StarFire Mod v-Beta 2

[President_Elect_Shang]

abc: The supply issue is good, don’t write it off, I don’t want you too. Just keep testing it and we can go from there after I get more feedback.

EDM: If they don’t work than I will need to put more thought into them, considering the advantage they give in battle I may have to toy with them some more by providing them with less movement (or even no movement) in battle and setting them to target seekers. They should not be able to fire on a fighter, which is the Defense Pod’s job, so write that idea off (fighters) when you are toying with the targeting type. However just to make sure tell me again, they would ram the ships and fire on the seekers with a target type of what?

More Capital Missiles: Ha, welcome to StarFire, I need to get you fully introduced to the game as you obviously have the right mind set.

Books: “In Death Ground” and “Shiva Option”, they where good but after having read them all I think they where the worst of the serious. If you like them, than you need to read “Crusade” (my personal favorite) and “Insurrection” which takes place after the Arachnid War but Weber wrote the book before the Arachnid War.

Finally if you get into the game, the 3rd Edition Version of it anyway, you can purchase non-novel books that will let you recreate all of the above wars and some other ones that Weber and others dreamed up but where never made into novels. And if that isn’t good enough there is a community of us 3rd Edition players that have games going. I am in two play-by-email games right now, and the software to run those games is easy to learn and best of all FREE!

Come over to the StarFire side, you know you want to, you can feel the real emperor inside you calling to get out, the one that never feels satisfied when wiping the crap out of an AI. My email (use the SF Mod one) is over at my web site, and I have ICQ if you prefer the faster method of chat, even emails are a little slow.

Operators are standing by.

[abc]

I'll think about the supply issue some more.

EDM: I simply copied the fighter/sat/seeker/drone target type! There were no fighters or sats present during my test. Set the target type to seeker or seeker/drone and they'll leave fighters and sats alone.

Btw, i tested XO Sprint Missiles in the simulator yesterday. I set the strategy to drone attack(optimal firing range/ram), but the drones moved to the edge of the map after firing! Has anybody an idea what i did wrong??

Cargo holds: Maybe you could decrease the cargo capacity of cargo components. A level 4 freighter has a capacity of 7500 (1.5 billion population)
And you can build it almost at the start of the game. A level 10 freighter can probably load a homeworld's complete population!

Another suggestion: give the XO Autoloader the armor ability. It reloads XO racks and should be damaged first, too!

Colony Ships: I can use military engines, too. Probably just missed it.

Playing a real StarFire game sounds really interesting I'll send you an e-mail tomorrow...the sun is shining, that is even more interesting

[President_Elect_Shang]

EDM: Yes I think Seeker/Drone targeting is good, I will toy with the idea of satellites and mines also, but that is not there function as there are other weapons to do that. I will include this in the next patch.

XO Missile: You should have set the strategy to ram, try this and they should fire before making contact then move in to ram. With the strategy set to optimal fire range they will want to move away (what happened in your test) until the weapon reloads, but it will not [reload] in that combat phase.

Wow! Need to decrease the cargo hold! Let me make a note of that for the next patch, suggestions on size? I think 200 should do the trick very nicely and keep proportions to other cargo holding components. The XO Auto-Loader will also need adjusted.

XO Auto Loader: Good point, this is a home made component and not from cannon. I decided not to give it the armor ability for three reasons. (1) The way I envision it is as an internal component that feeds the XO racks by a system of rails, which alone would take away any armor trait. (2) The XO racks have the armor ability and if they get destroyed than the Auto Loader is doing nothing but soaking up damage and eating space. (3) When you develop the Box Launchers (if I don’t change them back to there old form) it would really piss people off to lose all of there ammo when the Auto-Loader gets blown away before there armor is even breached; which could happen if it has the armor ability.

Colony Ships: It would be very easy to miss the Class III mount if you are testing with all techs given, the weapon mounts would push the Class III mount down so you have to scroll to see it.

Sun: What sun, I see nothing but clouds! And I wanted to take the kids to the park today.

[abc]

Originally posted by President Elect Shang:
XO Missile: You should have set the strategy to ram, try this and they should fire before making contact then move in to ram. With the strategy set to optimal fire range they will want to move away (what happened in your test) until the weapon reloads, but it will not [reload] in that combat phase.

XO Auto Loader: Good point, this is a home made component and not from cannon. I decided not to give it the armor ability for three reasons. (1) The way I envision it is as an internal component that feeds the XO racks by a system of rails, which alone would take away any armor trait. (2) The XO racks have the armor ability and if they get destroyed than the Auto Loader is doing nothing but soaking up damage and eating space. (3) When you develop the Box Launchers (if I don’t change them back to there old form) it would really piss people off to lose all of there ammo when the Auto-Loader gets blown away before there armor is even breached; which could happen if it has the armor ability.

Sprint missiles still don't work correctly. They fire and then move off

Auto Loader: If you decrease the cargo capacity, you'll need real cargo holds anyway. With XO Rack V, a ship can fire 20 XO missiles in two turns!

Weapon ranges: I noticed that there isn't much difference between the range ofenergy/sprint weapons and seekers on higher tech level. Maybe you could create three distinctive weapon ranges: XO Missiles, normal missiles(range 20) and energy/sprint weapons(range 10)

[President_Elect_Shang]

Sprint XO Missile: I don’t know what the h#@l is going on here. I tried it and the drone moved in and rammed without ever firing. I will take a closer look into this and see if I can figure out what the problem is. The default strategy I have for drone attack is ram/maximum weapons range. When I flipped them around the XO Sprint Missile fired but did not ram, then again it did not flee to the far edge of the map.

Auto Loader: That would be true except for two things. One the auto loader only takes up one hull space so it is great for filling in those extra spaces. And two, I just changed the price of the Cargo Hold so that ten auto loaders cost the same as one cargo hold. Now ten auto loaders not only take up the same space but cost the same. Either way the player will not get an advantage but can still us both effectively.

Weapon ranges: Yes I understand just what you are saying, but without having the texts to refer to you probably don’t realize how big of a problem that is. The true difference in ranges becomes apparent at more than 20 sectors. The daddy of the combat field should be the Heavy Bombardment Missile at a max range of 60 sectors. To mimic this I would have to cut all weapon ranges by one third. Not that I am against doing that but I would need some feedback on it from my co-author? Dan K what do you think? If I do this it will also mean that ship combat speed will need to be looked at. First however I think that the range issue should be addressed and tested, once that is done than the ship speed can be looked at.

Supplies: I am thinking that supplies should be cut back to around 10 points per star instead of the current 20, thoughts and feedback?

With all of the detailed testing that you and Dan are doing I feel that I can relax on my testing. This will finally give me the break I have been looking for to start working on the other as yet unfinished files. First though I would like to see you and Dan K start a dialogue here that I can follow, and the bumping of StarFire and Non-StarFire heads should lead to some good results.

[President_Elect_Shang]

I got the Sprint XO Missile to fire and the deciding factor here seems to be the range. After which it moved in and rammed. I can’t understand what is taking place in your situation abc, except that I would suggest trying again with the drone attack strategy set as I outlined it below. Let me know what happens when you do this. If it still does not work than start a new game and try that. Also if you go to the Version_History.txt and scroll down you will see what Build you are using, check to make sure that it says Build 2 below the Build 1 entry at the top. Sorry but I forgot to update that part of the ReadMe.txt or I would just ask you to check there.

I double checked myself by testing this same thing in the base Version of the game. Here to it fired then moved in to ram even though it could have fired again. This tells me that I will need to adjust the speed of the XO weapons. I will take a closer look at them later today and see if I can get away with cutting the speed of only those that are direct fire type however, in all likelihood I will need to adjust almost all of them to maintain a balance.

[abc]

Supplies: 10 point per star sounds good! Let's try it and see how it works out.

Missiles: Can you change the HBM to a drone warhead??

Drones: I'll test them some more, too. there has to be a way to make them work correctly+

Auto Loader: It's really a minor point. The auto loader reloads XO Racks, so it should be exposed to enemy fire, too. But one or more damaged components won't make a difference after a battle. With the new box launchers, ships will need more cargo capacity(multiple cargo holds) anyway.