Yeah, but it's also notoriously buggy.  There is no point in throwing in as many models that one can get their hands on, let alone, needing 10+ factions.  If you're going to break up the factions, at least, do it like Rebellion did.  A Progressive vs. Conservative divide works fine.  Not to mention that Zombie is probable the best coder in the community.   He isn't human.

Trust me, we've done a lot of bugchecking and balancing since our last release.  We're damn close to another public release though and we will be receiving input on bugs and balance issues, although after our next and final Entrenchment release (except for bugfix patches hopefully) we're moving straight to Rebellion with no Diplomacy release.

EDIT: That sounds awesome Zombies, and I can't wait to test it out.

Sparda, has 7DS considered splitting off it's various races into stackable mini-mods like SotF and SoGE have done? 7DS would heavily benefit from the reduction in RAM usage, assuming its militias aren't too racially diverse.

Yeah, we're definitely thinking of doing that for our Rebellion release, although we probably can't now that you mention it since our militias are definitely very racially diverse.

Even so, you can still do it; it depends on what you mean by diverse. For example, if you're only using 2-5 ships and 1 defensive structure out of a whole race's fleet of say 15 frigates, plus capital ships and Titans, you can leave those 2-3 ships' entity, mesh, and texture files present in your CORE module while the rest of the ships and structures can be moved to their own file. That alone is a good 170+ MB of savings right there.

Assets which are common among two or more races would have to be left in the CORE module, such as say a ship (entity and/or mesh) used by both the TEC and TCA. UI stuff, and entity files that aren't either a ship, structure, or playerRACE, could be left in as well. Or, alternatively, you could put those common assets into their own stackable mini-mod, one which would have to be put underneath the TEC/TCA in the mod list.  If say 90% of a race's stuff is integrated into the core of the mod, then it might not be the best idea to move them out.

Interesting.  I'll be honest, I haven't really looked at our code in a while so I don't know for sure how interdependent we are, but then again I'm no longer the primary coder.  SamazRalan (or whatever name he goes by on here) and mak0n are the primary coders for 7DS right now, and they'd be the ones responsible for the coding for that.  I'll let Mak0n know what you posted.

I'd be happy to explain things more detail and/or answer questions if any of you guys have some.

That's cool, but you're missing the main point:


It's bigger than it needs to be.  You can optimize Sins as much as you can, but you will start hitting stability issues the more you add (something you guys experienced long ago).  Not everything will be 100% accurate because of human error, and the more content added means more chance of screw ups.  You know how notoriously fickle the Iron Engine is.  Sins can be bitchier than a woman on her period [/misogyny].

You have to question whether this or that is worth having in the long run, especially, when far more time is spent working on tracking down bugs vs. creating and adding new content.  I would use this chance to combine as many assets as possible, and get rid of the excess.  It'll save alot of grief in the long run.

I'm ok with you guys commenting or criticizing my mod in this thread.

Please take comments about other mods elsewhere please.

 

I've said all I need to say on the topic.  I would argue the mod isn't as relevant now compared to when it was first released, anyway (it's not setting anymore standards and whatnot).  It's not worth arguing.

I cut a version of my modding framework for Fall of Humanity which will be my first conversion mod. 

Here's a rough draft of my plans which will mostly be a lot of coding work. I'm wanting more emphasis on fleet engagements and less on geeking star bases and titans against the AI. Hopefully it all pans out well and since it's all primarily coding I only have myself to work against me on this. Like I said previously magic casting abilities are out of the mod as I'm wanting to focus on a more limited hard scifi theme. Maybe it will be fun, maybe it won't. I'm just going to enjoy trying something different.

 

Fall of Humanity will be told in 3 acts.

Act 1: War

Act 2: First Contact

Act 3: Extinction

 

War Factions: Alliance and Syndicate

First Contact Factions: Unknown aliens yet to be discovered

Extinction Factions: Unknown new threat arrives

Human Fleet Roles

Flagship 

• Your fleets main Battlecruiser which coordinates fleet strategy
• Flagships won't be overly powerful but will retain levels when rebuilt.
• You'll only be able to build 1 flagship (similar to titans in vanilla).

Battleships

• Heavily armored
• Heavily Gunned
• Extremely slow.
• Capable of extremely long range Kinetic Bombardment 

Battlecruisers

• Sacrifices armor for speed
• Heavily gunned
• General purpose attack battleship capable of taking on Cruisers
• Capable of engaging battleships in number or supported with Heavy Cruisers

Auxililiary Cruisers

• Heavily armored
• Slow
• Lightly gunned
• Responsible for resupply and performing remote fleet repairs (ship yards will be capable of performing on site repairs)
• Able to exploit remote resources while in hostile territory to manufacture additional expendable munitions

Heavy Cruisers

• Moderate speed
• Moderately Armored
• Heavy Weapons for engaging Battleships

Light Cruisers

• Lightly Armored
• Fast
• Capable of defending Battleships or Battlecruisers from Heavy Cruiser attacks

Destroyers

• Very Lightly Armored
• Very Fast
• Primary role is to defend heavier unites from Light Cruisers
• Speed advantage can be used to strike fleeing targets or targets of opportunity

There will be no strikecraft

General Characteristics of ships

All ships will have dynamic movement

All ships will have shields though shield mitigation as a mechanic will be out.

All heavy cruisers or larger while taking damage will begin to have critical systems go offline at various intervals. Eventually ships will lose the propulsion and if damaged enough will slowly float away and die. As ships are damaged they will take less and less physical damage depending on the class of ship. Battleships for example will become increasingly difficult to destroy as they're hull reaches 5-10% though at this point they will be floating husks without any weapons or propulsion.

All ships will have expendable munitions represented by their reserve capacity. When expendable munitions run out weapons such as missiles or kinetic based weapons will be disabled. Powerful shorter range energy based weapons will still be available until expendable munitions are re-supplied.

Escape pods will be launched from dying cruisers and battleships. Escape pods making it to friendly planets or fleet will add back to your available Military Personnel. Escape pods may be captured for additional experience by enemies.

 

Economies

Resources will include Personnel, Raw Materials and Research.

Research facilities may be built on key planets only and can be used to focus on improving key areas of your empire.

It will be possible to divert Personnel for temporary increases in Raw Materials or Research.

Raw Materials and Research may also be sold to acquire additional Personnel.

Personnel and Raw Materials will be used when constructing ships and structures.

Research points will be required to start any improvements through the various research trees.

 

Additional personnel will mainly be acquired by building orbital training facilities. The rate of increase in personnel will largely depend on the population size of the planet and available training facilities.

Alliance forces will rely on a steady stream of recruits and will experience surges in volunteers after successful engagements.

Syndicate forces will rely heavily on forced conscription for resupplying additional personnel. Their surges will occur when acquiring new planets or after suffering losses.

Colonizing planets will require dedicating a large amount of personnel to secure the planet and enough raw materials to start operations. Integrating a planet fully into your empire will be a costly affair.

 

Research

Fleet combat tactics, command and control research will be based on the number and presence of capital class ships in the fleet.

Planet side operations including planet development, training facilities, construction yards, etc will depend on the number of research stations built.

New technology or advancements will be acquired by spending accumulated or purchased research points.

 

 

Well im impressed. This sounds great. I have been hoping for someone to ditch the magic abilities and make it more of a tactical fleet battle. I really like what you have outlined above.

Regarding strikecraft, you could make them entirely different by inncreasing the time it takes to rebuild em to like 2-5 minutes or something, which in effect means that when you launch all squadrons that are the squadrons you have availible for that encounter, they wont endlessly spawn which imo are a really lame way of dealing with it. But entirely up to you offcource, i personally think bombers and figthers and carriers add something, but im pretty sure they are not needed to make a awesome mod.

Would be cool if you had a somewhat different way of approaching combat for the different factions, like for instance one faction could focus on micro/macro cannons and plenty of broadsides while another could focus on ehrr mass drivers/rail guns whatnot and have most of their weapon points facing forward etc. One slow and steady vs another that is fast and skirmishing. One focusing on large powerful ships whereas the other focusing more on small packs of long range destroyers, just to make it feel more like unique factions.

Suggest you still keep the leveling system just change the abilities to more moderate plausible ones (like veteran engineering crew, expert gunnery crew etc simply giving a small damage boost/repair boost etc) or just implement a bronze, silver, gold chevron etc to indicate gaining rank and a small boost to go alongside it.

Just tossing out some very broad thoughts here.

I got no clue how you intend to implement refilling of ammo, unless you will simply halt antimatter regen totally and have a vessel which can refill other ships antimatter act like a support vessel, but then how will that vessel refill, i doubt the ai can be made to go back to its planets to refill. Will be interesting to see what you have thought here.

Anyway good luck, sounds like an ambitious project but a very good one.

Right now I just don't see strikecraft playing a role in the mod.

Syndicates will have the more expendable ships overall. Their tactics will vary slightly from the Alliance that likes to preserve ships and their crews. Overall weapons will be fairly comparable between the two factions though in keeping with the harder scifi theme as these are both human factions. I will look at some other tactical differences as well with the Syndicates in keeping with this theme based on how things test out.

I also have some challenges learning how dynamic movement will affect the battles as well as avoided the dreaded infinite chase out of the gravity well. 

Indeed ship leveling is a bit of an issue as I don't want magic hull and armor appearing on the units. More experienced repair, engineering teams all sound plausible. A rank insignia for promoting the ships commander sounds interesting too. I've thought about decreasing the chance to hit down for all ships (vanilla is 100% chance to hit). A seasoned crew might be able to better position their ship ensuring more attacks go where they should.

The general idea is only missiles or kinetic based weapons will rely on expendable munitions. All energy based weapons will always be available. Auxililiary cruisers will be tasked with refilling expendables which the AI should be able to handle quite well. The next task is how do you refill the Auxiliary. Two ways will be possible here. One is being in your own system where supply routes are established and expendable munitions can be resupplied when not in combat. The other way is for an Auxiliary cruiser to deploy their own mobile mining units in remote locations or deploying raiding teams to enemy structures.

I had also thought about using raw materials as a global resource for Auxiliaries but I'm leaning more towards the fact if your fleet is in remote enemy space they are cutoff from traditional supply lines.

Oh dynamic movement eh, is that the one that was used in the star trek mod? The mod was awesome, but i remember i really despised the ships moving around like small jets. A real battle in space would involve ships lining up at the maximum of their range and unleashing deaths thousand of thousands of meters away. I would like actually positioning your vessels to get the most out of their weapons, but i guess that might be taking it a bit too personal hehe.

Yeah leveling is tricky, but dont get too caught up in the magical stat appearing when you get a level, its just symbolic for what really goes on. Like a crew may be highly experienced and may have some tricky maneuvers in their sleeve which enables them to position in such a way as to make most of the enemies initial shots miss while themselves hitting with a full salvo. It pretty much comes down to strategy. How good a strategist are you, but then how to put that into stats? Very hard to do it realistically but thats just it, its simply impossibly, you need to force your brain to see that ship x has a 40% statistically higher chanse of victory due to highly experienced crew etc, thus in effect making them take less damage/do more damage aslong as the outcome is said 40% (or whatever number you want)  I would for the most part avoid active abilities and keep things passive. Simple things like a 5% cooldown on weapons per rank (veteran gunnery crew), 10% faster repair per rank(expert engineering crew) to keep it from beeing magic i would say it must either be realistically linked to strategy, skill or actual improvements on the ship (installing an extra generator etc)

I would however advice to keep a number of different abilities open for selection, it is more fun to be able to make different choices. The problem comes with finding a cool concept and making sure its balanced. Or maybe this is just the old SINS speaking through me hmmm. Hard to say, hard to say. Would also be cool if you kept effects to a minimum, more realistic than a laser screaming across the screen that is as big as the capitol ship firing it. Keep the effects somewhat in line with the ships firing them and the size of the guns.

Have you considered not having shields at all? I applaud that you are removing the mitigation factor which is just totally strange, but might also be an idea to do away with shields at all, or keep it for a special faction/special ships or something.

Finally with the personal attention to ships that you are dooing here, might it be an idea to make ships more special, as in not something that you build a swarm off in 2 mins and send off to die to be easily replaced in the next 2 mins. When you loose a bunch of ships it should mean something, not just be a number in an endless zerg you spawn forth from your factories. This might mean fewer ships overall, hmm.

Just some more random thoughts.

So explain what the syndicates and the alliance are. I am guessing the alliance is the typical alliance of united worlds under a democratically elected leader/council of some sort while the syndicate is the evil megacorporation/s? Or am i totally off base here. hehe.

Decreasing the chanse to hit overall sounds like a plausible idea which might work well together with some abilities like you said.

Hmm, the auxilliary logistical cruisers sounds plausible to me, you have to keep them alive because they keep you supplied. However we have to remember the size of some of these ships they would prob carry vast amounts of ammo making re-armament not exactly a daily thing, its like a modern day carrier x2-10 prob. Offcource if its firing cannonshells into space the size of small houses...

Anyway looking forward to seeing more stuff outlined, you got some good stuff going here.

In the back of my mind I want ship building to be a slow affair especially for larger ships. I want to avoid the swarm mentality too.

Though fleet to fleet engagements will be costly so just because you won doesn't mean you can just barrel through to the next system.

I thought about it, but like the idea of shields protecting from random volleys. They won't be able to survive sustained hits. Some weapons will poke holes in shields too allowing weapons a chance to bypass for a short time.

The idea in space is the ships are moving and moving fairly quickly. I get what you mean about positioning units and what not, but I think speed will come into play more with dynamic movement. I might find I want the battleships taking more stationary positions which is something I was considering. I just have to play around some to see.

These are basically some things I'll be shooting for. There will be other improvements ships can get, but you'll have to visit a shipyard or be newly constructed to get them.

Exactly. Evil megacorporation everyone works for. Kind of like Hypercorps taking control of the population and treating planets and their population like a corporation too.

Ships should have enough on board supplies to fight engagements assuming it doesn't go on too long. They would should only need resupplied after a battle or while retreating.

Also, some systems will require Auxilliearies in order to exploit the resources there as you won't have the option to colonize and backtracking may not be an option.

Basically there's some other stuff I haven't fully gone into like time to traverse a system, game speeds, etc. Some of these things will dictate a change in tactics versus flying around a massive map as quickly as you can on faster settings now.

Thanks for answers, it sounds like you have it pretty well thought out. Going to keep an eye on this for sure.

It's good to have ideas challenged. Thank you.

I can only hope the gameplay is fun, because I'm not messing around worrying about a bunch of new models.

A word of caution on this; a stationary ship in a sea of dynamic movement ships will be extremely powerful, as unlike the moving ships, it will be focused primarily on firing at ships. I've noticed this in Sins; a stationary ship will fire it's weapons more than a non-stationary one and thus has a notably higher damage output, assuming statistically "equal" weaponry. Of course, this is very analogous to WWII battleships; heavily armored long range bombardment platforms, vulnerable to fighters (which don't exist in space).

Hehe, yeah ugh, not worth it just for a new shiny dress.

Yeah what lavo says. When i played star trek, i parked my ships and they outgunned every other moving one, was pretty hillarious, them zooming around while i just sat there blowing them out of the sky.

I have a few ideas to hopefully punish people that put their ships in hold position. We'll see... but if you want to game the system you can do that in vanilla sins too. Sometimes it's more fun to limit how you cheat

Well, that was fairly easy to solve. 

 

Ability: Evasive Maneuvers

When your ship is moving it will be harder to target and damage.

When your ship is not moving it will be an easy target to hit and damage. (i.e. a ship not moving will get raped by anyone attacking it).

 

How big distance do you visualice the ships fighting from zombie? Im just having a realy hard time seeing huge destroyers etc dogfighting like modern figther planes, especially in space where there are no gravity and bullets can go miles.. and miles.. and miles..

I just want some help to see this mechanism as cool instead of as hopelessly lame. So someone.. come on.. give me something.

Also nice and easy solution to the problem with stationary superiority there.

The problem is stationary is not superior in space. The ability to dodge and move is superior in space. 

If one target is moving towards another that is not moving which has an easier time of predicting where shots should be fired?

We are essentially talking basic physics and predictability here especially in a 3 dimensional space.

 

Which is more likely to happen with moving targets. That stationary target is likely to catch everything thrown at it.

 

From a gameplay perspective with Sins they took the right approach. But honestly WWII battleships are not analogous to how a Battleship would behave in space. 

Picture flying towards a planet at relative sub-light speeds. Your targetting computers lock onto the orbital frigate yard and ships being built or repaired. 

Do you

A) launch weapons while moving at 0.x light speed towards the targets making a sweeping pass?

or 

Pull up in range of the orbital frigate yard, perform a full stop and then launch weapons at the frigate yard?

Some of the weapons will be long range, especially kinetic attacks at planets or structures.

 

Others will be shorter range such as the Energy based weapons.