Hey, you actually got me to think about and do a little work on the mod.
Here are some notes on what I've done SO FAR with fighters in 3.0.7 (aka 3.1.0):
Version 3.0 attempted to alter fighter balance and gameplay to require
major research before fighters became as powerful as they are very quickly
in version 2.x. Hitpoints were reduced, the engines and supply reworked,
electronic warfare made expensive, shields changed from damage absorbers
to hit-spoiling deflectors, and rate of fire was halved as a way to get
them to swoop in and out and make anti-fighter fighter designs less
destructive against ships. Well, it added up to a much more of a nerf
than I intended. I finally got around to addressing all of this in version
3.0.7.
I wanted to preserve some of the neat ideas in 3.0, though, and engines
were one. The new combined engine components are nice in that they allow
more engine power to give combat bonuses, which can't be done with
separate components. But it also gave me many components, and I didn't
want a vast number of them to support the whole range of fighter sizes
from 15 to 45 kT. In 3.0 however, this meant very slow larger fighters,
which doesn't make sense. Eventually I decided scale mounts were the
solution. Note that although in terms of actual acceleration, it might
be only proportionally more difficult (and so, entirely possible) to
accelerate a small fighter or a large bomber, the maneuverability would
be harder to achieve, and since SE4 movement is abstract and contains
no way to represent maneuverability other than movement points and to-
hit modifiers, larger fighters and ships are shown as having slower
maximum abstract speeds, to represent this.
With the new scale mounts and fighter engine classes, instead of having the option of putting something like 1 x Ion Engine on a Large fighter, and having it barely move, the low end would be a Light Propulsion system which even on a heavy bomber will be scaled to produce a low end but somewhat reasonable amount of speed.
Code:
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Gameplay Changes:
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* Fighter propulsion reworked. See "Version 3.0.7
fighter rebalance design notes" above for explanation.
* Fighter engine components redefined as Light, Standard, Heavy, etc.
* Engines/move for larger fighters greatly reduced.
* Fighter engine movement points increased.
* Fighter engines now use scale mounts, with different costs and sizes.
* Fighter engine design space reduced.
* Halved cost of titanium fighter armor, and upped its structure by +1.
* Incompetently messed with emissive armor cost/effect.
Does emissive effect ever do anything on fighters?
Need dogfight/interceptor balance review!
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Cosmetic:
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* Fighter Power Plants categorized as Supply.
And other fighter adjustments, including balance adjustments to firepower, to-hit chances, speed, supply, reduced cost, and removal of so many levels of total-utter-crap fighters at the low end of the tech tree.
Also planned for 3.1.0 is a major balance change to weapon mounts, at least for planetary weapon platforms. As it is, large weapon platforms with mounts and strong combat sensors can become so powerful that large specialized fleets are really required to take out planets efficiently, and it's easy to lose strong anti-ship fleets to a much cheaper investment in WP's. That was originally more or less intentional, but I'd like to tweak that so that it's still possible to have tough planets, but not so cheaply and with not so much accuracy and instant deadliness.
Then 3.0.8/3.2 was planned to have the other features I have wanted to do, including:
* Intel system rebuild to be usable (offense stronger than defense, but little or no sabotage - only/mainly information-gathering).
* Sensor technology reworking for more interesting cloak/sensor competitions.
* Various mine technology ideas.
* Efficient scale mounts for small ship control systems.
* Space-based production & research facilities.
* Possibly improving the AI.
* Probably some other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.
PvK
Re: Attempting to improve the AI for Proportions 3
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