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

[L.I.F.]

Personally, I'd avoid giving the UBW any kind of cloaking capability. As we saw in WC4 the cloaking Avenger was a one off plot device, not something that would be reasonably repeatable (even with Kilrathi assistance). Additionally, the cost of mass producing cloaks and then retrofitting existing fighters that weren't designed with stealth in mind would be pretty onerous. In-universe we see that ships with cloaking tech are specifically designed with cloaking and stealth in mind, retrofitting cloaks most often wouldn't work as expected.

In my mind the UBW is more of a Zerg-rush type faction, they can overwhelm you in the early stages with tons of cheap and expendable fighters, but will struggle in the later stages of the game as more technologically advanced factions (ie Confed and BL) gain their super-tech ships like the Dragon and Excalibur.

Speaking of the BL faction - I know the mod currently defaults to giving the faction the BL carrier as a default. I was thinking that they should start with Rangers and Concordias (since they're basically Evil Confed) instead and have to research to get the stealth carrier. Let's face it, a cloaking-capable carrier with a wing of cloaking arrows, Dragons and Excaliburs is fairly OP, and starting out with something like that might throw off game balance - and that doesn't take the Vesuvius into account.

True that for the CV, I'll see if I can do that. As for the cloaking, maybe a unique and overpriced Avenger with a sub-par cloak that lasts a very limited time and does not recharge, just like in the game.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

I agree with your idea on giving the UBW tiers for fighters I was thinking something like:

• Recon/light fighter tier

1. Epee, Ferret
2. Banshee
3. Enhanced Banshee (leech guns, scatter guns etc.)

• Interceptor/Escort/Medium fighter tier

1. Scimitar
2. Rapier II
3. UBW Bearcat?

• Strike/Bomber tier

1. Bomber Epee (is that a thing? I haven't played WC2 in a while but I can't remember if an Epee can carry a torp)
2. Vindicator and Avenger
3. Cloaking Avenger (one shot)/ Morningstar

 

[L.I.F.]

I agree with your idea on giving the UBW tiers for fighters I was thinking something like:

• Recon/light fighter tier

1. Epee, Ferret
2. Banshee
3. Enhanced Banshee (leech guns, scatter guns etc.)

• Interceptor/Escort/Medium fighter tier

1. Scimitar
2. Rapier II
3. UBW Bearcat?

• Strike/Bomber tier

1. Bomber Epee (is that a thing? I haven't played WC2 in a while but I can't remember if an Epee can carry a torp)
2. Vindicator and Avenger
3. Cloaking Avenger (one shot)/ Morningstar

The Epee does come with a unique torpedo in a mission, you can see it in its wiki page. As for the tiers, that's roughly it, though I'd get the Morningstar as a Fighter too rather than just bomber. The Bearcat and the Dragon would be "hidden" fighters that can be unlocked under really hard conditions such as capturing a carrier from the Confed or the Black Lance, respectively. I'll see if there's a good Kilrathi fighter that they can unlock if they board one of the Cat's litterboxes.

 

[Dundradal]

So running with that command line prompt made my hard disk sound like it was dying and the game run with a stutter every few seconds. It was so bad I had to stop playing after a few minutes.

Which files were you wanting from that dir?

I see two with recent time stamps labeled ErrorLog and MiniDump.

 

[L.I.F.]

So running with that command line prompt made my hard disk sound like it was dying and the game run with a stutter every few seconds. It was so bad I had to stop playing after a few minutes.

Which files were you wanting from that dir?

I see two with recent time stamps labeled ErrorLog and MiniDump.

The hell? Normally, that command line, luatrace simply tells your game to write down the log of the actions taken by the game itself in the HWRM.log file. It's the standard load on my shortcut when I test new units or scripts.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

though I'd get the Morningstar as a Fighter too rather than just bomber

I just left it in the strike fighter/bomber tier since that's kind of what it does IMO; The Vindicator isn't a bomber either really, it just serves as one if needed. I think it would take full advantage of the "bomber dogfight" upgrade. But were you thinking of making it a fighter with a torpedo upgrade? Either way it should still work, but from a balance perspective giving the UBW a super-fighter that can also carry torps later seems a bit unbalanced as opposed to making it an uber-bomber that can dogfight with the best of them, just depends on how quickly you want the player to access it I suppose. On the whole though I think it would still be slightly inferior to the Dragon and Excalibur.

Regarding the Bearcat & Dragon - I like making them hidden units that can only be unlocked for the UBW if they capture a carrier or tech base. Also building them for the UBW should cost more than it would for their parent factions. (+30% or so)?

 

[L.I.F.]

I just left it in the strike fighter/bomber tier since that's kind of what it does IMO; The Vindicator isn't a bomber either really, it just serves as one if needed. I think it would take full advantage of the "bomber dogfight" upgrade. But were you thinking of making it a fighter with a torpedo upgrade? Either way it should still work. On the whole though I think it would still be slightly inferior to the Dragon and Excalibur.

The Morningstar will definitely be inferior to both. Excalibur is the premier dogfighter of the game, followed by the Bearcat, while Dragon is the best omnirole, followed in this by the Morningstar. In terms of RL equipment, Excalibur would be the F-22, Bearcat the Typhoon, Dragon the Rafale and Morningstar the F/A-18.

While Vindicator is a bit of both, it tends to still be used more often as a bomber than as a fighter, due to its quite heavy torpedo payload..

Regarding the Bearcat & Dragon - I like making them hidden units that can only be unlocked for the UBW if they capture a carrier or tech base. Also building them for the UBW should cost more than it would for their parent factions. (+30% or so)?

It's actually already ingame, and has been for a year or more. Currently, if you are Confed and capture a BL carrier (in the HW2 mod), then you unlock a special research project that unlocks the Bearcat for the rest of the game while Border Worlds, if they capture a BL carrier, can build Dragon from it, but only as long as said carrier is in one piece.

Ideally, I would like to have such hidden units for all factions, just like in Red Alert 2, where sending a spy to an enemy Tech Lab could unlock you some pretty powerful hidden infantry units.

On a side-note, I'm taking stats from all units in a single Excel file right now, so there'll probably be some heavy-handed rebalancing in the next update.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

Confed can get the bloodfang from the Kilrathi...

 

[L.I.F.]

Confed can get the bloodfang from the Kilrathi...

XD It could be fun, but not that really interesting, since the Excalibur is arguably better anyway. Perhaps the Sorthak.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

XD It could be fun, but not that really interesting, since the Excalibur is arguably better anyway. Perhaps the Sorthak.

Give 'em the rock ship! Totally useless Easter Egg!

 

[L.I.F.]

Give 'em the rock ship! Totally useless Easter Egg!

Not that useless, you know. Without any icon showing up in the enemy user interface nor, IIRC, on the radar, it's actually pretty hard to notice it inside a resource field. I could add a kamikaze move to it, which would be devastating given its mass.

 

[Dundradal]

The hell? Normally, that command line, luatrace simply tells your game to write down the log of the actions taken by the game itself in the HWRM.log file. It's the standard load on my shortcut when I test new units or scripts.

Oh, it made a noise that did not sound good. Like the drive was just hammering itself in a very odd way. At first, I thought it was something weird with the gfx card (just got my dad's hand-me down GTX Titan) like the fans on super high. But then I think it was the drive because of the sound. It was really odd. When I ran the game without the command line, it ran fine.

 

[L.I.F.]

Oh, it made a noise that did not sound good. Like the drive was just hammering itself in a very odd way. At first, I thought it was something weird with the gfx card (just got my dad's hand-me down GTX Titan) like the fans on super high. But then I think it was the drive because of the sound. It was really odd. When I ran the game without the command line, it ran fine.

OK, better safe than sorry, then. Don't wreck your computer on my behalf.

 

[Dundradal]

I don't think it was damaging the machine, just forcing it to work in an odd way or something. I'm still not 100% sure it was the drive. Because the drive light was not flashing but something was making that noise and it sounded like my extra hard drive (my main disk is solid state so if it's making noises I've got other problems ) but that didn't really make sense because it doesn't have STEAM stuff on it.

 

[L.I.F.]

I don't think it was damaging the machine, just forcing it to work in an odd way or something. I'm still not 100% sure it was the drive. Because the drive light was not flashing but something was making that noise and it sounded like my extra hard drive (my main disk is solid state so if it's making noises I've got other problems ) but that didn't really make sense because it doesn't have STEAM stuff on it.

Heh, as I said, better safe than sorry. The log helps, but it's not life-critical, if you get my meaning. ^^

*is too lazy to pick up all the data manually so writes a Matlab routine to datamine his own mod*

 

[L.I.F.]

Gave the most recent version a go last night. The ships look great.

The new gameplay mechanics were a bit...interesting. Definitely still getting used to them. One thing I did notice was that seemed if I grouped a large number of fighters together some of them got, for lack of a better word, "dumb stuck." As in, they would sit near a carrier, naval base, or HQ and appear not to dock or respond to move commands. The rest of the group would respond, but small batches would not.

Then I got run over by the Kilrathi AI using some lighter ships (frigates I think...I was a bit too busy dying).

Progress, still a long way to go for this fleet commander.

OK, about you being overrun by light ships? I think I know where the issue was. See, I kinda, sorta... made a mistake in setting up a handful of ship files that I realized only now thanks to my data mining code. It seems that, well, the Kilrathi Escort Corvette and their Light Carrier both have the HP of a Light Cruiser.

Yeah, I know, this does suck. I'll fix that in the next patch.

 

[L.I.F.]

The current vision for the Border Worlds involve the ability to swap turret configurations on most capital ships, which means I need to get more turret models in-game. The following one is a mixture of Klavs' turret base with DefianceIndustries Stormfire pod for his Rapier II. The result is the kitbash of doom made by a few drunk BW engineers: a heavy anti-air turret with four Stormfire guns, making flying around one of their capital ships an epic endeavour in and of itself.

You can see it in action on my test ship (the firepower and accuracy of the shells remain to be balanced, but I definitely intend to give it a cinematic AAA style):

Plus, if I'm not wrong, the new balistic rules for 2.0 mean that lose shells can still harm unlucky ships on their way.

 

[DefianceIndustries]

very BSG, I like it.

 

[L.I.F.]

very BSG, I like it.

The next idea is a bombardment turret, firing missiles that only maneuver during the first few seconds and then foy balistically very fast and very far and thus can be either dodged or intercepted. I'll try to have an internal Alpha version of the BW during the day and work my way up from there.

Edit: and the Border Worlds are now confirmed in Alpha. The faction doesn't crash the game at launch and the units are visible in the build menus.

Edit 2: the icons are done, now working on the tech tree and the various upgrade paths, which will generally be cheaper and less powerful than the other two factions. Plus, a bit different in what they do (for example, the Longbow had firepower specific upgrades and the Avenger now has health specific upgrades).

Amusing idea: the Epee could become the joke unit of doom, with very, very expensive upgrades that would make it an acceptable bomber... without changing its Zergling price. You laugh at the horde of Epee dropping useless torpedoes that barely scratch the paint of a frigate, but when the BW start spawning the same Epee dropping heavy torpedoes for a ridiculously low cost, the grin should disappear very quickly.

This could be the Border Worlds' superweapon, a completely unbalanced unit that needs a huge research to build but that can overwhelm anyone.

 

[L.I.F.]

X_X

Good news everyone. The Border Worlds faction is now in Beta status: its tech and build trees are implemented, the weapons and fuel codes are present for the relevant units, the new weapons are mostly coded in the game and the whole thing is stable-ish (read: sometimes, the mod crashes randomly during the load, but once its loaded, it should be fine). The user interface works as intended too (icons, names, descriptions, etc.).

The next step, after a good night of sleep (1 am here) will be to test the new stuff like the Mace nuclear missile (I'll have to add area damage for it, it's a very fast but non-maneuverable missile with a bit less than twice the damage of a torpedo, single shot), the stormfire on the fighters. Then I'll have to try and get the Banshee's special weapons in the game, if possible, and the Border Worlds' main feature, the ability to change turret setups on their ships for a cost. If I get these to work, I'll upload the whole stuff. Now, though? Gonna make a back-up and go to bed.

Edit: oh God, I realize that I do have some "issues" when the partial back-up covering only the folders I worked with today weights 14 GB. My entire work folder for the mod is 160 GB. Argh.