Comments - Mc_Intire

Unless the system has been changed since the Diplomacy version, doctrines are tied to specific regular researches. You unlock the tied research and the corresponding doctrine unlocks.

It usually gives an additional global bonus with the same theme as the tied regular research. Also, unless changed since the Diplomacy mod version, you can research all doctrines once they have been unlocked, you do not have to pick between them.

Open researches are a way to keep your research facilities useful in lategame when most researches are done. Given, in galaxial there are other ways to spend your research data there should still be a way to improve your empire through it.

I was thinking that maybe your industrial structures could have negative impact on the planets they are located on, depending on their type. At the beginning of the game, the effects are weak, but with advancing industrial research it gains in strenght. Research data could be used to stimulate projects to remove those negative effects, maybe even turn them into positive ones.

The effect would accumulate over time, but the ability to negate them would only appear once the effect is strong enough. There would be a limit that the effect reaches after some time that could be dependant on planet type and number of structures causing them. Any positive traits would stay and nullify the accumulation of new negative traits until the project runs out of "funds".

Possible negative traits could be: Pollution (declining population and loss of tax income), energy shortages (extreme reduction of productivity), high unemployment or overpopulation (sharp decrease of resource income), fluctuating gravity (greatly slowing ships in orbit) or space junk (damaging ships in orbit)

There should not be too many negative effects, to keep it simple. But maybe there could be different ways to solve them. Space junk could be recycled for temporary additional resource income or turned into a minefield to hurt enemies instead of your ships. Overpopulation could be solved by "cheap" birth control programs or by "expensive" megacity projects, giving a big temporary boost in maximum population. Unemployment could be amended by interplanetary commuting services, slightly decreasing structure and ship build times on surrounding planets or by mandatory military service, making ships cheaper on the given planet.

Makes me wonder if rockets can bypass that like they could in TibSun. Back then you had to activate it with the right timing, or the nukes/tib missiles/drones would just pass over it and still kill your precious powerplant.

Yeah, You may have noticed that my comment was 20 hours ago. Lots of stuff can happen in that span of time.

I congratulate the team for reaching 10% of their set goal within one day btw. If this keeps up you might even get out a nice extra. Shows how much players appreciate the game, despite all the bitching about bugs/netcode/performance/balance on the uwe and steam forums.

What are you talking about? The page states that there are 25/25 available.

I'd love to invest a few dollars, but I don't have a credit card... Steam should pull their finger out of their behinds and enable donations for games from within their store.

I hope activating the ability will play a nice soundfile fitting to the ability. Not for the duration of the ability, but something short and intimidating to notify your enemy of his soon to be defeat.

Damging and slowing down, huh? A bit simple I think... looking at vanilla Sins and taking some references from Star Trek, why not something like this:

Greatly weakens shield effectiveness and prevents enemy fighters from launching. Shield mitigation within the storm is lowered, enemy strike craft are heavily damaged or destroyed, ships with strike craft cannot build any new strike craft for the duration of the ability.

Looking at the Klingon love for risk and danger I would even suggest to make the effect range quite big or the effect itself quite strong at the cost of having friendly vessels suffer the same effects, to a lesser degree.

You mean like the phase stabilizer tech of the Vasari? I always figured this would fit well with the Borg, but why would the other factions use it? (also, you can scrape off a lot of distance with a few frigate factories close to the front).

Quick question: The indention next to the deflector phalanx goes into the hull on the left and protrudes outward on the right side. Is that intentional or did this happen when mirroring the texture?

Edit: after looking at the ship again, this seems to be the case for the armor on the whole ship, not only the deflector.

Such NIS scenes (lol the word makes me think of NCIS crime scenes :V) were in HW2 if I remember correctly, like when Cpt. Soban first comes to help you. Shouldn't there be any hints to help you in the mission script there?

I actually like this style a lot better than lcars or whatever it is called, and I think a "neutral" interface for menu and game lobby is a good idea 'tips head in direction of responsible decision makers and texture artists'.

I realized as much. Making her one would have been interesting too, but looking at her specs (without the tons of Voyager updates) it does makes sense that she won't be.

Would be interesting if you could invest money into individual Interpids to get some of the more combat oriented Voyager updates onto them. Like getting a cruiser/capital interim unit by spending some extra cash.

@Guest: My suggestion about the captains yacht was exactly to make it a strong diplomat. I would have thought that the diplomat would not only boost relations quicker than a regular envoy, but also give stronger boni that also affected the Sovereign itself. Like providing culture vision for adjacant planets, giving an armor bonus/stronger passive regeneration and providing partial bombing protection akin to planetary shilds for the duration the yacht is out. In turn the Sovereign could gain a boost in antimatter regeneration and offensive strenght. This would permit the Sovereign to strongly support allies on their planets, which would fit with the starfleet mentality, too.

Probably my favorite federation ship, partially because I soaked up the episodes like a sponge when they first aired.

I guess it'l be a light assault ship or a support cruiser. Hope I can build lots of them.

Probably because the two would otherwise fulfill too similar roles as offensive capitial ship, at least in a combat game perspective.

I would have changed the Sovereign class ultimate (guess it is the ultimate) to something like "launches the captain's yacht, acts as powerful temporary envoy on the planet where it is launched".

The launch fighter faster ability is the only one I don't find fitting, otherwise I like how you redistributed the standard Sins abilites on the ships, I'd say they fit well with the ships. Is the number of capital ships finalized? I like how you only picked 5. Do all factions have 5 capitals, or does the number vary depending on the faction?

I am very impressed with the changes on the ships, it does indeed seem to have improved them (although the ships were pretty decent to begin with).

I am still a bit unsure about the buildings, but as requested I will keep my criticism to myself until after release. Hope you will make it there, most stuff I see here gives off a good impression.

What the ****? I thought you guys also want some constructive criticism on your work, which I tried to give and at no point I imposed a "must do" on anything. I said in my initial post that you could do it if you deemed it important enough, and repeated this in my following post which should actually make it obivous that it was a suggestion and no order (which I couldn't give anyways).

I just pointed out that your ship textures look better than this SB texture. If it doesn't represent your current work that is alright, but I do not have this information.

If I look at screenshots I do try to give find problems with it rather than just posting "oh nice", since in my opinion it helps you better with your work if someone states that something might be off than just praising you into the high heavens. Of course if all you want is praise you can tell me this now, then I will simply stop posting until you actually want criticism.

As I said, a job for you if you want to as 99% of the time I will be in icon view anyways :p. However looking at the nicely textured ship models bringing the SB textures (and any other structure that could use it) up to par might be something for you to do in a later patch at some point ;).

Update: Okay I have found a picture that gives me a better perspective and it seems there is a mix of communication arrays and "administrative skyscrapers" on top the starbase. I would still suggest to remove the windows on some of the cones and add some structure to the windows on the leftover ones (no engineer would just randomely place them around the structure ;P).

Yes, positioning lights on top like most current installations have so aircraft don't collide with them.

But if you look on the other pics where you see the current antennae you see windows on them, which looks weird to me.

Is it just me or are the lights on the SB a bit... weird?

I mean the windows mainly, the textures look stretched/blurry in places (like under the "mushroom cap" part. Wow, I'm gonna call this the nuclear starbase from now on), and there seem to be windows in strange places like the cones on top of the mushroom cap (in the reference pictures I found they look more like sensor/communication arrays, so the windows make them look odd) or those cylinders underneath the ring in the middle on this picture (what are those supposed to be? maybe make the lights a different color/pattern and call them gravity generators).

If you want to exert the energy on something the average gamer won't see 99.9% of his gametime that is ;).

Yeah I know the bug. Happend to me twice, really annyoing since you can basically restart the mission afterwards (well thankfully it isn't a long mission :p). Thankfully there is hope stuff like this won't happen in HW Remastered.

And hopefully the AI will be smart enough so I actually have to build stuff other than repair and salvage corvs (hell I had 200something frigs and a good 50 cruisers once when entering the last mission. It almost cost me the mothership cause my frigates wanted to take formation in some faraway corner before attacking the enemy ships)

It is quite hard to make factions diverse if you have lots of shiptyes. Roles will overlap within a faction, ships will end up being stronger replacements for other ships. Factions will become more similar the more different roles the ships cover. Unless you have lots of brain power in your team that can avert this from happening I would suggest to avoid adding too many shiptypes. I would even go as far as to suggest that you add less ships than a faction would have in stock sins (this also goes for capships) if it helps form a factions identity.

I know, but I always counted the "second mission" as being the actual first one.

I have played the campaign a good dozen times and apart from the first two or so tries I always got all six cold sleep chambers without repair corvettes. And all four frigates (Yes, you only get three in the end but you know how I mean it). You just have to act fast and do some micro. Maybe sacrifice a fighter or two, but that's it. The first container will be burning and smoking in the end, but I usually don't lose it. First occasion where I need repair corvettes is in mission 3... erm 4 if I count the tutorial.

Never had to, uber micro ftw :p

Edit: Of course, it might be possible that in the mod the AI learned a few new tricks, that would be a different matter then :D.

Ah, the wonderful first mission... balancing your money between building your first fighters and corvettes and keeping some to build those first eight salvage corvettes :).

This might just be my opinion, but I actually like the simpler klingon buttons over the fed ones. Fits better with a "menu button" and I'm unlikely to notice the details while playing anyways (at least not on 1900x1200 resolutions).

So I guess my suggestion would be to bring the other faction buttons in line with the Klingon ones.

Sorry for the grammer, damn edit timer is to short :p.

Or you could use harvested ice from ice asteroids to permanently improve worlds that have a natural lack of water resources, like volcanic or desert worlds in some way.

Edit: Btw, are the availabel slots limited by the power only, or by seperate numbers? If the different slots have different limits to how many items can be places it would be nice to have the available/used numbers in the title of the corresponding slots (like: passive - 3/5). Unless this is already in, I that case I didn't missed it on the screenshot.

They could provide a boost to close structures, like 50% faster unit production or cheaper units. You got the enemy out of your base and want to make a push? Plant some barrels next to your WF and start pumping out tanks, but beware, the enemy might watch and one lone officer might be your doom...