I merged your post to this thread. I did not remove it. I apologise if this has annoyed you in any way, but I would simply rather avoid duplicate thread.



Edit: your post is on the previous page.

For all you canon needs visit Mass Effect wiki.





Hupailija I suggest reading the in game codices, which explain a lot about the Mass Effect universe, there are even audio recordings you can listen. From what you said, it is clear you did not do so. The fact that you think the Thanix canon is a laser is a very good indicator. I am also forced to assume that you didn't listen in game (assuming you played ME2), where listening to a conversation reveals that an Alliance dreadnought launches 20kg slugs at 4000 km/s.



We are lucky Bioware created decently extensive codices, which explain many things of the ME universe.

I am quoting the ingame codex:

Contrary to popular belief, Sovereign's main gun was not a directed energy weapon. Rather, its massive element zero core powered an electromagnetic field suspending a liquid iron-uranium-tungsten alloy that shaped into armor-piercing projectiles when fired. The jet of molten metal, accelerated to a fraction of the speed of light, destroys targets by impact force and irresistible heat.



Only 11 months after the battle, the turians produced the Thanix, their own miniaturized version of Sovereign's gun. The Thanix can fire reliably every five seconds, rivaling a cruiser's firepower but mountable on a fighter or frigate.

So not a laser, but... a particle "beam" weapon?



If you go looking further into the codex, you also learn that the weapons used in ship combat are mass accelerators, which are weapons utilizing kinetic energy to do damage. If I once again quote the ingame codex entry on the topic:

Mass accelerators propel solid metal slugs via electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. A slug lightened by a mass effect field can be accelerated to extremely high speeds, permitting previously unattainable projectile velocities.



The primary determinant of a mass accelerator's destructive power is length. The longer the barrel, the longer the slug can be accelerated, the higher the slug's final velocity, and therefore the greater its kinetic impact. Slugs are designed to squash or shatter on impact, increasing the energy they transfer to its target. Without collapsibility, slugs would punch through their targets while inflicting only minimal damage.



Rather than being mounted on the exterior, starship guns are housed inside hulls and visible only as gun portholes from outside.



A ship's main gun is a large spinal-mount weapon running 90% of the hull's length. While possessing destructive power equal to that of tactical nuclear weapons, main guns are difficult to aim. Because ships must be able to point their bows almost directly at their targets, main guns are best used for long-range "bombardment" fire.



Approximately 40% of the hull's width, broadside guns inflict less damage and can be mounted with greater numbers and more flexibility. The modern human Kilimanjaro-class dreadnoughts mount three decks with 26 broadside accelerators apiece for a total salvo weight of 78 slugs per side, firing once every two seconds.



However, mass accelerators produce recoil equal to their impact energy. While the mass effect fields suspending the rounds mitigate the recoil, recoil shock can still rattle crews and damage systems.

So here we go... ship using kinetic weapons... as their primary weapons.



As for missiles, I really don't recall reading about missiles, but would disruptor torpedoes do?

Disruptor torpedoes are powered projectiles with warheads that create random and unstable mass effect fields when triggered. These fields warp space-time in a localized area. The rapid asymmetrical mass changes cause the target to rip itself apart.

There are also lasers in game (GARDIAN laser batteries), the thing is they are primarly used for anti-missile/anti-fighter, though in ME2 on Horizon we do see ground based GARDIAN batteries used to drive of the collector cruisers.



source on the ME wiki:

Codex/Ships and Vehicles





As such there are three distinct difference between between weapons in Endless Space and Mass Effect. In ME kinetic weapons are used on all distances, depending on the size, with the heavy dreadnought ship length mass accelerator cannons being the long range weapons. The second is that lasers are generally not used for anti-ship fighting, but as a point defence weapon and that missiles/torpedoes are primarily used at short ranges.







As for Mass Relays, if you go with what we see in ME, you have Mass Relays which lead into star clusters. So a wormhole to a star system and then those star connections from the "mass relay system".

I don know much of how the coding will work for this mod but as for the 3D models we can ask for help to the modders of the sins rebellion-mass effect mod, as they have a lot of them done already:



http://www.moddb.com/mods/mass-effect-dawn-of-the-reapers



I also believe it can be done with great success, just helping with an idea I want to see turned into a awesome mod.

This has been brought up several times before on another thread, but... Reapers. Maybe when you hit a certain turn or tech tree level they could come and start decimating your systems in a way that makes the last system to be conquered your home system. Other factions could either ally with you and "Drive the reapers back to dark space". Maybe the most advanced faction in that match could be the one that the reapers will use to create the new reaper. It could go in any number of directions. This is starting to sound complicated here, but maybe on a random ocean planet, there could be an anomaly of "The Leviathans", the race that (Spoiler Alert) created the Catalyst, which in turn created the reaper Harbinger from most of their species. The ones that escaped are shown in the Mass Effect 3: Leviathan DLC. Or a turn reduction on the creation of The Crucible. Either way, it would be beneficial to find them.

Really, this is mostly hypothetical at the moment. But it seems as though suggestions are welcome!

If I may add in my humble two cents, regarding story line and races... Who/what says the mod has to be set in the ME time-frame we played during the three games? What about before, or after the three games? Lots of lore to explore.

A mod like this just seems right. The wormholes can act as Mass Relays, the race diversity works well too, and I'm with Armid. I think the best place for the mod to take place is probably the First Contract War or perhaps shortly after. The Rachni Wars are another option, though in this case you leave out the humans.

Maybe set it after the reaper war? There is no canon specifically stated after there. The only problem with that would be the races that may have perished in the war. But sticking with the non-canon aspect, there would be no rules holding it back with the development.

Couple quick tips when you start this project:

Make sure that you have atleast 1 coder per 2 races. Amount of code one has to write is staggering.

Limit the amount of storywriters to just 1 or 2 and make sure that they know exactly what to do.

Take 1 person who starts to make icons in very first moment he starts his "job" in project.



If I would have thought a bit further I wouldn't have started to do Dream in team when I didn't had 4 coders (well it's doable with 1 but it just takes 8 times as long) and definetely not with 3-4 persons who wants to mess with story.

Would anyone be able to make a mod for Endless space, whereby you could add the races of Mass Effect?

For ships there are all the different races ships seen in the games themselves...



Also after a changeable timer you could enable a REAPER INVASION, at which point really powerful fleets of Reaper ships begin to appear.

To show how they wipe out entire planet's populations you could make it so they take 2x longer than normal fleets to take a system...



Just a thought that i think would be amazing in Endless Space.

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?10106-MOD-REQUEST-MASS-EFFECT-3-REAPER-Mod-)



additional ideas to a Mass Effect mod....



SOMEONE MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Sentiel wrote:
http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?10106-MOD-REQUEST-MASS-EFFECT-3-REAPER-Mod-)



additional ideas to a Mass Effect mod....



SOMEONE MAKE IT HAPPEN!

RACES

A Mass Effect 3 mod could quite easily include all the major races ;

Human Alliance, Asari, Turian, Salarian, Geth, Quarian, ( Prothean even hehe ).



If you really want to go into it there's also Krogan, Hanaar & Drell, Rachni, Volus, Vorcha, Batarian, Elcor



The inclusion of missiles isn't a problem, and they could be entirely removed if you worked deep enough into it. (or left them in. Personally i have no reason to remove missiles just because of mass effect never really touching on them. It still has some).



REAPERS

After a preset number of turns which could possibly be changed or switched off if you don't want it, you could trigger a "REAPER INVASION" where large fleets of very powerful reaper ships would start to appear around the galaxy.

(maybe to facilitate this you could look at how pirates are spawned? )

These reaper fleets would be, like pirates, at perma-war with all other races, and to show how the reapers wipe out all sentient life on each planet they attack make them take twice as long to capture planets.



As the official endings to ME3 were a complete disappointment, in order to defeat the reapers, you could modify the tech trees to include "Prothean technology" which would boost your planets and ships against reapers.



THE CITADEL

In order to create the citadel, you can have it as a planet alone in a solar system, and can use the galaxy generation tools to facilitate this. Of course it means using a custom galaxy type to ensure it is always in it.





Thanks.

I actually just picked up my copy of ME3 recently, beat it lastnight. Now I'm here with the game fresh in my mind, heh. My thoughts on this;



As summarized in many of the previous posts, a lot of the changes proposed would not be terribly hard to implement.



For the races you would need to create custom races and give them images, and select them as the starting empires in a given game. Select the ones you want to play with, pretty straight forward. Making a new race is easy enough, not sure about the requirements for adding new racial images though.



Mass Relays would be tricky. There are only a limited number in the ME universe, and they would be perfect replacements for the existing wormholes, though replacing the in-engine wormhole system animation would probably be tricky. My thoughts on this are that all races should not have wormhole/relay use unlocked on start - you're basically starting a fresh game, right after the discovery of element zero (ie dust) and beginning to develop that technology. IIRC, in the ME universe humankind had discovered element zero locally shortly before unlocking their Sol system relay and encountering the Turians. It would fit the theme in having the players of such a mod have to research it first.



Missiles do exist on spacecraft in the ME universe. Several of the cut-scenes show them in ship to ship fleet battles though they are somewhat hard to make out, though you can clearly see the Normandy SR2 fire them during one cinematic in ME3, as well as some capital ships in the Citadel battle in ME1. They're uncommon but they're definitely there, if seldom-used.



Space stations are possible in Endless Space but would require some heavy modding. They would have to be added to the planetary pool as a possible planet during galaxy generation and have a textured 3D model assigned to them. 3D models for space stations are out there, I've even worked with a few when modding X3:Terran Conflict / Albion prelude. Many models and textures for them are available online for use. The ones I have worked with are loadable for editing in 3DSMax or Maya, though I would not know how to convert the models to an ES suitable format or how to insert them to the game resources for a modded game. Said space stations would most likely need to be pre-existing system objects (re: planets) that you could colonize, rather than build. I can see them having low to moderate population caps, with high resource generation depending on station type.

Ah i see. I apologise i did not see. I assumed it had been removed. My apologies. :S

Good luck with the mod guys! Seem like interesting

I can't wait to see this mod come to light......though I would like to see the Reapers as a playable race. I do like the idea of the Reapers taking the place of the pirates.

I'd love to see a mod that adds features of Mass Effect for Endless Space, because I really would like to play with the Systems Alliance and the Turians. But unfortunately, it seems that there aren't many modding teams for Endless Space for now. Maybe we can add certain factions of Mass Effect to Endless Space through the modification of affinities.

if anyone need some modding resources

http://www.foundation3d.com/index.php?categoryid=38&p13_sectionid=434

http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/17-728-1

I only know i wanna be a Reaper!



or Salarian maybe?

\o/

1) the way moving in Endless works, you basically already have clusters which require FTL travel, and the wormholes function somewhat like mass relays. Assuming you have the settings on constellations = yes. You can also make wormholes more frequent, if that's not enough.

2) Endless space and Mass Effect have kinetic weapons - ME had standard, forward mounted turrets, which were kinetic weapons, but which also would work quite a bit differently from the basically more is better functionality of kinetic weapons in Endless. Mass Effect also had "missiles," or rather torpedos, which are the same thing AFAIK when you're talking about space combat. The most significant difference is that endless space lacks fighter craft. In a sense the missiles of Endless Space are pretty well analogous to fighters/bombers and possibly frigates of mass effect, acting as faster moving craft that must be actively countered with close-range defense. If you want to make it good you could mod missiles to look like fighters, or take it a step further and make fighters (defensive) and bombers (counterpart offensive to fighters) a seperate research tree, and even further you would have to add new animations for fighters/bombers, and make the point defense cannons use lasers instead of flak.



3) Races are easy, combining an ability to change affinity and portrait with the standard ability to make new races without modding tools, to begin with. I've worked out how I think the different Mass Effect factions would have strengths and weaknesses - I would like more control over affinity though, or if modding, I hope there is an ability to make races like the basic races, that have more bonuses than the standard race creation allows. As it is, trying to accurately reproduce Mass Effect races results in races that aren't as good as the races you can min-max without any inspiration, simply focusing on mechanics.



The biggest difficulty would be making the Reapers, which would require a fair amount of serious modding, I would assume. You might have to make a galaxy map that is rather large in Endless terms to fit in all the races and at least all the planets that are in the trilogy.



I think it would be fun to have Reapers as a possible faction. Have one player fighting all the others that way. It seems to me to be accurate the reapers need basically the affinities of all the races, and then some. In the short term the Amoeba affinity works, because the Amoeba ships are larger and organic looking, so re-skinning the Amoeba could be passable. Maybe some basic technologies that surpass anything the other races have by a margin. It could be quite interesting to make the Reaper faction and play against them, as an actual faction and not just souped-up pirates. The pirate idea is good though, must admit.

Guys, a Mass Effect mod is becoming reality:



http://www.moddb.com/mods/endless-effect