Carrier Battles Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

But the combat map is only 50 squares wide, and in practice there is no reloading except between combats. The scale has to be kept down to match that.

Anti-ship fighter missiles will probably be the only single-shot fighter weapon, with guns firing rapidly and anti-fighter missiles going every few turns to allow the previous shot to hit and new targets to be chosen.

[Ed Kolis]

More varied missiles? Have you considered turning missiles into drones? I've been working on a mod I call the "RC Mod" (RC is for Radio Control, as in RC cars, RC airplanes, etc.) in which all the missiles are removed and a ton of new, smaller drone hulls and warheads take their place... just never got around to filling in all the rest of the wonky damage type warheads and removing the seeker launchers

[Suicide Junkie]

A total drones thing wouldn't work too well for this mod, unfortunately.
A key reason to switch to missiles is their natural tendency towards overkill with no re-targetting.

A swarm of drones would keep killing and killing, while with missiles the first two or three in the volley will kill, and the rest will fizzle with no target to hit.
Its that built-in diminishing returns on the volume of ordnance fired that I'm going for.

Now, that's not to say some super-missile drones wouldn't be handy... I'll have to see how it fits later.

[Arkcon]

Just recently I was wishing for a mod like this. Off and on people ask for a good fighter-based race, but you do need a good mod to make fighters more effective in SE4.

This has come up before. Consider Star Trek, with its using a "ships of the line" model, where ships line up, even though space is 3-D, and slug it out. That's how SE4 is run. Now, Battle Star Galactica, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 favor the fighters model -- its like watching a WWII in the Pacific movie, except in space. And that's always more fun to watch.

Some things I'd like to see:
- Give the biggest ships a weapon they can use against each other. Not too powerful, since armor and shields are leaky, but good range. Give it a high cost, make it big so only one fits on a decent battleship, and give it a long reload time. I'm envisioning something like the Incinerator Beam, but with a reload of 3 turns (or more, 5 or 6). Let a lucky shot turn the tide for someone, or maybe it will be a big waste, you never know until you try it.

- Lots of variations in point defense and fighter weapons. You've got those in other mods -- an example is active armor, give it a range 1 weak point defence ability. To model it blowing itself up to defect a missile.

[Suicide Junkie]

Oh, something related to that whole WWII in space thing...

What does everybody thing of this mount idea:
Take your basic DUC, laser cannon, APB, etc.
The mounts will scale it up and down without massively altering the damage/kt/turn like stock. Some change, but not insane.
The mounts would be named things from "9mm" to "8-inch"

Giving you 9mm DU pistols and 8-inch DU cannons from the same component, with a military flavour.

[geoschmo]

The same component being used on a troop and a battleship, just with a different mount? That's interesting.

So could you mount your dreadnaught with 900 9mm pistols if you wanted?

[Kana]

Arkcon said:
an example is active armor, give it a range 1 weak point defence ability. To model it blowing itself up to defect a missile.

Never thought of this...does it work? I was working on ideas for ESG's (expanding sphere generators) for an SFB (star fleet battles) mod. I was going to use the point defense ability, with a big weapon, so that it could also be used against big ships that get to close...does the PD ability work on other component types?

Kana

[geoschmo]

I think you can give the point defense ability to pretty much any component, but the "oppotunity fire" that you are trying to gain wont work against ships. Even if the weapon can target ships, the point defense ability will only use the opportunity fire phase to shoot at seekers. Missles, fighters, drones.

[Ed Kolis]

Ooh, very realistic!

edit: this was in response to SJ's post about the mounts

[Nodachi]

SJ said:

Combat move is always at least (strategic move)/2, so the carriers can't be made superslow in combat. It'll have to be a relative thing, with carriers running 2 or 3 in combat and 4-6 outside, while fighters go 0-1 outside and 4-6 in combat.

You can easily set it up so that even a ship that is fast on the strategic map is slow in combat (Imperial Star Destroyers come to mind). Just give the hulls the Combat Movement ability with a negative value (or a positive one for smaller ships). That's how I'm trying to do it in my mod.