Battlestars Forever - Galactica, Pegasus, Basestar, Fighters

Wicky_42 · Post by **Wicky_42** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 5:37 pm

From a little bit of play testing I would recommend these little tweaks:
- Give the jump drives maybe 1000 energy and 1000 energy required - the default 300 means by the time the ships have jumped past each other and decelerated to turn around they have recharged and jump back again - not a very exciting fight, lol! You could give the Basestar lower energy requirements so it could jump faster.

- I would suggest increasing the AI ranges by maybe 1000 (to try and stop the ships jumping directly onto each other - though perhaps a more accurate jump drive would help?)

- Make the missiles harder to shoot down, perhaps .2 instead of .4 interceptability - there's enough flak there to nail them anyway, it just give the baseships a bit more of a chance to do damage.

- Personally, I find it more satisfying to quadruple the galactica's gat. blaster damage and reload time, mainly because I don't like blaster spam and it gives the galactica more of a salvo fire, which is just all kinds of awesome.

- This is more of a question: did you intend the entire galactica to explode pretty much at once? In my games, it does fine for ages, taking a few hits, then all of a sudden the centre of the head explodes, presumably from a weak spot getting repeatedly nuked through the hull. The debris from this absorb the flak gun's attention, and a couple of uncontested nukes later the entire head, bar a couple of pylons explode as well, along with a strip down the side. The debris from this damage is enough to kill the ship. Perhaps a little bit of a rethink of the death system might be in order? Perhaps if you had more shrapnel fall off the outside of the ship when a weakpoint goes it would act as a shield to give the Galactica time to finish exploding, thus preventing the Cylons from steam-rollering over it.

antisocialmunky · Post by **antisocialmunky** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 8:33 pm

Wicky_42 wrote:From a little bit of play testing I would recommend these little tweaks:
- Give the jump drives maybe 1000 energy and 1000 energy required - the default 300 means by the time the ships have jumped past each other and decelerated to turn around they have recharged and jump back again - not a very exciting fight, lol! You could give the Basestar lower energy requirements so it could jump faster.

I ran into some problems tinkering with dieterling. Modifying energy seems to make the whole thing do weird stuff

- I would suggest increasing the AI ranges by maybe 1000 (to try and stop the ships jumping directly onto each other - though perhaps a more accurate jump drive would help?)

Yeah, that happens sometimes. The AI ranges are 1500 and 2000 respectively. It usually works except that flanking AI is kinda stupid and does that sometimes.

- Make the missiles harder to shoot down, perhaps .2 instead of .4 interceptability - there's enough flak there to nail them anyway, it just give the baseships a bit more of a chance to do damage.

Balancing missile interceptibility is basically impossible. There's a bug I ran into which seems to indicate that the enemy AI seems to have a bonus to interceptability that makes me need add another decimal to see any difference. That's why I made 'nukes' out of the plasma torpedoes. Three basestars will strip most of the battlestar's PD and leave it dead in the water and kill the battlestar. I make it so you need 2-3 to kill one battlestar.(This is the 'official' balance)

Anyway, the missile value I used is for allied and user battlestars. It won't work the other way around.

- Personally, I find it more satisfying to quadruple the galactica's gat. blaster damage and reload time, mainly because I don't like blaster spam and it gives the galactica more of a salvo fire, which is just all kinds of awesome.

Problem: Blasters have no intereceptability. As much as I would like to double or triple the reload. I can't get past flak of othere battlestars unless I have a high ROF. If thee was anyway to play with flak damage so blasters aren't intercepted, that'd be great.

I originally had both the flak(30) and blasters(20) roughly doubled but the flak effect didn't look very good.

- This is more of a question: did you intend the entire galactica to explode pretty much at once? In my games, it does fine for ages, taking a few hits, then all of a sudden the centre of the head explodes, presumably from a weak spot getting repeatedly nuked through the hull. The debris from this absorb the flak gun's attention, and a couple of uncontested nukes later the entire head, bar a couple of pylons explode as well, along with a strip down the side. The debris from this damage is enough to kill the ship. Perhaps a little bit of a rethink of the death system might be in order? Perhaps if you had more shrapnel fall off the outside of the ship when a weakpoint goes it would act as a shield to give the Galactica time to finish exploding, thus preventing the Cylons from steam-rollering over it.

Alright. I was thinking about toying with this myself - atleast iron out the bugs. It takes roughly 150+ 'nukes' to kill any of the weak sections but they really just decrease the HP to about 1500 so that the debris will chain react. Yes it is intentional. Battlestars explode spectacularly. Basestars just kinda fall apart....

Wicky_42 · Post by **Wicky_42** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:15 am

Increasing the AI range would still be good, and why not give the battlestar broadside ai? More in line with the cannon, and if you adjusted the fire arcs of the topside batteries so the rear 4 cannon shoot directly forward and the visa versa for the forward 4 it would add a little tactical depth. And be more cannon - Galactica is always broadsiding.

As to the dietling, i tested it and doing as I suggested works fine for slowing the jump rate - default energy max and required is 300, so just increase both a few hundred and it should work fine.

I know what you mean about enemy AI and PD - very frustrating. I hadn't fought battlestar vs battlestar, so yeah, i can see there would be problems. Guess high rof is the only way, unless you spent time tweaking the pd field density and baseship missile stats.

antisocialmunky · Post by **antisocialmunky** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:49 am

I did use to have it on broadside AI but I dropped it because it did some strange things with jumping and was a pain in the butt to control. I was figuring that the slow ROT and the constantly jumping and flaking basestars would do something similar and it does if you spawn the base stars one behind and one infront of the galactica. I'm actually just thinking about having separate broadside and flanking AI versions.

The arcs wouldn't be bad. I would give them about 270 degree archs so you ahve 90 degrees overlapping on either side.

antisocialmunky · Post by **antisocialmunky** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 10:28 pm

Eh, does anyone else get a weird bug when editting dieterlings?

I'm seriously considering just removing them for these ships right now since for whatever reason, dieterlings show over 100% for higher values but only charge up to 100%. Thus, you can't lengthen jump times, just shorten them.

EDIT: NVM - Sucessfully adjusted energy regen. Reported in the bug topic none-the-less.

Grenville · Post by **Grenville** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 3:57 am

Sorry if this is a bit of a necro but i came across this scale picture and if he was still working on the BSG ships i thought it could help

Sorry about the large size, its a direct link from the sight i found it on ^^"

Magick · Post by **Magick** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 4:06 am

Wow. A two week and five day necro.
It isn't too bad compared to others we have seen but...
Please refrain from dabbling in the occult.

Although...It WAS a helpful contribution..

antisocialmunky · Post by **antisocialmunky** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 5:36 am

Well, I do have the ships.

I wanted to post them with the Colonial Insignia done but I'm too lazy.

I'll send out the last revision of ships in a bit.

Spoot Knight · Post by **Spoot Knight** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 11:05 am

I've never seen a BSG ship so well done, these are fucking amazing.
Definate download from me.

antisocialmunky · Post by **antisocialmunky** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 7:59 pm

Thanks, glad you like them.

Also, I found some of the old BSG ships and I hate everyone who gave me a hard time and gave those thigns a pass.

Wicky_42 · Post by **Wicky_42** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:09 pm

As I was making some Homeworld 2 ships I came across the best way to make kinetic cannons BSG style - use missile launchers! (partly inspired by AD's RAN ships, I realised in hindsight) They are perfect: you can set interceptability to 0, colour to yellow and stretch the launcher longer and thinner for aesthetics, no turning, burst as how many barrels you want, and - the most important bit - bullet speed to about 500 to 1000.

This gives you hard, fast rounds that are immune to point defence (apart from those cheap point beams, though not a problem here). Bring back salvo fire! Bring back realistic rates of fire! Your BSG ships are seriously good, they just need nicer weapons