Game Enhancement Mod Revisited

[Sisko18]

Hey everyone, its Sisko18. If you don't remember, I had planned on releasing a Game Enhancement Mod a few months ago, but problems with uploading and a rough college semester made me put the project on hold. However, I am revisiting it and plan on restructuring this mod in the next few weeks. For starters, I was unhappy with the gameplay of the mod. It was very realistic and accomplished all that I wanted it too. However, I really am a fan of Armada I and am seeking a way to bring that gameplay back to Armada II. So here is a tentative list of what I plan to do:

Physics: I would like help on reworking the ship physics. As of now, battleships are still too fast and manueverable, and the gap between smaller and larger craft is not nearly as pronounced as it should be in the heat of combat. So if someone could help with the general physics files that would be great.

Weapons: I plan to just rip the weapons files directly off of my first version of the mod since they came out very good. Battleships all have multi-targetting torpedos and usually multiple beam weapons, as they have plenty of arrays and can take on many smaller ships at once. Smaller ships have more restricted fire arcs and less arrays.

Scaling: I plan to rescale all ships to make them larger. In Armada I, ships are much larger and more significant. In Armada II, ships are extremely small and are just too expendable. You shouldn't send in 40 or so ships to a base and have them all obliterated and then just replace them in a few minutes!

AI: I would like help on making some extra spicey AIP files, as my AI would fight you, but didn't offer too much of a challenge. I want someone who is pretty good at programming AI and can give a pushover AI, a challenging
AI that you can beat, and one of those impossible AIs.

Races: I plan to combine the Cardassians with the Dominion as usual because that seems to be the only way to keep the real and competitive. However, I am a little unsure of the Borg. I found it increasingly difficult to make them realistic, balanced, and fun at the same time as the only way to do that is to make cubes massive and take minutes to build, which lead to borg fleets of only 5 or so vessels which wasn't fun. I don't really care for the Borg too based on the what I have in mind for this mod.

Techtree: If you ever have played Myth's Dominion conversion mod for Armada I, this is how I plan to structure the techtree. A simple build your resources and build ships as you please, with no need for research or ship upgrades. People want to build ships, so let them build them! Obviously battleships will take much longer to build, so I will definately take that into account.

Well, that is a rough plan of what I want to do with this mod. Right now, I am looking for help in making the ships physics and later some spicey AI files, as well as feedback on the Borg. Any help is appreciated!

[CanadianBorg]

Well, you should leave the holding beams and tech assimilator beams in for the Borg, but consider adding them to every Borg combat ship, just to make them more efficient at assimilating the enemy.

[Sisko18]

So leave the Borg in as a race? Currently I have Detector, Borg Probe (which is the Interceptor), Diamond, Scout Sphere, Battle Sphere, Renegade Prototype (see TNG: The Descent), Assimilation Cube, and Tactical Cube. They all have assault transporters, but only the Battle Sphere and Cubes have holding Beams.

[the Starfleet Kid]

A better option might simply to be to leave the Borg out altogether. Not every mod needs the Borg in it, and I'd rather see a Borg done right (without "Tactical Polygons" and other impractical designs just to make a race out of 'em). I'd always prefer to see a focus on the races that can be included, and which have something new to offer. The Borg can always come later.

You might also want to release this one in the style of AoW-- one piece at a time, just so the community knows what you're doing.

[Freyr]

Originally Posted by Sisko18

Physics: I would like help on reworking the ship physics. As of now, battleships are still too fast and manueverable, and the gap between smaller and larger craft is not nearly as pronounced as it should be in the heat of combat. So if someone could help with the general physics files that would be great.

IIRC Thunderfoot's physics project is free to include in other mods. He let me pinch his latest and greatest version for Vanilla Ultimate anyway. Once you compare the differences between that and stock it should be reasonably easy to make what changes you want to fit your mod.

Originally Posted by Sisko18

Scaling: I plan to rescale all ships to make them larger. In Armada I, ships are much larger and more significant. In Armada II, ships are extremely small and are just too expendable. You shouldn't send in 40 or so ships to a base and have them all obliterated and then just replace them in a few minutes!

That's more play balance. However, yeah. I couldn't really agree more!

Originally Posted by Sisko18

AI: I would like help on making some extra spicey AIP files, as my AI would fight you, but didn't offer too much of a challenge. I want someone who is pretty good at programming AI and can give a pushover AI, a challenging
AI that you can beat, and one of those impossible AIs.

Have you been playing Vanilla Ultimate by any chance?

you only actually only do one AI (as in build list) the appearance of 3 different AI's is simply done by renaming easy, medium & hard and changing the times it takes the AI to build etc.

I suppose I should do an AI tutorial at some point really.

Originally Posted by Sisko18

Races: I plan to combine the Cardassians with the Dominion as usual because that seems to be the only way to keep the real and competitive. However, I am a little unsure of the Borg. I found it increasingly difficult to make them realistic, balanced, and fun at the same time as the only way to do that is to make cubes massive and take minutes to build, which lead to borg fleets of only 5 or so vessels which wasn't fun. I don't really care for the Borg too based on the what I have in mind for this mod.

If you'd like a radical idea try this.

The borg have 3 ship types. The Sphere, Diamond and Cube.

The sphere and diamond are sort of normal ships.

Which leaves us with the cubes. You start off able to build level1 scout cubes, 8 of which can fuse to make a ship 8 times stronger than a scout (which makes it a slightly overpowered light cruiser).

This level2 cube can be built as well as fused, at the same point everybody else can build cruisers via your borgs tech tree to make leveling up easier. The Level2 cube then fuses to create a Level3 cube which is freakin overpowered and expensive battleship. Repeat this until you get the point where the officer limit wouldn't let you have 8 cubes to fuse for the next level. Then add another level just to taunt the people that DO build up that far.

This would be (reasonably) balanced because the borg would have either a lot of small cubes that would be blown away by everybody else or a smaller number of really powerful ships than anybody else would be using at that time in the game. As their ships would be expensive and slow to build they would be immensely valuable to the borg player and they wouldn't be throwing around cubes like confetti for fear of losing them so it should end up fairly treky balanced.

Originally Posted by Sisko18

Well, that is a rough plan of what I want to do with this mod. Right now, I am looking for help in making the ships physics and later some spicey AI files, as well as feedback on the Borg. Any help is appreciated!

Physics is easy, just ask thunderfoot to use the physics project.

As for the AI, its easy to do yourself. Just remove anything that's not useful from the AI's build lists and set the minimum force matching ratio to between 0.6 and 1.0. This forces the AI to hang onto its ships until its fleet is at least 60% of the size yours is. In the campaign in vanilla ultimate I had it set to 0.8, which is enough to nearly decimate your fleet every battle. This forces you to be constantly rebuilding and worrying about what the AI has planned next. If you set it to 1.0 or higher then the AI will either build a fleet and steamroller you everytime (which is undesirable because you want to person playing to have fun and not curse your AI) or never have enough ships to attack you with and just sit around its base doing nothing.

[Sisko18]

How do I alter the force ratio thing? And really their fleet size wasn't the problem, it was the fact that they would chill at their base with a large fleet, then wait like 10 minutes to launch an attack at what seemed to be the most random time. I want them to build then attack immediately and send continous waves in.

[Freyr]

// Use the fleet AI system
double fleetAIRatio = 0.8;

Also, these are quite useful;-


int min_escort_force = 1;
int max_escort_force = 1;

int min_perimeter_force = 8;
int max_perimeter_force = 8;

int max_defense_force = 32;
int min_defense_force = 16;

int min_exploration_force = 1;
int max_exploration_force = 1;

int min_attack_force = 8;
int max_attack_force = 16;

Easily guessable what all that does really, and these are the reasons why:-

Escort set to a max of 1 to prevent the AI tying the entire fleet down on escorting its freighters or whatever.

Perimeter set to 8 ships because you don't want to waste to much on doing essentially nothing.

At least one fleet kept in defence with an absolute maximum of two fleets (you want to kill the AI? work at it )

exploration set to 1 ship, as the campaign is set up with borg stations in contact with the player on like every mission. this would want to be far higher in skirmish.

Attack set to a minimum of 8 ships because the AI can't do tactical combat with even forces to save its life. Therefore you compensate by just forcing it to use a larger fleet. A maximum number of ships is set to force the AI to attack.

If you do have vanilla ultimate play mission 6 on merciless to see how well it works and what it does and then look at the fed_06 AIP file (and what it has on the map!) Just take a look at what it does and how it is written and copy it. I say the fed06 one because in my opinion (and i'll admit to some bias) my fed06 AI is the best AI available for armada. I can't beat it half the time on merciless and I wrote it so I know what its going to do! I know it doesn't cheat one iota doing it, which makes it feel worse...

I was going to rewrite the AI for every mission to that standard, however I simply don't have the time anymore.