Wormhole Mechanic

Well, it is easy to make ships die when they enter a gravity well. Just copy the wormhole.entity file and create an abilitiy that does say 100000 damage to all ships every second. Give it to your modified wormhole and that should work.

If you only want them to die if they "enter" the wormhole, I think the range of planet abilities starts at the center so you might get it to work if you make the ability above with a range of 1. Otherwise, you can make "one way" wormholes, which could dump the ships in an unconnected planet without any way to get back.

I would prefer being able to do this without modding the files, as in a map that I could have other people download and play without changing their game. I'm guessing only your last suggestion works then?

Well it's a good idea. But then once people knew that the wormhole led to nowhere and only destroyed their vessels, why would they continue going there in the first place?

Yeah, the only thing to do would be to scuttle their initial scout. And that's probably not big enough of a lose to justify having a useless one way wormhole.

Without modding sadly its not really possible apart from how GoaFan has mentioned having the wormhole dump the ships off at a useless planet. However if you do want to mod or want to use anothers mod we do have a Black Hole & Black Hole Star for use in the Distant Stars mod for just such an occasion!

There really is nothing  better than playing Distant Stars and watching ships get sucked in by Black Holes. Even more so with the Vicious AI. LOL hordes of ships go poof!! Pop some popcorn and watch the show!

Is the latest distant stars updated for diplomacy? I'd love to try it then.

yes

Distant Stars

Speaking of the black holes in Distant Stars (Great mod by-the-way), I have been trying to understand how to do the following (so far I have not been able to get it to work):

1) Make the black hole "ownable" by a player or AI through the map design.

2) Make the abilities and buffs of the black hole only apply to non-owning forces passing through.

I can see the abilities cascade to produce their effects but I have no idea how to alter what I am assuming are the triggers without breaking the entity files--which is all I have achieved so far.

As suggested elsewhere, I looked at some of the military planets and in the mad scientest mod for examples but I am not finding what is transferrable and works. 

Is adding a target filter the sort of things that can be used on the files?

Can anyone help?

The black hole in Distant Stars is too awesome not to have and while it is comical watching the AI get eaten en masse, it isn't a good game mechanic for play.

Is there a master list of known, working ability strings anywhere?

Yes. You'll have to make the black hole colonizable (though since it will destroy anything that gets to close its effectively whoever starts at the planet), and a target filter should work nicely. I'm not sure how the wormholes work currently, but this is the target filter you'll want to use on the buff that will give the damage buff to the ships.

    buffType "LinkToADamageBuffHere"  
    targetFilter
        numOwnerships 1
        ownership "Enemy"
        numObjects 2
        object "CapitalShip"
        object "Frigate"
        numSpaces 1
        space "Normal"
        numConstraints 0

Thanks...at least I am on the right track.  There are four-five abilities/buffs (they seem to vary a little between Celestial and DS) for the blackhole and its own abilities so I will start with this and see if I can figure out  which one needs what.  Great help! (fingers crossed).

Yeah, the black hole is a rather complicated set of abilities. Good Luck with that.

Lol--feel free to volunteer assistance

Suggestion for Distant Stars...have a black hole and a "stable" black hole--that does what I am trying here.  Then players designing maps can add them in to their game scenario.

I'm basically going to have a pirate base at a black hole as a choke point--that is, if I get ..."lucky".

Just take the buff and abilites from the Black Hole and tranfer them to any captuable planet. See if that works as you intend. Then you can just change the planets mesh to the black hole and you should have your captuable black hole.

Also might wanna look at homeplanets in DS, the planetary buff is for the owner of the planet. Unlike most of the other planets.

Seems mashing both homeworld and black hole entities files should give you what your want. You still might have to put the targeting filter like GoFan said. But between those two planets abilites you should have just about all the pieces you need.

Cool--I hadn't thought about home planets being different and hadn't noticed the buffs.  Thanks for the tip--now I have a reason to not sleep (again).  Argh!

Why does it have to hurt!?