ship designs boring and too similar

[spacerat]

hm i'm kinda annoyed at how every ship has only 2 forward gun hardpoints and only 2 forward heavy weapon hard points. One would assume a battleship or somthing would have more forward firing weapons than say a destroyer. Right now every ship is basically the same except for max tonnage. Sure you can throw on bigger and better weapons but you really can only have 2. I've really not found a use for hte side mounted weapons anything I throw on there for occational use can be better spent on bigger heavy weapons or more shields. Is there a way to mod a ship to make all the hardpoints face forward? or give them more hardpoints in general. Also why are all the heavy weapons ONLY missile weapons. Thats kind of wierd. Why not just call it a missile/torpedo hard point. Heavy weapon implies that a 40kton ripper bean should fit there.

[ October 10, 2003, 06:27: Message edited by: spacerat ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Lots of the non-Terran races have ships with interesting firing arcs. I like the Abiddon ships, myself. They have pretty good all-around coverage. If you really want a 'battering ram' type ship with 4 or more forward facing missile or torpedo mounts you could mod it. You can also mod weapons to use the 'heavy' mounts if you want. That's the best feature of MM's games.

[Rollo]

hmm, I guess it is time to reimplement that Orc Battle Kroozer by Atraikius. very fast, terrible to maneuver, and 5 weapons facing forward

[Suicide Junkie]

That EEE destroyer was pretty nifty too.

[clark]

You can mod the demo spaceships (terran cruisers, etc).

You can have all exsisting hardpoints have the same firing arc (direction)- just go into playership-somethingorother.txt

You can change the exsisting Hull spaces to be weapon slots (either light, or heavy). You can increase speeds (or decrease), turning rates, armor and hull and shield regeneration rates, costs, sell back value, actual tonage, etc.

The only thing I haven't been able to do is create a 360 degree firing arc, but something tells me that this will be possible (either later with a fix, or with the full game).

I'm sure with the full game you will be able to mod it so that certain hard points only accept certain types of weapons (like for just alien weaponry, or certain MOUNT size weaponry). As it is, it can distinguish between Heavy and Light, as well as armor or Shield... so it should be rather straightforward.

I might add, you can add extra shield and armor points too.

I bet this game would make a good Honor Harrington Mod since you could effectively mimic the 'wedge' and set up ships for broadside attacks.

[Phoenix-D]

It might, but you can't minic laser-heads except with fighters, and they wouldn't be destroyed when they attacked. Nor can you emulate rolling ship to interpose the wedge between you and incoming fire.

[spacerat]

well i have the full verison and theres nothing as simple as playship.txt or anything to edit. Most the files arn't readable in notepad so i dono what to do. I'm sure some util will come out in a few days to do it but till them apparently im SOL.

[Phoenix-D]

Actually, most of the files -are- readable in notepad. You want the Campaigns folder, not the .x files.

[macjimmy]

I agree that the ships are too similar, but not because of weapons or firing arcs. I think that it is odd that the Fazrah cruiser is billed as the king of fast attack ships, while the Abbidon Crusiser 2 is described as slower than its Terran counterpart. However, top speed, acceleration, etc, are same for all cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and carriers (within the classes I mean). I am messing with modding some of this stuff to be different, such as making the Fazrah ships faster than the others, adding built-in armor & hull regeneration to Amonkrie ships, making the Abbidon ships slower, but maybe with increased resistances, and adding extra base cargo capacity to pirate ships. Only race I am having trouble coming up with an idea for is the Xiati... maybe added shield regen? Hopefully, these kinds of modifications would make the ships a little less generic.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by macjimmy:
I agree that the ships are too similar, but not because of weapons or firing arcs. I think that it is odd that the Fazrah cruiser is billed as the king of fast attack ships, while the Abbidon Crusiser 2 is described as slower than its Terran counterpart. However, top speed, acceleration, etc, are same for all cruisers, destroyers, battleships, and carriers (within the classes I mean). I am messing with modding some of this stuff to be different, such as making the Fazrah ships faster than the others, adding built-in armor & hull regeneration to Amonkrie ships, making the Abbidon ships slower, but maybe with increased resistances, and adding extra base cargo capacity to pirate ships. Only race I am having trouble coming up with an idea for is the Xiati... maybe added shield regen? Hopefully, these kinds of modifications would make the ships a little less generic.

All of the AI ships need some sort of 'base' level repair to compensate for their lack of a 'character' with skills like you get. Different races could have different levels of ability in various areas, of course, like the Amonkrie having higher armor regen.

The nearly identical maneuverability is a problem, as well as the arbitrary caps on speed. The only reason a destroyer is faster than a battleship is that the battleship has been capped. Both of these factors need to be adjusted, but hopefully MM will find a way to tweak the propulsion system to make it more realistic.

The Xiati could be given a 'unique' ability with some weapon modding. They already use Meson BLasters and Plasma Missiles, which are both relatively fast-firing weapons but do less damage per hit than others of similar type. You could speed them up further while decreasing the damage proportionally -- then a Xiati attack would consist of a hail of little fleabites that would be very hard to stop and add up to serious damage over time. This in itself is an advantage of sorts. The big, hard hitting Graviton Hellbore does lots of damage if it hits (it should do more, though... another mod needed) but you can hit that single torpedo with your PDC and make it useless. A huge number of little bullets from Meson BLasters and quick-firing Plasma Missiles is much harder to stop.

[ October 10, 2003, 22:42: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]