I was just thinking it would be really cool to have missions where you have to use your ships to escort a transport or two, or a scenario where you have to defend a space station or vice versa, that sort of thing.
That would be epic =D
Praetors, in your Praetorian industries mod, there are tankers for the new faction right? Would it be possible to mod the victory conditions of the game to where the defending player loses if more than X of the tankers is destroyed?
The victory conditions are unmoddable. The 10% victory is the only one I know for sure. When I do fighter spam it seems to surrender at 50%, not sure how exactly that works. My (untested) guess is that the surrender conditions are when frigates/cruises are >10%, AND fighters are >50%. I’ll do some testing to confirm this.
A convoy siege could be theoretically made where the game will surrender after a certain number are lost, using the conditions.
EDIT: After testing it seems that the game will always surrender at 10%. However, if only fighters remain the game will surrender at 50%.
The only workarounds I see are-
There’s an item in Praetorian industries called antimatter containment, if I recall correctly a ship carrying more than a handful of these would take out the surrounding ships down with it (this made ships carrying this effectively kamikaze’s Now, if we buffed this immenselly so all of the ships in the scenario would be destroyed if a tanker was brought down, or somehow changed it so that the damage from its destruction would only effect allied ships, so that when the tankers were destroyed all of its escorts would be destroyed too, triggering a win for the attackers.
Or-
Maybe make the tankers a very large % of the fleet, so that 3 tankers would show up as 90% of the fleet in the upper corner, even if there are upwards of 20 ships escorting it, as such, when the tankers are destroyed, 90% of the escorting fleet will be registered as killed, even if far more of the fleet is actually still operational, causing the escorts to surrender and the attackers to win,
The flaw here is separation. If the fleet spreads too much then it’s useless.
Doing that means you really have to give those cargo ships a beating. That poses its own problems, especially justifying that high HP.
You could take advantage of the fighter surrender I mentioned:
I was doing some cago ship modding, so I may try to utilize that fact.
So it seems the only loophole would have to be making the transports into fighters, and only giving them fighter cover as escorts, against the player made fleet of frigates and cruisers to take the fighters out- the problem is that flak gun spam will make the scenario a cakewalk. Unless of course, I misunderstood what you’re saying, in which case I apologize.
Actually your idea is different than mine, but it works too. Don’t forget about the sub-types of fighters; many mods contain corvettes, and there is the frigate squad mod which makes fighter-type frigates. Adding a bunch of cruiser-type modules to fighters for defending race would allow cruiser-like fighters for transports, while being realistically unusable on normal fighters. You could theoretically make a leviathan squad. (In practice though, $$$$$) Squads of 1 work for transport units, or groups for squads of transports.
I did a little testing though, and you can create a scenario using frigate/cruiser transports with fighter escorts:
Make sure each transport has >10% of total, and fill the rest (but avoid more than 50%) with fighters. (For example: 9 transports totaling 94%, 6% fighters or 4 transports totaling 56%, 44% fighters) This way when all transports are destroyed you win, regardless of fighters. >10% on each transport means you must destroy all transports.
Your idea works better for destroying part (half in this case) of a convoy, while mine is better for destroy all.
Great idea! I’ll try to do all of the editing, and ignoring the all to probable fatal noobie error in the programing, I should have some results by tommorow.
Warning! The fighter surrender at 50% if the enemy is at 100%.
If the enemy is at 90%, the fighter will surrender at 45%
If the enemy is at 80%, the fighter will surrender at 40%
If the enemy is at 40%, the fighter will surrender at 20%
(If you are good in maths, you can see that the fighter surrender at half the enemy score ^^)
What I see is to play whit negative health module.
An negative heal module only affect the score the ship grant.
Example:
A tribe cruiser had 2500 HP. A tribe transport had 5000
If I use 10 cruiser and 2 transport in my fleet, my score will be of 35 000. One transport representing 14.29%
If I add a -2500 negative health module on the tribe cruiser, the cruiser will still have 2500 effective health but only count for 0 in the score.
So, if I use 100 cruiser and 2 transport in my fleet, my score will be of 10 000. One transport representing 50%
I’m not sure this will work as you intend. I did some testing with a negative-HP module; here’s what I found:
You can deploy ships with negative hit points; when such ships are destroyed, your fleet percentage goes up (my test fleet wound up sitting at 113%). Also worth noting is that my test cruiser, deployed with -25 HP, took one shot from a frigate plasma (max 15 damage) and imploded. So I do believe the negative HP do, in fact, affect the solidity of the ship. And if that wasn’t enough, a hull boost does amplify the negative hit points of any module (e.g., with the example above, a -2500 HP module on a Tribe ship with its 100% hull bonus will actually have -5000 HP).
Huzzah! We have lift off. Sort of.
After changing the transports to fighter class vessels, I booted the game up, and noticed that the so called “Corvettes” in Praetorian industries, are in fact fighters, but with access to some more advanced weaponry. As a result, all of the Corvette ships are now escorts to the transports, so no longer will only fighters escort the cargo ships.
Now, for the actual gameplay.
I gave the cargo ships 100% increased health, so they took twice as long to take out, but in most of my tests the Cargo ships were among the last to be destroyed, the attackers usually beating the crap out of its escorting fleet and then taking out the all-to-slow transports. It seems like the defenders would surrender around the 40-30% mark, around the point where
A. If I was personally attacking the fleet with direct control (The A.I. never does this), I would send a feint north of the convoy, and then take out its transports while its escorts were busy. After losing 2 or 3 out of 4 transports the defenders would surrender.
Or
B. If the A.I. was attacking the transports, it would usually just attack the escorts, and if it won, it would then destroy some of the transports for victory.
Are the transports armed? The AI will largely ignore unarmed vessels if there are armed targets within range. (There are some weaponlike modules that do not count for purposes of determining “armed”, but I don’t have the complete list to hand.)
The transports were unarmed yes. I’ll give the transports a single low level laser and see if it changes any behavior.
I just realized how to make a working “capture” scenario.
Make sure the scenario still allows victory conditions if this ship(s) survives. If you then make a variant of the “capture” hulls without explosions they can have all their modules destroyed, but not the ship itself. There’s also a fancy high-FX way involving terrain effects, but I’ll skip that one.