This mod enables fighter physics and behavior for larger ships, enabling ships handling characteristics to come into play beside their defense/attack values. Tactics such as tactical retreat, regrouping, fire groups, battle formations etc. now have a meaning as you want to prepare your fleet for the upcoming chaos of battle which quickly rages out of control. Superior numbers no longer guarantee victory as the large random factor of ships dogfighting comes into play. Ship roles have been further separated, with attack classes now playing the pivotal role in any fleet composition and support and fire support classes taking the back seat, as they should.
HD version can be downloaded here.
High-res version can be downloaded from here: Mediafire(85.42Mb)
Keep in mind this is a beta, and thus is far from perfect.
Big thanks to Banthracis for taking the time to convert the mod to the latest version of Entrenchment, and to Harpo99999 for making the tool with which this was done!
MOD DOWNLOAD:
v0.9 1.041 version compatible (FileFront)
v0.9 1.041 version compatible (Megaupload)
v0.9 - (Mediafire , 4.77Mb)
v0.8 Mediafire(2.47Mb)
BETA TESTING INFORMATION
As this is a beta version of the mod, occasional strange ship behaviour, unforeseen inbalances and other such occurences are to be expected. I would appreciate any player reporting observed bugs, inbalances, disfunctionalities of ship abilities or roles etc. as this will enable me to further refine the mod. You can post such comments and suggestions here or send them to mansh00ter@yahoo.com
Changes so far:
V0.9-increased the hull and shield strength of siege frigates. They are less likely to terminally melt at the first sight of a combat vessel-increased the capital ship top speeds across the board roughly doubling it - now they are on par with cruisers and slower frigates. However, most require about ten seconds to reach top speed, with siege ships requiring twenty-reduced the lateral weapon damage for Illuminators drastically, and equalized the frontal attack values with other siege frigs, to bring them in line with their counterparts.v0.8-enabled fighter physics for all ships except capitals, long range frigates, colony ships and siege ships.-doubled damage on all ships except siege and LRM-halved the hull and shield points of LRM and siege frigates-decreased the angular acceleration value of LRM, siege frigates and stationary turrets to 0.5-halved the top speed of all ships-drastically increased angular acceleration values for all ships using fighter attack-reduced the top speed of capital ships to one quarter of original***Installation:Unrar to your Entrenchment mods folder, then enable ingame. Make sure this mod loads last.Beta archive contains modified Volumetric explosions for testing purposes. If you are using the Volumetric mod already, make sure to load this mod after it. If you do not want to use Volumetric explosions&damage effects, simply install the mod as usual, then delete the "Particle" folder and explosions.explosiondata file from the GameInfo folder.
Enjoy!
I have upped the dmg by more than 2x in my mod, but also increased certain other variables to increase the difference in the. a cruiser is 5x more powerful than a frig, a cap 10x more than a cruiser. regardless. i am not trying to plug my mod, nor discredit yours. i was just wondering what you did, that is all. in my mod my ship speeds are increased and my scalar is 2.5x vanilla. so maybe that is why. they gain so much speed the turn around takes them way out the grav well. but, imo, the ships and battles move way too slow in vanilla, so i'd rather get rid of usefighterattack than sacrifice speed.
and i don't necessarily trust my Admiral AI
Well yeah, the increased speed and toughness of ships are the main reason why your battles take longer. I actually noticed that in my flight model battles tend to be more violent as ships are way less durable to damage. That's why I had to tweak some of the debris counts, because there were too many ships exploding at once during very large fleet battles.
where did you tweak debris counts?
First off, I am having a blast using this mod and belkien's one. I admit I was dumbfounded when I first played SINS and the ships stood still, I accepted it but it suprised me wholly. Your mod basically makes the game play like I envisioned a massive space battle game would. Thanks for that. Even if you changed nothing, I'd still be enthralled using it, but I cannot help but comment on one common theme.
Ship speed: I can for the most part accept my fleet not moving rapidly across the solar system with the knowledge my opponent is also unable to. However, the colonization ships are insanely slow, they are basically asking to be destroyed when unaccompanied. The ship is valuable, there is zero chance the building race saw fit to make it both slow and weak. A bit of hurry wouldn't hurt. The recon vessels, I don't see why the speed on them would've been reduced. It's not like you send a fleet of recon vessels to battle the enemy anyways. I'm sending it out for intel; as we say in the military, get there. That's what recon ships should do, get there. Quick, fast and in a hurry. Proceed smartly. Double time. Yesterday.
A remedy for having substantially slower ship speeds could be increase jump speeds somewhat, serve as an offset. Traversing the gravity well may take longer but transit between them being mildly shorter could help make up for that, especially if you are traversing more than one. As it is, if you need reinforcements, they had better be in the next gravity well over or you are done for. As noted, faster jumps could offset slower traversing afterwards.
Hyomoto, thanks for the input!
When colony ship speed is concerned, I tried to make up for the very annoying (and tactically unrealistic) fact that you can insta-colonize in this game and there is nothing anyone can do about that. Colonization of a planet is, or should be, a channelled thing, where a ship needs to actually "build up" the initial settlement before it goes into action. Now, if colonization were a regular ability, it would have been a simple matter to simply add some graphix and a timed delay to simulate this and also give the contesting force a chance to destroy the ship and interrupt the process.
This would also make using multiple colony ships on a hotly contested planet viable, as the enemy would be required o blow up all of them to prevent you from claiming the planet.
Alas, this is not so - colonization is hardcoded to be instant.
Therefore, a colonization ship should take time in another area - actually reaching the planet. This particular woe will be deeply felt by Xin players in the upcoming Last Stand mod, where the Seeder Pods can be insta-popped by a shot or two.
This makes it a viable strategy again to use multiple colony ships at the same time - unless the planet is really heavily contested, at least one of them should make it through.
Recon ship speeds were decreased to keep them in line with the rest of the ships in game. If they were left unchanged, you would en up with nigh indestructible scouts (due to them being able to outrun everything with impunity), which would make it impossible to create "blind spots" for the enemy by specifically not allowing any recon ships to get through a particular chokepoint. They are still the fastest ships in the game though.
Also, good note on the reinforcement thing - alas, its working as intended. The thing is, I wanted to reward a player which has a methodical approach to front line management. This includes thinking about how your front lines will shift and adjusting the position of your forward bases (shipyards most notably) and reserve fleets accordingly. Yes, even having a fleet on the wrong side of a gravity well should matter. This is not so apparent now, but when the Last Stand goes live, the increased size of gravity wells will make that quite apparent.
In this game, it is quite hard to actually outmaneuver your opponent on a tactical scale. Things like flanking maneuvers make little difference in a confined gravity well where ship speeds allow fleets to "get over there" quite fast. This mod attempts to tweak things a bit so that these tactical nuances become doable. Yes, you can play well without employing them - but if you do, you will be rewarded by extra success. At least, that's the goal.
Naturally, things may not be prefectly done - that's why I appreciate the input as it helps me determine what does and what simply does not work.
ok first off wonderful work ManSh00ter. One question, can you make it so when ships go for an attack run that they break off up or down? I find it annoying that ships only break off left or right. Keep up the good work!
It is?
I swear there is a instantaction buff type that is 'ColonizePlanet' in addition to the AbilityType - couldn't this be simply called from another buff & put on a delay (rather than being an AbilityType)? I haven't messed around with it yet (just been working on Subversion-esque planetary invasion troopship pod things) and I'm probably wrong but just in case...
Whatever the case, I just got Entrenchment but I will definitely be checking this out tomorrow, I wish I had known it was out before but I either missed the download link or I wasn't keeping up enough on the thread. It's kind of spooky reading your posts because they're pretty much the same thought process I had behind making a lot of the changes that I made for DoV (from stuff that was lacking in the base game like flanking tactics to the thought process behind colony ships' value). I really really think you've done excellent work here as well as in TLS - probably the best in this community. I was really shocked when Uzii expanded the planet types in Sins Plus back in the day and the game felt so much deeper even with changes mostly confined to one part of the game (much less here or in TLS where it's expanded or global), and it's even nice just to see a developer actually elaborate on why they made the changes they did and what it's a reaction to rather than just see the final result as in so many other mods.
Hello
Thanks for your mod !
But, it seems to be not working with the "Distant Stars" mod ...
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/335474
Units doesn't move like they should to, the mod seems inactive !
Any idea ? Thanks.
(and I've put ur mod in the bottom of the list)
Ok, the only way for this mod to work with distant star and show is to edit the distant stars ship entities with the values in this mod
Really tired now so I'll just be short: yeah, as Mooster said. The Dynamic mod works only with vanilla ships, any new units/factions need to have their .entity files tweaked in accord with the mod in order to get a balanced and working system.
Does it work with Entrenchment?
stikkypixie it is FOR entrenchment ONLY as stated in the OP
harpo
Note to self, lean to read. Thanks!
Dude, I downloaded this yesterday... OUTSTANDING!!!! This is the best "add on" mod I've played yet... I'm with everyone else, the ships just standing there bugged me... now they make sweeps and bomb runs and strafes.... VERY cool!
Also I used it with the Celestial Bodies Mod with no problem... that was too fun.
This looks amazing and I can't wait to see how it develops and how/if I could possibly merge the "tech" into my mod. I realize this is probably a bit optimistic, but you might want to think about making a generic "formula" for converting existing ships to use your patent.
e.g. on capital ships, multiply linear acceleration by 0.25, multiply top speed by 0.5
e.g. on frigates, multiple linear acceleration by 0.50, enable UsesFighterAttack, multiply armour level by 1.5 (etc. etc. etc)
This way your mod could be passively incorporated into other mods.
Actually, there is a general formula I use, with some tweaks. The thing with new ships is that unless they are based on a similar formula (for example, 25% stronger weapons than vanilla average across the board), you need to playtest them to see if the dynamic behaviour doesn't upset the balance too much.
But I'll dig around my files and post the formula so that people can "compare notes" without reaching for the calculator. Good idea.
Just_Jim, glad you like it!
thank yoy ManSh00ter! I wanted to do something similar to Jason, and use something like yours in my mod, as well. Thanks a ton!
Hey, I'm just bummed no one thought of this for Vanilla Sins. It's amazing... adding just 1 line to the entity files has to be one of the coolest things in Entrenchment... and it's been almost completely ignored! Dude, thank you so much for pointing it out!!!!
I won't lie, I'm already addding it to a "combination" Mod I came up with last night. Basically I've combined the Requiem and Celestial Bodies Mods, and I'm adding in the "Dynamic" battle system into now. I'm going to just copy and paste over the flight specs from the "Normal" races to the appropriate Empire and Alliance ships, then use those to experiment with... I would love to see your formula for calculating everything.
Thank you again, this is the greatest!!
have to post to keep this thread alive and near the top. This mod is basically what everyone who plays sins would want... Now it just needs tweaks/balancing. Somebody should make a dynamic battle systems clan so we can always find people to play multiplayer with and be able to use this mod.
Will this mod be updated, so that when using this ships will actually not stop when attacking structures?
Love the look of this mod. Still not entirely sold on a couple issues though:
1. Turrets and their ungodly slow turning rates. It's way too easy to simply fly past turrets and lay waste to everything behind.
2. I like the LRM balance but I think they are too fragile. I generally have no problem slaughtering hordes of LRMs with light frigates, which IMO shouldn't be the case.
edit post im an idiot.
if possible please try to make dynamic system optional with your new races mod manshooter, thanks
ric
Jeebus, no mod team, just me. Since the dynamic battle system is meant to be more of a mini-mod, there won't be any merging done with other mods - instead, I envisioned that other mods can freely merge this one in! So bug your favourite mod teams to include this little puppy.
Also, the Last Stand mod will feature several improvements to the game in addition to dynamic battles, such as new planets, so you might want to check it out when its released.
To answer your question Uglybutz, yes, the Episode I of the Last Stand mod will have an optional Entrenchment only version which will feature dynamic battles.
Goodgimp, a new version is in the making, which will take into account user feedback so far. So you can expect slow turning turrets to pack a PUNCH, making them lethal for capital ships and unlucky strayers. LRM frigs will get a look-into as well, maybe a slight boost to defense, but not too much. Assault frigates are meant to rip up LRM's... you're supposed to use LRM's as a support force, preferably as a separate group which is dedicated to taking out enemy capital ships and structures (where they don't have to constantly turn around to track moving targets). In other words, LRM's have a dedicated role now, and they still should be way better against stationary or slow targets (hint: turrets of megadeath).
Mooster, my test runs didn't show that ships stop when attacking structures. They sometimes bump into them, but keep on moving. If you can send me detailed info on mansh00ter@yahoo.com, including what other mods are you running and whether this is a repeatable or once-in-a-while occurence I'd appreciate it!
Mansh00ter, when I was beta testing the ST: SoA2 mod, the ships wouldn't even slow down to attack stucture nor, even bump against the buuilding, that is what I am suggestion for the mod
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