My own mod thread !! PDFMod !! (design stage)

[Suicide Junkie]

I just hate the « damage soaking » armor model ...Armor is here to STOP damage, either it succeeds and the damage is minimal, or it fails and damage passes through. That's how it works IRL for AFVs and naval ships !
So I plan to rather have « massive » component (basically 1/ship) with a high « emissive » ability (and perhaps regen as well). Structure of these should be high as well, but I have to tinker more with the idea...

I suspect you will have a LOT of trouble balancing that emissive thing. Instead, you may want to consider the following:
Piercable Armor
1) Start with a standard SE4 piece of armor.
2) Remove the armor ability.
3) Increase the hitpoints per KT size immensely. At least 10 HP/KT is good, Tweak to taste.

For example:
Make a 30 KT "armor" chunk, that has 1180 hitpoints, and place it on a standard Escort (which has 120 hitpoints worth of internals)
This piece of armor will absorb about 90% of the hits that strike the ship. The other 10% of the time, a shot will pierce, and shred the internals.
Big guns can destroy the armor, and little guns can zing shots off the armor while hoping for a lucky hit.

In many cases, by the end of the battle there will be a number of burnt-out shells of armor plating, waiting to be salvaged or vaporized by excessive amounts of weapons fire.

You can use smaller/weaker components, and allow layered armor, or whatever you desire.

[oleg]

SJ,

This is exactly how Proportions' standard armor works ! (it has "normal" armor as well)

[Val]

Working with engines of different sizes is something I had tried in the B5 Mod, it worked great for human players, but the AI would have fits when it was designing ships.

Best of luck in making the mod, looking foward to seeing the results

[geoschmo]

Another (untested) idea is to give them less than 100% chance of hitting by making their heads « direct fire » with a hefty negative modifier (say -60% at start, improving through research to -20%).

Please let us know how this comes out. This is actually an original idea I think. I have never heard anybody suggest this before. Of course I could have just missed it. I have probably only read 20,000 of the 25,000 Posts on this forum.

Geoschmo

[tesco samoa]

I always found mines usefull up to about turn 70 then they are just swept away. Since the limit is 100 per location.

So what I did was increase the units per location to 5000.

This kept mines effective for the whole game.

For ship sizes. I found the 575kt and the 650kt sizes very usefull. Especially if you add an additional engine movement to the 575kt and 650 kt.

[tesco samoa]

Watch out on the non weapon component enhancement if you want the ai to use them.

You will have to create default component enhancements for the ai to use.

[Suicide Junkie]

This is exactly how Proportions' standard armor works ! (it has "normal" armor as well)

I had no idea about that until people started telling me it was the same.

I started with the BTG armor in P&N, years ago now. (April 2001)
Then it was a natural extension on that to make armor for B5. Now people are telling me its all over the place.

This is a good example of convergent evolution at work