dam i see your point about the 153 nukes.. ok well now i have lost my train of though i dont honestly know how to implement them bolth I dont knwo the modding limitations of this game.. is it possible to give a ship two types of am?

Keep in mind these defence platforms are godly, with enough power to rip through even a battle cruiser with a single shell, heavily wounding if not killing the thing. The only things that could face these monsters head on with a chance of winning alone would be assault carriers and battleships.
They fire a single round with devistating power every 20 seconds, i really dont think this thing needs upgrades other then damage control which would increase hull regen rate.
Another thing to note, give planets a buff that knock out all MAC platforms when the planet is down to say 15%. Remember that the generators for these guns are on the planet not the platform itself. This would simulate the reactors being captured or destroyed.

I agree with the invasion idea, but it should still work with planet HP. As for the upgrades, i really dont think it should matter because most UNSC ships would have this anyways. Besides if we really looked at it that way then a single UNSC or covenant ship would be unable to capture a planet alone or even with a few others. I think the bombing damage with teh bombs replaced as dropships should be enough. Unrealistic but the best i think we can do unless someone knows how to actually mod other effects into the game.

Again, please read my post regarding MAC rounds and nukes, your idea simply would not work out as stated by Acolyte.



Again, please read my idea regarding AM, nukes and MAC shots.
As for the refit stations, rearming nukes would be great, i would also like to see colonized planets with a refit option as well, giving say 10% hull and 1 AM to say up to 10 ships in the gravity well around it. Something that can only be used once every 600-1200 seconds (10-20 minutes)
The refit stations i believe DO have strike craft docking stations so they would have strike craft.
While i dont think you can actually mod in the effect of stopping to repair nearby ships you could have an ability with small range requiring either godly micro management or just that you stop all ships around the refit station and keep the station in a single position while it works. In addition the buff would have to work so that it can be fired off every second and only benefits the ship for that second. Otherwise people could dock for a second then run and the ship would continue to get repaired/refitted.

Also i think that to really get a halo-esk feel to this mod things would have to be slowed down a bit, large battles later in game would have to incorporate only small fleets of up to 100 or so ships. Not only will this maximize the micromanaging of fleets on both sides but in actuality the entirety of the UNSC only had about 500-600 ships total while the covenant had around 2000. (humans might be overexaggerated here, as are the covenant. 153 ships at reach + an estimated 200 at earth + 50-100 for Harvest and other ships here and there for for humans, ~500 at the unyielding heirophant + 13 first battle of earth + ~500 with high charity + ~20 at Halo plus other ships here and there and possible unknowns hinted at in GoO for covenant)

Oh and in regards to colt556, i know most cov ships have more then one torpedo tube, i was stating only the frigate, which you must have looked over when you corrected me first.

I just re-read your post, my mistake.

As for the ideas of planetary assault, I think you should go with the invasion affect, but with one twist. For the covenant, have it so once the planet is dead, they go through an animation of "glassing" the planet. Since the covenant never captured planets, they just neutralized defenses like the MAC generators, and then glassed the planet. Also, I think that if the planet is killed, all SMAC platforms should immediately go offline. Since SMAC platforms got all of their power from the planet, and couldn't sustain their own power.

Furthermore, I like the MAC/Nuke antimatter suggestion that was made earlier. Give like a frigate 153 antimatter, where a nuke costs 1 antimatter and a MAC costs 50. So that frigate has 3 MAC rounds and 3 nuclear missiles. Also Acolyte, you should make a shipyard type platform for repair and re-armment, instead of using the SMAC platform (I gathered from your post that they would go near a SMAC platform to heal). A SMAC platform could only dock, at most, two frigates, and could never repair or re-arm anything.

Also, I heard somewhere that a SMAC platform could fire a MAC round every second. But that might be a tad unbalanced, so maybe you could make it fire a round every ten seconds. The reason for this godly fireing rate, is because it had unlimited power. That was allways the limit for MAC guns on ships, they didn't have sufficiant power. But since SMAC's get their power from stations on the planet, they can get as much power as they need and so fire at such a fast rate.

SMAC's should also have low hull points so two/three torpedoes could take it down. But they should take up more tactical slots.

Please read tha bove posts. It has already been stated the 153 AM thing wouldnt work, twice. And the SMAC was said to fire once every 20 seconds.

I read the posts, and see how the whole 153 Antimatter wont work. However I have a way it can work. What you do is code in a SECOND anti-matter slot. So there's two bars of anti-matter on a ship. One will be tied to the Mac, the other will be tied to the nukes. (This is possible, unless hard coded, and seeing as how this game is suppose to be moddable I highly doubt it is.) So on the first bar, you could put 3 anti-matter, and a MAC round costs 1 anti-matter, so he has three rounds. On the second bar you again put 3 anti-matter, so it only has 3 nukes. Neither bar regens unless supplied as mentioned before. There you go, a perfect solution. Only problem is your coding ability, I don't know how skilled you are so you might not be able to do it. Hopefully you can though, as it would be perfect.

It is hard coded. A ship only has Antimatter available. There is only one like of code for available antimatter and its only represented graphically by the bar in game. The idea of anti-matter wasnt suposed to be used for ammunition but rather as energy available.

For the last time, i answered how this works! Most ships have more then 3 rounds for their MAC aside from older frigates. (I believe in FoR it was noted that a frigate had 3 rounds, but in halo 3 if you listen to the crashed pelican in the first level your on the arc you'll hear Keys fire more then 3)

The MAC cannon wont require anti-matter but will instead just have a 30-90 second recharge, the warheads will cost 50 AM and have a short 5-10 second charge. Then the ship will have 50 AM x warheads + 1. The one extra AM is just in case you need to have a minimal of 1 AM to use any abilities.

I just can't believe something like antimatter is hard-coded in the game. Most games now days don't have that type of thing hardcoded, hell most moddable games (As this one) don't have hardly anything hardcoded. Acolyte can you tell me how I can view Sins code? I wanna check, since I just can't wrap my head around that being hard-coded.

And Maico, Acolyte said that MAC's would use AM, and nukes wouldn't. If only one can use anti-matter, then I agree with Acolyte's choice. Macs are more devestating to the enemy then a nuke. After all a MAC can rip through a covenant ships shields AND do hull damage, a nuke can not.

The only flaw I see in the extra bar of antimatter is which will supply the antimatter for phase-jumps or slipspace or whatever you want to call it.

Colt to view the code you have to download the forge tools on the download page. And it is hard coded.

As for the what should rely on antimatter, after some more reaeach, the only vessel that was have a ammunition number on the MACs is the frigate [which has 6 rounds]. Either A. with make the nukes depend on AM and put MACs on a cooldown/recharge or B. Use less reliable and speculated number for the MACs and place them reliant on AM.

can I ask, except for lord simpson, is anyone here ACTUALLY making this mod, or are you just argueing over how to balance this yet-to-even-be-made game?

Based on relvant data. I've made the decision the the first craft UNSC players with have access to are the Mako-Class Corvette, the UNSC Shield Ship [colony/support ship] and the Marathon-Class cruiser.

The reasoning behind this as oppesed to starting off with frigates is that the Marathon-Class was designed before the frigates and un-refited Marathons have weak armorment [frigates carry more Archer Missiles]. Therefore, frigates will be a tier 1 or tier 2 researchable ship type even though they are cheaper.

EDIT: Me and CanadaMan are working on this as we speak. We're having trouble getting the code to work right but we're getting there none-the-less.

and lord simpson is the modeler?

I'd rather we just speculate on how many rounds a ship has, as I do believe MAC's are a superior weapon then nukes, and thus should be the more limited of the two.

Also, I find your reasoning for the starter ships to be extremely odd. I've only ever heard of the Marathon being the UNSC's answer for the aging Halcyon class, they were designed and built for the sole purpose of being their new capital ship. I'd imagine Mako's, and frigates, and destroyers would be the starter ships. While Marathons and carriers would be the capital ships.

Considering Marathons are suppose to be the strongest battleship the UNSC has, it obviously can't be spammed, atleast in the begining. Yet in the begining of a game you need a spammable type ship, a frigate if you will. So it would make a lot more sense for the frigate to take the place of the Cobalt, a decent starter ship, and one that can serve you throughout the game. While the Marathon would be more comparable to the Dunov or some other capital ship.


Edit: This is taken from Halopedia.

With current human technology, the UNSC frigate is barely a match for even the smallest Covenant vessel. It is outrun by even larger Covenant vessels, its armor susceptible to enemy pulse lasers, plasma torpedoes and its weaponry substandard. Only en masse does the UNSC frigate give any United Nations Space Command fleet element an advantage in the war against the genocidal Covenant. Also, a covenant frigate is more than a match for a UNSC frigate.

Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a picture perfect description of a starter ship in Sins.

Destroyers as starters? I was thinking that the destroyers play the role of the heavy cruiser, which has to be researched

The way I thought of it, was that Mako's would be like the scouts, cheap starter unit that you can use to scout and whatnot, only they'd be combat oriented. So combat scouts.

Then I figured Frigates would be like the Cobalts n whatnot, the spammable starter unit that you use to take over nearby planets.

The destroyer would be like the LRM frigate, a mid-level cruiser.

Then, since the UNSC seems to lack very many ship ideas, I was thinking some fan-made ship would take the place of the Kodiak, the heavy hitter. Just below the capital ships.

Then of course you'd have the capital ships, the Marathons, the carriers, the super carriers. The big daddies who rule the sky.

Atleast that's how I was thinking of it, based on what we know of the UNSC's ships. Frigates were weak, sucked in combat unless en masse (Sound like the cobalts? lol). The destroyers were like the frigates, but stronger, dishing out more damage and receiving more. Not exactly like the LRM since it's a long range missile frigate, but just something mid-level, it's deffinently stronger then a frigate, but nowhere near a cap ship. Then since the UNSC seems to lack a ship comparable to the kodiak, I was hoping for a fan-made ship. And then of course you'd have the cap ships. The Marathon would be like the Dunov, the re-fitted colony ship would be like the Akkan, the super carrier is self explanitory.

If we're going to make a fan-based heavy cruiser, I got an idea or two.

1) A ship built around three massive MAC cannons(inbetween normal MAC and SMAC)
2) a mobile, but weaker SMAC
or(my favorite)
3) an experimental ship with a weaker covenant arsenal(kind of like how the prowler has two pulse-laser turrets)

Sorry but give up with this Halo crap, Halo in the first place wasn't that good and only got even worse over time to the eventual point the Story line is nothing but "Aliens, Ring, lame main character with nothing described about himself etc, and the pathetic attempt at trying emotions with an even more pathetic love story".

Why not use your time to make a Mod that actually has potential instead of with the screaming little 10 year old Halo Fanatics, or talentless frat boys who don't know what college is actually about, which is women, in case you are one.

Try and spend your resources and time thinking on what could be, an actual interesting mod that is, something like an Aliens Mod with Weyland Yutani and the Colonial marines fighting each other while there is Alien outbreaks on ships that spell their impending doom unless you upgrade your on board security staff to not get face hugged and make an outbreak which would make Random events interesting, then add Predators there too and that can give you your third Edge, but honestly it would just add a little too much.. Kind of like how the Flood added a lot too much of unexplained how in the hell did they survive after the ancient wiped themselves out which only to be later explained by the lamest reason, you think the forerunners would have been smart enough to make the weapon kill the flood and secondly not had them on their own damn weapons. The map would have to be one big gravity well with a few planets as space travel is still really risky in it.

Or heck how about Warhammer 40k, sure the story line in it lacks but thats just the fault of the current games workshop writers which are fairly horrible, but there's enough back story and lore you could make quite the campaign and there is no limitation of originality and uniqueness for you to draw from, aside from the fact there are 10 freaking major factions (Daemonhunters and Whitch Hunters I include) and then all your small factions like Farsight Enclave etc. You can use warp for space travel.

Or how about another overlooked but better than Halo by insanely far, Starship troopers? If you can't see the possibilities with it.. Well obviously you'd be a Halo Fan.

Or heck how about the most overlooked Sci-Fi ever, FireFly! Alliance VS Independents, so so many features, pirate raids? Reavers, or hell make Reavers an entire faction to play! Your possibilities here are so based and rich with eloquent plot possibilities I mean it would be pretty darn cool. Plus the ships of the alliance were very varied and would fit an engine like Sins perfectly.
You could have neutral space stations for trading etc, but have it so that if there's combat around them chaos breaks out and the station fights both sides. It would be important to make the map one big gravity well with planets in it etc instead of phase lanes.

Or hell, Battletech! Heavy Gears! Something with more depth than wet sand..

why does it matter? let them argue over ideas, they're not actually doing anything anyway.

Valaska, unless you have something good or something constructive to say about this mod then dont even both.

I also need to make a clarification. I mistyped the starter ship. I meant to say that Halcyon class cruiser before refit. That should make more sense with everything else I wrote.

valaska your a punk that doesn't know a good game when he sees one... halo is one of the greatest games ever and has one of the best stories


This halo mod would be great, i would play it all the time

Thank you Brandex18. As for Valaska: Please keepyour unconstuctive criticism to yourself. There are already talks for most of the series you mentioned (just talks mind you, you might have to shove them into action) and I really think I can change your mind with what I'm gonna start cranking out.

Carbon, Valaska, get out of the thread. If you don't like the idea of a Halo mod, don't comment on it, and don't play it when it's done. And Carbon, it IS being worked on. It has a modeler and coder as far as I know, that's more then some mods can say.

And I think a Halcyon would make MUCH more sense, thanks for clearing that up.

I agree that the starter ship should be frigates. As for MAC/nuke issue i cant agree.

Nukes have area of effect, on top of that they knock out shields REGARDLESS of ship size, if they launch when the ship has no shields chances are that ship is gone. MAC on the other hand almost always deal damage in two's. One to kill shields, maybe minor damage (and i mean just a fat dent, no real hull damage) if the ship is a frigate, and two to actually hit and deal any true physical damage. The only exception to this rule is an SMAC round which can gut even a CCS class battle cruiser.

In addition like said earlier the only ships limited apparently are frigates and thats at 6. Set their recharge time to 60-90 seconds and chances are in a single battle you'll use it 3 maybe 4 times tops if its a big fight.

Think about this, 5 frigates vs 20 cov destroyers. They dont stand a chance right? For a micro manager this is an easy fight however. Two frigates launch their nukes into the middle of the battlefield where they'll be fighting. The destroyers get hit, then before getting in range for their pulse lasers or really realize whats going on, 5 MAC rounds hit killing 2-5 ships. Another nuke gets launched to prevent shield recharge, but before it goes off the other two release their nukes. The covenant ship shields drop then half if not all of the covenant ships are now dead or heavily wounded. Sure they might have gotten off some plasma torpedoes but in the long run, when the UNSC can only win fights 4v1 and they draw at 1v4, id call that a win.

As for the halcyon class cruiser. This is already placed for us as a heavy cruiser. While available early to us its still expensive in the metal department for its extensive hull and while under-powered would still beat out a few frigates in battle just from its hull design. Dont forget that this thing has a HUGE cargo bay holding a good bunch of tanks, warthogs, dropships and fighters.
Then of course theres re-armament research to be done for later, new reactor design making it MUCH faster (better design as a whole = more speed plus its boost ability that gives it up to 300% more juice) doubling in point defence (40 instead of 20 50mm auto cannons) and of course new MAC rounds + magnetic coiling for 3 round burst using shredder type rounds.