Currently mines are late game cpu laggers and are easily circumvented and hellaciously expensive for what they deliver. They can be cleared by simply plowing through them or sacrificing a few scouts and are often just used for target practice. they are simply boring.
As far as strategy goes--not a lot there. Dump them in a big pile to augment defenses briefly. Sure, versus AI you can abuse them well but they are so disjointed that in player vs player they are considered anathema.
It is simply an insult to mines and a waste of a good concept.
So I'm working on alternatives (with no help of course 'cause everyone considers it a lost cause). There is room for as many as 18-21 differing mine types (6-7 per faction) and that gives room for innovation (I don't think I'll need that many). Mines just need to be handled differently and with more realistic and strategic effects.
Instead of mine fields that are easily spotted and require a near physical impact to hit (like a pilot would have to want to hit them for them to work like that in space) mines should be designed for the space environment and not used like WWII and Vietnam area ground munitions. They also need to be a genuine part of game strategy and not the flawed "tack-on" they currently are.
So here's the ones I'm working on (I had many more variants than these but these are the ones I think will make mines interesting). The concepts are based on current warfare, the American Civil War, Reagan's Star Wars program and science fiction ideas we all know and love.
The Faction-Specific Mines
[Phase] Singularity--spawns a mini black hole for a set duration. Friend and foe alike affected.
[Tech] Area-Effect--simply makes a big, dirty, energetic bang of HEAP antimatter shrapnel hurting friend and foe alike. Close range, heavy damage. The mother of all explosive munitions.
[Psi] Domination--a large psychic amplifier that captures all enemy frigates within range.
The Generic Mines
Grazer--fusion explosion powered ranged mine that fires a single gamma ray laser beam at a single target. High damage and long range at targeted enemy capital ship.
Xaser--fission explosion powered ranged mine that fires a single high energy X-ray laser beam at a single target. Medium damage and long range at a targeted enemy frigate.
Anti-Strike--cluster munition that fires explosively propelled antimatter pellets at all strike craft in range. High damage, medium range.
Dummy--low cost decoy mines that do no damage and deploy as multiple mines.
Notes
All mines will be deployed by mine-laying vessels and I am exploring rather than hard limits on numbers instead making them count as fleet logistics slots. These could all be created as "frigates" but that's a waste of good ship slots and a waste of the already present mine slots. Best to get the value of all of them.
It remains to be seen which abilities mines can have and can do. Feel free to contribute anyone.
Ok. I have balance for the bombers, gunships and strike craft.
All have unique performance and behaviors.
Strike craft are similar to dive bombers (continuing my WWII analogy). They come in very fast and pack a wallop of damage--enough to usually take out a single scout out in two passes--which they can just do in the time it takes a scout to cross the grav well. They only have 15 hull, a weapon cool-down of 7.5 seconds and a rebuild time of two minutes. This keeps them from being used as throw away uberbombers. They also are much weaker versus heavier armored ships--showing a significant decrease in effectiveness even against light frigates. Enemy fighters make toast of them once they catch them. Interceptors are primarily designed to stop scout reconnaissance and non-antistrike defended small forces behind lines.
I swapped tactics and made the strikecraft more maneuverable so gunships make huge truns and roar in at high speed, heavy bombers make large slow turns and crawl right on top of targets and interceptors shoot in and do hi speed maneuvers "in the thick of it".
Once again, I seem to have mixed some files from a corrupted mod so I am backtracking and cleaning up right now.
Ok, I have Interceptors, Assault Fighters, Heavy Bombers and Support Craft operational.
The final class I am working on are Interdictors. These are ships that effect planets/economies.
I've tried several approaches to place siege weaponry on strike craft and I ahev gone from minidumps to simply "missing text label" but I have not been able to narrow down where and what in the file has to go there.
The Squad files indicate "Uses Fighter Attack" is used and I assume it might also apply to "Can Bomb". I've tried placing parts of the siege weapon bombing lines in differing places throughout both files and/or only a single one but it simply breaks the line count for the engine or shows a "missing text label".
Has anyone ever succeeded in making strikecraft able to bomb planets or any thoughts in this area (other than through abilities which I can implement to a great extent here)?
what about the mines at 1:12? that was an awesome idea and a great movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_1C2gKJ0vg&feature=related
"This ship, is dragging mines"
In a mod I experimented with, I was able to rig up a passive ability similar to the Sova's Heavy Strike Craft, only it gave bonus damage to various targets (dependent on target, actually), and as I had created a custom fighter unit, it also gave said fighter AoE on its missiles.
Yep--anything that is an area effect and mostly passive should work on strike craft. I have the Heavy Fighter ability and morphed it into a more powerful version.
The mines in Galaxy Quest are essentially Advent Homing Mines as far as Sins is concerned. One of the problems with mines is lag. The other problem is they are rarely used as they can be gone over or around. So my concept it to make them more area effect and specialty and rather than relying on "fields" a single mine is the field. to rudece numbers, they will be made more powerful in some cases.
So far I have a gravity mine that sucks you into it, a flak mine that hits strike craft and a few others. I'm still learning triggers and bools and the like so it's slower going but I am getting there.
I had a couple of people ask me about having models for this mini-mod. In principle it's fine but in practice I didn't want to have to add new textures and models to the game. Here's a pic of the models for my variant bomber-fighter types and they total about 12k of non-textured model. I think most of them will work with existing textures but won't know unless its tried.
Anyone with an opinion here as to whether or not fighter-level models are needed or desired chime up if you will.
And a question...where are the graphics for the "fighter pips"? (if that's what they are called). The little icon sets that show strike craft positions when zoomed back from the model. I would like to modify these so the new strike craft are readily identifiable. Just not sure where they are.
Thanks in advance--here's a crappy graphic of the top and bottom of the models. I based them all on existing vanilla types to keep continuity.
Shown here are Heavy and Support Bombers and Assault and interceptor Fighter types for all factions.
So...can someone point me to where the icons/pips are for strike craft?
in the SAME picture that has ALL the ships, structures AND strikecraft, ie Unit_Main.tga in the textures folder.
harpo
Well that makes sense. Thanks.
Sin, will you truly bring "missile strikecraft" to the game so the carriers can become pseudo-missile-carriers, even if they only attack other strike craft I'd be alright with it lol, anti fighter/enemy missile measures are still fun
also
"Is there air!? you don't know!?" love it
The best I can see at the moment other than using abilities is to give weapons good vs certain ships structures to different fighter roles.
One I am playing with (though I have been off this week) is a "torpedo bomber" with a slow long range missile. I hope to change some abilities so tech strike craft can "embargo" on a reduced level--to simulate interdiction vs shipping and trade.
You get a lot of weird quirks with strike craft abilities and its taking some time.
I seem to have a constant issue with "mixed mods"--pieces of one left with the other but it seems very random. I'm stable with three new roles and twelve new craft right now but I keep getting bad ability mixes. Maybe this weekend I can experiment more.
domination sounds incredibly overpowered but highly interesting
Well--that's one of my problem children. I've had problems so far getting it right as I am new to this but I am sure it's possible.
The Domination mine would be the "uber" mine for the Advent--sort of like the "ultimate ability" of mines.
For the Vasari it's the gravity-Implosion "black hole" mine.
The Tech will be the "Mother-of-all-Explosions" doing ship, structure and fighter damage.
Of course the mine has to be successfully placed and then the enemy has to oblige you by running over it or passing close enough or you to manually trigger it.
Yeah, I don't want to completely overpower and just make "really big weapons"--I want to make mines actually strategic and that means they have to have the ability to impact strategy.
Ok...here is an example of errors with the fighter abilities that don't crash the game and still allow the effect to work--but I would like to eliminate the errors if that's possible.
I have other abilities I have created and from other mods that "work" but also generate similar errors. Is there a fix or reason to not be concerned? All errors-occur when in targets enter the range of effect.
Here is the pastebin of the ability and buff and following below are the errors for those.
http://pastebin.com/M02UxBrR
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Assert @ C:\Projects\P4\SinsDiplomacy\Release\CodeSource\GS/Entity/Interfaces/IBuff.cpp(5072)_firstSpawner == NULL || CanEntityBeAttached(_firstSpawner)-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Assert @ C:\Projects\P4\SinsDiplomacy\Release\CodeSource\GS/Entity/Interfaces/IBuff.cpp(5073)_lastSpawner == NULL || CanEntityBeAttached(_lastSpawner)------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Assert @ C:\Projects\P4\SinsDiplomacy\Release\CodeSource\GS/Entity/Interfaces/IDamage.cpp(1274)pDamageDealer == NULL || CanEntityBeDamageDealer(pDamageDealer)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
what's with the "fixed level 10"? thought it would be 1 since it's a non capital ability
"finished condition type enter hyperspace" dunno about that one and the last set of level 1 level 2 level 3 you have the 2nd and 3rd lvls at 0 while the 1st has a value unlike the others up top that have identical values for all 3 levels
Fixed level "zero".
Yeah--I looked at several mods and each has slightly different ways of doing it. As long as you have a single level and they are all the same or zero doesn't seem to matter.
I get the same errors on the other mod abilities that I do with my own even after rejiggering them repeatedly and trying different approaches.
I'm not sure but I'm fairly certain it's because it's strike craft. My squads only have a single fighter otherwise I'd think it was an issue with multipole units in the squad.
Was wondering if some genius out there knew.
Spawner errors, I believe, are occurring because the game expects the ability to be a two buff ability so to speak, with a first and last spawner, even if this isn't necessary. No idea what the last error is though.
It looks to me like the engine is expecting the abilities to call particle effects spawners......and the abilities aren't doing so.
Thanks guys. That's good to know. These exact same errors show in a couple of mods too.
While i think of it. Sin can you make the size of the mines about half their usual model size? Maybe run it by Stress or the other opti crew for a work check. I was thinking the smaller they are, the less memory they'd use compared to many other things, and no one really spends much time gawking at the zoomed in mines(maybe a little when they first came out). just my thoughts =x
It's not the size. It's the polygon count and the size of the texture sheet. A 512x512 sheet is a quarter the size of a 1024x1024 but will show a lot less detail.
I don't care about detail lol, I just want them to vanish from my empire tree and get as small as possible in game to take up the least amount of memory possible. Ideally I'm hoping for MAYBE a blinking light for the mines at most or some kind of really slow fade in and out signal light like you see on some of the capital ships/carrier vessels. I think the whole mine thing was done too over-sized. I mean the mines of WW2 and such for hunting U-boats were pretty damn big but that was because of the technological limitations of pins, magnets, and low yield explosives. This is some X000 years into advancement, even now we have computers that went from the size of a room to the size of your fingernail for processor power. Surely, someone can do the same thing for a big hunk of explosives floating in a vacuum?
I have never understood why the mines are so big in the first place.
Yeah--don't get me started. It would take BILLIONS of individual mines to even start to cover an area of space around a planet. It could easily take trillions to cover a narrow arc of a planet's orbit.
So I think mines would have to be a lot "smarter" than simply dumb fire bombs that wait for you to run over them.
exactly! I mean they came up with a nice multi-body unit in the strike craft but somehow they make mines the huge hunks of debris that explode if BY STATISTICAL OBSCURITY something passes too close? they could have made each "mine" into a field and have it cover the range the placement "ring" area. I mean having 10 super tiny things explode together on a wide range makes a lot more sense than some big bulky hunt being missed all together. As far as physics go, many mines in a mine field are detonated by the explosion of OTHER mines so this idea isn't totally out there. Some shrapnel from one mine pierces another and it explodes causing the same effect to occur around it to the other mines, meanwhile whatever set off the first mine is getting swiss cheesed by the waves of coming off of these explosions causing damage over time instead of one quick pop.
If someone, ANYONE, could figure out how to make this work the entire community would probably praise them for the remainder of the game's existence lol.
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