Carriers

Um, yeah.

First off, which carrier are you trying to change? The frigate ones, or the cap ship ones?

If the capship ones, remember that the number of fighters changes with the ships level, and is called "command points" or something to that effect (I did some research). So you aren't just changing a "2" to a "4", your changing the delta value as well (how many does it gain per level, when less than 0 it effectively becomes how many levels per squad).

Is it "maxNumCommandPoints"? If so, I can double that value and call it good...
If only there were a cheat mode to test with...

Cheating to test this sort of thing is pretty easy. Look in PlayerTech.entity, under the "galaxyGeneratorInfo" section. This defines the ships you start with at your homeworld. "kingCapitalShipDefName" is, of course, for your Kol flagship, and changing this to specify a carrier is easy. Also, "frigateDefNames" defines the members of the group of starting ships you get whether flagships are enabled or disabled. Despite the word "frigate" in the name, you can put capital ships here, too. For testing, I have one of every kind of ship listed here, so I can just load up a new game and test away.

Thanks Therax! I had already started a new game and got high enough up the tech tree to figure it out, but that will be helpful for future mods. I have noticed that the AI tends to massively overbuild cruiser carriers; this small mod makes the game significantly more competitive. Not to mention fit better with my own tastes...

Does anyone know if units can be added? Or must they be modded over existing units? I'm thinking that certain mods might be fun if you could have (say) 10 types of frigates, but only 2-3 cruisers. Or something...

Can anyone say WING COMMANDER MOD!

Sure, but why would I bother?

It has taken you more effort to be a jerk than it would have to do nothing. Why on Earth would you use your energy in that manner?

... that was meant as a joke.

Adding an ungodly amount of fighters/bombers will make (most) frigates and cruisers much less effective. However, it would put quite an interesting spin on the game.
Edit:
I would love to see some screenshots of the ensuing madness.

Then I will publicly apologize. I will suggest that smilies were invented specifically to deal with this sort of confusion...

I know, but I figured that joke was obvious enough to not need them. Apparently I was wrong.



I accept. No hard feelings

...jerk...



rushing the carriers would probably be their use.

Wing commander was the bomb. I don't know how fun it would be from a command and control perspective though I mean a lot of the game was about sending fighters and bombers out partially blind and hoping they run into trouble while avoiding enemies looking for the same.

Also, did any of you guys ever play wing commander armada. That was sorta a weird attempt at a turn based strategy game combined with a space sim. You could play full turn based or and this was the weird thing you could jump into the cockpit during fights.

The real problem though with modding this game would be that you would need insanely powerful fighters and bombers and honestly it might be kinda a hard game to enjoy. Cluster of Fighters and bombers --- vs. cluster of fighters and bombers. There would need to be coding for escorts, bombers, fighters, figher-bombers, and all the other kinds of things one would need to make this possible. I can't deny though seeing a broadsword torp. a carrier would be sweet as hell. I just don't think the code is there to support it and this game is really might not the right candidate to mod towards it.

pffffff with all the things the devs say about the Iron Engine, I am expecting it to make me those waffles!

LOL, poor devs. I already beat them to a waffle-making program. Just needs a couple thousand dollars of specially designed hardware to actually make it. (Well, ok, I'm lying through my teeth here...)

God I love waffles....

some how we always get to the delicious goodness of waffles.... samething happened on the intro movie thread....

o yes and btw I am a total noob at messing with code, the last time i did that Gal Civ 2 never worked again......

I'd say "oh, just dive right in, this code is _very easy_ to change." But then so is the GalCiv2 code, so ...

What I will say is: this code is easy to change, just make sure that you back everything up before you mess with it. Seriously, copy your entire "gameinfo" folder onto your desktop before you do anything. That should keep you from messing up too badly...

well thank u *bows* but i don't like to change stuff in the game because then im not playing with the original settings, idk changeing to a wing commander mod cheapens the game a little, but i do think that perichins should be at least able to carry 2 squads when they reach veteran status!

Bah, you pansies.

Ok. Some messing around indicated that I could:

Edit CAPITALSHIP_TECHCARRIER and set their command points start value to 8, and their incremental value to 2.

Then I went to PlayerTech and set as kingCapitalShipDefName "CAPITALSHIP_TECHCARRIER"

That gave me a starting carrier w/12 odd fighter slots. Bah. I can do worse.

So I also looked up FrigateTechCarrier and gave the cruisers a good 4 command points each.

Then I looked up FighterTechBomber and FighterTechCombat and was disappointed that I couldn't do anything really abusive.

Then I noticed SquadTechBomber and SquadTechCombat. And what do we have here? A "baseMaxNumFighters" value? Lets just tweak that from 5 to 20. Oh, and so I don't have to wait around all day, lets drop their construction time from 20 to 2.

The result can be seen in the screen shot below. This is all with the starting carrier only, mind you. It was actually tricky to take a decent screen shot that managed to capture all the fighters. This one has about half of them in the shot.

Linked for size.

The unfortunate thing is that right now the fighter/bomber combat AI has them beeline straight at their targets and a tightly packed mass of a hundred or so fighters makes for a pretty crappy screen shot. Everything they point at just explodes in a hail of missiles half a second later and it makes the combat pretty dull. I may play around with the balance. Looking at the text files suggests one could do some really abusive things with flak cannons.

EDIT: Hot damn I suck at imageshack. Uh.... images in a second.

Just use the "insert web link" and "insert image" buttons

Heh, I just figured that out. I kept trying every variant of BB code I could and never thought to look for an "insert image" button. Sigh....

Since I can no longer edit my original post (what, twenty edits is too many?), the other image I took was this one:

Linked for size

you can only edit until someone else posts
and yeah, devs, is there a way to make fighters/bombers only attack a target until you have enough of them attacking to do 10% more damage than its current health?
for example, instead of having my 57 bombers attack 3 arcovas one at a time, why not have them attack only for enough damage to kill them with a bit of overkill, and have them attack multiple targets?

does that make sense?

ok this is a stupid question but how did u guys get the gray box on the left side of the screen to disappear?