WC: Sins of Solar Empire Conversion

AD said:
I think he wants to choose which era of ships to play the game with... But if there's a tech tree I assume you would progress through them according to the actual age of the designs and not according to which game they were originally in. (for example a number of wc3 designs predate the RapierII)
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Well I gave a bit lazy of an answer there AD, I apologize.

There are two options. First, the tech tree. You will advance through era's, that is through the age of designs.

The second one, is the game mode one. If it will be possible, You will be able to choose whether to play WC3/4/5 or 1/2, or You will be able to choose whether to play with superweapons or NOT. [ or we will make a launcher utility, i guess that's more reasonable ]. We are trying to get everyone satisfied, but as everyone knows... it's hard to satisfy everyone, if it isnt impossible.

Got questions? Post em up, I'll be dropping media on You, so stay sharp.
 
Sorry, that I didn't express me right. I was talking about a selection (before a game) between the timelines. Because, as you mentioned, there are people, who liked the era of Wing Commander 2&2 and other who prefer 3&4.

So if you are one of those who liked the old fashion of Wing Commander, you don't want to evolve your Ships and Fighters to the 3&4-era ;)
 
AcePilot said:
Sorry, that I didn't express me right. I was talking about a selection (before a game) between the timelines. Because, as you mentioned, there are people, who liked the era of Wing Commander 2&2 and other who prefer 3&4.

So if you are one of those who liked the old fashion of Wing Commander, you don't want to evolve your Ships and Fighters to the 3&4-era ;)
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Yep, we will try to achieve that, but its all up to the game engine in the end :)
 
As slim update for You guys here, the mod should be featured in the forthcoming issue of PC GAMER UK, if it's true leave me a word or perhaps scan it? [ My mod crewmen are also buying it ;) ].

As a matter of progress, in terms of coding we've focused on gameplay issues for now, we will start implementing models as soon as we will get our teamwork server up. Then we will start to produce first in-game screenshots! You will also see some concept art in about two weeks I guess.
 
I'm not really a connoisseur when it comes to SoaSE, but I do have a suggestion... you could rework the tech trees (if that's moddable) in such a way that pursuing new designs is always an option, but never a necessity, in order to not fall behind in technology.

What I mean is that you could have a single shipset for the game (which would probably reduce the workload and balancing/playtesting time to a significant degree) made up of the most emblematic ships from each of the different eras, and just leave it up to players whether they want to research the new prototypes or improvements to the starting ships instead.

Someone who prefers the WC1/2 era could just focus research on improving current designs (stronger armor/weapons/new abilities/etc), while others could favor researching the new prototypes (WC3/4/Prophecy ships).

Since the game is real time, nobody would have a real advantage: the guy investing his time in new ships would not have done many upgrades for them, and the guy investing his time in upgrades would have made his old ships become as good as the non-upgraded versions of newer ones.

This could also make multiplayer more interesting since the battles would not always feature the same ships, but would instead depend on each player's style. In one game you could have heavily upgraded Ralaris attacking the Behemoth, while in another game you could have Hornets successfully holding off a Hakaga attack (Landreich anyone?). :)

I do know that SoaSE has all sorts of crazy tech trees (technologies that are required in order to train others, technologies that affect existing designs, technologies that allow for new designs, etc), so you could probably integrate all of this in a way that is true to the WC continuity.

For example, everyone could start without Phase Shields, as in the WC1 era, and Phase Shields would be a researchable upgrade that would strengthen the shielding of all existing capital ships - then the other player would need to consider researching Torpedoes, which would increase the damage done by bombers to shields, in order to keep up with Capital Ship technology advances, etc.

Short version: I think this is a much more interesting approach than selecting different shipsets from the game's launcher, it avoids splitting the game into different games for different fan groups, and saves you the trouble of having to make each era feel unique (while still keeping them balanced!) rather than a retexture of the other eras.

Damn, now I want to make a WC RTS mod too.
 
eder, I am in awe of your wisdom! I hope one day you start your own company making awesome games! ( kinda like what I see you doing as a hobby)
 
Eder said:
I'm not really a connoisseur when it comes to SoaSE, but I do have a suggestion... you could rework the tech trees (if that's moddable) in such a way that pursuing new designs is always an option, but never a necessity, in order to not fall behind in technology.

What I mean is that you could have a single shipset for the game (which would probably reduce the workload and balancing/playtesting time to a significant degree) made up of the most emblematic ships from each of the different eras, and just leave it up to players whether they want to research the new prototypes or improvements to the starting ships instead.

Someone who prefers the WC1/2 era could just focus research on improving current designs (stronger armor/weapons/new abilities/etc), while others could favor researching the new prototypes (WC3/4/Prophecy ships).

Since the game is real time, nobody would have a real advantage: the guy investing his time in new ships would not have done many upgrades for them, and the guy investing his time in upgrades would have made his old ships become as good as the non-upgraded versions of newer ones.

This could also make multiplayer more interesting since the battles would not always feature the same ships, but would instead depend on each player's style. In one game you could have heavily upgraded Ralaris attacking the Behemoth, while in another game you could have Hornets successfully holding off a Hakaga attack (Landreich anyone?). :)

I do know that SoaSE has all sorts of crazy tech trees (technologies that are required in order to train others, technologies that affect existing designs, technologies that allow for new designs, etc), so you could probably integrate all of this in a way that is true to the WC continuity.

For example, everyone could start without Phase Shields, as in the WC1 era, and Phase Shields would be a researchable upgrade that would strengthen the shielding of all existing capital ships - then the other player would need to consider researching Torpedoes, which would increase the damage done by bombers to shields, in order to keep up with Capital Ship technology advances, etc.

Short version: I think this is a much more interesting approach than selecting different shipsets from the game's launcher, it avoids splitting the game into different games for different fan groups, and saves you the trouble of having to make each era feel unique (while still keeping them balanced!) rather than a retexture of the other eras.

Damn, now I want to make a WC RTS mod too.
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Great input, thanks. The main thing is... we have only 3 tech trees.

We have civilian tech's - Improving the economic side of an empire
The Military tree - focused on new designs
and Upgrade tree - focused on new upgrade for the previously mentioned designs.

I would have to see, if we can put upgrades of designs themselves. Upgrading upgrades in the upgrade tree ( this sentence sounds silly, yep ) is possible, it should also be able to make other shipdesigns to get upgraded so the base value's of each design will be higher.

The problem appears, when You upgrade a branch of weapons, You upgrade them all, so Design upgrades + weapon upgrades would focus the gameplay on WC1/2 designs, because it would take too long to get the WC3/4 designs. Now I had this idea, to make the ship upgrades in the upgrade tree, but the engine is so robust it crashes on every major thing you try to do. So it takes a lot of patience to get things done, despite the fact modding the engine is so easy its actually fun.

And we could do with a gameflow person onboard, You could join with us! :)
 
I like the idea of haveing this kinda seperate tech tree but what ships would you compare?
In the case of destroyers, cruiser and so I find it quite easy but I got a problem with carriers.

Saying a Exeter or Gilgamesh with upgrades is comparable with a Southampton or a Waterloo with upgrades vs. Tallahassee. That would be ok.

The problem I got with carriers is that they got unique features, at least from my point of view.
A Yorktown is a light, cheap carrier I would put out in masses but the Vesuvius is a quite expansive supercarrier. Comparing them to a Bengal or Confederation with upgrades is still hard for me since I see them in totaly different roles.

A solution to this might be that a player that goes with the WC3/4 timeline could have the choice between the massproduction of light carriers to outmanouver a WC1/2 player or to just have some supercarriers with a small escort.

Problem would be that it restricts the WC1/2 player a little bit on the tactical side. On the other hand WC1/2 players could have a number of Gilgamesh with less fighters than a Yorktown carrier but it might get into range to do some direct damage.

Still from what I understood you wanted to give people the same tactical choices regardless of the choise of the ships designs.


Another posibility would be do drop the strict division from WC1+2+3+4 and go more with a role based gameplay.

You want a light carrier? Build a Yorktown.
You want to do secure a system with just one ship? Build a Midway.

Problem with this are the different stats the ships would have when you go after the given numbers.
The Bengal had a shield of 21cm, the Confederation class allready 500cm and a Yorktown even 1000cm.
You would have to even this out a bit like you would do with the upgrade idea.

Well just a thought I had.
 
Yes Lars, I'm aware of the problem, thank You for the input though, we need all the ideas we can get : )
 
Do you think it is possible to have torpedos work like they do in WC as they can bypass the shields or will they do damage to the shields as the rest of the weapons?

Another smaller part is what about makeing carriers quite expansive so that it realy hurts to loose one. Espacial in MP I think it would be interesting to keep an eye on your carriers and also your oponents one since they could cause a lot of trouble.
On the other hand Sins "battlefields" seam quite small. At least in the demo it was hard to outrun enemys destroyers with a carrier so that the fighters would take care of the enemy destroyers while keeping my own carriers out of range.
 
I would have to see it working... A torpedo will have to work as an ability, and when we will get an ability editor, then we can easily do that, since now what we can do is reverse engineer the text files we've got [ You have text files which you then compile to binary ] and make it running now. But the problem with fighters still persist. Until 1.1 ver. of the game isnt here, we can't make more then 2 types of fightercraft. One's without abilities, as this would have to include making a new entity file, and we can't do that *YET*, as of 1.05.
 
The Battlefields are really big now, and the map is vast... like the space itself, but not to a point You will keep looking for Your enemy for ages. Already the game in small maps is designed that loosing a carrier makes You face a lot of trouble. It's all there, at the very moment.
 
gevatter Lars said:
The problem I got with carriers is that they got unique features, at least from my point of view.
A Yorktown is a light, cheap carrier I would put out in masses but the Vesuvius is a quite expansive supercarrier. Comparing them to a Bengal or Confederation with upgrades is still hard for me since I see them in totaly different roles.
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SoaSE really, really shines in making each ship unique, though. Each capital ship has certain special abilities, and a different number of fighter squadrons that it can hold, and then each capital ship gains experience points that let you improve each special ability... I've only played the game for a few hours, but it's really the most balanced and interesting system I've seen in a while.

So I think it would be easy to make each ship retain their "personality" while still allowing some generic upgrade technologies to affect all (or most) of the ships, so that the WC1/2 purists don't feel forced to retire old ships.

Maybe the more extreme WC1/2 purists could be limited in having less abilities available... if they don't want to research a Behemoth, they would not have a capship that has the Giant Freaking Gun(TM) special ability. :p

But you could also mix and match the different research areas. A little of upgrades, a little of new prototypes. You could research the Wake-class escort carriers instead (also a post-WC2 invention, but very cheap and mass produced unlike the Behemoth)... or you could just research improved Shields/Armor for your starting Bengal-class ships to make up for it, it would all be your choice. In a real-time game no strategy would be better than the others since all require the time investment.

The idea is only to make it possible to win games with the ships you want, but of course for each ship to keep its personality, this would have to require different strategies depending on what you research... so you could win games with some very old and heavily modified Bengal heavy-hitters going around blowing everyone up, or with a swarm of cheap and disposable Wake-class CVEs carrying bombers to a lot of different planets at the same time, or you could just avoid most fights and send a brand-new Behemoth to the other side of the galaxy to destroy people's planets directly (just random examples, I have no idea how moddable the game actually is).
 
Everything You said Eder, is doable in the game. The only problem is, there will be no exclusive fighter abilities until 1.1, as well more then 2 types of them ;).

But also You will have to agree that older ships should have big chasis restriction to them, rendering that they can't be UPGRADED to eternity. If they could get REDESIGNED instead of UPGRADED, I guess that would make sense them. Like Hornet I , II , III Hornet III T [ with torpedo loadout ] etc etc. but even then, to some point... the game will promote the new wc3/4 designs, since old is cheap, and new is expensive and good. I can agree that you could balance the old 1/2 with 3/4 but it shouldn't happen to a point where it would be pointless to research 3/4. Otherwise everyone will play with 1/2. Cheap, good, infinitely expandable units. My my.
 
Eder said:
SoaSE really, really shines in making each ship unique, though. Each capital ship has certain special abilities, and a different number of fighter squadrons that it can hold, and then each capital ship gains experience points that let you improve each special ability... I've only played the game for a few hours, but it's really the most balanced and interesting system I've seen in a while.
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Thats good to know. I have only been able to play the demo since the game hasn't been released here yet. So all I know about it is from what I experianced in the demo.

But you could also mix and match the different research areas. A little of upgrades, a little of new prototypes. You could research the Wake-class escort carriers instead (also a post-WC2 invention, but very cheap and mass produced unlike the Behemoth)... or you could just research improved Shields/Armor for your starting Bengal-class ships to make up for it, it would all be your choice. In a real-time game no strategy would be better than the others since all require the time investment.
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I totaly forgot the CVEs when I thought about what ship could replace/balance the other.

I think it dosn't matter what way you go, timeline techadvancement or the "splited by game" idea the techtree would be much more complex then it was in the Demo.
(I guess that the final game techtree isn't much more complex if at all)
I allways had the impression that the Sin techtree was quite directly.
Liken when you want a light carrier you just build enough research centers and then pic it.

I should stop thinking about it. I am allways on the "to complicated" side of things ^_^
 
gevatter Lars said:
I think it dosn't matter what way you go, timeline techadvancement or the "splited by game" idea the techtree would be much more complex then it was in the Demo.
(I guess that the final game techtree isn't much more complex if at all)
I allways had the impression that the Sin techtree was quite directly.
Liken when you want a light carrier you just build enough research centers and then pic it.

I should stop thinking about it. I am allways on the "to complicated" side of things ^_^
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Well, the research tree can be done to have prerequisites so for ex. You will have to have shielding tech. before You build capital ships and so on. That's not a problem. The problem lies in space - we can't get more then 3 tech tree's... and that's what I've got to work with. I cannot expand the research tree by any means. I can make the buttons smaller though..

And yes, the research center thing ... is true. Though I'm thinking of modding the game to make it rather work in a way, that the more research centers You have, the faster the research goes, since it's rather silly to have more then 6 research centers to research whatever. A breakthrough can be done even in your own flat, so having 6 centers instead of 1 to just start doing something with the same speed as always is rather dodgy.
 
I partial agree that you can do things with just one center. But the bigger the project the more likely it is that you need more. Like I doubt that the Behemoth was developed just in Tolwyns basement ^_^

For certain tasks of research you just need more space. Also when I played the demo it forced me to make a difficulte decision. Should I build more civial or more military stations. In other games I don't realy care but even in the small demo I was realy concerned about what to do and when. So even while its true that you could do allmost every research in a small room it added something to the gameplay.

About the number of techtrees. You mean only for the military part, am I right?
It was devided in Armor/Health, Weapons and Ships IIRC.
Something that just came up is that you could stack some techs in the tree.
So you could research basic lasers1, basic laser2 and so on presented by just one button and a number.
That way you could fill up the tree a lot more without useing to much space.
Question is. Would that be possible with ships too?

I mean lets say you got a button for...destroyers.
So when you first research it you get the Exeter. Second time the Gilgamesh and at the third the Southamton.
Combining that with advancements in weapon and/or shield tech you could put a lot of stuff into the techtree without using to much space and people who don't want to have the Southhamton or even stop with the Exeter could just research the weaponstree and still would upgrade their existing ships.

On the other side that would prevent that a player that advanced over a certain point to go back.
Wouldn't hurt me ^_^
 
Well, You are right in that matter, perhaps prerequisites in amount of labs should be done.
There are three branches

- Civilian Improvements
- Weapon/Armor Improvements
- Ship Designs

In the vanilla game, you already research lasers in that fashion [ in TEC at least ].
It can be possible with ships... I think. But that means a some complication to the player. And yes, so much for combining ships from each game, You end up with WC3/4/5 ships to be the best in game.

And with that system the ships from wc1/2 will be worser then the ones with 3/4, since the upgrades for weapons You do apply to every ship that has a subsystem...

Let's say

Hornet has a base value of 300 HP, and the upgrade gives it additional 400 hp. While the Arrow will be better armored [ I think, I may be wrong here ] so it will be 500 HP with additional 400 HP. Always the newer design will be better this way, since the more time You invest in getting something in the game, its ought to be better. I think.

But the way of putting things in the tech tree is a good idea and saves a lot of space indeed.
 
Newer is allways (mostly) better ^_^

Anyway. I think you could get around the problem if you do the following or if its possible to do the following.

Picking up the Hornet Arrow example.

You said that every advancement in XYZ is allways calculated to all ships you have.
Lets say you have got the following setup.

Armor level 1 gives you the Hornet with 300HP.
Armor level 2 triggers the research of Arrows and gives additional 200HP.
So the Hornet would now have 300+200= 500HP. Now the additinal points are also added to the Arrow. The Arrow should be a little bit stronger but not as much as in your example.
The solution I would have for it set its base value low enough.
Means the Arrow would have only 400 basevalue + 200 from the upgrade = 600HP compared to the 500 HP from the Hornet.
You could even out that more by giveing the Arrow only 325 basepoints so the differance in the end would be just 25 points.

In that way a WC1+ player with his Hornet would have a good chance against an WC3+ player with his Arrow.


The problem with even things out this way is you would have to find good ways to do it.

For this example I would say give both the same armor level but I think the Arrow would have stronger weapons while the Hornet may be faster. That way both would be different enough to have a reason to be in the game but still do basicly the same. Beeing fast scout ships.
Hornets would be the real fast interceptors that could catch up every fleeing fighter or bomber while the Arrow could deal with enemys faster...compared to the Hornet.

If your aim is just to give people different ship models but basicly the same gameplay just give ships of the same class the same values but I would like to see some differances between the designs.
 
The main problem Lars is that we want to give differences to each design, while having the game balanced and make each design actually usable. :) Also the problem is that I can't alter the AI in any way. So I worry if the more speedy hornet would take out the arrow. I would need to give it a spin in the game engine.

Also the research doesnt actually apply to EVERYTHING, but there is one armor plating You research, but if You research laser weapons, only laser weapons will be better, meaning that an arrow without laser weapons won't benefit from that at all. Obviously ;)
 
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