I am tinkering with what I call an Intensity mod, essentially I am increasing the capabilities of the various factions (10k starting money, more faction traits) so that there is a faster ramp up to advanced technologies and consequently much funner space battles with higher command points, better weaponry, etc.



I am starting to take a look at the capabilities of the pirates in the PirateDifficulty.xml and wanted to see if anyone here has any best practices of what adjusts very well, which features should not be touched (like the ability for pirates to invade which is CanInvade="false"), etc. I think I am going to start by seeing if I can increase their command points, and perhaps create an elite class of pirate ships that can match the 30k-50k combat power of a 17 to 24 command point late game fleet.



For Example here is an excerpt from PirateDifficulty.xml, the following lines don't appear to be commented so I am not sure what adjusting the following values mean, I can only guess from the names:






PercentPerPlayer="0.02"

AllowedSpawn="-1"

CanMoveOnEmpire="false"

CanInvade="false"

NumberFleetPerSpawn="1"

MoveCoolDown="10"

PercentShipPerFleet="0.15"

TechnologyGap ="1" >


LimitMin="4"/>





















Would adjusting WeaponModuleKinetic from 0.15 to 0.05 mean that more kinetic weapons will be mounted in the same hull volume since the weight value has been reduced?



I would like to tinker with their hit points, the number of weapons they mount, and the types, especially for the late game ElitePirate class vessels. Any suggestions or experience about what works and what doesn't is certainly appreciated. If I am the first to really start to tinker with the Pirates I will post my experiences along the way.



P.S.

This forum will not allow a search on piratedifficulty.xml as a search parameter, or I would have done just that.



Kind Regards,

Koinonos

Richland, WA

Koinonos wrote:


Would adjusting WeaponModuleKinetic from 0.15 to 0.05 mean that more kinetic weapons will be mounted in the same hull volume since the weight value has been reduced?

No, that's not what the weights are for. Weights in this case have noting to do with the mass of the weapons but how much the game will put of that module on that ship (ie relative to the other weights defined). 0.15 is a bigger proportion than 0.05, doing that would make the Pirates put a lot less guns, if any.

I would like to tinker with their hit points, the number of weapons they mount, and the types, especially for the late game ElitePirate class vessels. Any suggestions or experience about what works and what doesn't is certainly appreciated. If I am the first to really start to tinker with the Pirates I will post my experiences along the way.

Hit points depend on the ship hull used, so if you want to alter that you need to either make them use a different hull or edit the pirate hulls in hull.xml. What weapon they mount depend on what they have researched, unless it's ships spawned by random events (those have fixed loadouts, found in shipdesigns.xml).



Hope that help.