I guess I was talking about regenerating hull until 2% and then it stops regenerating hull. No way to do that without an ability in the game?

Even more than different planet types, I would 'GREATLY' like to see variation in planet size. Distant Stars does this by having Small, Normal, and Huge planet types. The two variations of the standard planet affect population and resources as well as gravity well size. It add variety and to me helps bring the universe alive while playing as everything isn't uniform in exactly what you can expect.

Me as well and it is relatively straight forward to change the entity files but the art work...there lies the key problem. ATM TobiWahn is our only artist.

To the other question, sadly it is passive hull restoration or an ability.

That is where I'm not convinced it is neccesarily a problem. If permission is granted from the DS team, the art assets are already complete for the planets and their various sizes. The meshes and textures all look good as well.

Bummer on the regen ability ... still a neat idea though.

For planets you can very easily use the mesh resize tool to blow up planets, and use the same textures as before. Plus there are plenty of planet mods to nab art assets from.

The main concern that people seem to have (and is a valid one) is that they don't want 'pole pinching' or 'weird pac-man' style issue with resizing the textures onto the new mesh. I know that at least with Distant Stars assets, that this problem has been solved.

In addition to that our mod leader is correctly concerned about not using other's work as a direct lift without their permission and proper citation in the credits. So if the correct folks line up and shout out this could be an easy win...

Going back to Darvroth's cost proposals:- I believe that reducing costs would be beneficial for the AI, in addition to his original motive of speeding up the game. I'm middle of a match with all 8 AIs set on unfair (which IIRC get resource cheats). The Narn AIs, with relatively low unit costs, in particular seem to be making good use of their resources. Planets are fortified with turrets and a starbase, they build fairly varied fleets and even titans. So far it's been quite an entertaining match.

With AIs set on higher difficulty levels, SotYR does play a bit faster - they appear do research better and 'fleet up' quicker.

The fact that the more difficult AIs get resource cheats (and work better) may also indicate that SotYR unit costs hamper AIs on lower settings.

There seems to be a discrepancy between costs of turrets though. The EA G.O.D is a lot more expensive compared to a Kanet-6 or T'Gan. Granted the G.O.D (with beam uprgade) is ~twice a powerful, but is ~four times the price and requires twice as many tactical slots, hence will mean upgrading the planet as  well. It would be nice to see the AI build G.O.Ds - maybe reduce the cost to one half and/or slot requirements.

My thought as well. I lobbied successfully for cheaper less capable turrets for several races as a beginning of game balance measure as well as making planetary defenses more available earlier on (fewer research links) and it helped some races with their early game. I have not performed a systematic pricing review of the planetary modules but at some point it will be needed.

Current prices are in part to slow down the rate of the more powerful races early development. There are other means such as increasing planetary upgrade costs, and increasing fleet logistics costs which will serve to break AI development into tiers without to adversely impacting AI behavior as we are currently seeing. The hard part will be achieving that balance.

I like to play with pirates on but they are very unlike what was found in B5 and more like another faction as currently in the game. Early defenses are very necessary to counter pirate raids as well as wandering ShadowVorlon ships that even in passing can tear things up. I'd really like to see pirates receive some work for version 0.45. The artwork can wait (though some models are basically done) but the entity work, abilities, etc to mold the raiders into a B5 style of raider.

Open question - is there a good place to start reviewing the existing pirate tech tree and the mechanism into how that works?

TobiWahn,

I've been playing with the ship costs looking at the rate as the primary driver. Looking at EA thus far I took the Frigate Average (FA) resource cost and multiplied it by 1.2. I wanted to maintain the relative ratio of the ships to each other so I then either divided the specific resource Ship Average (SA) by the FA or the FA by the SA such that I always obtained a result less than 1.0. This calculated rate was then applied against the original resource cost for that ship to obtain a new resource cost that maintained the relative cost between the capital ships but was more in line with the race average frigate cost and adjusted based on informed judgment from there.  The initial average EA capital ship rates were:

after the process described above the rates were reduced to:

EA average frigate rates are:

The intent of this effort is two fold to correct noted AI behavior toward high cost items, and to speed up the pacing of the game, this is especially bad in multiplayer. When I'm done with my tweaking I'll post the results to Bitbucket and will review capital ships and frigates and make adjustment recommendations as outlined above. By working with rates and not worrying about the actual resource cost I hope to also assist with the ultimate balancing effort as we get closer to the Beta level.

You'll of course have opportunity to further adjust to meet your vision. Also, this will give the other testers with Bitbucket access the ability to provide feedback on pacing and AI behavior before making broad DB adjustments and locking in the changes.

Thoughts?

Alternatively, there is always the possibility of giving the AI special AI-only research which decreases ship costs, amongst other bonuses.

Nice one!

Good idea but I'm not sure it is possible without major knowledge of shader programming.

Yes, we should give almost any of the younger races some sort of supplyship.

Love that idea.

Another good one. If possible.

No simple one, probably none at all.

so true, and not the best one. And I have to do other stuff as well.

This is always an option. Though first we have to get over to rebellion completely, then produce more of our assets and after that incorporate what makes sense and is gifted from others.

true, another good and fast option.

(More) balancing will be done after crossing over to rebellion. And yes, cost needs to be adjusted on all levels.

Problem is, too high a fleet logistic cost and the AI hamstrings itself. This needs careful adjustment.

Seems good to me. Testing will help but basically it is sound to me. After I get the sync done and give the DB to you and NewHorizons you two can tweak and balance all the stats.

I'd go down that route only if we cannot get it to work otherwise.

@Boshimi

Thanks for asking Ryat. I will pm him as well and thank him for the allowance.

@Davroth and NewHorizons
I've been working the last few days to remove the Java requirement from the database and work on it's reliability. Syncing will be worked on this weekend, as my lovely girl is attending a congress. The committing part is mostly done but needs to be incorporated into all layouts/tables and the permission model and user accounts done. The approving part is still missing though that should not be so much work (I hope).

TobiWahn,

Glad to see you've been busy.

I'm delving into ship resource cost balancing first by race then between the races... lots of spreadsheet work and it will take a while. I've noted a lot of errors in the Rebellion master entity list hanging on Bitbucket...so many I'm starting to question if there was a translation error somewhere... I'm opening tickets as I find them and cross referencing to the spreadsheets I'm working. Once the sheet is posted and there is some initial testing and agreement we can import the changes. For max mitigation I'm referencing a conversation we had over a year ago and aligning to those levels.

Still not done with the tech tree upgrades as well though that effort is on pause for the moment. The rest merely require plus ups vice a complete rewrite. We are unlikely to capture all research needed for ability unlocks on the first pass as ability mapping is a distant dream. That said, I'll post what I have when it is ready and we will need to overlay that in a piecemeal fashion.

I expect many younger ships will lose shields in the near future... Shields still serve as a useful buffer for first shots from high damage weapons before mitigation ramps up so we should review case by case when applying the changes.

Can't say I understand why you'd be resistant to the idea... Human players would not see the technology item, and the AI as it is already "cheats" in any difficulty from hard onwards.

Hmm? What kind of errors do you mean?

Not sure I remember my arguments, but what were the supposed outcomes of our discussions? I do like to differentiate using the mitigation. But the exact levels may change.

true, and the idea of using only 0.000001 value shields for smaller vessels is appealing.

Perhaps because I still hope that an as of yet unannounced path will come and better the AI

I don't like cheating if we can get by without it as it is not transparent to the player what kind of bonuses the AI gets and for beginners just wanting to enjoy a easy game it might be a hindrance to not be able to control the AI in a way people expect it to. Thats why I said only for things we cannot get to work otherwise, so it is fine for me to get around engine implementation faults, just not to up the AI difficulty in a global way.

EA max mitigation early game is 0.10 tending toward 0.25 late game except Victory. I'd like to set Delphi at 0.30 and I was thinking of 0.40 for the Whitestars.

Centauri max mitigation was 0.15 early game tending toward 0.35 late game (there may be exceptions)

Narn max mitigation was 0.10 early game tending toward 0.30 late game (there may be exceptions)

Minbari max mitigation was 0.30 early game tending toward 0.45 late game (there may be exceptions)

Shadow and Vorlon max mitigation was 0.50 - 0.65 for capital ships and slightly less for non-capital ships.

The change in shields may need accompanying changes to the min mitigation which in most cases is 0.01. Min mitigation 0.01 makes such ships exceptionally hazarded by high damage first shot weapons. This is the key reason Vorlon, Shadow and Minbari capital ships can pop (one shot kill) many younger races ships since mitigation is negligible at 0.01 or 1%.

I'll tackle the above concurrently to the resource balancing effort I have going. It will take longer but will be more comprehensive.

Before the EA defenders pop up I'll point out the EA defense grid was useless against beam weapons.

So how close are we to making this now 4 month old goal?

And that's intentional, just like i the show. We can only adjust min Mitigation on a global scale, so I'd rather not change this.

Sounds good.

Yep!

Hmmm. Might be feasible, if I can get the sync to work this weekend. Found a few Bugs regarding Titan creation in the DB yesterday that I needed to fix.

Creating syncdata of Ships (Fighters, Frigates, CapShips, Titans) as well as orbital structures (Planetmodules and Starbases) is now finished (in a state that needs real world testing soon). Still to be done is Races, Research, Abilities, buffs and strings as well as rights and user management. Also the accepting of changes still needs to be done.

It's a lot more work than I thought, basically because I do it the most idiotic way possible I think. But I hope it will all work out.

You can put in passive abilities for ships that gives them shield mitigation, in effect giving them a unique minimum.

That would be wonderful!

Sounds like a splendid idea, thanks.

Also Centauri repair bay constantly throws its ability, until it runs out of AM.

Yes, the Abilities are there, but without Titan Upgrades they are not available.

I will look into the AM problem once the sync is finished.

Yes, whitestars would be nice, but are not on the menu for now.

A place holder or future tech. I have just the spot....