5451961

Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

Civic Protection

January 10th, 2011 07:49 PM

I cooked up these ideas myself. I don't know how to mod, I just came up with these ideas myself, leaving it to the people who know HOW to mod.

Bording party:
This button would be next to the attack button. Attack makes the ship fire weapons until the ship or station blows up.

"Bording party" makes a ship attack, then the instant the ship or station's shields are down ALL firing on the ship HALTS
(including your other buddies near you, they stop firing too, and they could turn to other enemy ships in the mean time) .
The shields go down and then crew members are beamed over to the attacked ship to take it over.

Using the old attack button then stopping when the shields are down to transport also allows the ship and your other buddies flying near to (without user intervention) resume firing while transporting and thus destroy he ship and making the process useless.

Transporter realism:
In Star Trek movies/TV series, a ship needs to drop shields before they can transport. This mod could be a button that disables shields. The transport button would be grayed out before the shields button is pressed. The range must be extended greatly too.

Self destruct:
ALL ships/stations in the game have the self destruct option added.
And a ship/station can be made to self destruct even if there is zero crew alive on board. Like Khan's ship blowing up after he was dead. The destruction radius should be doubled. The time should be added 1.5x original and more powerful, its antimatter exploding after all! And the fire ball could be made deep red. The audio clip could be a mechanical countdown. 3-2-1 BOOOOOOM!!!!

Better disassemble:
When a ship is set to disassemble, it just falls apart and disappears in space. Where did all that material go? And who disassembled it? This mod could be like a reverse of building with the construction ship. The construction ship would have a "disassemble station" button and when pressed and then the station is clicked on, the ship fly up and the worker bees fly around the station and the normal disassemble process is completed.

Tractor beam:
All ships have the tractor beam. AND the tractor beam can grab ships with engines intact, AND enemy ships.

Star base:
Can make the little Venture Class ship.

Venture Class:
should be beefed up with better shields, but to make it no more powerful then the Defient class ship.

Galaxy/Nebula:
Both the Galaxy and Nebula class ships should be given the Corbamite weapon.

Sovereign:
Sovereign class ships should be changed, to be the same strength and weapons as the Enterprise Hero ship. It is after all the same star ship class for gods sake! Stock audio effect are not changed.

Warp construction ships:
All constructions ships should beable to go to warp speed. They have warp nacells on them, god!

Farengi:
They are changed in the files to be enemy to all species regardless of the mission or multiplayer. Allows live ships in range to automatically fight back when these greedy little bastards sneak in and steal a disabled ship. If none of their Starfleet buddies are in range to fight these assholes then they get to keep their prize.

Warp core damage:
In Star Trek, in battle; when a ship gets hit and their warp drive is "hit"
and damaged badly, the ship can explode even with all other systems somewhat intact. So in the game when the "engines" meter drops to 0% the ship blows up.

Wearing out:
In the game if the ship is able to limp back to space dock it can be fixed to brand new shape. Again and again and again. This is unrealistic. Any mechanical thing like a tool, car, aircraft, or whatever, can only be used, abused, fixed and used again only so many times. In The Search for Spock, it is implied that Enterprise was too old, saw too much battle action was repaired and rebuilt too many times, it was time to scrap it and build something new. So a ship or station can only have so many "repair chances", until it can't be brought back to optimum. In the game if a ship is repaired totally at a space dock five times, whatever shape it leaves in is the best its going to be. After that units sixth return to the dock all beaten up, all the dock can do is recrew it, and that’s it. It no longer self-heals or can be fixed with the dock. If its sensors are shot to shit, that’s how it stays. All the hull damage remains after the sixth time. It must be decommissioned and a new ship built.

5452118

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 11th, 2011 03:56 AM

That's ok, it's easy to learn. If you visit Starbase 34 Tutorials, you will find comprehensive tutorials on ODF modding, which is all you need to learn to be able to do everything you've put here.
There is a boarding party button already on the commando ships for each race which does what you want, so this could be used to do that. Ships do already stop shooting at a ship that your transporting to, but that doesn't disarm torpedo volleys already on the way to the ship. You have to learn to quit shooting at a ship with powerful things before it's shields are down, because the hull doesn't last long.
Shields do already drop when your transporting.

Easily done by adding in the self destruct special to each ship.

This can't be done, unfortunately.
You could do this if you wanted to.
It can be done, but it won't make a difference to the lifetime of the venture class ship. IIRC, the shield rating of the defiant is 80. A battleship typically does 100 damage with it's phasers and photons, so you'll still lose them to one shot.
You can do this.

Or maybe the Enterprise should be changed back to the same stats as the Sovereign seeing as it's the ship that's bigger and better than the production varient?

All hero ships are tougher than the normal ones, mostly because keeping them alive is an objective in every mission they are in, and having them die easily would just be annoying.

But yes, it's doable.
It's doable, but it's problematic for gameplay because the construction ship can then be used to warp right next to a base and surround it with turrets which are far more powerful than ships for a comparable price. (hence why it can't warp)

I'm not sure that you can do this. You could always just turn ferengi off? I'm pretty sure it's an option under the advanced menu.
Critical hits do exist, you can tweak these to be more severe and more probable than they are in the stock game if you want.
I think they said the enterprise was 30 years old and she'd had her day, which is fair enough considering they were commissioning the excelsior class and other new designs at the time. Why spend shipyard time on a obselete ship at that stage? Besides, they'd probably have to create parts from scratch for such an old ship.

On the other hand, a 15 minute old Sovereign that's seen a few battles is a bit of a different matter as it's a production design, and they probably have spare parts lying around.

The clincher is really that this can't be done in the game though.

5452300

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 11th, 2011 11:52 AM

RLY? Sorry, usually I am the ODF nerd around here, but that one confused me. Okay, I know that we can put the tracbeam on every frakkin' ship in the game. But the other part really works? Must try this ASAP.

5452362

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 11th, 2011 01:57 PM

It doesn't, and the engines would need to be offline.

That said, if your going tractoring around an enemy ship then your going to want the weapons off-line as well. Even if he doesn't now, he will after he'd tried it the first time. Even if your towing an insignificant little ship like a destroyer with functional weapons then the damage adds up very quickly.

What can I say, back in the day when A2 was played online lots some maps required you to pass close to black holes, where the engine disabler suddenly became a highly lethal weapon against anything, even a TFC with shield remodulation. If you got your timing right. When you got it slightly wrong and only get most of a fleet and needed to do a clean sweep against remaining things like the Romulan Shadow class ships then marine ships with relatively acceptable shields and a tractor beam become pretty deadly, especially as all you need to do is sit at the edge of the tractor range, hit the tractor beam for that initial grab and pull towards the ship and then turn it off as the ship goes sailing into the gravity well to outraged shrieks.

But yes, you'd need a separate weapon to take care of weapons in the first place, so you could create a special that disables the engines and weapons if nothing else.

5452448

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 11th, 2011 05:55 PM

There was a special weapon I encountered somewhere a while back which tractored any ship you wanted. But it was held in place because the beam was a modified Borg holding beam. As Freyr points out, even with that beam if you don't disable the systems and take out the crew it's just not going to work.

And I love that trick. Steamrunners in the right place at the right time FTW.

5452614

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 12th, 2011 04:26 AM

You do realize that modified blackholes can be used to simulate the surface of planets and asteroides and lots of other things you don't want to crash into or lose engines around.

5453448

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

Majestic-MSFC

January 13th, 2011 05:42 PM

Yes I had one for A1 back in the early days of modding. I had it on my Ambassador class. So as it has been said it can be done and it was a modified borg holding beam, just a different colour and didn't transport any crew on board.

5454646

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 15th, 2011 04:16 PM

This is my favorite of all your ideas, the one I think that's worth considering. I think there's even a way to do it, if they ever make a sequel... not sure about the hardcoding for A2, I just can't imagine it doable in A2... but since battle statistics are tracked, participation and percentages damaged for each part (hull, engines, weapons, shields) could potentially be tracked and have a threshold; when reached, the ship is instead decommissioned... or perhaps subsequent damage occurs exponentially faster based on previous damage.

5454769

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

Majestic-MSFC

January 15th, 2011 10:40 PM

I'll say what many hate to hear, perhaps Fleet Ops might end up coding it in the future. I have only recently seriously looked into the mod myself as a modding platform and it's worth it. While I am not a fan of the base mod and it;s game-play I like it's potential as a modding platform and I wouldn't be surprised down the road that some like what is quoted above could make an appearance in their mod.

5454875

Re: Some of my Armada II mod ideas. Enjoy!!

January 16th, 2011 08:16 AM

In FO it would be possible to code it, but it would need a lot of work... A way would be to attach the repair order to a replaceweapon. Once the repair is complete, the ship ODF would be replaced with a new one which contains lower HP for the ship and the subsystems.
But for that you would need a lot of ship ODF. You still can't replace ODF values and keeping the ODF at the same time.