Is there any way at present to duel two offline fleets?

My year 5 class have been enjoying ‘Space Pirates’-themed challenges all year - things I made in Flash, or board-gamey type things - they’re pretty into it!

I’d like to use GSB for a sort of finale - dividing them into teams of four, have them work for a week on creating their own fleet (lots of good maths with crew/power/price) - then project my laptop onto the board and see which team triumphs!

Is there any way I can do this at present? I haven’t really taken my GSB online, which I presume is the way to do this - are challenges the way to go here?

Hello, gpallis, and welcome to the GSB forums.

The game aparrently does not permit multi-sided battles beyond a basic 1-on-1 duel. However, after doing some modding you can abstract things a bit to retain some of the “demolition derby” team play you need.

For example, you can hack together two sides, each with multiple 4-ship teams even if each team is composed entirely of ships that come from different races. Normally, all forces on each side of a GSB battle must come from the same races (ships as well as guns & other onboard items). Each of the two allowable sides in the battle could (for example) have one team of Fed ships, one team of Rebels, etc., but the entire set of combined teams on either given side will function as one team for purposes of separating friend from foe. Does that make sense? I admit it’s a rather graceless hack but it’s the only means I can think of to generate something like the result you’re asking for.

Feel free to stop by the Gratuitous Modding sub-forum and pose your question over there. We can try to get you started. Be sure to let them know how much time pressure you’re under, and what your level of experience is with modding this game. Hint: GSB is quite modder-friendly for what I believe you want.

Ooh - I hadn’t even thought of having more than two combatants at once! I was just going to do things as a single-elimination playoff. I think I’d probably prefer that, really - it makes more thematic sense to have everyone as Rebels, and I wouldn’t have to move the mouse all over the place! So that’s probably less ambitious a modding challenge than you were suggesting - though I think it might still be one.

Thank you warmly for your very welcoming post

Wow, i wish my year 5 teacher did something like this !

Anyways - Just a another suggestions:
Since your projecting the battle via a data projecter:
May i suggest that you open config.txt located \My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles\ and set the minimum zoom to OPTIONS_MINZOOM = 0.00 This will enable you to display the entire warzone at the same time. No mouse scrolling required.

As Archduke pointed out, there is a way to have 2 v 2 battles and for each group to use their favorite race with a bit of modding (For 1 v 1 - its easier done online)

Once again look us up in the modding forum for further details, we will be able to help you create an Epic Finale that will be the envy of the school.

What you wanted is much easier done online, which is just send a fleet back to yourself. So I would suggest this if you have access to the internet.

If you want to do it offline you have to create your own scenario, which takes about 5 - 20 minutes depending on how much you know what you are doing.

All the races, aside from the overpowered Tribe, are balanced enough. So you can let them choose instead of everyone being Rebel.

Well, this is upsetting. So we’ve been building up to this for a week, and they’ve all designed ships and everything, and the big battle is tomorrow. And I’ve just discovered that my mac GSB can no longer do challenges. At all. It crashes every time I click ‘Details’ on any challenge.

In that case you have to learn how to create your own offline challenges.

Warning: Back up everything before you start, especially if you are unsure what you are doing

basic setup
Step 1, Locate the folder “data” inside your GSB directory
Step 2, Locate 3 folders, “scenarios”, “ships”, and “deployments” inside “data”

add the map
Step 1, Find the custom map, locate that map in “userdir\GratuitousSpaceBattles\custom_scenarios”. Where userdir is depends on which version you have, so the best way is to find it with search.
Step 2, move it to the “scenarios” you located earlier
Step 3, Open up the map and change deployment to the entire map. To do this, find the line player_deployment = a, b, c, d. Replace a and b with 0, c and d with the maximum size.
Step 4, Now go to your missions, you should be able to see your new scenario.

add the ships
You do not need to add ships as long as they are build and saved on your computer.

setting up the deployments.
This step assumes the students has build their fleet on your computer, and that they also saved the deployment.
Step 1, Load the game, Load up the mission and load up a student’s fleet.
Step 2, Move the fleet manually to the opposite end of the screen (mirror), save this file as aifleet_easy.txt, do this for up to 2 more fleets, name them aifleet_medium.txt and ai_fleet_hard.txt
Step 3, find the folder that has the same name as your custom map in “userdir\GratuitousSpaceBattles\deployments”
Step 4, Copy the folder with the same name as your custom map over to the folder “deployment” located earlier
Step 5, Open the deployment files with a text editor (notepad ++), use the replace function to change “angle = 90” to “angle = 270”, this will flip the facing of all the ships creating a true mirror fleet on the other end.
Step 6, Run the game, you should now see the fleet you just made inside the map. You can now deploy normally against any of the 3 fleets.
Step 7, if you need to make more than 3 fleets, you will need to repeat this process.

Hello, gpallis. Are you going to give us a post concerning exactly what happened during the classroom’s big day? I hope the kids got to enact their high-decibel, pixel-based gotterdammerung just as you intended. I’m dying of suspense here!