On the Neroon Factory the button positions appear to be mixed up.

After selecting the shipyard all buttons are blank. Hover over the lower left and one - it changes shade and a 'Construct a titan at this planet' infocard appears. Selecting that then shows the icon for the Neroon in the top left hand button. I've not figured out the UI elements of modding Sins yet, so I'm not sure if this is the cause.

I like the new Neshatan model, the appearance is quite a bit different to most Minbari warships. It has scary amount of fire power, as a heavy cruiser should have, and a range that works well with Minbari capital ships. However the hull strength seems a bit too high - 12016 (after research upgrades & a Narn armour pact) is second only to a Neroon (14690) and exceeds that of all other war-cruisers - eg 9860 for the Sharkaan. Would it be worth reducing the hull points to bring into line with its heavy cruiser classification?

I second, looking through the entity files it has more starting hull than most of the Minbari capital ships and more than the other younger equivalent. I've always favored it despite the logistic cost but didn't dig into the why... Recommend reducing starting hull to 4800 from 5600 and reduce logistics slightly if required, however it is still a very powerful ship and only slightly less tough than most Minbari capital ships which range from Sharlin 5200, Sharoos 6000, Troligan 5000, Sharkaan 6000 and Neroon 9000.

Neshatan out ranges almost every other ship (to include many capital ships) and delivers robust damage in the forward and aft arcs. It can even target fighters on the left and right facings though only at very, very short range... recommend increasing weapon 3 range from 400 to 600 which slightly outranges most fighter primary weapons but does not out range fighter missiles.

There's techs & pacts that grant hull bonuses to frigates, but not capital ships. So you can end up with frigates with stronger hulls than the pride of your fleet.

Below is a comparison of all races base hull strengths, as defined in the entity files. What would be useful is to redo this table with bonuses applied.

Sounds reasonable, maybe worth applying such rule to all anti-strike craft weapons.

Most ship based anti fighter weapons have much longer range:

EA standard is 1600-2400

Narn standard is 800-1600

Centauri standard is 1600-3000

Minbari standard is 400 which would explain the poor Minbari performance against fighters.

Vorlon standard is 800-4200, Drone is 800 remainder are 3600+

Shadow standard is 1600-3000

You forgot the Vorlon Drone which the entity calls a fighter but is a frigate, soon to be a corvette which is still a frigate sub class.

Vorlon Drone has 190 hull.

Back on the titans (Neroon), you can't select any abilities despite having spare points.

TobiWahn,

Replayed the Minbari tonight and payed attention to the fighter defense and they faired very poorly. I'll need to rerun the experiment with the anti-fighter weapons range increased to 600 from 400 and the beam duration decreased to 1.8 sec from 3 sec which will also yield a slight increase in firing rate. The beam duration for an anti-fighter weapon is too long and looks odd but only when zoomed in close.

Gah! Build SOTYR is not person readable...

NewHorizons, could you run the experiment under the following variables: All Minbari ship based weapons with the fighter flag set TRUE increase range to 600 from 400 and decrease beam duration to 1.8 or less and see if the Minbari fair any better? Using EA as an opponent will give you worse case fighter groups, Narn less so, Centauri don't really use fighters in numbers till the Balvarin is developed.

I guess I should also avoid building many Morshins with Tishats & Nials too.

I just pitted a Neshatan against a Poseidon full of Thunderbolts, and the fighter squads almost ate it alive (it retreated with 1.9% hull left) with no detectable impact on the fighters, despite being ordered to attack the squads instead of their carrier.

However, the duration on the anti-strike craft weapons is already down to 0.25. What appeared to be a problem is the weapons are sited on port & starboard sides, so the cruiser had to constantly manoeuvre into position. By the time it did, the fighters would be out of range/outside the firing arc so the cruiser had very little opportunity to actually fire on a fighter.

I suppose it depends what is intended here. The classic counter to heavy cruisers are strike craft (typically bombers) so you would expect the cruiser to have weak anti-strike craft capabilities. In this case the heavy cruisers would be protected from strike craft by fleet diversity, in the Minbari's case, Tishat equipped cap ships/Morshins.

However, if the cruiser is intended to have some defence against fighters, then I guess put anti-strike craft weapons fore & aft with a range increase so that the squads can always be targeted if within range.

That should not be so high. Please file a ticket, it needs to be adjusted. Thanks.

Yes, this is the main problem. Rebellion gives us the opportunity to divide the weapons in normal and additional anti fighter only weapons with small beam duration values.

Well, the Neshatan should not be the counter to fighters but should be able to remove the last remnants of fighters from a system.

Found the reason for the missing Icons:

    UserActionIconOpenPlanetTitanManagement "ACTIONICON_PLANET_OPENTITANMANAGEMENT_PSILOYALIST"
    UserActionIconClosePlanetTitanManagement "ACTIONICON_PLANET_CLOSECAPITALSHIPMANAGEMENT"

Had them empty, now it works.

I do like to have the Titan limited, though I would rather have had a limit of two Titans. A limit on Titans makes balancing easier, as they now can be cheaper and use less slots while still being ensured not to be spammed.

Excellent!

If it can be done that would be nice. I don't think I could see a need for more than two, plus in the case of the Victory destroyer, fits in with a 'Call to Arms'.

Hmm, I wonder if GoaFan77 knows of a way to do this using the 'spawn titan' method where you can limit the number of titans in play at a single time for a given faction?

Aye, I devised just such a system for Sins of a Galactic Empire. The only thing it needs is to use the 5th ability slot on the titan and a limit on the titan factories somehow, probably just by starting with one at the homeworld, though I suggest a cool idea that you have capturable titan factories at special "Shipyard" planets, so the number of titans you have depends on controlling these planets. You'd have to rework the random maps to make it somewhat fair though, but those are the only two options I could think of.

I still have my proof of concept I sent Lavo, which would let the player have up to 4 spawnable Ragnarovs but no more than 4. It can easily be downscaled to 2, though you'll need to take a few minutes to understand just how it works (lots of buffs with conditions). If you want a titan limit of more than 4 you'll have to make a lot bigger buff tree, but it is possible. That doesn't simulate things like construction time, but with a dummy ship that takes up the fleet supply of the titan that is also possible.

There's also a few other things that come with spawning titans, which may or may not be a problem.

1. Titans never keep their levels when spawned by abilities, so they'll always come back at level 1 like capitalships.

2. While the game refuses to spawn any ship if you do not have enough fleet supply, this doesn't apply to command points. So it is quite possible to have negative command points if you spawn titans. This doesn't cause any problems besides abusing it to have a few more capitalships than you should have, but perfectionists might complain.  You can make the problem less bad buy using the instant action the Vasari use the Summon Capitalships, but this is hard coded to 1 command point and 50 fleet supply, so if your titans would need more than 50 supply that isn't ideal, and you can still have up to (-1 * # of titans) command points. Sins of a Galactic Empire got around this by having players start with 999 command points, basically getting rid of command entirely, but its your call which is the lesser evil.

3. If your titans are going to be expensive, it is unlikely the AI will ever actually use titans by abilities, and it won't know to save up for the ability like it would a normal titan. Sins of a Galactic Empire got around this by keeping the original titan system just for the AI (via an AI only tech). Thus while the player could have more than 1 titan, the AI would only have 1 like normal but it would still keep its levels to compensate for this disadvantage. Alternatively, you could have the AI titan build normally and still revert back to level 1 as in my Resetting Titan Levels minimod, or I guess you could even cause the other titan(s) to spawn when the AI builds its titan to let the AI have as many titans as the player, and have a nasty handicap at the same time. 

So yeah, let me know if you want my proof of concept, or just check out the supercaps in Sins of a Galactic Empire if you want a fully working example. I think the Galactic Empire in that mod is limited to two titans.

I've looked more closely at the problem and note the following:

1. Weapons with the fighter flag TRUE are dual use, they will engage fighters but will also engage other ships. For most of the other races this was accomplished by using weapons with low PreBuffCooldownTime and  AttackType "ANTILIGHT" or "ANTIVERYLIGHT"

2. The weakest Minbari weapons with the fighter flag set TRUE are AttackType "ANTIMEDIUM" which set some constraints primarily long PreBuffCooldownTime and very short range.

3. The Minbari ships with the fighter flag set TRUE have the following attributes (Capital ships have 360 degree coverage):

Neroon  range 3600, PreBuffCooldownTime 4.5 sec

Sharkaan, Sharlin, Sharoos, and Troligan are all range 3600 and PreBuffCooldownTime 9.0 sec

Leshath range 3600 forward arc with PreBuffCooldownTime of 4.5 and back/left/right arc range 400 PreBuffCooldownTime 4.5 sec

Morshin range 400  left/right arc with PreBuffCooldownTime 9.0 sec

Neshatan range 400 left/right arc with PreBuffCooldownTime 4.5 sec

Tigara has no anti fighter capability

Tinashi range 3600 forward/left/right arc with PreBuffCooldownTime 4.5 sec

Torotha range 2400 forward arc with PreBuffCooldownTime 9.0 and weapon 3 360 coverage range 2400 PreBuffCooldownTime 9.0

It becomes evident that the very short range and the long PreBuffCooldownTime work to decrease firing opportunities against fighters. The AttackType ANTIMEDIUM makes adjusting things a challenge as that is an effective against most other ships. I propose the following adjustments that should not overbalance the issue for the Minbari:

1) Increase the range of all weapons with fighter flag TRUE that are 400 to 600.

2) Decrease the PreBuffCooldownTime of weapons with range 400 to 4.5 from 9.0

3) Adjust weapon 3 of the Torotha (which is frigate type Antifighter) to the following:

AttackType "ANTIVERYLIGHT"

PreBuffCooldownTime 3.000000

Duration 1.800000

Steps 1 and 2 will increase the firing opportunities against fighters for most frigates without significantly increasing firepower against other frigates and capital ships. Step 3 will roughly triple the firing opportunities of the Torotha against fighters but the reduction in AttackType will not overly hazard other frigates with weapon 3. Moreover the Torotha will significantly increase the antifighter capability of a Minbari fleet and not significantly reduce the effectiveness of the Torotha against other frigates as weapon 1 and 2 still retain significant forward firepower.

An alternative for the Torotha would be to increase the Left/Right/Back TargetCountPerBank: to 2 from 1 but that would also significantly increase the effectiveness of the Torotha in fleet engagements and I do not recommended it.

Exactly

Colour me impressed! I would want to have the proof of concept you sent lavo just for studying how you do such things.

I don't think I will implement the Titans using abilities because of its limitations. In contrast to some other mods I want playing vs the AI to be enjoyable because that's what I mostly play. Egoism at its best

And I do love watching the Titan being built. It just feels right. As for the Titan always starting at level 1, that would not be a problem for me.

Repair platforms don't restore hull points on titans, adding to them to the targetFilter section of Ability_*_Repair_Platform.entity fixes the problem:-

targetFilter
    numOwnerships 1
    ownership "Friendly"
    numObjects 4
    object "Frigate"
    object "CapitalShip"
    object "StarBase"
    object "Titan"

    ...    ...

BTW: Repair platforms still auto-cast their ability when there are no undamaged ships nearby.

Corvettes would also need adding to this target filter too.

Done, thanks.

Corrected. Corvette added also.

That should not be the case, as I set ignoreNonCombatShipsForAutoCast to TRUE. Is this with all races or just with one particular?

The Vasari titan foundry would look pretty good for the Shadows, even for their cap ship factory. For extra coolness during construction have the Shadow vessel built fore-to-aft (instead of upwards) and move it away from the foundry. It would look like it was slowly emerging from the gates of hell! Mwah-ha-haa! 

Edit:

Certainly happens with Minbari, possibly EA too, not tried Narn & Centauri yet. All the dockyard repair abilities do have ignoreNonCombatShipsForAutoCast set to TRUE, go figure!

If you're not using the HasHullDamage constraint for repair abilities, you should.

I've gotten a cap of 2 and a cap of 1 working well in SoGE as well, all of them also have a delay between when the ship is spawned and the ability fired; a sort of "building" process if you will. I've also tailored it such that the AI is more likely to go for the cap of 2 or cap of 1 titan, essentially ensuring that it is not at a large disadvantage, if any at all. In fact, I've still been beaten by the AI, even if they can't figure out how to truly muster all their faction's titans. I've been pondering a method on how to make the AI spawn all it's titans, and may end up figuring out such a method; though this won't be for awhile.

Actually, this is not entirely true. The AI in fact uses the same spawning method players do, it just so happens that unless the AI by a freak chance saves up enough resources, it will only end up spawning a single titan. I have seen the AI spawn multiple titans on rare occasions. What I have done is give the AI a tech that gives them the regular titan construction abilities, however, by the time it has saved up enough resources to build a titan, the ability will automatically fire off. In addition, this research item acts as a carrot-on-a-stick to encourage the AI to choose the "better" titan.

I do, but thanks.

Interesting.

I will send you a PM momentarily (just got to adjust the entity.manifest for the latest version).

Oh absolutely, Dawn of Victory was the only mod that I've ever heard say they carried more about multiplayer, and look how that turned out. But there is no reason that the AI should be any worse in this system. If nothing else you can just use the vanilla system for the AI and it will be just as good as it is now, you just give your players the option to have more 2 titans or whatever. Heck you could actually give the players the option of having a single titan that constructs normally (with or without keeping its levels) or having whatever limit you want titans via spawning, but not both depending on what they research.

Ah yes, I suppose that would happen, but the key is to have the original titan method available so the AI knows the save for it. I imagine it will only build more than 1 titan if it really has nothing else to spend its resources on, so yeah a successful AI might indeed build more than one, but rather on accident.