Another Topic on Mod Ideals

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Modding
1

Yeah, IdeaLs, not ideAs. This is about the intent of modding, and the baseline of quality to strive to with modding…

I know I’ve been posting a lot of inane stuff, but I’m a talker, and lets face it, these boards can’t get much deader. I doubt I’ll known anyone off the board with this… Bottom of the page is from 6 months ago…

So, I was trying to come up with neat things I could do to mod the game, that wasn’t already done… You know, things like a Halo Mod, but I can’t make the .dds’ necessary, then someone outdid my MicroMite idea, so that fell flat, and it got me thinking about what is NEEDED from a mod, and most importantly, what ASPECTS are wanted, not what gimmick is wanted… So, I think I’ll start by addressing my concerns with GSB as vanilla.

Resource Management not being Resource Management-y enough:
When designing a ship, even in Campaign mode, I have never neglected upgrading a part to save on cash.
I have made many sacrifices. I have lost in speed to meet crew demands, I have neglected much wanted firepower at the constraints of my hardpoints, but money has never been a consideration for more than fighters, and even then it’s kinda bass ackwards. When I have an extra weapon port on my ship, but I’m redlining that Power Supply II, I never said “You know, the expense of the Type III isn’t worth it.” Unless both my new weapon and the Type III drove my Crew Requirements through the roof…

So, I thought about what the problem is, and it’s quite clearly the fault of high floors and low ceilings. The width of dollar per module is staggeringly low when you can consider 100,000 francs your upper limit. As far as the floor goes, my discount fighter squad should be shrugged together out of the money I saved on not buying the oaken desk for my fleet admiral. A squad is 1000 bucks a pop, more than a mediocre frigate, and vanilla cruiser is unlucky to tip the 4k scale. While the difference between a 67 buck Wolf Fighter and a 3200 Heavy Support Cruiser seems like a lot, you have to account for the fact that a fighter isn’t seen as a unit… Not really. Sixteen fighters are one unit.

That said, when playing around the upper limit, cash has absolutely NO meaning. At about pilot 378 (before fighters), you’re sitting there going “Well, I guess I’ll through down another armor laden’d cruiser…” It seems to me 100k would play better as a good sized fleet, instead of a spam fest. Maybe 10 Cruisers, an equal number of frigates, and as many plucky fighters as you can squeeze out of the remain 600, This makes the lower costs, 40k, and 25k more about careful consideration. One thing I found while playing with fighters at 2k is that, sure, the 120buck double crested super fighter would waste any equal fighter squadron on the field, but at these levels, that discount fleet across the way is almost doubling my numbers, negating my advantage. That’s how it should play at all fleet cost levels…

So, how to implement low floors, high ceilings? Well, that’s just a matter of options.

I feel the fighter’s biggest problem is its lack of options. Not more powerful options, just options in general. You start at the lowest levels. What can you get for a buck? I imagine a fighter with 1 hard port, 1 weapon mount, that produces 1.20 energy. Well, not much use, is he? That’s a rocket launcher (or Torpedo, if’n you’s brave), and a cheapskate Engine Type I… Normally that’s a 70-80 fighter, with the extra hardpoint and flexibility, but lets do bare minimum. I’ll give you 12 bucks for the chassis. That rockets not gonna do well, say he putters out at 300m’s, and takes a hit to damage. 9 bucks for the launcher. And that engine hasn’t had its oil change, thrust of 12, or even 11, and it’s fragile… 3 HP for your craft. Uhg, I’ll take that 6 dollar junker… That adds up to, what? 27 bucks a craft, and it’ll still do a damned good job of harrassing unarmored frigates, as what bombers are good for. So, lets say you had an expensive fighter. Spent 80 bucks on a squad, then brushed up your DPS with the bombers. You spent 1,280 on the fighters, and 432 on the bombers… The bombers are slow, kinda piddly, and look like shit, but honestly, they’ll add an extra 96 damage at the minimum, and what else are you gonna do with 400 bucks?
And that’s not it for the Fighters. Now you have discount Engine types, Prestine Engine types, models with higher HP, rockets with extra uranium. We’re talking small numbers; +1 to damage, 2 bucks, -50 to range -1, you have an array of options to eek out that final bit of leftover cash. But where is that cash coming from?

The cruisers.
Cruisers are proof that Automation Works. I can crank out a highly useful heavy DPS LRM cruiser for under 2k. You know what that means? If I could get all 50 LRMs within range of your fleet, I’d have 50 LRMs shooting seven missiles a piece. (And then they get eaten alive by those cheap 27 dollar bombers. Irony, no?) I think that’s a terrible ceiling. If cruiser is the best I got, the best better be expensive. A Ferrari isn’t a Ferrari without the 100K price tag, and my extra secure Anti-Air Cruiser with top of the line ECCM suites better show its superiority in its price tag. I’m talking I’ll hit 9, 10K easy, maybe span a 20K build with the best equipment. It’ll come to the point where when that $500 you save on not upgrading that power supply to buy that $800 dollar laser will be put to best use in maybe another handful of fighters. Or better yet An anti-fighter option that’s worth a dang…

So, that’s my first thought one what needs to happen in a successful GSB mod. I think I might try to reorganize the fleets economics… I have more ideas, but I talk a lot, I wanna hear from you. Disregarding what we cannot touch in the core code, what seemingly necessary ideas could be implemented (or are, just not widespread) into a mod that encompasses everything, not just the newest race?

Or, an even better side, do you think that vanilla GSB was perfect where it was, and has been skewed by the modding community?

2

Alright, I hit another observation, and since no one has commented yet, I’ll throw out another thing to look at.

I was playing the campaign today. If you don’t know, the Campaign is Designer Made, but uses publicly uploaded fleet designs. Player made fleet designs.

In fleet designs, there’s an obvious difference between a Designer’s Fleet, and a Player’s fleet. When designing a game, you often look towards a design goal to build it off of. Any object you insert into the game is with the intent of reaching that goal. If something is included in a game, odds are designers expected it to be used. And when coming up with the Opposition, most of the time it has a precedent of using as many of the options as possible, whether for good, or for bad.

In GSB, designers ships include all of the modules, regardless of their capabilities. They design even, goal intentive fleets, and often times that sets the middle ground for a games power level, since they’re including High Power modules and Low Power Modules…

Players, however, don’t design like this. I try to, but I don’t… A personal instance - I have never put an Engine Type I or a light shield onto a Cruiser. It’s either Type III or none at all. Players tend to pick their favorite, or what they presume as best, and apply it to everything always. If they do pick the best, they tend to sweep most of the Designers fleet, purely by ignoring some of the lesser modules. Sometimes you’ll get fleets focused around a low power module, but usually based on a fun idea. Sometimes they work pretty good (such as the armor cruiser), sometimes not.

I have seen, though, that in most cases, GSB has very obvious counters for any strategy. If someone’s going all out LRM attack, a few front line frigates can tear the missiles to shreds. Even the Armor Cruiser is eliminated if you get a mass of fire on it… But its something you generally have to plan, and build, for. You have to know the trick in able to counter it. That’s what Challenge is all about. You play against a fleet, figure out its flaw, and build for it. If you’re smart, you got it. If you ignore a glaring problem, tho, you’ll probably lose again…

In Campaign, tho, it’s a different beast. You build a relatively small number of ships, all before hand, and throw them against all of the internet. In this, I see three options.
The first is to build a medium, balanced fleet. Have all your bases covered, and you splash against the more powerful builds until the right defense is shown to win. It’s a large start up, to build every counter ship, and large cost as anything not geared towards a particular battle is a lot less useful, and gets destroyed if you’re not careful. It’s the way I imagine the Designers wanted us to play.
The second is to build several key element fleets. One against missile spam, one long range snipe fleet, an ECM fleet, and then an ECCM fleet, all in different arrays. You send out a probe to see what’s in the system, then you send the appropriate build to counter it, and BAM. Done. This is VERY expensive. To play quick, you have to have several FLEETS from the get go to splash through the encounters, and this makes for a very long beginning session. However, you lose a lot less. Since you’re countering everything perfectly, only your scouts die, and the fleet that gets attacked by a weirdo fleet. As long as you’re on the aggressive, you do fine…
The third is the one I tend to do, with a little more variety. This is where you grab your best build, your super tactic, and throw it at everything. If there IS a winning tactic in the game (Which there might be…), then this is easy. You have a cheap start up because you’re building only what you want to use RIGHT NOW, and since it’s better than most builds, you wipe the floors with everything that doesn’t counter it…

In the end, your choice in the Campaign is directly reflected by those that you face. Most of us probably choose option three, and my proof for it is in the player made fleets I often fight against… In the past three BIG battles (those having 5+ cruisers in the fleet), I have seen something peculiar. My love for fighters have given me to build a dual focus Fighter + LRM fleet. I build lots of Missile Cruisers, lots of fighters, and a few defensive frigates. In the Designer made Challenges, these guys decimated everything…
In these past three big player fleet battles, however, not a single Cruiser’s shield on the opposing team ever went down. Ever. I won all three, but not through the vast resources poured into cruisers and frigates, no. They all died by my fighter squads…
At first look this would say ‘Fighters are overpowered’. Well. Yes. They are. As they should be.
But that’s not these fleets problems. These fleets were all the same fleet. Different players, but they all exhibited two focuses. Long range weapons (plasma launchers and missiles), and long range defense. Point defense lasers serve two purposes by shooting down missiles and attempting to shoot down fighters. So, my fleet of missile launchers, against his fleet of missile launchers, we just splashed against each other, doing nothing, until my fighters chewed through the armor enough to take down all the cruisers from the inside. (Scary scarab images ensue from this…)
Why? Why are we all doing the same thing, spamming missiles? Not ALL of us are doing it, but a fair number of these fleets are made in that design spec.
Well, quite simply, its the only thing that WORKS. If you have a cruiser with a reflective shield (and you really, really should), the only thing getting through that shield is missiles, and maybe a few REALLY close range lasers. Long range lasers bounce off, plasma launchers are too slow, so all you have left is a lot of missiles, or you die trying to get close. Admittedly, the short range laser option might be the best, but for ease, we tend to spam missiles on the cheap instead of spending the time on the balancing act that is a fast, effective, striking cruiser.

I think, maybe, the design goal should continue to favor the rock-paper-scissors counter aspect of the original, but enhance some of the other, weaker options. As an example an idea would be to make lasers work mostly only against shields. (Try firing a laser at the heat resistant, reflective under belly of the modern day Space Shuttle and see where that gets ya…) You could have something to puncture the rediculous high armor builds. A lot of mods have these, high power ballistic cannons. Make them bounce off the kinetic shielding, and you lose a lot of Over-Power-idity that frequents some module Mod Packs… You could make the Plasma Launchers more effective by increasing the usefulness of the targeting booster. This also makes Point Defense SO much better. And finally, missiles work against everything, well, but as we’ve seen, they’re easily countered. And then sent right back to you…
Even through all of this, one last thing remains, and that’s using the Pricing Walls talked about above be a major balancer. If the low cost, low power, high damage missile is super effective, make it super expensive… But I already talked about that.

All in all, I think we need to really look into how ship designing is going, and refocus the mods to make all options good options, for different cases.

But again, I want to hear what you guys think. What do you feel is the best tactic to use against an unknown army? Should mirroring be the best defense against a particularly nasty build? Tell me your thoughts on how to Balance GSB. Because, if you dont, then tomorrow I’ll be back, talking about Armor, and why it deserves more.

3

I warned you…

Alright, today, I want to talk about one thing, and one thing only. Defense.

A man once said that the best defense is a good offense, but sometimes in GSB a good defense works just as well. Today, I’m going to peer deep into the three obvious (and one not so obvious) choices when deciding upon a good defense.

The first one is really a reference. It might be the best handled part of the game, and the way it interacts is amazing. You know what I’m taking about, its the staple of Science Fiction,
SHIELDS
Shields are great… They really are. You got a shield on your ship, and right off the bat, you have two perks to your advantage.
The first is obvious, Shield Strength. Essentially a recharging HP Bank, shield strength might be the second most important factor when deciding which shield to place on your awesome hunk of a ship. The math is deadly easy, too. A weapon does damage, it’s subtracted from the shield strength, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. Nothin’ to see here, lets move on.
Shield Resistance: This is really the highlight of a good shield. Shield resistance determines what kind of weapons can do damage to the shield, and what kinds can’t. If it doesn’t have good penetration, then it bounces off harmless. Note, however, that there is very little variety in Vanilla GSB to this factor. It’s practically you have the 27, or you don’t. Very little falls into the in between, and I feel this is very limiting to the tactical options available to a ship… Regardless, as it is, it works well, too, and there’s one other thing I want to talk about with shields, it’s one flaw, the Shield Bubble…
The shield bubble, I find, is ingenious. Essentially, there is a minimum range where if a weapon is within that range, it is unaffected by the shield. This applies almost singularly to fighters, and make them a dangerous foe. Indeed, they slip into the field and wreak havoc on your hull even while your powerful shield is at full strength. This glaringly obvious flaw in Shield Design adds a whole complexity to this Strategy First game, and in strategy games, complexity is good in my eyes…

Pointing out all these good things in shields brings to light the utter failings of another form of defense…
ARMOR
Armor is a mixed bag of great and suck all at once. You either don’t worry about it, or you have ALL THE ARMORS! I’ll explain how I feel armor was left out of the final idea…
Armor has some of the same perks of the shield. It adds a little bit of damage absorption per each module, like the shield strength. This damage absorption rating also details its Armor Resistance, which works in a similar way to the Shield Resistance. Now, I haven’t done the math, but I suspect it’s easy. I’ll test it later tonight. I believe, to determine the shield resistance, the game takes the total absorption gained by the modules, multiplies it by the stacking effectiveness of the modules (more is worse lololol), divides it by the hull’s armor boost (if applicable), and then divides that sum by the total number of modules attached to the ship. Including itself. The premise is that this ‘weight’ of armor is applied to each piece of the ship, and so more weight adds more resistance… I feel that, while novel, it slightly deviates from truth, and more importantly, makes them almost impossible to integrate smoothly.
Firstly, you can’t just use ‘a little armor’. Each slot that doesn’t have armor is most likely filled with another module, spreading your resistance so thin that it’s practically not that. And if you’re using it for an HP buff, well, then, you’re getting the worst end of the deal. A shield provides 2 times the HP, while keeping costs, and WEIGHT down, and also having a high, static resistance. Everything a little armor can do, a shield can do better, and they take up the same slot.
It’s the interaction between the absorption value and the resistance that ruins it. If they had given armor an HP amount, and then a rating similar to the shield, it’s be more useful more sparringly.
But it does have one benefit, and that’s rediculous stacking. By shoving enough armor onto a ship, you can make an impervious wad of metal to sling at your foe, if you ignore the Lucky Shot 2% chance… Oh, and also the fact that you’re flying like AN ENORMOUS WAD OF METAL. Which is to say, not very well… Why? That deals with the THIRD defensive option…

SPEED
This one is my favorite. I like going fast. I like seeing fast things going fast. I like making big things going wrecklessly fast. Dangerously fast.
What I don’t like is arranging my fast ships so that they meet other fast ships at a screaming speed to empower all the Gratuitous Destruction, and then finding out that the other cruisers have what amounts to a Zippo Lighter as an engine…
And they all do… Because whether it’s .02 or .2, cruisers just don’t go fast. Ever.
Again, I feel this is just one more option that has been removed from the game for no good reason. I want my cruisers to be able to go fast enough to make the low tracking weapons truly painful to use, and to make Target Boosters a bit more valuable, and I want my Frigates to go even faster than that, and my fighters to be blurry whirlwinds of tiny death. Well… They are… At 2.5 for an average speed rating of my topline fighters, they whiz across space to much glee. But then there’s a huge drop to 1.2 average for frigates, and a gargantuan drop to the .18 I can hope to achieve on a beefy cruiser. And that’s without the horrible-ness of armor exasperating the issue.

Noticing the ups and downs of a particular field makes the solution easy to see… For speed, I’ll apply the same theory as to the financial issue stated above. Higher ceilings, lower floors.

Well, the floor is awfully low. But a higher ceiling… Make the cruisers ABLE to go up to frigate speeds, and only the fastest cruiser weapons becomes an option for these super fast behemoths. Also, it gives the cruisers a reason to use the “Keep Moving” order. This will also make the weight of the eventual Armor Solution a bigger factor to consider… Do I wanna keep my awesome armor that shrugs off anything not armor piercing, or go fast enough to not get hit in the first place? And since cruisers are faster, that means frigates get to be faster, too, making their harrassing runs even more tactical, as only other frigates will have the tracking speed to knock 'em down… And finally, with faster frigates comes faster fighters. Fighters, however, are a WHOLE 'nother subject.
In conclusion, speeding up certain aspects of the game does two things. Firstly, it provides the Admiral with more strategic options to consider in his plans, and Secondly, it helps out all those player who sets their speed to x4 and never looks back… Personally, my lappy can barely handle a x1, so the slow speed of cruisers really hurts my enjoyment…

My armor fix solution is a little harder to explain than ‘More Speed’. Armor coding is pretty hardwritten. You can’t seperate armor resistance from damage absorption. But you can mess with the numbers. I’m going to even provide an example, and I’m not checking the math, it’s just for hypothetical purposes. Say you have a cruiser… Using the above option, you have a nifty new speed rating of .9, and you’re looking at armor to slap on your big’un… You have 15 slots for modules, meaning the rating is gonna get slashed 15 ways (PRETTY SURE this is NOT how the math is ACTUALLY, I’ll give you that later). So, you look at medium armor. Shrugs off 150 damage, and so, divided by fifteen, will give you an armor resistance of 10. Anything without a penetration higher than 10 will bounce harmlessly off this armor. Now, mind you, weapons will be reworked so that 10 is actually pretty good. Shrugs off small lasers and all annoying fighter weapons… The one catch is that if a weapon damages your armor, your RESISTANCE goes down. That makes sense. A hole in your ship is a Hole In Your Ship! Plus, you have that nifty armor repair bot to fix that stuff.
All this does is give you the same resistance capabilities of the shield, and none of the HP like it should… But what about stacking super armor?
Well, that’s a simple fix. 50% stacking effectiveness. Why? Because more armor doesn’t make the armor more resistance. If it eats through titanium, more titanium just makes it take longer, not stop it. So, you pick a high rating armor, and slap it onto ONE module slot. It applies it’s resistance to the entire ship, is the idea. Wow, that weight thing kinda makes sense, as does the cost. Slapping on another application of titanium armor will do nothing. A third will actually reduce the armor’s effectiveness, AND slow you down to boot.
So, now you have the resistance, but what about the HP benefit? HP is a valuable resource, and as the Tribe has shown, incredibly powerful. Thankfully, several mods have presented very obvious solutions to this problem. HP modules. Their whole purpose is to add a bucket ton of HP, and often times it’s flavored similar to armor. Hull Reinforcement, super strong alloy, whatever. For these purposes, the Armor Selection is the material your ship is made out of, like UnObtanium, and the Hull Reinforcement modules are just add selections of the armor. You get the Shields Resistance with One Module, and then bunchloads more HP with another.
But for two modules, isn’t a shield a better option? Yes, and no. Shields are lighter. You can go faster with a shield. But once a shield is gone, it’s out.
Armor doesn’t. It can be repaired. Have a good enough repair system (this should be an option to everyone, not just the Tribe, although they still should be better), and you can keep your ship alive for much longer than a shield by repairing your hull and armor. Now, mind you, your weapons are still ruined, but you can still act as a much needed decoy. That’s why it takes 2+ modules for the effectiveness of a shield…

These two fixes together, I think, would make the game faster, more strategic, and ultimately, more fun… I imagine a fleet with fast cruisers mixed with Shielded Cruisers, backed up by Armored cruiser, just to make sure no weapon goes uncountered. Naturally, weapon stats will be reflected to adapt to this huge shift in defensive strategies, but as it is right now, ‘Moar Shields’ on cruisers just isn’t exciting to me…

Once again, I HIGHLY urge you to comment. Please, give me your suggestions, your observances, tell me I’m right, tell me I’m wrong… Any and all information I get can only help this eventual rewrite I hope to do. And of course, if you REALLY agree with me, I would adore some help.
But it all starts by talking about it.
Tomorrow, if no one steps up, I’ll address the neglected ‘Other’ modules, like the defensive ‘Stealth’ module, the offensive ‘Target Booster’, and the altogether useless ‘PD’ modules…\

EDIT!!!:: Regarding the Armor Math, I was almost Spot On… Take Damage Absorbable, and divide it by the number of modules you have installed (including the armor) + 1 for the ship hull itself. Therefor, the Minimal Armor (45 Damage Absorbable) on a fully equipped Buffalo cruiser (18 slots total) has a final resistance of 2.37 (45 divided by 19 is 2.3684210526…). This math will go a long way in balance several different armor compositions to shrug off everything from light fire from fighters (for those minimalists) to everything that is not armor piercing or from another dimension…

4

Just a short post… I had a huge subject to talk about, but I’m diverting it in hopes of dragging in at least ONE comment…

I was perusing the Suggestion forum, so see what people wanted, since you’re not talking about it, and I saw a topic on the issue of tanks…

As you might know, my solution to tanks was to make a effective counter in the form of a weapon module with a high Armor Pen. I would encourage armor builders, but always have a way around it.

However, a lot of people was of the impression that the best counter to the tanks were the commands Rescue and Retaliate, as they would focus on those things that had guns. Usually that isn’t the tank…

What of this? It can be an effective way to deal with the problem, but should it be THE way to deal with tanks? Would a module specifically made to eliminate a player option be reducing the emphasis on orders too much? Or is there room for a tank buster AND the tank aversion commands to be on the same playing field?

5

I’m starting to feel like I’m talking to a Vacuum.

C’mon people ! It only takes a second to respond!

Alright… I’ve been number crunching, and it’s led to a startling revelation, and that revelation is: Math is hard. No, really. It is.

Ok, so I’ve played around with numbers, using my ideas for defenses which I posted ^ up top. Basically, I tried to marginalize, and even out the three primary defenses. I now have a top line and bottom line for all three, with a little overlap so that each class isn’t secluded to its own.

I applied my numbers to the fighter modules, to see how thing balanced themselves out using the guidelines I built for myself. The result was… Interesting.

The first thing I did was I upped the fighters speed to a top level of 4. The fastest fighter (before hull bonuses) you can build has a speed of 4. However, the best ‘fighter’ (IE anti-fighter fighter) with the given modules tops out at 3.53. This fighter is a basic fighter, armed with a Laser, and sporting the type III engine (finally the best engine in the game) and a class II power generator (I’m sure there’s a reason for the Type III, but this is not it.) This is the best GENERIC fighter one can make, using my fixes. So, I wanted to see how long it would take for the Best Fighter in the game to take out the Best Fighter in the game.
Doing the math, I found that a fighter with a Speed of 3.53 vs a weapon with a tracking speed of 4.0 (newest best for the Laser) would get hit about 31% of the time, and with the damage from the Laser, that means one of the two fighters will pop into a fireball in 51 seconds. Kay… 1 minute dogfights sound about right… But I wanted to make SURE that was good. So, I took generic fighter number 1 in Original GSB, a fighter with a laser, Power Gen I, and Engine II (arguably the best make), makes a fighter that goes 2.5 against a 3.0 laser…
Those are the same numbers (relatively).
A very solid choice for the fighter in GSB has the SAME math as the best fighter in my fix. That was it, confirmation that my numbers work, at least at fighter levels.
Now, I did make some changes. Pulse Lasers are now better that regular lasers. They have a higher track speed, meaning they’ll hit fighters more often. The one fall back? Very little armor and shield pen. But that’s fine as long as fighters dont have armor (as they SHOULDNT!!) or a shield (Which… Maybe they should…) Also, I removed Armor. They will be replaced with the HP boosters mentioned above, which will be FLAVORED as armor, but not provide an armor rating. Just more HP to take more shots. As it is now, the balance of the game has shifted greatly, but I plan on including some balancing modules to make more options viable. Like a shield for the fighters to avoid Pulse Lasers…

Once again, I’ll ask… C’mon Forums. What do you think?

6

wall of text mind shutting down…

Sorry but this is what most think when the see nothing but text. I have been very very busy and unable to sit down and digest this in one sitting . Please give us a little bit to digest all your ideals here and all.

Kay thanks
Lonestar

7

I like your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

8

Alright, alright, I get it guys. I talk to much.
But I’m also afraid that if I don’t get it all down, I’ll lose it.

Like the alternate module choices… I was gonna talk about Cloaking, and Targeting Boosters, but I got sidetracked…
Ah well…

I also, in good conscious, can’t keep this to myself, for if I’m working towards what I believe is true, and do a whole mod under my impression, just to find that people don’t agree? Well, that’s an ego crush…

So. I put it out here to get some quality information, but putting it out here shuts people out of quality information.
Vicious circle, eh?

9

>>Overview
Include a Summary in your idea posts

>>Content
Personally i do not mind if you place a wall of text describing your ideas in detail. I would just suggest that you get into the habit of prefacing your explanation with a summary. If your audience is interested from reading the summary - there is a full explanation that they can read.

Anyone who mods for public acclaim runs the potential for getting into a world of hurt for the very reason you stated.

My suggestion (for what its worth) Build the mod for yourself, just like your MicroMite idea. Get it to a point where you like it and enjoy playing it. Then sometime down the track, share the mod.

Now if your like me and struggle for ideas - ask for input from the community. However just reading through your posts, it seems you are not short of an idea . . . or twenty.

10

No no that is not what i ment, Shgiar them here let others hear what you have in your mind. Just do not expect people to post on it for a little while due afterwards till we have time to think and stuff.

I LOVE what i have so far read and think that you have Gratuitous plans but may not know just how to make then real. Like darkstar suggested summerise a little of the topic Kinda like writing an essay were each paragraph has a topic or thesis statement. Then go into detail in the below paragraph. If you have to just brainstorm and write it all out do it and then organize it all later. into that format.

Anyways i gota run!

11

Right, ok… Summaries. That’s a great idea…

Question, tho. Should I edit my above posts to have them? Can’t hurt right?

I think I’m gonna do that…

I’ve been away a lot recently… Free times spells Magic competitions for me, so now that Life and Job are coming back into view, I’ll be focusing on more at home things. I hope to have a balance preview by the end of next month. All current modules rebalanced to what I feel would be right, and secured into one folder for easy installation. Then I’ll work on new necessary modules for the current schema of things. Eventually I plan to look at how to model for GSB, but that’s doubtful.

In the meantime tho, I’ll still be spouting off lots of words and my thoughts and preferences. Only this time, prefaced with Summaries. That should do it…