torpedos?

I agree that an FL space in which the player has an "uber" ship can get stale quickly without some method of re-inserting challenging situations.

From your post it seems like you've already worked it all out but I thought that I would throw in my comments because I am curious to know what you're thinking is and also, to help..... if is of any help to you.

Is this what you were thinking?

Maneuverability vs. Power:

As you said.... Many of the ship mods available basically make VHF or better class fighters share the same maneuvering characteristics of a Starflier or even better. Also some mods create ships with unbelievable cargo capacity as well, with no penalty for such a full load.

I also fell that the unaltered SP game does not spread the response characteristics spectrum between LF, HF and VHF as far apart as it should be (but the SP doesn't anticipate all these "uber" ships).

I would start by first spreading-out the total mass range that define LF from HF from VHF. A VHF, from the way in which the uber mods present them should, at a minimum be 2.5 times the mass of an LF ship. If an LF ship with only 4 weapons hardpoints has a mass of 100, then a VHF at a minimum should have a mass of 250. Just as an example, a "standard" HF ship would have a base cargo capacity of 45 units and a mass of 175 and a VHF would have 80 in cargo capacity and a mass of 250.

Reasons:

Not only should cargo capacity govern the mass of a fighter but also its overall weapons load capability. Some uber VHF mods provide for 10 or better weapons hardpoints. There has to be a price for this weapons number advantage when out ther flying. Same again for HF fighters. Some HF fighters are only HF in name. They otherwise have all the attributes and hardpoints of a VHF.

If an LF ship has a cargo capacity greater than 30 units or more than 4 weapons hardpoints, then that ship's mass should be more than 100 by some kind of proportion of the amount that it can carry over "standard." In the same way but in reverse, if an LF has less than 30 unit cargo capacity or less than 4 weapons hardpoints, it should gain in maneuverability by reducing its mass from 100 by some kind of proportinate formula.

Mass vs. Speed

Again, the lower the mass, I would expect the greater the speed capability IF you operated in an environment full of friction and gravity. In space, I do not know if it matters. It seems like the bigger the engine, the greater the power, the greater the speed would be the truth of it. BUT for gaming purposes, I would prefer that the smaller ships have the greater immediate quickness to go along with the greater maneuverability. Maybe all ships ultimately top out at the same top speed but the amount of time it takes to get there should be different. I would apply your rule to thrusters much more noticeabley as well as to cruise engine engagements. It should take thrusters much longer to get a VHF going than an LF with HFs somewhere in the middle .. so that the bigger the ship, the less likely that a missile lock can be evaded. I am not sure but I cannot notice much of a difference (if any) in the standard SP game. Let me know if I'm just not seeing it as well as everyone else can see it.

LFs (only) Capable of All Turret Weaponry?

I was wondering whether you thought that allowing LFs to mount turrets or guns interchangeably would improve an LF's capabilities. I tend to thing that it would.



Edited by - indylancer11 on 30-09-2003 21:23:26

Hey good idea, sounds a lot like my mod (Victor's MP Enhancement Mod (old version) is available here at the reactor's DL page). But, like you I made mine because I didn't like the way other people had implemented features, so good luck and have fun, I know I did.

Anyway, your ideas should all work fine, I balanced all of the ships by class so the players could fly ships they liked rather than being forced to upgrade to a ship that could mount better weapons, I'm guessing this is what you had in mind. I increased the top speed of the light fighters as well as reducing their cruise charge times, I found this to be a good way of adding some more variety as I quickly found out that the game got a little boring if all light fighters were essentially the same. Another fun thing to do is reassign some of the equipment mounts, such as making it so light fighters can't mount mines but can mount multiple thrusters. If you do modify steering and speed though be careful, if your mod is going to be used online the lag may make it nearly impossible for players to hit the NPC ships, as a result I had to create two sets of engines, one for the player ships and another for the NPC ships.

For the capital ship weapons, I changed all of the turret classes to avoid a bunch of visual defects. I changed all of the existing turrets to class 1 and I used class 2-9 turrets for the capital ship weapons, class 10 turrets were used for unique weapons such as the Liberty Cruiser main gun. I had to use more than one class for the capital ship turrets since some of them are considerably larger than others and you run into the same problem as you would with a fighter mounting them, it looks goofey to have a transport sporting a huge battleship turret. The problem with mounting the weapons on the ship in the package but not actualy having the hardpoints defined in shiparch.ini is that they can't be replaced when destroyed and they don't show up on the ship inventory screen and the players can't see the specs. For the unique weapons though I had to make it so the guns themselves were class 10 but no ship in the game had any class 10 hardpoints. As a result they could never be replaced and the players didn't know the specs and this makes it incompatible with the 1.1 patch as the server thinks they're cheating when they have a weapon but no mount for it.

As for the capital ship weapons specs, I ended up using all of the teritary turrets almost like point defense weapons, unlike the rest of the capital ship weapons they fired quickly for less damage and the turret traverse speeds were high. The heavier weapons had slow turrets and slow projectiles and the players in fighters found they could easily dodge the shots of the big guns and as long as they stayed out of the range of the defense turrets they were fairly safe. A nice but unplanned side-effect is that the military capital ships were the only ships with the defense turrets which made them substantially harder to attack than the transports. Another advantage of the defense turrets is that they can be used to shoot down incoming torpedoes and missiles which was nice since I didn't give the capital ships any counter-measure droppers.

Hopefully that will save you some headaches while you work on your mod.

I must say I am happily supprised by the quick responce of support by those who have read this thread. As a result I will attempt to put a little more detail here as to what I intend to do.

The Universe
===========

I intend to recreate the entire universe. This will take a long time, but can be done. It will be setup on the boarder between liberty space, and pirate controlled systems, with a line of neutral territory between them. As a result you can either follow the path of a law abiding citizen, safe within liberty space, or as a pirate who avoids the law as he carries illegal substances across the boarder. as a result illegal substances are cheap in pirate space, but expensive deep inside liberty space, where as light arms can be bought openly within liberty space, but are highly valued by the pirates.

Fighter ships
===========

Fighters class ships are divided into 3 types.

Fighters - fast, manouverable, with a limited selection of weapons and at most 1 torpedo

Bombers - slow, lumbering, well armoured, but carrying a very large number of torpedoes. Designed to attack capital ships.

Civilian - Pirate modified fighters. Pirate ships carry a greater number of weapons as well as a greater selection of weapon types. They are not as manouverable as fighters, nor as hardy as bombers, but are capable of carrying a limited number of topedoes, allowing the pirates to select a fighter or bomber payloads. They also carry a large amount of cargo.

Fighters are then divided in LF, HF and VHF.

LF - very manouverable, vary fast, low cruise times
HF - better armour, more weapons, less manouverable, slower cruise times
VHF - as abover, but on a larger scale

All fighters have a relatively low hold size - they are not designed to haul cargo, and excess mass is unwanted in a fighter.

Capital Ships
===========

- Battleships
Designed to attack bases. Their primary weapons are very powerful, but slow moving and unable to accurately follow fighters. They are armed with a number of fast firing but short range point defence cannons designed to harrass fighters, but primarly to shoot down torpedoes

- Cruisers
Cruisers were built to protect Battleships from fighter based attack. They carry a large number of fast firing turrets designed to attack fighters, but are not powerful enough to attack battleships. This combined with their slow speeds means that cruisers is built as an escort ship.

- Gunboats
Designed to attack cruisers, without wasting the resources of a battleship. They move at a greater speed, making attacking them with battleships almost useless, though a succussful shot is most likely to destroy them outright. Their guns are ineffective against battleships but capable of dealing massive damage to cruisers. They also carry a few turrets for self defence, but their surviveability is greatly increased when escorted by fighters.

I realise this is long..... sorry

Weapons
========
All weapons will be divided by weapon type, not level. As a result they may look something like this

Class
1 - energy pulse
2 - energy cannon
3 - missiles
4 - rockets
5 - projectiles (machine guns)
6 - ion cannons (emp)
etc

Ontop of this ammo for torpedoes, missiles etc will not be limited, but instaed will take up room in the cargo hold. If a freighter intends to carry 40 missiles, he can carry as much loot, their just isn't enough room.


I cant think of anything else at the moment, but if I do, I will be sure to post it here for your consideration.

Cheers - Thallelus