WC4 Mod For Homeworld 2 In The Works (June 5, 2006)

Defrancoj a lot of the questions you asked have been answered earlier in the development of this mod and thread. fighters cant shoot down torps, missiles are not limited ammo - they are driven by time delay only. all ships repair the same way ships do in the original hw2 - repair upgrade and use of resource collectors to repair capships. map sizes are quite big in hw2 because they extend in all 3 axis. try out rings of haraal to see what i mean. but nothing can be placed on a map at starting point in terms of buildings or platforms that are not assigned to any player. thanks for your support, glad your enjoying the mod :)
 
couple quick questions:
do/will fighters and flak be able to shoot down incoming torpedoes?

I was going to say you should try to find a compromise for the torpedoes, not quite as weak as HW2 bombers, yet not as powerful as WC bombers. However the above quote reminded me that the Point Defense Systems mod for HW2 obviously uses point defense. Missiles(or torpedoes in this case), show up on screen as separate targets, and I believe even fighters can target them. IMO, adding something like that would hinder the bombers enough to make the game more enjoyable and would add a nice aspect to combat. Of course I have no idea how difficult this would be to accomplish, so do what you think works best, and I'm sure we'll be pleased.:D
 
Ejecting would be awesome don't you all think? Would you rescue the pilot if you knew you would get money for it? Would you have at least one SAR on each carrier or HQ? Those are questions I asked myself and I said to all, "yes I would." What about you? Would you do that? I even thought of a way to implement it, first built a squadron of any fighter. Then if they were getting shot at and about to explode you could build on them each ejection seats (or it's a research thing and you research "ejection seats") and a fighter has a 1/2 chance of a seat and the pilot coming out of the ship!
 
sartyr if missiles are made targetable they fall under a category called munition, however munition is not targetable by force. if the fighter happens to see it as a target then the fighter will attack it, same for turret mounts. mainly the drawback is that you cant specifically tell ships to target them even if they show up on the scene. i believe pds made torps not as munition but as ships and gave them kamikaze AI.
 
well the only way to leave something behind when a ship is destroyed is by activating debris - like with the capships. however that means a hundred % chance of pilots ejecting and thats alot of polys floating around the map during every encounter. plus i will have to make a new debris type that looks like the eject pod and somehow differentiate it from current debris types, i havent found this possible since debris is not really an editable object in hw2, like fighters are. they share the same kind of generic form type as the asteroid fields that harvesters gather RU from. so actually its not really possible to make it into a research or even practical to have this new type of debris strewn all over the map. if you imagine it you would just have large fields of eject pods, one for every fighter lost after any battle, not very realistic.
 
i was just curious, have any of the CIC staff played the preview release? chris have you been able to play the mod? what do you think?
 
Any way to make retreating strike craft take evasive action?

You can set your ships to one of three stances - Agressive, Defensive, Passive - which determines how they react when they meet an enemy target. Passive actually lowers their defense but increases their manuverbility and speed (or it did in the first Homeworld)

what are maximum map sizes, in theory and in practice?

Like czacen said - very big! Homeworld 2 has some gigantic 6 player maps that are even bigger when you play one on one.

seems to me that for this thing to really flourish we will need large maps with pre-placed jump points.

Not at all. See, the great thing about placing your own jump points is the ideas you can do with it - send a jump point out with a sensor disabling probe to hide it from long range sensors, park a jump buoy right next to a harvesting area to speed up the supply. Heck, you can even do what they did in the novels and games and place a mine field around the buoy!

No, I like having the ability of placing my own buoys. :)
 
@ Sarty: The 1600x1200 image you posted a page back or so, as it includes the custom WC UI, did you just enlarge the image up to 1600x1200 from 1280x960 before uploading or have you somehow managed to get the UI working in other resolutions?

@ IronDuke: I like the name suggestion (Wing Commander: Eternal Vigilance). :)

I'm looking forward to playing the mod in about three weeks time when I get back home, so I'm speaking below from my testing experience a few months ago and this pre-beta release may play quite differently.

About the bomber/torpedo damage potential, this element of gameplay was adjusted significantly in the last few weeks of my testing duties, or rather the underlying capital ship stats were amended to substitute for the difficulties in implementing a robust shielding system, resulting in torpedoes becoming very effective, whereas previously they only did minimal damage. Check out this unrealeased (LQ - 11.8MB / HQ - 26.7MB) video I compiled in August. The torps also seemed to have collision detection issues then.

While testing, I was finding that the computer AI would sometimes send concentrated bomber groups and defending against these without much fighter cover was difficult; lone capital ships being especially vulnerable, although this does tend to tie-in with WC gameplay (torps king against capital ships) and it works both ways. There may be some need for further balancing and hopefully this release should give everyone the chance to provide some feedback to refine the experience.

A couple ways it could maybe be adjusted (if the feeling is that torps and/or bombers are too powerful) is to either increase the cost of bombers, significantly increase the strength of structures and bases or maybe place some kind of limit on the number of bombers that a carrier (e.g. 4 wings) and space station (e.g. 8 wings) can build or perhaps a time delay similar to the missile/torpedo delay between the construction of bombers, i.e. after constructing some Longbows a two-minute counter prevents the construction of any more from that unit (carrier/base) until the countdown is complete?

How are you guys finding the speed of the capships and fighters, as well as general gameplay? There were some adjustments when I was testing to give the impression of a more realistic environment, i.e. didn't want the fighters to be able to get from one side of the map to the other in 30secs, which reduces the importance of jump lanes and far-flung resource operations.

Some of the new features sound interesting... can't wait to try out the sensor disabling probe (a UBW capability?). :D What do you guys think of the Capital Ship Missiles and the UBW missile frigate? I really enjoyed the missile launch sequence and sound fx! In the last few days before I left for university I was working on a weapons video but was unable to finish it in time, showing off the CSM (some slo-mo of a transport getting obliterated), sensor pings and the marine shuttle/UBW attack shuttle, which I thought were very neat. Taking over enemy carriers was a blast -- the shuttles (you could stack two on either end of a Concordia to decrease capture time) tended to be pretty safe from nearby capital ship turret fire while actually boarding, but were particularly vulnerable to defending fighters.

Cheers,

Bryn
 
Sucks it can't be implemented into the game, earlier you said it was possible, but you most likely learned already that you can't. Sorry for creating a disturbance.
 
@BrynS: That was sized automatically, not really sure why. My game is set to 1280x960, yet when I took a screenshot, the pic came out in 1600x1200.:confused:
 
The 1600x1200 image you posted a page back or so, as it includes the custom WC UI, did you just enlarge the image up to 1600x1200 from 1280x960 before uploading or have you somehow managed to get the UI working in other resolutions?

I believe you can get the game to run at resolutions higher than the game intended. Weasel/mercury made a passing mention of that.
 
I think limiting the number of bomber wings makes the most sense. You doesn't get the ability to have more than one or two bomber wings per cap ship assualt. Also, capships have painful turret defenses--at least in WCP. In WC3/4 though, they seemed too easy to kill even for rookie.
 
I just had a chance to try out the preview, and I wanted to say you are doing an excellent job. The ships look splendid, and hearing the WCIV music and comm chatter again was great.
 
I think limiting the number of bomber wings makes the most sense.

I don't believe the unit capping option in the game allows you to cap only one type of ship, per se. The cap would cover all fighter craft, not just bombers.
 
yeah but iceblade there was something i wanted to implement along the same lines. esp for the black lance dragons. there is a way to make a specific ship take more unit cap points during creation, right now you are allowed 25 avenger wings and 25 longbows but i want to raise their cap so that you can only build 5 avengers and 7 longbows or something like that. the balance will have to be calculated. still no feedback from any CIC members. Chris have you had the chance to test the mod? also dont worry winny i gave your ejection seat idea considerable thought but couldnt get past the editing of map debris items, sorry.
 
So, I played my first multiplayer game against WildWeasel/mercury.

Sweet Jews For Jesus...





We discussed the game while inplay, noting several things along the way:

*Transports have way, way too much firepower. They blew a marine shuttle out of the sky in three hits.

*You can change the link between jump points on a whim. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or a bad idea, but it's not how the nodes work in WC (usually). I think this is something that would make for a good discussion before changing anything though.

*On that line of thought - is it possible to allow marine ships to capture oppposing jump nodes?

*What ships are going to be able to drop mines?

The game was amazing to watch and fun as heck to play. It still needs to be tinkered with to get the game balance right but I think Weasel said it best with "someone needs to give czacen a medal; this is a freaking alpha version?"
 
YES! AWESOME! you guys cant imagine how happy i am that multiplayer works!!! i know balance needs tweaking but now that can start happening better with ppl playing and feedback from actual scenarios. awesome! Lehah is there a step by step you can make for ppl so that more ppl can try out multi-player. cool. transports will be toned down. i think lehah we need to keep a track record of changes needed on a per ship basis for future releases. ill send you an excel sheet in the mail later. however you cant capture hs gates, not even in the original hw, since a captured gate doesnt link up with a gate of your own race due to different race specific IDs attached to hyperspace jumps. cool stuff. great screens lehah. :D btw iceblade that is 25 wings of avengers - totally 100 ships.
 
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