Annex wrote:
Even with this mod everything dies either in the first round or shortly in the second. Ive never made it to the third round

Unless there is a big disaparity in fleet size or tech levels, your battles should often reach all three rounds. Are you sure you have the mod loaded?

Played with the mod for far more hours than I intended to. It definitely seems to improve things for the better, the fleets I'm seeing are large but theres not endless waves of ships to deal with. The battles definitely are more interesting and lasting longer, though anyone with a clear cut edge will still win quickly (as it should be). The game devs should think about patching in these changes themselves.



Thanks for the mod!

JustSpectre wrote:
So I tried your mod in early game. All my battles ended in draw. Even when I'v had 2 times more ships than opponent. It's quite strange to have weapons, that do not deal damage at all. On the other hand AI had deflectors and flack installed, but even so. Maybe decreasing damage only by quarter not half could help.

I might have a solution to this. I think the reason this happens is because the AI sometimes loads up on defense modules in ways that human players generally wouldn't do. This isn't a huge problem later in the game when multiple weapon types can do damage to whatever weak spots the AI has, but early game it can be a bit obnoxious.



I might give a tonnage malus for defense modules to Corvette class ships to prevent AI/humans from loading up so high on defense modules before the other weapon types come out. This would cut down on the number of defense modules installed on ships early game and would be consistent with the Corvette's role as a light/scout/repair ship.

arithon wrote:
Played with the mod for far more hours than I intended to. It definitely seems to improve things for the better, the fleets I'm seeing are large but theres not endless waves of ships to deal with. The battles definitely are more interesting and lasting longer, though anyone with a clear cut edge will still win quickly (as it should be). The game devs should think about patching in these changes themselves.



Thanks for the mod!

Thanks for the kind words; I'm glad you're enjoying the mod. Stay tuned for a few more changes. I'm hoping to release some more changes in the next few days.

ANNOUNCEMENT: A new version (1.1.0) has been posted! Installation instructions remain the same. If you have 1.0.0, you should be able to overwrite those files. However, you do not need to install 1.0.0 to install/run 1.1.0. This will be the case for all future updates.



Saved games from 1.0.0 should be compatible, although you will want to redesign any corvette-class ships you have to fit into the new tonnage rules.

Can I continue to play an ongoing game I had with the first version, or will that mess it up?

arithon wrote:
Can I continue to play an ongoing game I had with the first version, or will that mess it up?

When I make changes I often use old savegames to test (that way I don't have to play a brand new game every time). As far as I can tell, the changes I made for this update should not break any parts of your game. The only thing that I can think of that could possibly be an issue would be any corvette-class ships you have. With the new change to defense modules for corvettes it is likely that any saved ship loadouts you have for that class will be too heavy, so you will want to redesign any models you have of that class.



Long story short: Yes, your savegames should be okay if you just overwrite 1.0.0.



EDIT: This was an important question so I added this info to the original announcement (post #27). Thanks for bringing this up, arithon!

Playing the new version, lots of fun.



Btw, I would suggest you re-title the mod to "Combat Rebalance Mod" or something, it might attract more attention by putting what it doe's in the title.

arithon wrote:
Playing the new version, lots of fun.



Btw, I would suggest you re-title the mod to "Combat Rebalance Mod" or something, it might attract more attention by putting what it doe's in the title.

I thought about giving it a name like that, but I didn't want to limit the scope of the mod to combat. As it stands right now most (but not all) of my changes have been combat-oriented, but I didn't want to pigeon-hole the mod.



I would like to at least include an allusion to the changes in the thread title so I can keep people posted on what is going on with the mod, but I do not know how to change the titles. Does anyone know how to do this?

Any moderator can change the title. We will usually be happy to change the title once, so pick carefully and I'll change it.

Even with this mod everything dies either in the first round or shortly in the second. Ive never made it to the third round

Please, put the folders Original.1.0.18, Original.1.0.17 and so on in zip file. So there is no need to backup original files.

I think there is no problem for everyone to download ~100kb more.

a4rino wrote:
Wow! The only thing more terrifying than your fleet in the 4th video was the loading time of the battle itself! While the crashes must have been frustrating it's fun to see people pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the game.

Yeah, 119 dreadnoughts takes quite a lot of time to load...Took like 3 mins to load, not to forget the epic lag o.O(The lag was even worse in the 1st recording of the dreadnought fleet which I didn't upload when I couldn't even press free camera) But I think having more than 20-30 ships on field is useless xD Since their weapons won't even hit before the enemies are already dead ;o

arithon wrote:
Unless there is a big disaparity in fleet size or tech levels, your battles should often reach all three rounds. Are you sure you have the mod loaded?

Yep, auto loading it via steam, and it says its loaded in the bottom left corner. Either way I extracted it this time around to the public folder overwriting the originals, playing a new map, will see how it goes.

Annex wrote:
Even with this mod everything dies either in the first round or shortly in the second. Ive never made it to the third round

This is sad to hear. What difficulty are you playing on? And is it your ships that go down or those of other players? The AI gets some hefty buffs at harder difficulties that may be wiping your ships out; alternatively, you may just be much smarter than the AI at your fleet composition! Let me know the details of your game and I will see if I can reproduce your problem - I've been seeing many of my battles make it to melee.

DDark wrote:
Please, put the folders Original.1.0.18, Original.1.0.17 and so on in zip file. So there is no need to backup original files.

I think there is no problem for everyone to download ~100kb more.

I'm not sure I understand your request. If you follow the mod installation instructions on the first post then you should have no need for backing up the original files - they will all still be there in your Program Files (assuming you're running the Windows version). You should not be touching the Program Files directory, so all of the old files should be intact.

I almost never lose ships, but dont worry about it this is a minor complaint really. Game has much bigger issues (like boring me to death)

Just wanted to say I'm still enjoy the mod, battles are so much better with this.

I would like to see this mod placed into the community mod that is already out there.

The battles are soo much more interesting with this mod, and with the other changes that the community mod is making... Wow...



The two mods together would be VERY cool.

Thanks for the encouragement. Unfortunately this particular merge is "hard", because both have modified the same files in different ways. A person who is familiar with linux diff/patch/merge (or similar capabilities in some fancy Windows editor) can probably do it. I think the scope of this change is too big, and probably too controversial, to put into the community mod. However, a4rino is certainly welcome to merge the other way, and include the community mod changes into his mod. Credit to the original authors (davea, ail, grubsnix) is requested.

NovaBlazer wrote:
I would like to see this mod placed into the community mod that is already out there.

The battles are soo much more interesting with this mod, and with the other changes that the community mod is making... Wow...



The two mods together would be VERY cool.

I don't foresee a wholesale integration of these two mods because I think they serve two different purposes (and thus have two different trajectories for where they will end up). That said, I will try to take a look at some of the changes davea and company are making in the community balance mod and perhaps I will incorporate some of those changes if I feel that they will add value to my mod (giving credit where it is due, of course!).



Also, to davea: Thanks for your permission to use changes made by you, ail, and gubsnix. Feel free use any part of my mod if it strikes you as interesting, valuable, or fun. Actually the same goes for anyone who enjoys my mod and wants to use parts of it for their own creations.

a4rino wrote:
That said, I will try to take a look at some of the changes davea and company are making in the community balance mod and perhaps I will incorporate some of those changes if I feel that they will add value to my mod (giving credit where it is due, of course!).

That sounds like a good plan. Of course with all the AI economy changes in the community mod (the way it values upgrades, etc...) the battles tend to be pretty dern good. So perhaps just a weapons tweak or two that Anthony's Mod focuses on, would work really well for the community mod.



Thanks goes to both mods as they have introduced a new element of fun for me.

NovaBlazer wrote:
That sounds like a good plan. Of course with all the AI economy changes in the community mod (the way it values upgrades, etc...) the battles tend to be pretty dern good. So perhaps just a weapons tweak or two that Anthony's Mod focuses on, would work really well for the community mod.



Thanks goes to both mods as they have introduced a new element of fun for me.

It looks like there are some significant AI changes coming in the 1.0.20 update from Amplitude (see this thread, so I've decided not to implement any of the community mod's AI stuff until we see how the game plays once that comes out. Until then, I may only implement one or two ideas from that mod (I like the Decrease research income earned as part of trade; was 2x dust, now 0.5x dust idea, as well as the color changes).

NovaBlazer wrote:
That sounds like a good plan. Of course with all the AI economy changes in the community mod (the way it values upgrades, etc...) the battles tend to be pretty dern good. So perhaps just a weapons tweak or two that Anthony's Mod focuses on, would work really well for the community mod.

I took a look at the community / bugfix mod files and it turns out that they do not modify the files that are most central to my combat modifications.



It should work if you simply copy and paste the following files from AnthonysMod/Simulation to community-mod/Simulation:







Now launch community mod (not Anthony's Mod) and you should get the best of both worlds! I haven't actually tried this myself, so I can't guarantee that it works. Not all of my changes will be there, of course, but these files are the ones most central to the combat and davea and company have not changed these files at all in their mod.



If you decide to give this a shot let me know how it goes. I will probably try it myself if I find the time, although I will most likely be pretty busy this week.

Well this sounds nice. Good on you for making battles less monotonous.

What's new in 1.1.0?

I decreased nano repair battle action rate by half to compensate for the fact that weapons do less damage. This should make nano repair a less obvious choice and bring it more in line with the other cards.



Corvette-class ships were given a whopping 75% defense module weight malus to hopefully help prevent early game battles from becoming a chore. This change should be in line with the role of corvette-class ships to be fast and light and not particularly combat-oriented.



Finally, I played with the industry improvements a bit to make them less powerful. As they are in vanilla, they tend to pay for themselves in only a few turns regardless of the system they're built in and so they are supremely obvious to build ASAP. Hopefully the changes here will make them more of an investment and decrease system productivity in general.



The other changes are fairly straightforward. See the changelogs below for details.

changelogs

1.1.0 wrote:

• decreased nano repair base repair rate from 0.2 to 0.1
• increased ship upkeep factor from 0.5 to 1.5
• applied 75% defense module weight malus on corvette class
• reduced base effect of all industry star system improvements
• increased upkeep/decreased effect of 2nd science improvement
  
  

1.0.0 wrote:

• decreased long range beam weapon accuracy from 0.5 to 0.4
• decreased short range missile accuracy from 0.4 to 0.3
• decreased nopersalve of all kinetic weapons by half
• decreased missile damage by half
• decreased beam damage by slightly less than half
• halved deflectionperturn for all deflector modules
• increased ship hulls by 30% for all ships
• increased base maxcommandpoint from 5 to 7
• increased cost of all ships and modules by 30%
• increased cost of all system improvements by 20%
• increased ship upkeep by 50% from 0 to 0.5
  
  

Could you upload this to Strategy Informer as a mirror? http://www.strategyinformer.com/mods/

JamieSI wrote:
Could you upload this to Strategy Informer as a mirror? http://www.strategyinformer.com/mods/

If the mod becomes popular within the community here I may mirror it over to the SI page. At present I'm more interested in keeping all the information together in one place (here). This will make updates easier.

Are you planning on any changes to the HP/Defenses system? I feel like it is far to easy to completely block out all damage of a particular weapon and can easy lead to wars where a players weapons are doing 0 damage.



Would it be possible for you de-emphisise the the defensive nature of blocking an opponents attract to the omni-defensive nature of HP modules while retaining the normal specialized defenses worth?

Igncom1 wrote:
Are you planning on any changes to the HP/Defenses system? I feel like it is far to easy to completely block out all damage of a particular weapon and can easy lead to wars where a players weapons are doing 0 damage.



Would it be possible for you de-emphisise the the defensive nature of blocking an opponents attract to the omni-defensive nature of HP modules while retaining the normal specialized defenses worth?

If I understand your comment correctly I think you're saying that defense modules (deflector, shield, flak) are too effective in comparison to the armor support module. You would prefer that defense modules be made somehow less effective.



This could be worth looking into. Perhaps increasing the weight of defense modules would cause a player to think twice before they load their ships with these modules. It might encourage players to specialize in one type of defense, requiring that they know more about their enemy.



I'd be interested to hear what the rest of the community thinks about this.

You understood correctly

Igncom1 wrote:
You understood correctly

Do you think module weight should be increased or defense benefits should be decreased?



My only concern about increasing weight would be that the AI may not handle the change appropriately (i.e. it may waste a lot of tonnage on defense modules and have little left over for anything else).

Module weight would be my choice, and I do believe there reported cases of the AI not using its tonnage to the fullest extent so this might help even the scales.

Hmm, how did you increase command points? ;o(I want to go full retard and make a 100 ship fleet to see what happens )



edit: Nvm, I should read all the files before asking this stuff...For people interested, any info on where to find stuff can be found in the Changelog.txt

INTRODUCTION

Amplitude Studios realized an incredible creative vision in developing Endless Space. However, not everyone shares this same vision. This mod is an attempt to realize my own vision for what Endless Space could be. This is a mod I've developed for my own amusement, but I'm posting it here because I think that the community might appreciate the changes and because all of you can help me make it better.



MOTIVATION

I decided to make this mod because I really like Endless Space, but a few things bugged me about the base game:





For full details, see the changelog in the post below.



CHANGES/FEATURES





DOWNLOAD

VERSION 1.1.0 (for ES 1.0.18): http://www.mediafire.com/?4n4v3ps9llbvou4

Date Posted: 2 Sep 2012



HOW TO INSTALL AND LAUNCH

Follow the instructions from Amplitude:





Alternatively, you can have the mod launch automatically when you start ES by right-clicking on ES in your Steam library, clicking Properties -> Set Launch Options and then typing +mod AnthonysMod into the text field. You can confirm that the mod loaded by checking the bottom left corner of the screen on the main menu.



FEEDBACK

I don't have a ton of time to test every aspect of the mod at all difficulty levels and for all factions. Should you notice any features that aren't working or have unintended consequences, reply to this thread for a discussion.

Hmm, how did you increase command points? ;o(I want to go full retard and make a 100 ship fleet to see what happens )



edit: Nvm, I should read all the files before asking this stuff...For people interested, any info on where to find stuff can be found in the Changelog.txt

Yes I note the xml names next to each change so that I can easily retrace my steps. I would be interested to see the battles that could take place with such a high command point limit! You should post a video!

Well this sounds nice. Good on you for making battles less monotonous.

Thanks for the kind words; I'm glad you're on board with the idea. Let me know if you have any ideas you'd like to see make it into the game and maybe we can make it happen.

Stupid question:



So I load the mod, it says it has to restart, but the game doesn't restart automatically. Do I have to reload the game manually, and then start a new game? How do I know the mod is currently running or not?

a4rino wrote:
Yes I note the xml names next to each change so that I can easily retrace my steps. I would be interested to see the battles that could take place with such a high command point limit! You should post a video!

I will definetly do that! Should definetly be intresting at the least, I was kind of planning to play it later today, but I guess I'll make a video first and play eve online later ;3



edit: Ok...For some reason the mod won't show up in the mods list...And i fixed it, lol, I got the wrong game version.(I be yer friendly neighbourhood pirate until I got money to buy endless from steam, I promise!)



Edit2:

arithon wrote:
Stupid question: So I load the mod, it says it has to restart, but the game doesn't restart automatically. Do I have to reload the game manually, and then start a new game? How do I know the mod is currently running or not?

At the bottom on the left side, is the game version and, when using a mod, also tells you what mod and what version of that mod you are using.

So I tried your mod in early game. All my battles ended in draw. Even when I'v had 2 times more ships than opponent. It's quite strange to have weapons, that do not deal damage at all. On the other hand AI had deflectors and flack installed, but even so. Maybe decreasing damage only by quarter not half could help.

arithon wrote:
Stupid question:



So I load the mod, it says it has to restart, but the game doesn't restart automatically. Do I have to reload the game manually, and then start a new game? How do I know the mod is currently running or not?

I've noticed this happening to me sometimes with mods (not just mine). I think it's a problem with ES and not the mods themselves. I've discovered two potential fixes:



1. The best way is to go to your Steam library, right click Endless Space -> Properties -> Set Launch Options and then type +mod AnthonysMod into the field. This will tell ES to automatically load up the mod when you start the game. You can confirm that it loaded by checking the lower left corner of the main menu.

2. The other fix is to simply restart your computer and try again.



See this thread < http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?9767-Mod-Load-Crash >.

I've been having some battles already(quite small ones tho, no dreadnoughts used yet) but I did record them and will upload to youtube after this match, in about an hour, I will have a massive fleet of dreadnoughts and rape the remaining AI

JustSpectre wrote:
So I tried your mod in early game. All my battles ended in draw. Even when I'v had 2 times more ships than opponent. It's quite strange to have weapons, that do not deal damage at all. On the other hand AI had deflectors and flack installed, but even so. Maybe decreasing damage only by quarter not half could help.

This does happen often in earlier skirmishes, especially at higher difficulty levels (because of bonuses the AI ships get). These draws can lead to some exciting arms races in contested systems during the early game. Research new weapon types in the military tree and you will be able to bring down enemy ships more easily.

Interesting approach ....ill try it....

hmm, my game just crashed with a too many heaps error...I guess the game doesn't like me having 400 dreadnoughts and 250 cruisers o.O I'll restart the save I made and hope it does make the turn now...Otherwise I'll just see how I can get a nice recording of alot of dreadnoughts ;3



Edit: Ok, I got 2 fights off before the game crashed again, 1 recording was...Terrible...To say the least, the Other was ok-ish. I got 4 videos uploading to youtube atm(Ranging from early game to my dreadnought fleet), Will link here when they are done uploading.



Edit: Alright, here is the playlist for the videos!(Ofcourse watch in 1080P and full screen!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feBmpj8ZMTQ&feature=BFa&list=PL809C47A034BA3273

Lolwut wrote:
Edit: Alright, here is the playlist for the videos!(Ofcourse watch in 1080P and full screen!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feBmpj8ZMTQ&feature=BFa&list=PL809C47A034BA3273

Wow! The only thing more terrifying than your fleet in the 4th video was the loading time of the battle itself! While the crashes must have been frustrating it's fun to see people pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the game.