You are more than welcome to do this!

How is it done? I'd love to choose the faction by research instead of choosing it upfront!

Declaring faction example:

How to lock techs out example:

Cool! Thanks.

Guess I was stretching 'political traditions' with culture a bit there, sadly I don't think planet bonuses can affect weapons, eg rate of fire, accuracy, range etc. The only way a planet can affect those is with an ability, eg asteroid belt.

To add to boshimi's race-inspired bonuses (Docker's Guild & Minbari workers) some based on the other young races:-

* Narn Hydroponics Facility: pop +30, Trade +20%, planet upgrade cost -25%, planet upgrade rate +25%. Desert planets only, but as they have lots of upgrades the savings are quite handy.

* Centauri Finance House: Tax +1.0/sec, Trade +40%, tactical slots +4 (to protect all that cash/bullion), probably Terran planets only - I couldn't image a Centauri financier (or his clientèle) roughing it on an asteroid or volcanic planet.

While we are at the Centauri, maybe you could somehow make a planet bonus out of the Cora Preedo (or however the proud knifes - Londo's and Urza's dueling society - are spelled).

Maybe a little less tax in exchange for trade and culture. Trade because they'll need supplys for their parties and swords, culture because of the high value the Centauri put into their traditions and the reduced tax, because those highly respected nobles surely know a lot of tricks for not having to pay for damage they cause.

Already shows up as ship abilities.

Wonder if planet bonuses could be set to specific factions as Lava_2 described above?

I backed it out though to simplify what I needed to deploy. Also, the cruel and vicious cheats made it pointless for what I had.

So it it viable at all? Can cruel and vicious research everything no matter what faction? (That would be a bug)

Yes, and yes, SD knows about the latter, but as this function is depreciated, they won't waste time on it. Cruel and Vicious AI are a bit too OP imo, better to put in AI-exclusive research, or your suggestion to make a human and AI version of a faction, is better.

I submitted 0.43RC1. Issues were mostly resolved, some were postponed till 0.45.

I also added Antimatter regeneration to the Hermes and the Explorer as well as adjusted the crystal cost of the Hermes (2000 were a bit excessive)

Dear testers please check and give notice.

Thanks
Tobias

Well. ic it is feasible I will use it. Except the AI is so bloody stupid that the research trees don't work at all, then we could consider a AI Faction.

Btw, are the factions hardcoded? Or can I introduce a number of factions?

Well, theoretically, if you have an AI-only faction, you can link nearly all the techs together, into one big tree, and make the "super techs" on the top of the tree pre-requisites for a ship; this will increase the odds of the AI researching things, even if slightly.

Unlimited. However, be careful with how you lock things out... If you're planning to allow races to switch factions multiple times, you can run into odd problems.

Found the reason why the dockyard kept autocasting

ignoreNonCombatShipsForAutoCastTarget FALSE

kept it casting on module constructors.

I#ve updated the repository with the fix.

Well, thats going to be some heavy brainwork

No problem, thanks for watching and testing.

TobiWahn, go ahead and publish. We'll never be satisfied with where we are... We can plan on a hot patch in a few weeks if the larger community finds a serious flaw we few testers missed. But if not we have our new baseline.

Fellow modders, since we are about to launch into the Rebellion phase of out mod I thought I'd kick off a conversation toward that end. Rebellion introduces a new ship type the Corvette. I've been thinking and have come up with two proposed courses of action in ticket 134.

1) The smallest/er frigates of each faction are converted into corvettes, simple but lacking something and under optimizes the new game mechanic.

2) Assign the "strike/assault" frigates as corvettes and take advantage of the distinctly different game mechanics that corvettes have to give us more flexibility in optimizing ships toward the hit-and-run tactics practiced by most of the B5 factions.

Thoughts? Best ideas should be moved to the ticket for action. Let the discussion begin.

Since if I recall correctly you guys already have all the frigate roles filled and have some overlap for at least the EA, how about converting more than one frigate to the corvette class?  Also, all that makes corvettes operate differently from frigates is that they always use fighter movement and are in a different target filter for abilities.  You guys could easily make it so the lighter combat frigates use fighter attack methods since the usesFighterAttack line got added all the way back in Entrenchment.

If you convert some frigates to corveettes (which I highly support!!!) please consider slowing them down when compared to the vanilla corvettes for sins. Somewhere in between where they currently are, and strikecraft ... that would lead to more cinematic battles in my mind more akin to the sluggishness of most of the races. Just some aesthetic thoughts.

The Centauri Haven already has the fighter movement flag set to true...we used it to overcome a problem we were seeing in-game where the Haven would pace a target but not engage it because in only has weapons on the forward arc. It actually worked very well. I and most of the mod team I suspect haven't yet dug into the Rebellion deltas yet as we were focused on Diplomacy and even then had some format problems.

If the version you have doesn't have the flag set true for Haven, set it and you will see how it should look in 0.43. I don't recall if that was the only frigate whose flag we set or if that was the only tweak...

If there is a quick reference to Rebellion deltas 101 that would be useful.

I've already done some work in the DB for the Rebellion migration (though Titans and Corvettes as well as the new InstantActions, PeriodicActions and OverTimeActions are still missing)

I will publish 0.43 in the coming days.

It is my personal recommendation that the dev team consider these two paths when dealing with 'titans' for the B5 mod.

Path 1: Titans are scaled to be 'heavy capital ships' as far as the stats are concerned through all 10 levels, and are treated more like a 'capital class flag ship' instead of a monstrous vehicle of doom that can eat entire fleets by itself ...

Path 2: Remove titans all together and consider having regular capitals and 'heavy' capitals that use the titan armor value (making them much less susceptible to strike craft spam etc) but are still considered capital ships by the game. The AI would need to have an 'ai-only' version of a heavy capital (titan) that it could research so that it wouldn't crash the game when trying to research a titan (this could be hidden on the tech tree so it is not available to the human players). This (titan) that the AI can use would look and function just like any of the other 'heavy capitals' and therefore would not break the immersion of the player's experience.

It is my personal opinion that Titans, as implemented in vanilla rebellion as a one off super ship, would ruin the feeling of the b5 universe in its entirety (with the possible exception of the Vorlons and Shadows).

Ultimately it is your decision on how these should be implemented and these are just my suggestions. I just wanted to throw them out there for your consideration as current vanilla rebellion boils down to 'who has the better titan' during the end-phase of most multi-player lan games I have played.

I've sometimes thought it would be nice if any B5 titans were unlocked via a diplomacy pact, each titan specific to a faction:-

EA xenophobes: Omega-X (Advanced Shadow variant)

EA xenophiles: Victory destroyer

Minbari warrior caste : Neroon heavy cruiser

Minbari religious caste : not sure, maybe Whitestar?

Narn xenophobes : Bin'Tak?

etc, etc, although as you can see it would need to more thought as to what titans other factions get.

It hopefully might encourage diplomacy in the middle of the game (Babylons 5's design purpose) instead of Rebellion's race to launch the first titan.

Xenophobes entering into a diplomatic pact to get Titans doesn't seem like that's something they would ever do.  Titans would also be unable to be built in 1v1 games and people would just rush diplomacy so they can get that out of the way so they can rush to Titan.