mod idea - wierd worlds at war

[Puke]

As the title of this post might imply, i've been toying with some mod ideas. The ones that I would like to explore in this thread, are of a military bent.

Another user mentioned a campaign to be played as a carrier picking up lost fighters. I'd like to take this a step further, and re-tool the combat to be carrier-centric. My fellow grognards from the Space Empires' community will be familiar with Suicide Junkie's Carrier Battles Mod.

The premise is that carriers are the mainstray of fleet combat, and other ships exist primarily as support vessels (point defense, long range bombardment, etc). Fighters would be of two main types: Interceptors (which shoot down missiles and fighters) and Bombers (which attack capital ships).

The only capital ship beam and projectile weapons would be for point defense or close-in knife fighting.

I think I already understand how to re-balance the weapons, re-arm the fighters, change the starting ships, and generally make the ships and equipment 'work'.

I was hopeing someone had a few ideas about Combat AI. This type of fighting would require ships to stand off at long range, and engage each other with fighters and missiles. Formations would be important. is there a way to handle this? does anyone have an idea how?

Also, it would be necessary to manage a flotillia or carrier group. There are two ways of setting this up, that I can think of. First, you could have "fighter bay" components that constantly stream out ships. Second, you could have some fixed alotment of fighters available to you.

In the first case, different types of fighter bay need to exist to launch different types of fighters. Due to graphical issues, I think these components need to be non-removeable (it wont do to have someone slapping a fighterbay on what looks like it should be a gun-hardpoint).

It MAY be possible to work around this with other flags, so that fighter bays are interchangeable only among carriers. Fighters, if you have noticed, can only mount certain small weapons. Perhaps something similar could be done that limits fighter bays to carriers and only carriers.

In the second scenario, there would have to be some mechanism to replace fighters once they are destroyed. My thought is to have them replenishable from the homeworld. As we all know, events can add ships to your fleet. I think it should be simple enough to have items add ships to your fleet, when used. Thus, your homeworld could have a large quantity of "Fighters" for sale as Items. you could carry them in Cargo or use them immediatly, but you would need to raise funds to purchase them (through your conquests).

The big deal-breaker on option 2, is if there is a hard limit to the number of ships that you can have in your fleet. Anyone know?

Of course, some combination of these two ideas is possible. You could use this mechanism to purchase additional capital ships for your fleet. Perhaps purchase different types of carriers, that launched either interceptors or bombers. Perhaps purchace missile bombardment or point defense ships.

Which brings me to the initial game setup. Since there is a hard coded limit of 3 mission options at game start, how do we avoid making multiple copies of essentially the same mod, so that players can play with different ships from different races? My suggestion is to use the same "ship-purchassing" mechanic. The three choices at game startup would give you a command ship (or carrier, as the case may be) from one of three races. From there, you will be able to customize the rest of your fleet at your homeworld. Instead of giving you an outfitted ship, it would give you an empty ship with some credit-having items in cargo to trade for equipment at your homeworld.

This mechanism could be used even outside of the "carrier warfare" mod, such that you could have a general military campaign, where you picked a side at the main menu, and then outfitted your ships once the game started.

both positive and negative feedback is encouraged. i'm interested to hear if anyone had other ideas to add, or can think of other ways of doing any of these things, or if there is some reason part of this just wont work.

cheers

[Fingers]

It's possible to create removable fighter bays, so you can change what kind of fighters your carrier will launch. Fighter bays have their own type of "slot" so you won't be able to install anything in the wrong place.

Persistent "ammunition" doesn't exist in Weird Worlds. Fighter bays simply have a number that determines how many fighters can be active at any one time (three in the case of Garthan Light Carriers for example).

The player flotilla size is limited to five ships by the fact there's only room for five in the flotilla interface (and there's only keyboard shortcuts for #1-5). You could give the player more ships but it'd be difficult to select and manipulate them.

At the moment only one race per mod can be used as the player race (the first one listed in game.ini). This'll change in a future patch.

[Puke]

Fingers said:
At the moment only one race per mod can be used as the player race (the first one listed in game.ini). This'll change in a future patch.

cool, thats good to know. I was thinking that the race would be the same, but it wouldnt be noticable because the player ship would be different. Of course, the problem would be that if you were purchasing or outfitting your flotillia, your selection would not change based on the ship you had.

perhaps each ship type could have an item in cargo that started a quest or summoned a trade ship, which was used for the outfitting. each one could summon a different trade ship, which was set to 'friendly' upon the activation of the item.

That would stop you from trading with them, if you started with a non-matching ship-type.

naturally, thats not needed if you patch in multiple starting races...