Actually as long as you set the abilities and player entities up right you can have one ship deploy different types.

Our Empire Faction in 7DS can deploy either a Logistics and Support Starbase (Imperial Outpost) or the super weapon starbase. Both are built by the Imperial Modular Task Force Cruiser =D

You need to have both starbase entities mentioned in the player.entity, and you need seperate abilities that reference one starbase each which in turn need to link back to the right ability.

Wow.

Admittedly I am overwhelmed even after spending hours combing through the various tutorials, how to's, modding for idiots thread etc.

I'm just trying to learn the very basics of how to do even the simplest of things in SoaSE: Rebellion.

I'll let you know how far I've come at least (probably not very far, lol)

1) I've been able to open all the reference files that I downloaded and I understand that these files contain all the specific abilities/buffs for the things I'm looking for.

2) I've found a few abilities/buffs that I'm interested in modifying but I'm not sure how they even apply themselves in the game.

3) I found BuffPhaseOutHull, AbilityHyperspaceDisruption and PlanetModule_PhaseOrbitalJumpBlocker. I understand that PhaseOrbitalJumpBlocker is the Vasari version but since each JumpBlocker/PhaseInhibitor uses the same ability, I think I'm in good shape

4) I'll worry about actually installing/testing the small changes/mod I've created once I understand more about how to actually produce results, ha!

So basically I'm looking at modifying the phase inhibitors effects on the ships that are within their radius. Some general things I'm looking at doing.

1) Playing with the radius of the phase inhibitors effects

2) Changing the tactical slots taken up by phase inhibitors

3) Changing the severity of the inhibitors effects

4) Changing the amount of tactical slots planets have by default

5) Disabling Superweapons

6) Changing the tiers/upgrades for Fleet Supply - (I find that early game its not enough and late game its so much that it makes my friends computers lag an incredible amount)

Anyway, I was hoping to open a dialog with some folks - mostly just for them to point me in the right direction as far as where to find the information I'm looking for. I'm really impressed with the community in general through the countless threads I've read. My hat is off to the absolute giants of community contributors adding various help threads and putting obviously countless hours into tools etc for everyone to you. As Neil deGrasse Tyson would say, I can only accomplish what I have by standing on the shoulders of giants.... or something like that.

In any case, let me see if I can phrase my questions correctly to get some answers.

1) Can someone explain to me the relationship between an actual object/planet/ship/building in the game and how they relate to their abilities and buffs? Lets use my phase inhibitor example. My understanding is that the phase inhibitor entity (PlanetModule_PhaseOrbitalJumpBlocker) uses various abilities like (AbilityHyperspaceDisruption and AbilityBiDirectionalJamming). Then the entity AbilityHyperspaceDistruption uses these buff entities to actually apply the effects in game (buffInstantActionType which "applyBufftoSelf") which triggers bufftype "BuffHyperspaceDisruptionSpawner"

Phew that was a lot - is that all correct? So in essence, BuffHyperspaceDisruptionSpawner is where the actual effects can be modified correct? 

2) Now assuming I'm on the right track here as far as modifying what I originally outlined, what are all these things in the Spawner? Specifically:

• actionIntervalTime which has 4 levels but only level 1 has a value of 2.4 the rest are 0. 
• targetFilter - I assume this is what it CAN effect since I see that ownership "Enemy" is set and it doesn't affect your own ships
• I see there are 5 objects, listed in numObjects - its interesting to me that I dont see Cruisers listed anywhere, and Corvette's are listed on their own. Are Cruisers considered Frigates in this instance?
• I see something called constraints with numConstraints and constraint "CanBeJumpBlocked" - can someone explain the intricacies of these I didn't see these explained anywhere nor do they appear to be entity types in GameInfo folder like the others that can be modified.
• range - is this the range of the inhibitor that I see in game? I didn't see a range for the entity of the planetmodule so... help?
• maxTargetCount - all the levels are set to -1 which I can only assume there is no target limit. Correct? 
• stackinglimit - I assume if this has a value of 1 that it cannot be stacked but if I changed it to 2, I could put two phase inhibitors and the the effects of the buff could stack? That would be appealing if so

3) A more general question perhaps is if there is an explanation anywhere of these types of things that can be found in entity's whether they be abilities or buffs or otherwise?

4) For the actual entity of the JumpBlocker:

• It has 2 abilities, if I wanted to add a 3rd ability would I just add it to ability:2 or is more involved in added abilities to entities than just that? Does the ability entity itself need to be modified in order to be used by a phase inhibitor? Lets say for example (and purely just for example) I wanted to add the ability of phase tunneling/phase gates? How would I go about that? Maybe you can think of a better example to explain.
• planetUpgradeSlotCount 2.000000 - As I mentioned I would like to decrease the amount of tactical slots these use, or possibly just upgrade the amount of tactical slots on each planet. Firstly, do these numbers like 2.000000 always need to have 6 decimal places? Can I put a number in there like .5 instead of a whole number? 
• angularSpeed - what in the heck is this? I'm just more curious than anything. Would changing this actually make the object in the game move?
• formationRank 3 - what does this mean simply?
• baseBuildTime 150 - is this measured in seconds?

Phew... okay that is pretty intense. Again, thank you all for the community you've put together here. Any help would be appreciated - it seems to me that a lot of my questions could be answered if I could find a good explanation for what a lot of these things do in the entities... I did find https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/306405 but it wasn't particularly helpful.

Thanks!

Keller

Whether it can come from individual ships or not would depend on allowFirstSpawnerToStack being true or false.

It's a percentage and it's not.  25% would be 25%, -25% is not.  -100% gets you half of what you started, etc.

I think the equation goes like this for negatives.

modifier percent is negative

s = starting value
n = new value 

n * (-(-modifier) + n = s

example: decrease weapon cooldown of 14 by -25% is n * (-(-25%) + n = 14 or n = 14/1.25 or n = 11.2

modifier percent is positive

s = starting value
n = new value 

s * (modifier) + s = n

example: increase weapon cooldown of 11.2 by 25% is 11.2 * 25% + 11.2 = n or n = 14

After some experiences and tests regarding attack types, I've found that that the following attack types won't result in fighters auto-attacking other fighters and bombers, regardless of the actual damage modifiers in Gameplay.constants: TITAN, ANTIMEDIUM, ANTIHEAVY, ANTIVERYHEAVY, COMPOSITE, CAPITALSHIP, CORVETTE. Or in other words, only ANTIVERYLIGHT and ANTILIGHT will allow fighters to properly function as interceptors and dogfighters. This constraint does not apply to frigates with the AntiFighter frigateRoleType however.

Textures don't have a manifest, but they must be referenced in a .brushes files in the Window folder.

Don't know what you mean by background, but any decent image editor can be used to edit texture files, whether they are in .tga or .dds format. Photoshop and Gimp are popular, and I personally use Paint.net for HUD work.

You need to add that artifact to the Map or galaxy scenario def as a starting planet item for each faction.

No, The way I described is the only way you can seed a faction with a research bool modifier.

I can't recall if the RESEARCHSUBJECT_ARTIFACT_GALAXYTRAVEL has a GSD entry or not. Scan the file for the artifact entries and check and see. If there isn't one you'll need to add that as a possible planet item type (and increase the count of said types). Then you can setup all the factions to have it with the normal start setting just like a frigate factory and constructor are added.

Im not too worried about Sins plot cannon tbh. I have just always hated the restrictions on phase jumping in the game. Im making a mod where all planets and all stars are connected via phase lanes to all other's in the entire map and there is no difference in phase jump speed between planets in different solar systems vs planets in the same solar systems.

It just never made sense in my mind, if you have warp 9 capabilities, why go crawling along inside a solar system at warp 2 and make your commute 10x as long, especially when trying to rush reinforcements to a beseiged planet. Also I hate the phase lane system in general, it kindof eliminates the fully 3 dimensionality of deep space by forcing you to jump to different planets to reach a final destination, no thanks, ill just set my navigation computer to jump directly to it and now with this mod im making it will all be a reality!

So I've been poking around looking for explanations on the Music.sounddata file- that is, Im looking to see if anyone has figured out how to interpret the Action Level/range and emotion level/range.  I cant seem to find a concise explanation, and would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction

Thanks

Damn, I was hoping someone had come up with some sort of guide for that.  Thanks anyway.

So I'm trying to make a passive ability for capital ships that spawns a frigate once the capital ship is destroyed. Tried two methods, one with an ability+buff, and one with just an ability. Not sure why this isn't working and crashing the game; any insight is appreciated. Ability+Buff vers Ability only

I know where it is.  Sound>Music haha.  not hard to find, harder to understand what works when