Babylon 5 Mod

[Lighthorse]

Greeting Val,

What does ship enhancement do for you? What addition research do one need for ship enhancement. Does it lessen the cost for vessel, allow more room for weapons/engine, improve ship hull for increase in speed?
Also at what percentages does the different type of armor stop hits. Is it 1 in 4 or 100%. What does structive armor do for you. Increase the number of hit location ?
What really would help is a addition description to each research or armor item.

Looking forward to the day when I can play B5mod on PBW. May it so sooner than later.

______________________________________________
Lighthorse

[Val]

PDF:
No worries, I do understand being preoccupied

Lighthorse:
Man, you don't miss anything!

Ship Enhancements will do a variety of things, including: increasing the ships maneuverabilty (harder to hit), a speed bonus, improved power transfer (less supplies), and a few other ideas. Right now I am trying to balance them out and make it work. Also working on special crew enhancements for the ships. Right now this tech doesn't do anything - but it will

[Suicide Junkie]

The armor effect is very fuzzy. The larger the armor's hp, the more likely it is to absorb hits. However, the larger armors are also slightly weaker in terms of hp/kt.

Send one ship with heavy armor against another ship with light armor (otherwise identical designs, same space devoted to armor).
What will happen is that the light armor ship will have 50% more hitpoints, but will lose most of the time.
If you look carefully, you see that the light armor ship suffers from damage skipping the armor, and loses guns, eventually turning into an inert, burning wreck, which has a few 1000 hitpoints left. The winning ship keeps firing, and eventually vaporizes the wreck.
If the light armor ship gets lucky, and dosen't lose its weapons early on, the extra hitpoints will enable it to outLast the heavy ship. When the heavy armor fails, the light would still have 40% left, and the light armor ship wins.

The structural supports form the skeleton of the ship, and can take a severe beating. Unforunately, they also tend to be the Last things hit. Think of it as light armor, taken to the extreme.
What they will do is allow your ships to hold together after being nearly destroyed, possibly drawing fire away from more important ships (ie: those with guns still operational).
They also provide a great amount of power when you are ramming someone

[ July 07, 2002, 19:23: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Baron Munchausen]

I recommend a new approach to 'internal armor' once the new patch comes out. Use a special mount to create large blocks of armor suitable to the ship size and the mounts it can use. Since the components' 'damage' size seems to determine how likely they are to be hit, if you make a mount to enlarge armor to be about the same size/damage as the weapons that class if ship is capabale of using you will create a truly effective damage 'decoy'.

[Suicide Junkie]

Hitpoints on weapons are scaled to represent how vulnerable they are to fire.
The mounts should cause only a small increase in the hitpoints of the weapons, representing their larger surface area.

The main problem with having larger armor mounts is that they would then become extremely effective for protecting everything else. You would need to force the player to use a large mount bridge & etc. The hitpoints balance for unmounted components, and should only be altered slightly by mounts.

[Baron Munchausen]

Well, that's true that re-working the mounts could also reduce their vulnerability. I haven't looked at the B5 mod in any detail. have the mounts been changed much from the default game?

[Lighthorse]

Hello Again Val,

I got another suggestion for you. For ground forces, a player gets to chooses either to have a low grade or elite grade troops, (a real no brainer here, we always pick the elite troops) so why not instead start both infantry and ground vehicle at the lowest level and cost, and advance the technology and troops grade together.
Plus you can used all those other troop grades. Neat idea would be allowing only a very few races to have elite grade troops and double the effect/fighting value of elites. I think Nomads should be elite, increase they chance in capturing other races planets. Or make elite troops a ruins technolgy, or the be used by AI empires only. But main idea is to limited elite grade to only one or two races would increase the interest in ground forces and the B5mod in general.
As for my other past questions, you need to plan on having a "read me" file attached to B5mod on all your changes and new ideas for this great mod. Thus this will help new and current players and increase the value of all your hard work. I suggestion that you start now in listing any change/new idea to a read me file so it would be completed when B5mod is completed.

Please remember I'm trying to assist you, not to be to pushie.

Lighthorse

[pathfinder]

Playing as EA in current game(no rce....)

really starting to make the Narn mad (Partnership atm).... diplomatically stabbing them in back by allying with their enemies....slow game until EA got Ice colonies.....now it's starting to heat up

[Lighthorse]

Hey Val,

My latest B5mod game as the Shag"trog locked up, turn 153 with error message "Access violation at address 005B179F in Module "se4.exe." read of address 0000001c. Tried restarting the game as Narn and correcting all they ship design problems, but the game stilled locked up on turn 153.

Lighthorse

[Baron Munchausen]

Suggestion:

See the 'Cowabunga!' thread for info on the convertability of events and intel projects. Intel and events use the SAME powers! You could use some of the event powers to make special intel projects for certain races.