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[Annex]

Speaking of mega beam, no way is it 1500 range. Mark IX has 1800 range and shoots like 3x further. The mega beam appears to only be around 500-600 and not 1500.

[Cyan Leader]

So I just blew my second million on a station on the same system.. what does it do again? I was hoping they would generate credits or something but are we really blowing 1 million into these things just to make sure there is a friendly place to dock after declaring war with the others factions?

Also do Blueprints actually do anything other than being a more expensive Germanium?

[Annex]

Tested the win condition on a 12 system map, worked great. Two things that would be nice: 1) having some sort of indicator on the galaxy map beside each system if there are hostile station(s) present there. I spent a good 45 min hunting for that last station. 2) variety in the station battles in terms of positioning, strength of forces, order of deployment etc. As is right now each station fight turns out exactly the same way.

[Annex]

So I just blew my second million on a station on the same system.. what does it do again? I was hoping they would generate credits or something but are we really blowing 1 million into these things just to make sure there is a friendly place to dock after declaring war with the others factions?

Also do Blueprints actually do anything other than being a more expensive Germanium?

Blueprints are just for money right now. Stations give you a place to resupply, and they also spawn friendly units that help fight for you. Generally not worth it as its better to put together a 5-6 battleship fleet and take over enemy stations, which then become yours.

[xenoargh]

Stations will eventually be able to do some things for players:

1.  Without a Station, you won't be able to engage in diplomacy.  Diplomatic relations (and changes in how the Factions feel about each other, including your Faction) is an upcoming feature.

2.  Eventually, you'll need Stations to win.  Stations represent territory you've claimed; if you don't have Stations (and therefore a legitimate claim to the title of Space Emperor), you'll eventually get attacked by all of the Factions... and if you don't have a fleet powerful enough to capture an enemy Station, you'll lose the game.

3.  Establishing a Station will be an important diplomatic event, in the sense that you're staking a claim to a System.  Factions in that System will react negatively to this.

4.  Stations will probably become income centers at some point, but at that point in the game, money is probably the least interesting problem you'll have. 

I might make a simplistic rock-paper-scissors dynamic, where Stations can have different settings; a Trade Station might produce income but would produce weak fleets and fare poorly against Assault Forces, a Defense Station might eat a little income and produce fleets designed to hold the System and have an enhanced defense against Assault Forces, and an Attack Station would eat a lot of income and produce fleets that are designed to damage enemy fleets and take their Stations.

I don't want to get any deeper into that stuff atm, though; I haven't even built the basics of diplomacy yet, and I need to do stuff like ensure an even scattering of the Factions throughout the game and make the AI players behave a little more intelligently first; right now their "AI" is incredibly stupid and all we have is a simplistic "take over the galaxy" game where if you don't make any new enemies, it's very simple to win.

Anyhow... that is the plan, roughly.  Right now I just have the bare-bones structure, in terms of explaining things to newbies and a win condition.


Also, after much debugging and polishing, I think that the Glaug are buffed and their regenerating-armor shtick is pretty cool.  I am thinking about also adding another type of special effect like this- a "shield" that trades damage for Flux and nullifies damage while it's on.  After getting the Glaug's new stuff working, I am really intrigued by the idea of getting rid of the circular-shield problems in other places where something else might work better (lookin' at you, Acanthus).

[LiquidStang]

Build 8 is now available.

Changelog:

• Adds Newbie Guide- a really basic explanation of "how 2 play".
• Adds You R Winnar- a win-condition that informs the player when they've won.
• Fixes a smallish bug in the missile guidance code.

Stuff on plate for Build 9:

1.  Distribution of Factions to make for less-random playthroughs / difficulty.
2.  An actual difficulty setting that influences the entire game, beyond the current settings for number of planets.
3.  Diplomatic relationships between the Factions, including with the player, that can change who's a friend and who's an enemy over time.
4.  Maybe a look at virtual systems to replace Fleet mechanics.  Could mean simpler player control over their Empire, too, when that part is finally considered.
5.  Doing the big bad rewrite of the FleetInteractionDialog, to bring the Capture mechanics in line with the random encounters and simplify the system a bit.

So, what you're saying, you wanted to add influences to the game to make it difficult. Which is the friend and who is the enemy? You should make a good rewrite just to make the game seem easier.

[xenoargh]

I'm not quite understanding what you're saying.  Are you saying that the mod is too hard for you? 

Because yes, it's going to get harder; right now there is no challenge at all if you play it "correctly" and avoid fighting with anybody you're not already enemies with; you can just take over their Stations and win the game pretty quickly.

On Half Damage, I find it's really easy once you've earned enough money through mining.  There are several ships that are practically invulnerable.  On Full Damage, it's reasonably challenging, but it's still a little too easy, and there isn't much to do, from a strategic standpoint.  Making that part of the game work is going to take a little while, but the first big step is getting diplomatic events working, so that your enemies today may or may not be your enemies tomorrow, depending on what the player does

[xenoargh]

My favorite little person said that the Glaug needed more guns.  I said, "OK, but they have to have something that's new and not just pew-pew, and you have to draw them, but I'll paint them.". 

The Spore Guns resulted



These have really unique rules.  On any given hit, if it hits shields, it does practically nothing.  If it hits armor, it strips away 1-3 / 3-6 armor panels, removing <some percentage> of the armor in the square.  If it hits Hull, it does <some percentage> of current Hull damage. 

So it's really nasty vs. stuff that dropped shields and doesn't have regenerating armor (say, Exigency or anything that's Venting right now) but it's really weak vs. enemies with strong shields and weak armor (say, Tri-Tachyon) and only moderately useful for killing enemies that can regenerate health (Exigency, Punk Junkers, various others). 

It also can't actually kill anything (by fiat, it won't be allowed to drop Armor / Hull to zero)- the final damage has to be done by another weapon... so it's support.  Weird, flukey support.

[xenoargh]

I built a new type of shield, called an Integrity Field. 

The shield provides 100% coverage of the ship, like a Bubble Shield, but fits the ship exactly (and has a moderately cool special effect when turned on and all that). 

Like any other shield, it takes damage, can use all of the tools for draining Hard Flux, and can be turned on and off just like a regular shield.  Unlike the Glaug's new special power (Armor Regeneration) this is (technically) a System, so it cannot be combined with normal shields, but it replaces them in every way that matters. 

There are a few loose ends I need to clean up (while we can put new Systems onto ships via equipping them with PHASE and using a custom System, the engine doesn't recognize them as PHASE when testing .getPhaseCloak(), oddly enough, so I have to add a few checks to certain special weapons that do damage directly so that they can't cheat and go through the shield) but it's basically working and it's fairly polished already.

Right now the only ship that gets it is the Acanthus, since it really needs it, but I may change that as I review the ships that might benefit from it the most.

[xenoargh]

Example of the Integrity Field on / off:

[LiquidStang]

I'm getting the hang of it now.

[Annex]

Example of the Integrity Field on / off:

Looks fantastic! Like going from the bubble shields of the star trek tv series to the hull hugging ones of the movies.

[Az the Squishy]

I love this mod! It's much more involed to a degree then excerlin is, however Excilerine has support for the Community factons, which is why it's still my favorite, but over all your own mod is GREAT! I'm glad to see youve updated it! I was worried youg ave up on it. :<

[xenoargh]

Yeah, support for the community factions is great; unfortunately, due to lack of engine support for a lot of things I wanted to do and a very different vision of game balance, this had to be a TC

[xenoargh]

A couple of the new weapons for the next build:

A double-barreled Slammer turret.  It's smashin' time!

The Neutron Cannon.  A very special weapon, it fires blasts of high-energy anti-neutrons that interact with normal matter in exotic ways.*

*Translation:  it's a weak-sauce Energy weapon that sucks vs. shields, but does damage directly to Hull.