First post on the forums to say that I love your work, Rus. I'd love the Colonial and Cylon factions and what they bring to Rebellion, I would love to see eventual full integration with the rest of SotF of course.

The Colonials are the main faction that I play as and besides a lot of their abilities being missing from the rebellion version (understandable, it's not a full release) I'd say they're a very fun faction to play as. Above all I'd love to see more focus on the Battlestars (heavier armour and weaponry, for example) at the expense of a higher resource and fleet supply cost to really make them have that feel of a "Battlestar." The main problem I had with the Colonials was the apparent falloff they seemed to have in the later stages of the game compared to other races. Their ships seemed lackluster as they didn't have any special amazing feature or task they could preform better than any other race late game; The Vasari have the phase penetration, the TEC have the brick factor to their ships and the ability to dig in deep, and the Advent have the amazing un-penetrable aggressive wall tactic with their dedicated support fleets aiding their Destra Crusaders. Even the Cylons seemed to have very good end game fleet composition with their ability to nullify large portions of damage from the enemies; sadly I didn't play too much of the Cylons so this may not be the case.

It's hard to judge where things will end up, but I agree more emphasis on the Battlestars is important. 

Some of the key tech changes that should help is better Armor upgrades which can extra hull points per armor up to a max of 1750 extra hull currently. This will help higher armor ships scale better into the later game and is in addition to the hull and hull repair rate percent upgrades.

They'll also have a special tier 8 upgrade that adds an additional target per bank to all capital class battlestars.

Colonial taxation is a non combat tech that will earn extra credits/sec for each capital class colonial ship. 

The rest of the emphasis really has to fall on their abilities and how they play out.

Cylons are really closer to vanilla vasari right now. So until their stuff is swapped out it's mainly model flavor.

Z... you've got over 200 karma now!!!!! hehe thats awesome you legend!

With what you said above, wouldn't this suit the Cylon's more? I mean, a majority of their population is housed on their basestars, with only one major base (that we know of), being the Colony. Also, they don't have much interest in colonising planets and therefore drawing any credits from planet populations. Would make more sense for ships to generate credits.

I would love to help out with this, but I'm not sure how much help I would be. I don't have much modding or "technical" knowledge on how things work in the game.

Vaserius - I think this would be great for you. Sounds like you have a lot of knowledge about what ships should do, especially the Colonials.

And Mord_Sith83, sounds like you have a lot of ideas for the Cylons.

Thanks, a few people are trying to keep me ahead of Sinperium

We can start some discussions about the Cylon economy again.

In this case the idea for Colonial Taxation isn't so much that the ship is generating the credits, but that the colonial empire is being taxed that amount to maintain and support the battlestar and it's group.

If it weren't for some core things needing credits like planet upgrades and black market, I'd basically remove credits as a resource for the Cylons.

So... What does credits mean for Cylons? 

I propose to change the credits into copies (units) as how many different copies of each model we have on our disposal, as one number, planet can generate this as product of Farms we know from series.

For example a ship to be operational require 1200 cylon unit, copies etc..  ;and 2200 metal and 1600 crystal to be build

It may come down to this as removing credits from a faction will not work very well.

Maybe have it as number of centurion units required to man ships? I dont know... this would be a bit weird though i.e. how would this work for research, and for diplomacy elements, black market etc?

That's the problem I was explaining earlier about removing a dependency of credits from a faction. There are some things that are global in regards to credits. 

Credits tends to imply a generic currency of a faction. In the case of sins it's a global currency that can be exchanged between all three factions. Does Vasari really have exchangeable currency with Advent or TECH???

It's sorta a magic game mechanic.

ok i don't say to remove credits, just to rename it to "population" for example.

This number will be gain normal way an can express number of organic unit, centurion, hardware, software and other cylon thing that we posses.

For ship this number will be number of copies require to be operational

For research this can be hardware and software of one use.

For black market this can be all things that i write above just capitalize in private sector in process of exchange.  

Again, credits is a global resource. You can think of it as credits=population for cylons... but it's still credits.

I've had one person so far approach with helping on the mod. I've decided after conversing with him I will setup a special SVN repository for those that sign up to help test or come up with ideas in-between released builds. 

I'm working on setting up this SVN repository and should hopefully have it done in the next day or two. This will essentially be a read-only repository representing the latest build which is generated from a separate repository and associated build scripts.

Any developers that sign up would need to get permission and access to the main mods SVN to make changes.

That's awesome that you have someone else to help you. Wish I could do more.... just don't have the skills.

With the credits debate for the Cylons, why not just give them credits? Just give them other ways of generating it other than from planets. I think that's where we need to focus, give the Cylons credits, lets just think of creative and race-specific ways that they generate it.

A majority of their credits could be generated from capital ships, starbases, the Hub (could give them a lot of bonusus). Maybe they can't generate credits from planets at all? But give them high bonuses on metal and crystal so they can trade to compensate for low credits. 

The incentive for capturing planets is to gain more metal/crystal extractors which they get great bonuses for. There could be other incentives i.e. building human-cylon farms on the planet surface (and obviously reserach facilities etc)... maybe you could rename the civilian structures on cylon planets to human-cylon farms and this could generate small amounts of credits for further incentive to colonize?

well as Cylon_luvr say lets leave the credits, but in my opinion it can be generate by planets where cylon can produce everything from electronics to body parts, black market buy everything, and generate nice amount of credits  

Anyone can join up and help. You'll just need to get an SVN client so you can download the updates. This will be much better to receive feedback and even be able to try out changes as only the modified files will need to be downloaded. You should be able to extract from SVN directly into your mod folder.

There are basically two types of contributors I would like to sign up. The first and majority is those genuinely interested in helping the mod can provide feedback, comment on issues, help with balancing, provide descriptive string entries regardless of whether they can model, texture or code. The second is those that would like to help with technical side of the mod. I'm not sure if I'll get any interest in the second group outside of those that already help like Koobalt but figured I'd ask and see whats out there.

For example: I haven't had a lot of time to play mods lately, but I've sat down recently and played B&C fairly extensively with the new code. 1) I found mesh points on the Cetus titan were off (XSI freeze issue). 2) I found all the mesh points where off on the Cygnus (XSI scaling issue). 3) There's some wierd texture issue on the Raptors I didn't remember (still need to investigate). These are things I would like a forum for people to point out as it's easy to get caught up in the structure and code as I tend to test the game from a different perspective when I'm in that mode.

I also want people who understand it's a work in progress and are capable of providing constructive feedback. I think the main group here fits that description. If you want access send me a PM with your email and give you the details. 

My preference would be to have a decent number of people plugged in but not too many to keep it manageable. 

I'm ok with using this thread for comments from those contributing as it might help keep people interested and maybe get a few more volunteers.

Will likely start this way regardless and then fine tune as the Cylons take more shape.

Colonial abilities and buffs updated to include titans in the Reb.QA in addition to a few other various fixes.

I'm thinking about at making modifications to flak shield to have it be possibly AM based. Not really sure, just too many passives on a couple of the capital ships.

I really like the passive damage reduction but I would love an active flak field for the Battlestars; sadly I don't think there's a way to get flak field to last a duration and target missiles. It would be especially cool with the flak field animation included in Vanilla Sins.

I actually have the passive flak field using the flak burst effect periodically when weapons fire which is kinda cool.

I'm thinking about making a few variations of the flak fields with some being active and some being passive to bridge some different gaps I'm noticing with gameplay. I may also look at making some other passives actives too. 

That sounds good Z.

exactly how up to date is the diplomacy version of this?

money has always seemed to be a problem with both the Cylons and the Colonials. The Cylons never seemed to have an actually currency system, despite having obvious worker and supervisor castes. The colonials on the other hand never give a frame of reference as to roughly what their money would be worth on earth. 

"I want 50 tough basestars surrounding the colonies and I want 50 soft basestars to make the tough ones look tougher," states Cavil "and i want them arranged as Tough, tough, soft, tough, soft, soft, tough, soft".

"sir I think you've gone mad with power," some random eight remarks.

"Course I have, you ever gone mad without power? its boring no one ever listens to you," stats Cavil.

Where did this come from? I don't remember this being in the show.

It's not up to date at all. All new mod development is being done in Rebellion.

so no point in trying the diplomacy version then?

an cylon_luvr its from simpsons movie....I was bored. besides it dose seem that cavil has gone a bit mad with power at points.

If you only have Diplomacy... then you should try the diplomacy version 

I'm surprised a few of you haven't requested SVN access. Is it just something you are unfamiliar with?

I'd like to have your feedback but really feel the ease at which mod updates can be made for an active group of SVN is an obvious plus, especially considering I'm rather unwilling to upload a 500+GB file everytime I change something small.