Modified Races - Modifies racial traits and default templates for balance and greater challenge. Humans now have randomized home system. Enables all races.
Combat Rebalance - Makes ship hulls stronger and starbases more powerful. Armor more absorbant. Shields regenerate 50% faster. Slight balance changes to beams. Torpedoes slightly stronger. Missiles boosted by 50%.
Enjoy.
Last edited by Dialtone on Fri Jul 17, 2015 3:52 pm, edited 6 times in total.
True_poser wrote:Hmm, so you've tweaked the dmg down.
By the way, did you find out if it's possible to enable weapons special not on 5th level?
I wanted to make ships survive longer, thus having less of a "tin can" feeling. But I couldn't find a way to make armor stronger, so I just lowered weapon damages, same effect in the end.
I believe having weapon specials on level 5 is hardcoded, you can change which special a weapon has, but not when it has the special.
There are some data tables that haven't been exposed to modding, such as the armors. I'll do a pass on them soon as I find some time and put it in XML so they can also be modded.
Zaimat wrote:I was able to sneak these through in today's update. It should help your endeavor!
Changing the repairRate, absorbRate and absorbPerLvl under <ListArmors> in tech_stats.xml didn't seem to make any in game changes. Other changes I made to things like shield recharge rates and all the previous weapon damage changes worked good, plus all the changes I made in the new ship_design_stats.xml file seemed to work good.
I see what's wrong with <ListArmors>, there is a typo with the tag name starting with capital 'L' and the game expects lowercase there. I'll push an update to fix that, in the mean time you can also change it the opening and closing tags and it will then work. Thanks for finding this!
<ListArmors> change to <listArmors>
</ListArmors> change to </listArmors>
<hullSpace>225</hullSpace> <!-- affects space available for ship design -->
You can give a hull more space, obviously.
But will the AI ever redesign and/or refit its ships to use the extra space if you increase this value? As far as I can tell the answer is no, at least with starbases.
Dialtone wrote:But will the AI ever redesign and/or refit its ships to use the extra space if you increase this value? As far as I can tell the answer is no, at least with starbases.
You are correct. The AI won't automatically make use of more available space as it bases it off the original design.
You would have to update the default design templates for each race ship (12 per race) but this is currently in a data table that's not exposed to XML. I could expose it if you plan to do this, might take a little while.
Zaimat wrote:You would have to update the default design templates for each race ship (12 per race) but this is currently in a data table that's not exposed to XML. I could expose it if you plan to do this, might take a little while.
Yea sure, I would love to have the ability to do that, I planed on giving the scout and starbase more hullSpace. As long as it wont hurt any aspects of performance and stability, and it doesn't waste much of your time. I may even tweak some of the designs if I can come up with ones that are a bit more nasty.
Dialtone wrote:But will the AI ever redesign and/or refit its ships to use the extra space if you increase this value? As far as I can tell the answer is no, at least with starbases.
You are correct. The AI won't automatically make use of more available space as it bases it off the original design.
You would have to update the default design templates for each race ship (12 per race) but this is currently in a data table that's not exposed to XML. I could expose it if you plan to do this, might take a little while.
I would like the AI to be able to use the additional space in a larger starbase.
Does this mean that the AI never redesigns ships/starbases to include different/better weapon technologies but only levels-up the weapon it started off with?
"Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet."
Ex Circuit Boi wannabe
The AI adds new technology to designs as it discovers them. It does not retrofit old ships though like players can but they get refit to the latest level.
1) existing ships (both mine sand the AI's) automatically level up to the current best level of whatever wepons they were built with originally (starbase/shipyard required)
2) when the AI creates a new design, it does not refit existing ships to the new design
3) the AI does periodically create new ship designs
4) so for example: if a weapon should decrease in size the AI would update a ship design to have more emplacements of weapons to use up the space and maximize damage
5) levelling up a weapon or discovering a new weapon triggers me to consider new ship design- I assume the AI also redesigns when trigger conditions are satisfied. Are those trigger conditions a new tech and/or a new tech level?
6) if I were to increase the size of Starbases in a mod, everyone starts with the current starting Starbase design.
6b) same for ships
7) only when a starbase redesign is triggered will the AI be able to make use of the modded extra space and then only for new starbases, never the existing ones
7b) same for ships
What did I get right and what did I misunderstand?
"Evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet."
Ex Circuit Boi wannabe
The AI updates it's designs (ships and starbases) when the game starts, taking into account race templates for technologies.
It then checks every turn if a new technology (eg: Cloaking device) is discovered. Each race has their own preferences for designs and takes that into account when updating designs.
In the current (live) version miniaturization doesn't trigger AI design updates (or available space if you were to increase the default via modding) but I have added a bit of code today so it will in the next update.
