[Mod] The Foundation: Conspiracy [v0.0.1 Alpha Release]

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Modding
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The finished update to my mod: Hull variants.

Currently only on fighters, they come in 4 types: Budget, Lightweight, Reinforced and Advanced. Each one produces different effects which are easily understood by the name. Lightweight and Reinforced involve trading weight and hull strength for speed, and vice versa. Using Budget and Advanced can often halve or double your hull cost, respectively, but coming with associated effects on the hull.

It will probably need balancing, and there’s problems with stacking currently. It may also be crashing the game right now…

42

At the present time, I do not see any lore conflicts created by this scenario’s stated background.

Indeed I have. And I sure hope that somebody kicks Mayor Indbur III to the curb before he does any more damage. :wink:

43

Well, the names are mostly symbolic. At the best analogy the Foundation Conspiracy is occurring around the equivalent of 50 F.E. (maybe closer to 80 F.E.), so we’ve got an equivalent of good ol’ Salvor Hardin leading the Foundation. However, the main scenarios are more like ~195 F.E. where Bel Roise invades the Foundation. So in best terms 50-200 F.E. is being merged into the timeframe of the Gratuitous war, with the Hardin counterpart taking control near the war’s outbreak and you leading Roise against Hardin in the present. Indbur’s counterpart probably wouldn’t rise until after the current Gratuitous war.

The Asimov’s Empire around that time had some pretty powerful tech. Just look at how they described a captured Imperial ship"
“It’s a ship! They could build in those days. Its cubic capacity is half again that of the entire Anacreonian navy. It’s got atomic blasts capable of blowing up a planet, and a shield that could take a Q-beam without working up radiation.” Foundation, The Mayors, p.93
I’m sure the true reaches of the GSB Empire has that kind of tech in hiding. >.> A lost prototype of it could be explained… with a few executions…

Before I had even noticed that quote I had planned that the main emphasis would be high power weaponry and shields. Oh, and my planned Terminus-only shield will be really exciting. Before you freak out and cry OP, it WILL be penetrable by at least one vanilla weapon without lucky shots. Besides, it has a size of 1600m. I’l make sure the scenario one doesn’t produce too much power when you destroy it though; I expect blast radius is going to be close to 1km. Terminus Command Station hull will be left out of alpha release while I do a lot of work on it.

44

If by shield you mean a shield generator that creates a shield bubble, you should be aware that these are not susceptible to lucky shots. If the shield has a shield resistance greater than the shield penetration of the weapon firing upon it, the shield will never sustain any damage, no matter how long you keep firing on it.

On the other hand, if your shield bubble is 1600m or more in diameter, every weapon in the unmodded game can fire from within this bubble, and many of them cannot fire from outside of it. I’ve heard that missiles fired from beneath shield bubbles are still blocked by shields, although I cannot confirm this. Any other weapon fired from beneath the shield bubble will impact on the armor or hull of the target ship. This means that your super shield may be completely useless against unmodded weapons, as the centroid of a ship needs to be within the maximum range of a weapon before that weapon will begin to fire on the ship, and most unmodded weapons will be inside the shield bubble before the centroid of a 1600m ship is within the maximum range of the weapon.

45

I hadn’t ignored that part, I plan to have the scenario(s) where you fight a Terminus station use a significant range increase. The key idea with the Terminus battles will be that almost nothing will penetrate the shield, forcing your main fleet to get in close.

46

Well, pre-balancing I have one interesting fighter set-up: a viable torpedo fighter. Using a combination of the stock torpedo launcher and several types of custom modules I created one with a speed in the mid- to low- 2 range. It comes at a major cost though; pre-balancing it costs over twice as much as your standard fighter, and may get more expensive by v0.1. I’ll wait and see how it works out during the balancing phase.

47

That’s an interesting development. I can’t say that the much greater price bothers or even surprises me, though. Giving the player access to a torpedo bomber that’s fast enough to not be easy meat for Cruiser Pulse Lasers & etc. should be pricey. Quality doesn’t come cheaply. :slight_smile:

48

The module required to make this work isn’t called “Advanced Fighter Hull” for nothing. With weight and power reductions, plus hull and armour bonuses, its a powerful, albeit expensive, module. Imagine what fighters capable of being anti-cruiser could do, even if they aren’t amazing at it. Curiously, I think the fighters were actually faster than the torpedo itslef.

49

That’s it. My god, this is the mod to crash all gameloads.

50

The hull’s not that much bigger than Praetors’ Epivallon. (In terms of file sizes, at least.) And trust me, so far even my budget laptop has run any alpha tests of Terminus without any problems.

51

No, you misunderstand. My game crashes when I try to load a certain mod. Don’t remember which. Still, this mod looks nice. I really want it. And not for the explosion. Just kidding.

52

Hopefully this won’t be that crashing mod. I won’t be releasing anything that crashes my copy of GSB.

I’ve now finished coding the 5 fighter hulls that are part of my initial release! Once I finish the hulks and some final tweaks I’ll release for public testing.

53

Everything should now be ready for the first public testing release!

This mod includes 5 fighter hulls and 9 fighter modules of the Foundation, plus a Rebel scenario as part of the Foundation backstory. This is a testing version designed for feedback and balancing on the fighters. Be warned that it may contain imbalances and errors, and is not a completed mod. A proper stable version with the second scenario should be ready within the next week or two.

EDIT: Found some good Foundation fighter ship design? I’m looking for some of your favourite designs in this mod to use the next scenario. Send me a message with some designs and let me know.

54

If you’re looking for an interesting scenario, the Foundation may have it. Can you defeat a swarm of fighters where the count is a multiple of 762? We’ll see. Torpedo fighters with speeds over 2.00, an experimental device that (according to scientists) could disable a MK II shield generator and a close range armour-piercing bomb means the fighters won’t roll over to cruisers easily.

55

Ok…

First: Negative health module don’t work, it only affect the % of the ship in the battle (Hint: never start a battle with a fleet with “negative health”, it’s an inta-defeat…)
Second: Negative weight, not a good idea! Most of the time you can create speed monster with negative weigh module (29.6 speed Rocket fighter ^^)
Third: Negative cost, not a good idea too (-384.6 creadit fighter…)
Fourth: Keep up the good work ;D

56

Hull variants are working better in theory than practice. I’m reworking them, but it’s futile so far. Stack ability also made them more unbalanced. I may turn parts of some them into their own (less OP) modules. Probably a hull-boosting armour, lightweight armor and maybe a module that gives something like -1 power, -1 weight and -10 cost.

Engine also posed a problem so now it has positive weight. It has 0 stack effectiveness, and negative hull, but it will have less reduction than the hull of any working layouts I’m aware of.

There’s a load of other issues in the initial release I’m tweaking too. (Such as Wolf fighter module code error)

57

One way to limit “Hull variant” module to 1, is to modifies the cost of your fighter to around -1000 (+ or - the cost of the fighter with a factor of the hull cost), and set their power production to -100.
On your modules, set there cost to 1000 (+ or - the cost of this module) and the power prod to 100 (or the power consume to -100).
Here you have a unique module without way to put 2 on the same hull.

More, you can limit who have access to this module by not modifie the current value.

(If you want an application of this, look at my Xedilco. The Wakizashi and the Buckler use this technique.)

I have look at your code:

[slots] 20.00,32.00,TURRET, 236.00,32.00,TURRET, 54.00,138.00,STANDARD, 202.00,138.00,STANDARD, 128.00,64.00,STANDARD 128.00,204.00,STANDARD
There are two thing who are missing.
First, coma at the end of the two last modules slot
Second, the 1= 00.00,00.00,TURRET
If you look at the code of the vanilla hull, you can see that all modules slot got a number. It is quite important.

The restriction to races is missing on the fighter Bomb.

Your scenario is very very easy cause it’s a lot of weapons spam. I suggest you to look at the “standard” ship of the game.
(To look at them quickly, copy the ship from “gratuitous space battles\data\ships” to “My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles\ships”

You have much to learn, padawan, but you are on the good way.

58

Already had noticed that. That was just a typo. I input the locations then sort, so I enter the numbers last. Forgot that last part on the Wolf.

Had noticed that too and fixed it.

Well, it goes along with the idea of a bunch of scientists who have no idea how to control a naval fleet and are controlling remnants of the under-supplied fleet trying to flee of the system, doesn’t it?

…I’ll probably make some harder ones once I get some more ship design skill.

59

===>

Another thing, 0.01 HP is VERY different than 0
If the module have 0.01 HP (or negative health), a single hit destroy it (With the probability that all the damage “miss” the module, making him survive a second one.)
If the module have 0 HP, it is indestructible! There is no way to kill it. It’s quite useful for missile launcher of some kind to be sure that the missile will at last travel to the enemies even when his ship is destroyed. If a ship have only destructible 0.01 HP modules, a single hit kills it. An indestructible module on a destroyed ship work differently. The weapons stop shooting, but the missile stay in flight till the end. Carrier BUG hard! If there is any fighter in it when the ship go boom, the fighter will be stuck in it, be indestructible, but will still create a aggro zone and count toward the %.

60

Well… Guess I’ll be blasting some designs with high-intensity lasers. I’ll be modifying a couple thing to avoid those issues. I’m sure you can see what I was trying to do, but obviously it doesn’t work that way. Modded engine will be “fast, lightweight and expensive but brittle”, rather than “fast but strips hull”.