Ascendancy Mod Idea (need some help)

[Starhawk]

This mod is an idea a buddy and I came up with a while back, it is based on a bunch of races from boardwars he and I took part in and their seperate tech trees.

Okay here is a list of races their creators and the guys that made their models:

Terrenesi
Creator: Starhawk
Modeller: Starhawk
Desc: The Terrenesi are a humanoid race divided into four castes, Warrior, Civilian, Ambassadorial and Rulership. Each is a unique "subspecies" and has a unqiue role in the Terrenesi Federated Empire.
They are aggressive and expansionistic but also honorable in their own way and they see it as their duty to bring order to an otherwise chaotic universe and to protect the weak from the strong via making them a protectorite of the Empire (which often requires the conquest of said race).

Positive Traits:
Largest ships in the game
Phased Weaponry, Shields and Armor
Natural Warriors (all space based combat ships are manned by warrior caste)

Negative Traits:
NO Devoted Carriers
Ships take a LONG time to build
Expensive tech

Icaran Star Empire
Creator: Starhawk
Modeller: Starhawk
Desc: The Icaran Star Empire is a human empire that left earth several hundred years ago and colonized their homeworld of Icara.
The Icarans follow their leaders or "Praetor Saints" in their holy mission to establish Human rule over all the worlds they can lay claim to, they are interested in the greater good and peace and wherever possible they will absorb new races into their Empire through peaceful means however if that fails the Praetor may declare a "Crusade" where the military might of the Empire is swung into action against a holdout race to bring it into the fold against it's will.

Positive Traits:
Relatively Cheap ships and tech
Long Ranged Weapons
Heavy Armor

Negative Traits:
Limited Shield tech
No Fighters (gunship only)
No disabler weapons

Rebel Icarans:
Creator: Starhawk
Modeller: Starhawk
Desc: Unlike their Imperial counterparts the rebel Icarans simply desire to be left alone, they beleive in the "divinity of man" and as such think that allowing other races into any Icaran world defiles that divinity.
The rebel Icarans are xenophobic to the extreme and lay claim to any world they can, whether it is inhabited or not and will "steralize" any world occupied by "Xenos" without warning and establish their "freeholds" on the burnt ashes of alien cities.

Positive Traits:
Long Ranged weapons
Heavy Armor
Relatively cheap ships and tech

Negative Traits:
No fighters (gunship only)
Limited shield tech
No disabler weapons

Swarners
Creator: Yoshi
Modeller: either Yoshi or Kerensky (depending on who I can grab)
Desc: The swarmers are a mechanical race created by an unknown alien race thousands of years ago to conquer their masters enemies however they turned on their creators and have begun destroying all organics they come across seeing them as inferior and unworthy of existence.

Positive Traits:
Deadly fighters
Largest Carriers in game
Advanced fighter weapons

Negative Traits:
Largest ship to ship combat vessel is destroyer
Weak capital ship armor
No point Defense guns (for fighter killing)

Hunters:
Creator: The General
Modeller: Starhawk
Desc: The hunters are a mechanical race created by the enemies of the creators of the Swarmers, they too turned on their masters as the war against the swarmers continued and the "central net" decided their organic masters were more a hinderance then a help.
Unlike swarmers who rely on massed fighter formations the Hunters rely on ship capturing technology and disabling their enemies, their warships are not capable of overwhelming firepower but instead defeat their enemies by crippling enemy vessels and neutralizing the crews before installing an artifitial intelligence core onboard.

Positive Traits:
Advanced ship disabling weapons
Advanced cloaking technology (including planetary)
Central AIs spread experience throughout a fleet (neural net)

Negative Traits:
Largest ship is a battleship
No Energy weapons (beyond disabler tech)
Small carriers

Corim Empire
Creator: Kerensky
Modeller: Kerensky
Desc: The Corim Empire was once vast and galaxy spanning however after a devestating civil war most of the Corim are now extinct and the few that remain try to survive as best they can by estalbishing alliances with more powerful empires and by "borrowing" ships from other races (basically they are pirates in order to survive) and taking their resources.

Positive Traits:
Advanced Weapons
Superior Speed
Good boarding parties

Negative Traits:
Expensive ships
Medium Ranged weapons
Inferior Fighter tech

Hra-Thrall
Creator: Mephesto Odium
Modeller: n/a (either me or Meph if I can grab him)
Desc: The Hra-Thrall are an ancient Aquatic race with a relatively peaceful nature and the desire to preserve their worlds with as little bloodshed as possible.
They are however quite willing to defend themselves and as such have developed powerful ships and weapons to preserve their worlds and they will not back down when it comes to defending themselves from all who would threaten them.

Positive Traits:
Excellent Shields
Slipstream/Shard Weapons
Good engines

Negative Traits:
Short Ranged weapons
Low ROF with slipstream/shard weapons
Fragile subsystems

Yucra Hive:
Creator: Siber
Modeller: Siber
Desc: The Yucra hive is made up of billions of tiny ant like creatures with one goal in their hive mind, the goal to expand the hive!
At first glance the Yucra seem to be no threat as they are so tiny but like any insect creature their real danger is when they are in swarms and only a fool would walk into a swarm of Yucra, and only a lucky fool would come out alive.

Positive Traits:
Rapid reproduction
The Entire planetary populace is turned into milita upon invasion (if I can impliment this)
Mass produced ships

Negative traits:
Ships are tiny (a cruiser is only about 8ft long)
Weapons are weak
Low fuel storage

United Shipping Corporation
Creator: Frish
Modeller: LOL Starhawk again
Desc: The USC is a multispecies corporation who's goal is to expand to as many worlds as possible and gather as many valuable resources as possible and all in the name of Profit.
Their "Corporate Security forces" are merely converted cargo and freight ships that are fitted out with moderate strength weapons and armor, their sole advantage is mass production abilities and the fact that their crews are clones so they are completely expendable.

Positive Traits:
Natural Merchants
Advanced Production Faclities
Bonuses to Intelligence projects
Advanced Asteroid mining

Negative Traits:
Weak At space Combat
Low population Growth
No "quantum reactor" style tech

Goals of the Mod
1. To create a unique playing experience for each race and make a player feel immerssed in the race they are playing.

2. To create a more "strategic" game where there will be star KILLING weapons but no star building weapons. (basically your going to really have to think before just nuking a sun)

3. I am trying to make more "tactical" options for the player as playing a race like the Terrenesi will make you want to be careful with the loss of even a single Dreadnought as it is a large investment of time and money (though it will outclass just about every other race's dreadnoughts) but at the same time if your playing a race like the Icarans your not going to want to try and take on a Terrenesi warship one on one as it will blow you to dust.

4. Different tech tree's for different races.

5. TDM style AI (basicaly smarter and harder).

6. I am going to try and make it so that the smaller ships are still useful even into the late game.

What I need
1. People who know how to make seperate tech trees for seperate races

2. People who can help me write challenging AIs

3. Play testers for Alpha and Beta stages

4. Maybe texturers if I can't get some of the shipsets looking good with Wings "material" painting.

5. People who can tell me how to make certain weapons types restricted to certain sizes of vessel (I don't want Heavy Pulse cannons on a frigate basically) without making them so heavy that you simply can't put them on a small ship.

6. Patient people who are willing to lend even moral support to the mod.

Please keep in mind that this is just a basic layout and I'm going to need some support to make these idea's possible so chime in with your oppinions and help me out.

ALSO if you have an idea for a race feel free to run it by me, though I would ask that you be prepared to provide your own models and weapons ideas.

[Fyron]

Ah man, this has nothing to do with that classic space opera game Ascendancy... Oh well.

Take a look at Adamant Mod to see how to make separate tech trees for different races.

http://adamant.spaceempires.net/

5. People who can tell me how to make certain weapons types restricted to certain sizes of vessel (I don't want Heavy Pulse cannons on a frigate basically) without making them so heavy that you simply can't put them on a small ship.

While looking at Adamant Mod, examine how Colony Modules are restricted to only Colony Ship hulls via the Colony Mount.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

My suggestion? Divide it up into portions. Make one or two empires at a time. If you try to take it all on, you run the risk of being overwhelmed.

[Fyron]

6. I am going to try and make it so that the smaller ships are still useful even into the late game.

Quasi-Newtonian propulsion (same % of hull space devoted to engines to move at speed X for all ship hulls; eg: A 200 kT ship requires 50 kT devoted to engines to move 5. A 400 kT ship requires 100 kT for the same speed), Leaky Armor (armor components have no armor ability, so are not a magic wall of protection, and they have lots, and lots, and lots of hit points), and Leaky Shields (shields generate low shield levels, but use the crystalline armor ability to simulate partial protection from each shot, instead of magic wall protection as in stock SE4) can help in this regard. Not to mention the vast improvements to tactics and strategy they provide... Some other common methods to make small ships more useful is to give larger ships increasing combat penalties, and possibly increasing maintenance costs. Removing the absurd stock game scale weapon mounts would be a good idea as well. There is nothing wrong with a mount that makes a weapon 3x the size and do 3x the damage (well not much wrong anyways). But a weapon that makes it 2x the size and 3x the damage is bad, and is one of the biggest culprits in making small ships useless once the larger, heavier ships are available.

[Starhawk]

How do I make ship sizes "race specific"? Because I know I've seen that in the Startrek mod but I can't figure out how he did it.
Can anyone help me out there?

And does anyone here know how to write challenging AIs?

Oh and Narf the Alpha will only have the Terrenesi, Icaran Empire/Rebels and possibly the Corim. The beta will add another one or two races.

[Fyron]

Imperator Fyron said:
Take a look at Adamant Mod to see how to make separate tech trees for different races.

http://adamant.spaceempires.net/

It involves adding racial tech traits (like Organic Manipulation, Temporal Technology, etc.), technologies that require those traits, and making those techs required by the ship hulls.

[Ed Kolis]

To make race-specific ship sizes, give them a tech prerequisite that has its Racial Area set to one of your defined racial areas in RacialTraites.txt. Just like you do for a component
But remember, if one or more of an item's prerequisites (direct prerequisites only - not prerequisites of prerequisites) is non-racial, then the technology can be traded or stolen by other races! (That's how some of the special techs in the Star Trek Mod are stealable )
E.g. if Gelf Frigate has prerequisite Gelf Technology which is racial, Gelf Frigate will only be buildable by Gelfs, even if Gelf Technology has prerequisite Physical Paradigm or something... but if Gelf Frigate has prerequisite Gelf Technology and Ship Construction which is NOT racial, then Gelf Frigates can only be built by Gelfs UNTIL they trade the tech away or someone steals it, either by espionage or ship capture.

[Starhawk]

So to make a race specific ship basiaclly put something like

Requires: Gelf Technology

Then how do I make it buildable of I can't put what level of ship construction it needs?

Or is it possible to put something like

Requires: Gelf Ship construction lvl2?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Entirely. As long as Gelf Ship Construction is in the TechArea.txt

[Starhawk]

Okay this may sound Incredibly stupid but would you guys mind typing up an example?

I.E. type up a weapon that is size and race specific

And type up a ship size that is racial trait specific

Just so I can get it in my head, I have a cold right now so thought process are going slow for me.