Good find. That are small details but should be included. I just need to find some time working on the mod again! Live is so busy (work) atm.

Well, as the trugati approached B5 they were surprised to be able to target it at all, so at least till that time EA had no way of targetting Minbari ships.

Well, I am. 'nuff said

TobiWahn,

Thanks, that helped, if not a complete response... My only other concern relates to AI behavior. Request all ship designs indicate what AI role they are assigned either in the name or description. Scouts for example have predicitve AI behavior as does planetary bombardment, carrier, cruiser and frigate, etc. This will help identify why a ship is doing what it is doing and help with bug hunting.

Darvroth

Perhaps i can compile a shiprole list but its easy to do yourself, just take a look at the entity files under

frigateRoleType

They need to be worked on/balanced as well.

TobiWahn,

Target count per bank seems a formidable way of buffing any ship particularly when the fleets are larger. I've noticed all the ships I've looked at are 1 per bank. Is this intentional or simply a by product of grinding through so many files to release V 0.43? I'm finding opening 4 or 8 entity files at once is a great way to do side by side comparisons for balance within a race and between the races. At some point I may need to figure out how to write a ship ability. Now if I could find some uninterrupted time....

Darvroth

Giving a ship more than one TargetCountPerBank severely changes the power of that ship. And it does not look good (as in Babylon 5 like) for Beam weaponry. And as we can only change that value per bank, not per weapon, I mostly not use it as it looks wrong in most occasions.

If you get into writing abilities, be sure to heavily test them before submitting them to the mod. I had many abilities included in a prior version but one of them (and I still don't know which one) caused a minidump minutes to hours into the game. So I want to avoid that.

TobiWahn,

I was aiming to apply it to the various (mostly older) ships using pulse, plasma and ion turrets. Prior to the increases in targeting and precision as seen in the Minbari, Vorlon and Shadow beam weapons there was a spray and pray mentality. Hence Narn, EA and to a lesser extent Centari used a volume of fire to hit what they could not automatically target. There are lots of canon examples of EA and Centari ships engaging multiple ships on the same facing.

Balance is a different problem. It is arguable that older ships use more but less powerful turrets to be effective. So my proposal is ships that have a canon example or can be extrapolated based on turret count. Increasing TargetCountPerBank to 2 is reasonable for some ships and within canon. Those ships may need to have their weapon damage reduced for the effected bank which will reduce the value of the ship in a skirmish but will tend to increase its value in a fleet engagement.

I'll be making additional .entity suggestions seperately in PM.

Darvroth

Davroth,

I understand the intentions, but for beams it just looks odd and not B5 like. And I want to recreate the feeling of the show. For ships that have only projectile weapons it will be possible (or when u just adjust the banks that have no beams) but this must be done very carefully. I'm looking forward to your test results!

TobiWahn,

TargetCountPerBank applies to all weapons on that facing. That is so frustrating! Nova already has count 2 for left and right bank. I'm still tinkering but the limits with mixed beam ships is annoying at best.

Darvroth

Yes, it's freaking awful! Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I won't be available the next 5 days but then I will do more on the mod again, I promise. I have Vorlons and Shadows running internally, but I need to restructure their research a bit.

And thanks for all the input Davroth!

TobiWahn,

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/sins-of-a-solar-empire-rebellion/1219036p1.html

Highlights:

The artifact world might make a good proxy for Zah'ha'dum,

Titan as mobile homeworld...

Rebel faction making good with the pirates... Opens up a whole new level of diplomatic mayhem,

Summon Dark Fleet, sounds like a Shadow or Drahk raid to me...

Multiple star bases in a gravity well from one faction,

Capturing planets!!!!!!!!

Fleshed out boarding pods which can either capture ships or blow them up,

"a Rebel player can even stash valuable ships smack in the middle of the Pirate base for safekeeping." Sounds like they may have solved the Shadow planetary implant feature we seek.

It is going to be a long time till the B5 vision is complete unless there is a lot of help in the wings. Balancing is also going to be a pain. I'm reminded of a relay marathon.

Darvroth

Thanks for the link! Good news mostly. But Artifac World is a game mode and I'm not sure one can specify which world it will be. If it is possible that would be awesome. Zah'dum or the great machine, which will it be?

Mobile Homeworld might be the key to making the Drakh work.

Capturing planets, how long have we waited for that :')

Boarding pods - lets see if they are better than what we can do already!

P.S.: Will take a look at the contents of your email this weekend, thanks again.

let see...

First, start with Epsilon III as homeworld... build the B5 station as a no mobile titan ( sure that entity files can be edited in the same waty that actual files ) with homeworld capability...

Result will be Earth alliance and the rebel faction called Interstellar alliance...

For ship, some earth ship, plenty of ship from the former league of non aligned worlds... each non aligned worlds have not a lot of ship type, range from 1 to only a few but there is over 12 non aligned worlds ( one have become extint during the serie due to a plague )...

More interesting is that rebellion allow to destroy planet too... welcome to the fully functional Vorlon planet killer and the shadow/drakh death cloud...

Well, there is plenty of thing who look very exciting in Rebellion... will be best to wait beta/release before have too much hope...

And if all the promise change are in rebellion, it will be a real nightware for tobi to upgrade the mod... somebody will need to invent the day with 36 hours for him

Might be a nightmare for some files, but most of the entity files are all in my database editor. Should be just some new fields and a bit of rearranging  as well as adding support for titans  and corvettes   and then overhauling all the other files ...

Damn, that will amount to an awful lot of work!

But destroying planets will be mightily cool!

Well, imagine that with the new shader, they  make something similar to sins 1.1... switch again the cl alpha with a da channel... hope that you have the texture in tga for all models, ... or a psd/xsf with a layer for color, a layer for team, a layer for light, a layer for bloom, a layer for...

Hope that they use the geometry instancing who have become available with shader 3.0 ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173349(VS.85).aspx ) ... can greatly improve the performance, specialy with a game like sins where you can have hundred of identical fighter onscreen... more, it can use multiple texture for make each model look a little different ( remember my various starfury skin http://babylon5ins.blogspot.com/2009/09/fileosofts-b5-starfuries.html )... well, it is maybe to much ask for now...

Well, the exact words are :

the hyper-aggressive Loyalists can no longer sit still and wait for the still-unnamed threat that chased them into TEC space to catch up with them, so they're focused on mobility. They can upgrade their capital ships to produce money, supply, and research, and their Titan can function as a mobile capital world (and also summon Dark Fleet ships). Once they have that, they have no more need for planets, so they can strip them of every shred of resources and leave behind nothing but a dead, uninhabitable asteroid. They're the only faction that's able to keep on fighting with no colonized planets at all.

Will be your job to find the section of new code who allow to transform a planet in a dead uninhabitable asteroid and include it to the planet killer or/and the death cloud...

Lucky that you have not yet work greatly on the mod balance because all the news think can only break a mod balance...

There is the titan and the corvette but don't forget the new capitalship, the troop transport... The nova class can become these new capitalship type for the earth alliance, remember the episode called Gropos and the EAS Schwarzkopf from the father of doctor Franklin... i bet that in Rebellion, it will be the capitalship who allow boarding party...

TobiWahn,

Digging further through the ship entity files I've noticed there are inconsistencies between some of them. I haven't looked heavily enough yet to deterime if it is due to roll type or some other issue. Once I figure out if it is beneign or not I'll address specifics.

I have noticed however that capital ships uniformly lack:

formationRank

ExperiencePointsForDestroying

maxMitigation (guessing at this point this is shield mitigation but would need to compare to unaltered SoaSE entity files to be sure)

There are likely others but it is growing late and my eyes are bluring.

I have some data base questions I'll PM later.

Darvroth

TobiWahn,

I've been beating my head on the best way (without actually having access to the DB) to sort out the complicated arrangement of shield vs armor vs armor type vs weapon type vs damge rating vs cool down vs shield mitigation vs you get the idea. Here are several links that may or may not help fill in blanks in your already extensive knowledge:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/177335/page/2/#replies

It seems each point of armor effectively adds 5% to the ship hull (mechanics are fuzzy), though I don't know yet if there are weapon selection modifiers to that general observation. Armor type is more important than armor points. Weapon type (not weapon ie laser, pulsegun) is applied against armor type to apply a multiplier ranging from 2 to 0.1. The information is dated but I haven't yet found anything more comprehensive yet. Also, not at all sure the to hit is correct based on previous discussions.

https://www.sinsofasolarempire.wikia.com/wiki/Shield_Mitigation

Ooooooo... very helpful. So depending on how tweeked in the entity files single large hits with slow PreBuffCooldownTime on the same target are better than lower damage with quicker PreBuffCooldownTime... I'll send my considered thoughts in PM.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/305565

More difinitive data on combat mechanics although a bit aged WRT the current SoaSE Trinity standard.

A lot to consider.

Darvroth

This is defined in Gameplay.constants for capital ships, and not their entity files.

Lavo_2,

Thanks. I suspected some such. Is the XP fixed or a variable dependent on several inputs, ship level being the most obvious?

I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out the combat variables. There are many and the relationships are not always obvious. What I can say conclusively is shield mitigation has the biggest impact on damage dealt and received.

Darvroth

Variable based on ship level. Unfortunately, it's the same value for all capital ships.

Another thing that you might be interested in are these values, present in the race Player files under the shieldData section:

shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage - How much shield mitigation increases per damage
shieldAbsorbDecayRate - Assuming it's how fast shield mitigation decays by; not entirely sure what this is.
shieldAbsorbBaseMin - The basic shield mitigation values for all ships. This overrides the "maxMitigation" value set in a ship's entity file; ex. if this value is set to 15% and the ship's maxMitigation is set to 0, the ship will have 15% shield mitigation regardless.

All,

After a bit of research the SotYR mod is seeking to ascertain the accuracy of our combat variable calculations for initial set up and later balancing. Please comment if our model is wrong or is missing a non-trivial variable.

Lavo_2,

Thanks. Yes I knew of all those variables and what they do, just not where they were located or if they were constant or a modable variable.

minMitigation is the minimium first hit shield mitigation it increases to the maxMitigation value according to shieldAbsorbGrowthPerDamage is held at its highest attained value for 10 sec if no further damage is received returns to the minMitigation value according to the rate set by shieldAbsorbDecayRate. Capital ships have another value to increase mitigation above maxMitigation that is tied to the capital ship level.

Darvroth

TobiWahn,

Another issue I've been looking at is experience for destroying a ship. Since the capital ships are set and based on the ship experience level I'd suggest we use that as the upper end. Some frigates being perhaps more than lower level capital ships on an as needed basis. What concerns me most however are fighter experience values. As found in 0.43 they are very inflated. Since fighters are far more common in SotYR than in SoaSE this is important so capital ships don't gain experience overly quickly.

I'm going to presume the capital ship experience level thresholds are also found in the race Player files or at worst are a game constant. This allows for some control of progression but those thresholds need to be balanced against the experience for destroying ships. Fighters die in droves hence my concern.

Darvroth

Absolutely agree! Haven't come round to it though. Will need to be done for everything to work.

When focus fire is set to TRUE, that weapon fires upon one ship and one ship only, regardless of how many targets per bank it has. Or in other words, you are correct in your assumption.

TobiWahn,

I have several abilities ready to test and have modified the ship entity files, but I still need to figure out how to add a correctly mapped button to activate the ability. Assistance would be appreciated.

Darvroth