TCR Balance Pack

[TChapman500]

posted on September 24th, 2010, 2:09 pm

Last edited by TChapman500 on September 24th, 2010, 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This pack will re-balance the stock factions in a way that special weapons will be very important to the success of a battle.  Both offensively and defensively.  If you don't use the support vessels, but someone else does, you will loose the battle.  If your vessel looses its shields, chances are the next shot will destroy it or severely damage it.

If you decide to separate the saucer section, from the star-drive, you will gain a tactical edge as both vessels will last longer and increase the overal strength of the fleet.  I'll see if I can make the starbases upgradable, but I don't know how many replaceweapon commands were put into the 1.2.5 patch.  You definitely won't have avatars.

By the way, in addition to vessel armor dampening the damage received by a weapon, in a Borg vs Borg battle, the Borg vessels will receive an additional 50% reduction in damage.  But only in a Borg vs Borg battle.  It makes since to do this since the Borg can easily adapt to their own weapons.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 4:17 pm

how is it fun if borg ships sit their doing half damage to eachother, borg vessels would never die until late game.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 4:22 pm

The vessels do not have as much armor as the Fleet-Ops vessels, so that should shorten the battle a bit.  I think Fleet-Ops cubes have around 2800 health.  My cube enhancements have about 1600 health.  And I think my enhancements have a slight bit more firepower than the Fleet-Ops cubes.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 4:24 pm

you have to double the health as the weapons do half damage

so in a borg v borg battle the cube would have the same health as a fleetops cube, but being as easy to build as armada 2 cubes? or are they hard to build too?

posted on September 24th, 2010, 4:37 pm

My cube enhancements give the cube 1560 health and no shields.  Most phasers will do about 10-20 HP in damage to any vessel that doesn't have armor.  The cube phasers do 65 HP damage to any vessel without armor.  Plus, the cube has heavy armor and receives less damage from weapons, allowing it to last longer in battle.

The Fleet-Ops cubes have about 4000 to 9000 HP in health depending on what you install, and no shields.  Fleet-Ops cube phasers do around 45 to 50 HP in damage to vessels with no armor.

But if you try to just shoot out those cube like the stock Armada 2 cubes, even with more than one shipyard, you'll run out of resources withing the first two vessels without having any expansions.  Even with the expansions, you are likely to run out of resources if you queue up more than one vessel at a time per shipyard.

Plus, you are now so dependant on assimilating the crew of enemy vessels now.  If you don't research assimilation technology, you will loose!

posted on September 24th, 2010, 5:09 pm

Again; another idea for a mod that doesn't make sense. What is the point of this Balance exactly? It sounds vague as it is, and the Borg modifications sound lacklustre at best. TCR is starting to become analogous with WTF.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 5:17 pm

Pretty sure the strongest HP Cube in Fleetops in the Tact Cube with about 5600-6500 hp.  I'd have to check the ODF's but another major part of it's strength is it's inherent regeneration.  You can't forget something like that.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 5:20 pm

Or that the majority of small vessels do a percentage of their total damage to them

posted on September 24th, 2010, 5:25 pm

6723 HP for the standard tac cube, with a healthrate of 16.5/second.  There's also the hybrid mage cube variant that has a little over half those hp, but has a regen rate of 29.5/second.

[TChapman500]

posted on September 24th, 2010, 5:36 pm

Last edited by TChapman500 on September 24th, 2010, 5:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The point of this mod is to make your fleet more reliant on support vessels.  And to make shields much more critical.  Sort of like the way Fleet-Ops works, but with whole different game-play mechanics.  Different ships will have different levels of resistance to different weapons.  Some ships will be resistant to pulse, others resistant to torpedoes, and others resistant to phasers.  Plus some resistant to specials.

And yes, I have taken into consideration the regeneration rate of Borg vessels.  One two three vessels won't do any damage to some Borg vessels as the Borg vessel will regenerate faster than the damage can be done.  That on top of the reduced damage.  Borg vs Borg will take forever without special weapons.  The Borg will be able to run their vessels with a lower crew percentage, but that will dramatically effect the vessels performance.

But there won't be as many vessels to choose from.  Only those in the star-trek series.  The Neutrino Mine that the Borg wanted to use to destroy Species-8472, for example.  The probe that thinks it can assimilate an Intrepid.  Or that scout cube that is the densest Borg vessel in the fleet but can still operate normally.  Why would a bus-sized vessel be so heavy anyways?

Can I use the replaceweapon commands in patch project?

posted on September 24th, 2010, 6:08 pm

My fault.  I didn't read that this is for stock armada 2.  I don't think anyone did.

I think people read this and thought you were trying to "balance FO", but that's what we get for not reading carefully.   You're trying to make stock A2 more like FO, which is interesting.  It will be nice to see what you cook up!

posted on September 24th, 2010, 6:10 pm

My fault.  I didn't read that this is for stock armada 2.  I don't think anyone did.

i did.

i was voicing my concern that the borg v borg matches would be annoying due to half damage.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 8:59 pm

Borg vs Borg would get annoying after a while.  It would take a 3 cube vs 1 cube battle using just phasers before the enemy vessel takes on any damage.  Using phasers in constant with Borg torpedoes and the battle won't last quite as long.  Although you're probably just going to disable each-others cubes.

If you can sneak a diamond into the battle, then you can end the battle right there.  Of course, if your opponent has a diamond too, then whoever is the fastest at using the diamond, wins the battle.  One computer override and the battle is over.

Your phasers and torpedoes will probably end up disabling each other.  So you can see how important special weapons are.  The assimilator beams cancel each other out.  So assimilating weapons from another ship will help tremendously as well as other special weapons.

posted on September 24th, 2010, 9:22 pm

This is what I have been trying to do for my mod for many months now, actually since my project began. By any chance when did you begin this or come up with this idea?  I ask this because this idea is exactly what I have been working on, but I'd say on a much higher scale.

Higher health rates mean that the ships become drifting pieces of ships that are salvageable and that but they were never destroyed. This is what was causing the Ferengi problem so many times in my mod because salvage became a constant for the Ferengi and all the other races involved.

Now maybe I added higher numbers to a spot in the ODF files that wasn't meant for that spot and created many disabled and derelict ships.

Ok, thus thinking that I made derelicts more than I did anything else, I was wondering how did you get rid of the shields on Borg ships well maintaining their health and allowing them to survive longer? I've had so many Borg ships becoming derelicts faster when shields were taken away. What coding in the ODF file has to be changed?

posted on September 24th, 2010, 9:57 pm

Here's how to disable the shields.

Code: Select all

maxShields = 0
shieldRate = 0
shieldGeneratorHitpoints = 0

The ships becoming derelict after the shields go down are because of two reasons.

• The damageVariance value.  Setting this to 0 seems to prevent large crew losses.
• The criticalHitPercent value is too high.  Lower this by a certain amount and raise the hullHitPercent value by the same amount.

If you do not change the damageVariance value to 0, then I guarantee you that changing the probability of the crew being hit won't work.  I think this is how Fleet-Ops prevents their vessels from becoming derelict so easily.

This basically requires a complete redo of all ODF files.