Capships - love 'em or leave 'em?

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Sligor
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Capships - love 'em or leave 'em?

Post by Sligor »

Finally, after goofing around with all those space idiots, furry, fanatic or both, alien drones and listening to the "good boy" BS of that yester-yesterday admiral I could buy the Paradigm...wow! :shock:
Well, maybe I should have the 8 mios better invested in Jolson or an new holiday resort on Speke, since what I got was rather disappointing. :lol:

The Paradigm (milspec) was stuffed with all the upgrades so I couldn't equip it myself. Changing it in the save game to a paradigm.blank solved this nuisance. Except for armor, hull and turrets I could equip it now. But I wasn't still very happy. Flying missions with my good old Cent was still faster, more succesful with better chances to survive...in general: more enjoyable.

So what's my point?
The PR team did a great job to convert the old Privateer game into the21st century. Ships like the Drayman or the Paradigm where never supposed to be flown by players. They where mission goals, opponents or just "decoration". So they are equipped like all the little fighters and medium freighters in the game.
I would like to have "real" capships, that means: Big, heavy ships with superior firepower, not just blown up fighters with many turrets.

What could a player in the original Privateer, and in general, in the remake do?

- dogfight
- bringing stuff from here to there
- picking up things in space

No matter what kind of mission is flown, finally it ends into one of the mentioned things. Which is very fine for fighters and small/medium freighters.

What is a military capship supposed to do? dogfight? Cargo runs or collecting space salvage? Surely not.
The main purpose for military capships in such a game could/should be:

- holding ground, or better, space
- fighting other capships

Military capships could/should be real threats, challenging mission objectives which can't be taken out in a few minutes by an avarage Centurion or Orion.
Does that mean, that I can't take off and blow away that Kamekh in no time anymore? I hope so. With wingman in the game, either hired or given by allies, very new options are open. A Capship shouldn't be taken down by just a single fighter. (Well, as long as I'm not Luke Skywalker and there's no Death Star in the game)

So what I did was to fumble around with the units.cvs to change stats of the paradigm. I managed to "create" new very heavy shields and reactors. (Not really difficult, to make them buyable and work is something different :wink: ). Also I made some new repairable armor and hull, much heavier than isometal. I found it annoying anyway that the inbuild default Paradigm armor wasnt repairable unless some of the internal systems were damaged.

Wht I try to do is:

- creating a seperate class of upgrades for capships only. It's not very likely, that a reactor or jump drive of the size of merely 1m³, good enough for a small fighter, would support a huge capship. So, by example, I made a level 15 rector of 150 tons and 120 m³ for the paradigm.

- Increasing shields, armor and reactor power of capships in general. A level 9 shield is of course better than a level 7 one, but not that much better than a Paradigm is bigger than the orion. There's also a line in the units.cvs Shield_Efficiency. If this means what I think that it means, there's an easy way to make capships better protected.

- Creating really heavy weapons like big guns or certain missiles which could only be equipped by capships.

- Capship fights only based on turrets. This is mostly the case already, since turning the nose with the guns towards a talon isn't very effective. (Ok, the AI is still stupid enough to attack directly the front :lol: )
It would be great, though I don't know how this could be done, to have severals classes of turrets which could be aimed on several targets. Let's say the medium turrets be CTRL + W as a kind of AA guns and the Heavy ones aim on that nasty Kamekh.

Capships will be still valnurable to fighters, which is ok. Even an Iowa class battleship was doomed w/o a small fleet of support ships and planes flying CAP. But we have the wingmen.

I hope I could make the directions of my thoughts clear and would be glad to read some opinions and suggestions. And maybe someone is working on smething similiar already.
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Post by Dilloh »

Nice idea, though there's something to add:
- The REAL capships, meaning carriers, will be available in WCU, means we need something in between, which are the corvettes right now
- Work at large turrets is already in progress, they'll be in service for carriers
- Try to double the capship turret range, half the fire delay, add missile turrets with low delay
- Inspiration by original WC series: Create a photon torpedo as the only possibility to take out a capship - locking time 30 seconds.

Just a few ideas
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Well, we cant have a real cap ship (cofederation, gettysburg) until some one 1) make the space platforms larger, new constantinople, etc. 2) make the distences a LOT further as each system is too small, i took me ten minutes to get from a jump to the other side of the system.

What was it i was going to say... UGH... Yes capship only things are needed.
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Dilloh
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Post by Dilloh »

I also think that New Constantinopel, Perry and especially Planets are too small. Still, you could solve that by creating a new base unit, e.g. space dock or ship yard, confederation only.
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

How would one do that???
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Dilloh
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Post by Dilloh »

By creating a 3d model, texturing it, giving it specs and placing it e.g. into the troy system (/sectors/gemini/troy). You can try that with available bases. I've placed a kilrathi controlled perry naval base into troy for example.
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Image

Well cap ships are also used for air support.
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Neskiairti
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Post by Neskiairti »

one weapon that would be a good idea...
im sure many in here have played the Freespace games.. remember the heavy beam weapons?

thats one thing that for the most part, WC missed.. most lasers and such, dont fire in a little pulse.. if you want to do damage, you cut something in half.. or core it..
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Post by Draken Stark »

Ok.. one thing about capital ships.. when they want to send crew members down to a planet... Think of Star Trek (I know this isn't that but look at this: ) They never landed the Enterprises on a plant to unload one crew member... they used shuttles! Just render the cap ship in the background where you can (like on the places where you can see sky/space show the cap ship there and have a little shuttle on the landing pad.

That definitely makes things as simple as creating a model for a small shuttle and if you really want and can show the cap ship in the background.
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Post by Dilloh »

That would also be a possibility. But the work for carriers is already done in WCU, at least I saw a fralthi folder there. I'm gonna try to merge that with PU soon.

What I'd miss with this "background carrier" is that it wouldn't change its size when you fly towards it. My proposition would be to implement the carrier like a base (e.g. like perry). It would be easier and more realistic (if paradigms make up to 250 clicks, a carrier should not make more than 50 clicks, virtually nothing). It wouldn't be armed, but could carry a fighter bataillon (like perry - ever attacked it?).
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Post by spiritplumber »

We do have carriers -- at least the Concordia-class and Confederation-class.
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Post by Melonhead »

spiritplumber wrote:We do have carriers -- at least the Concordia-class and Confederation-class.
And do they ever look nice at a scale of about 0.3 to 1.0! :D Very cool.

I copied over the folder and pointed the drayman in units.csv to \confedcarrer and connie.bxfm, changed the scale to 1, and there are carriers everywhere. (Okay, not realistic, but I wanted to see what they looked like, and didn't want to wait too long for one to show up.)

One thing I can't figure out--I can dock on z30's Drayman_CVL, but not on the carrier. Is there something special you do to the .bxfm file to make a landing bay? (I copied over all the other values from Drayman_CVL, thinking perhaps there was a difference between it and the regular Drayman.)
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Post by Melonhead »

So, partially answering my own question, making the carrier a "unit" in the *.system file does the trick for docking. But, how do the missions that ask me to dock on a Drayman accomplish this? There isn't a ship unit in those systems...
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Post by Neskiairti »

are you talking about hitting the D key docking, or bumping in to docking..
cause i know you can dock with many ships by hitting D, but cant "bump" dock them.
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Post by Dilloh »

@melonhead
Are you talking about a cargo mission? If you get an objective to visite a drayman you can't find, then it is either destroyed or you are designated to land on your own ship, a bug that has been fixed lately and will be fixed within the next PU release

I currently see no other way than placing carriers as units. You might want to do some experiments using the vehicle variable instead of unit, maybe it keeps the ship moving on.
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Re: Capships - love 'em or leave 'em?

Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Sligor wrote:The Paradigm (milspec) was stuffed with all the upgrades so I couldn't equip it myself. Changing it in the save game to a paradigm.blank solved this nuisance. Except for armor, hull and turrets I could equip it now. But I wasn't still very happy. Flying missions with my good old Cent was still faster, more succesful with better chances to survive...in general: more enjoyable.
That will be fixed when i find out how to (1 assign stuff to AI flown ships (2 find out what the hell went cap ship reactor.
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Zool
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Post by Zool »

I might be able to help here. I gave myself a kamekh in a savegame, (I think they look reall cool 8) ) and for that it came with enerything, like an upgrade shop, so I opened the units.csv file found the kamekh entries and had a look. There is three entries for each ship;
1) [name] - AI flown ship and its equipment loadout.
2) [name.blank] - a "blank version" but can still have some equipment built in. The one you buy at the upgrade shop.
3) [name.template] - sets the max levels of equipment and settings (and not sure what else yet).

For my kamekh it was a matter of going through the columns; cargo, upgrades, mounts, and seeing what was there and changing it appropriately. All the equipment was listed in the cargo so I removed it all and bought what I wanted. This worked better than leaving in the equipment that was listed.

Also if you have a ship that wont allow you to change the armour and hull just remove the armour settings on the [name.blank] version and increase the settings on the [name.template] version to above 40 so you can use isometal armour and hull. eg; raptor and scimitar can only have a plasteel hull.

I wouldn't take the armour off your Paradigm (or Kamekh) as it will be much stronger than anything you can buy.

Hope this helps. :D
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Post by Dilloh »

Okay, the thing with the armor settings is new to me and maybe interesting for further PU rebalancing.

Btw:
name = Milspec ships for players
name.blank = Stock ships for players
name.template = AI ships
this was confirmed by a developer
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Thanks i will start with somthing easier. Armor. I did have cap ship reactor but it is no longer working.
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