A first!!!

[Arralen]

Imperator Fyron said:
The idea was that huge cities clustering tons of people into small spaces tend to raise general levels of discontent. If that is the only thing you dislike about the mod, you can perhaps try the attached file, in which I set the unhappiness to 0 for metroplises.

Thanks, will try that out. And have a look at the file, to see how it is done.

You know, its not that I don't like the idea in general - while I have some doubt if that penalty makes sense - if I can build an entertainment falicity seperatly, why not postulate its already incorporated into the Mega-Polis thing? At least, mines, farms, extraction and research centers seem to be ...
What I don't like is that it feels not entirely thought-through .. the AI can't cope with it, I think, and even the human player has little options to cure the unhappiness, at least at that level ...

Note that homeworlds can not riot; they stop at the Angry level.

Means -20% production from angriness nevertheless.

The AI is configured to build as many happiness facilities as it needs (actually 1 extra) for all colony types, so the worker unhappiness scheme generally will not hurt them.

But the homeworlds are generally full, so unless the AI can tear done facilities now, it will end up with maximum angry homeworlds and the according production penalties. AFAIK, it can't raze facilities?!

Btw, it looks to me like those morale penalties from the mega-cities are cumulative .. at least the +4 entertainment thingie didn't help me at all ?!



Speaking of un-happiness:
Is there something upside-down with the happiness in between-nation relations? If I stumble over an AI in the next system which is agressive and whatnot, it knocks on my door asking for a trade agreement some turns later .. despite having all our system disputed by each other and all.
Then, I meet another AI out there 5 systems away. Despite being neutral and having not one disputed system, and none of mine ships in their systems etc., they go "murderous" and declare within 5 turns. Sometimes their mood gets up to normal levels again, but they'll stay at war forever.
Have started 5 games (with different mods), and it happened not only once, but in at least 3 of those 5 ?!?!?

What about leaky armor/shields?

I'm not sure if I like them (any more) - looks to me they don't really work out, at least in the versions I have seen up to now:
Armors:
Some mods even mix leaky and 'normal' armor, what doesn't make sense at all? I mean - leaky armor is just a functionless compoment, that can take more damage than 'real' components. But this is more 'armored structure' than outlying armor which shields the ship .. unless 30% of the components or more are armor components - otherwise hits on the armor are just too unlikely. Sadly, those armor pieces still have standard size, therefore if I fill a ship with 30% armor tiles, it wouldn't be able to do anything as there wouldn't be sufficient space to place everything else. If those armor tiles are smaller than normal components (some mod does that), they work better, obviously, but take forever to repair ...
This gets rediculous if some armor types stay 'hit first' .. 1 piece providing 100% protection ..
Shields:
Shield regenerating ability was way too low to make any difference, at least at the tech level I got to try out: Again the shield should be reloaded to at least 30% between single hits, otherwise its not leaky, it turns into duct tape after the first go-through ...

[Fyron]

If I could control the homeworld facilities directly (*cough* SE5 *cough*), HWs would start with several entertainment networks. But alas...

Arralen said:
But the homeworlds are generally full, so unless the AI can tear done facilities now to replace them with more needed/fitting ones, it will end up with maximum angry homeworlds and the according production penalties.

With even a low bonus, they get a 100% bonus to production; up to 400% bonus with high. And it only applies to the HW. The angry penalty is not that significant for them, in my opinion.

Also, there are the effects of ships:

Our Ship in Sector := -10
Our Ship in System := -3

1 ship in the same sector as the planet offsets a 1% facility penalty. I suspect it might take a while before they get enough ships roaming about to have an overall mitigating effect, but it could happen.

Btw, it looks to me like those morale penalties from the facilties are cumulative .. at least the +4 entertainment thingie didn't help me at all ?!

Yes, planetary happiness abilities stack.

Is there something upside-down with the happiness in between-nation relations?

The AI is insane.

[Arralen]

.. sorry, had some edits to make to my above post ..

[Fyron]

Arralen said:
I'm not sure if I like them (any more) - looks to me they don't really work out...

It seems to work as intended in the mods I've tried with leaky armor. The whole point is to let some damage get through, but still have the armor components take a good share of damage. Generally, leaky armor components have a lot more hp/kt than normal components (usually at least an order of magnitude). The component selection function is further biased towards hitting high hp components, disproportionate to the component's percent of total hp.

The size of leaky armor isn't so important; larger pieces actually generally work better due to having more hp/component. For example, in leaky armor setups like B5 Mod and Adamant, ships with heavy armor tend to defeat ships with (the same total tonnage of) light armor, despite the light armored ship having a ton more total hp. The lower hp/kt heavy armors tend to take more hits from the "internals" than the higher hp/kt light armors.

This gets rediculous if some armor types stay 'hit first' .. 1 piece providing 100% protection ..

If you are refering to Adamant, the "dense armor" components come at the end of the tech tree, after all leaky armors. They are not really comparable to them, and by that point leaky shields + dense armor are generally the way to go, rather than using much leaky armor. Though, note that there are armor-skipping weapons available to all races (graviton hellbore and graviton missiles for physical paradigm), so you can really pull off some surprise punches against those dense-armored ships.

Note that armor-skipping weapons (shard cannons, graviton hellbore in Adamant) have some interesting effects against leaky-shielded targets. The Skips Armor damage type does not trigger the SGFD (or Emissive) ability, so "skips armor" actually works well against both leaky shields and dense-armored targets. No shield points are generated as a result of an armor-skipping shot, and the damage bypasses the dense armor.

Shield regenerating ability was way too low to make any difference, at least at the tech level I got to try out: Again the shield should be reloaded to at least 30% between single hits, otherwise its not leaky, it turns into duct tape after the first go-through ...

First, not that regeneration abilities are not part of the leakiness; leakiness comes from the shield generation from damage (SGFD) ability.

But it is leaky; it doesn't block a percentage of each hit, so much as replenish the shields after each hit (to a point). Statistically, this has the effect of regenerating damage by a certain percent. If you have more total SGFD than what weapons do per hit, you essentially get the overall damage reduced by half. The percentage of reduction varies by damage type; for example, 1/2x to shields means that overall damage is reduced by 66% (it takes 2 shots to deplete the shield points generated from 1 hit that entirely damages internals). Naturally, the water becomes murky when different types of weapons are mixed together, but you still get some general overall reduction in damage.

At least in Adamant, low tech shields are not very powerful. At low tech levels, it is better to rely more on armor. As tech progresses, the shields start to come into their own. I did make them 20 kT to speed up the point when they start becoming useful, though.

When you get tech to efficiently mount both leaky shields and leaky armor, the damage from each shot is statistically reduced on two levels before reaching internals to do real damage to the ship. There is always the possibility of being unlucky and receiving several hits that do not hit leaky armors, thus incapacitating the ship more quickly than normal. There is also the possibility of getting lucky and having most/all hits go into the armor, thus making the ship remain operational far longer than normal. But overall, it tends to balance out. This is the beauty of leakiness.

[Arralen]

Let's take this discussion to the Adamant Mod Thread ... .

[Suicide Junkie]

An in-depth discussion of Leaky Defenses can be found in the Carrier Battles mod tutorial pages:
DEF 200 : Damage Theory and
DEF 340 : Armor Mechanics

DEF 340 goes into detail of the tradeoffs between thick (large, low hp/kt) and thin (small, high hp/kt) leaky armors, plus the effects of tech level on damage absorption rates.

Shield regeneration has nothing to do with leaky shields. As stated before, it is all about the shield generation from damage ability, which charges the shields between each hit.

An additional bonus is if you have strong leaky shields plus thick armor; If the leaky shield points are greater than the weapon damage, and each armor component has more hitpoints than the weapon damage, you can actually suffer no damage from a hit.

This was a deciding factor in the first PBW game; I warped through with a carrier into a fleet of Combat Wombat's destroyers. They were all armed with small 40mm lasers, and my carrier had thick armor and shields...
The destroyers quickly vaporized my armored warship, but they were unable to do any damage to the carrier, despite scoring about a hundred hits. (~10 ships, firing every other turn, for 30-40 turns with good accuracy)

60 leaky shield points, armor with 60+ hp/kt, and the lasers dealing only 45-ish damage. Eventually my anti-missile interceptors nibbled his unshielded ships to death 4 points of damage at a time, and my Carrier lost only a single crew quarters due to an unlucky armor leak.

(This fun story is a good example of why larger mounts are useful in CBmod even though they reduce accuracy. Small guns for small targets, big guns for big targets)

[Gandalf Parker]

I still play SEIV daily. I have SEV but just dont seem to enjoy it. Maybe when some of the mods I like get converted to SEV.

At the moment, the mod I play is called XperiMental.
Its mine. I wont release it because I didnt write any of it. Its half a dozen other mods pasted into one.

Gandalf Parker

[StarShadow]

I still play Se4 exclusively, with my own modifications added in.

[Possum]

Yeah, SE4 all the way here. I had a very active fun PBW game going, until capnq's computer committed seppuku.

[Makinus]

SEV - Was planning to buy it at the earliest opportunity (even asked some forum members to buy it for me and send by mail to Brazil), but after battling with the demos and losing to the UI and the long turn processing times, decided to stick with SEIV for the time being...

In my opinion, in the current form, SEIV is better than SEV, but that can change as more SEV patches are released, and when i get more powerfull computers...

I´m actually playing 3 single player games of SEIV, with different modifications in each, all based in Devnull Mod 1.8 with personal modifications, i normally remove warp manipulating components, decrease reproduction and research rates (by a factor of 10) and add some roleplaying components.

So, for the time being, i have no plans to buy SEV, and will stick with SEIV for a while longer... it gives a more rewarding experience...