DJAS Mod v11

[arthurtuxedo]

DJAS Mod v11

This mod is built from Captain Kwok's excellent Balance Mod, and makes a number of changes.

1. Ships are split into destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. All are available from the beginning of the game, and all get bigger as Large Scale Construction is researched. Destroyers are good fighter-killers and missile ships, cruisers are good anti-ship and all around, and battleships can crack planets and starbases and make good carriers, supply ships, etc. Fighters, drones, and other units have much the same uses as they do in BM.

2. There are 4 types of weapons: Missiles, beams, pulses, and guns. Each can be researched up to level 100, and so can shields and armor. There are 3 tiers of technology, unlocked by researching a "breakthrough" tech that unlocks advanced theoretical sciences. The higher tiered tech starts at level 1 again, but quickly eclipses the older tech. It becomes a balancing act. Go for the higher tier too soon and an enemy may be able to defeat you by leveling existing tech, but wait too long and you won't stand a chance.

There are lots of smaller changes, but those are the main two. Racial and specialized weapons have been left in, but may or may not be useful. They have not been tested against the new weapons and will eventually be replaced. Racial tech other than weapons, armor and shields has the same usefulness as in BM. This mod is currently multiplayer only. Singleplayer will start, but the AI players do nothing.

Install by unzipping to SE5\GameTypes.

[Ed Kolis]

Hmm, the ship hulls remind me of SJ's Gritty Galaxy mod, and the weapons "tiers" remind me of an old 4X game called Starships Unlimited, where you had the "ages" of technology... I think someone once tried to make an "Ages of Space Empires" mod which did something along those lines. Do you plan on expanding the "tiers" to include more than just weapons?

[arthurtuxedo]

The ship hulls are somewhat like GG mod, but also quite different. Their roles are more distinct from each other, whereas in GG mod the bigger ships are pretty much better across the board but take longer to build. The original impetus for the three ship sizes was actually Sword of the Stars, although the DJAS implementation doesn't resemble that too closely, either.

The three tier idea came mostly from Total Annihilation, but it's a fairly common idea. The tiers currently include weapons, armor, shields, engines, shipyards, and stellar manip components. I don't really forsee expanding them further than that, except maybe for racial weapons and armor.