Re-balancing the game
Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 2:11 am
I discovered OCL a couple of years ago and had a lot of fun messing around with it. My brother and I like to play over a LAN (wireless) and I am looking forward to trying out the new 1.40b22 patch and the OCL plus editor (I haven't played MOO2 in over a year since I upgraded my computers and had to re-format the hard drives). I've gotten a lot of great ideas from reading posts and looking at other people's OCL mods. Here are some of the major changes I plan on making - any feedback would be appreciated.
-rebalancing the ships to reflect the maintenance costs for each size class.
I am going to re-balance size, cost, armor, structure and special sizes/cost to reflect the BC maintenance cost. For example - size going from Frigate to Doom Star will now be 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 and 1200 (vs. 25, 60, 120, 250, 500, 1200 - no change for the doom star). Very dramatic increase for the smaller ships (and it will cost a lot for them vs. before) but they will be much more viable vs. just making battleships and larger. Maintenance costs = 1,2,3,4,5,6. That equals an increase of x2, x1.5, x1.33, x1.25 and x1.2 for each size class over the previous. Of all the things I could think of this seems to make the most sense to balance out all of the ship size classes.
-dramatically increasing bases size/armor/structure - a star base will be equivalent to a doom star, a battlestation x2, star fortress x3 or x4. A big problem with the game (IMO) is that fixed defenses are just not strong enough when compared to fleets. I will also probably reduce the planetary defense structures cost and maintenance.
-removing techs that can be used for 'cheap' tactics (tractor beams, death rays, time warp facilitors, phasing cloak, neutron blasters, assault shuttles, transporters, etc..) and removing techs that put the AI at a big disadvantage because they don't use them as effectively or as much as human players (battle pods, reinforced hull and reinforced armor are three that come to mind; to offset this I am probably going to triple armor/structure for ships and bases).
-removing 'offensive' weapon techs that are too powerful (Achilles, hi energy focus?, structural analyzer, hyper x capacitors) - often when a ship gets the initiative in a late game with many advanced techs it is able to eliminate many enemy ships of similar caliber before they can even move. This is also part of my reasoning behind removing reinforced hull/armor and just making the ships and bases much tougher.
-dramatically increasing the research costs for intermediate and advanced techs so they are not researched so quickly.
-I would like to balance missiles, torpedoes and fighters more with beam weapons. Torpedoes seem easy because I can increase the damage they do. I'd like to make it so that only point defense weapons can target fighters and missiles (see my other post) but I don't know how. For now I guess I can increase the armor points of fighters and decrease their size requirement. Any way to make fighters go faster? The big problem with fighters is that often in a late game they just get destroyed before they can fire at all and now you've got a defenseless carrier ship with no weapons!
Using COORION I like to make a game where all of the homeworlds are huge and ultra rich w/ gems (makes early game go a little faster and I think homeworlds should be much better than others). I like to limit each star system to just one planet (too many planets = too much micromanagement) and to make it so there are no ‘bad’ planets (no poor, ultra poor, toxic, tiny or small). I also give the AI players some serious bonuses (for example – Psilons = democracy, +4 research, telepathic, +10 espionage, omniscient, creative) so it can compete later in the game.
-rebalancing the ships to reflect the maintenance costs for each size class.
I am going to re-balance size, cost, armor, structure and special sizes/cost to reflect the BC maintenance cost. For example - size going from Frigate to Doom Star will now be 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000 and 1200 (vs. 25, 60, 120, 250, 500, 1200 - no change for the doom star). Very dramatic increase for the smaller ships (and it will cost a lot for them vs. before) but they will be much more viable vs. just making battleships and larger. Maintenance costs = 1,2,3,4,5,6. That equals an increase of x2, x1.5, x1.33, x1.25 and x1.2 for each size class over the previous. Of all the things I could think of this seems to make the most sense to balance out all of the ship size classes.
-dramatically increasing bases size/armor/structure - a star base will be equivalent to a doom star, a battlestation x2, star fortress x3 or x4. A big problem with the game (IMO) is that fixed defenses are just not strong enough when compared to fleets. I will also probably reduce the planetary defense structures cost and maintenance.
-removing techs that can be used for 'cheap' tactics (tractor beams, death rays, time warp facilitors, phasing cloak, neutron blasters, assault shuttles, transporters, etc..) and removing techs that put the AI at a big disadvantage because they don't use them as effectively or as much as human players (battle pods, reinforced hull and reinforced armor are three that come to mind; to offset this I am probably going to triple armor/structure for ships and bases).
-removing 'offensive' weapon techs that are too powerful (Achilles, hi energy focus?, structural analyzer, hyper x capacitors) - often when a ship gets the initiative in a late game with many advanced techs it is able to eliminate many enemy ships of similar caliber before they can even move. This is also part of my reasoning behind removing reinforced hull/armor and just making the ships and bases much tougher.
-dramatically increasing the research costs for intermediate and advanced techs so they are not researched so quickly.
-I would like to balance missiles, torpedoes and fighters more with beam weapons. Torpedoes seem easy because I can increase the damage they do. I'd like to make it so that only point defense weapons can target fighters and missiles (see my other post) but I don't know how. For now I guess I can increase the armor points of fighters and decrease their size requirement. Any way to make fighters go faster? The big problem with fighters is that often in a late game they just get destroyed before they can fire at all and now you've got a defenseless carrier ship with no weapons!
Using COORION I like to make a game where all of the homeworlds are huge and ultra rich w/ gems (makes early game go a little faster and I think homeworlds should be much better than others). I like to limit each star system to just one planet (too many planets = too much micromanagement) and to make it so there are no ‘bad’ planets (no poor, ultra poor, toxic, tiny or small). I also give the AI players some serious bonuses (for example – Psilons = democracy, +4 research, telepathic, +10 espionage, omniscient, creative) so it can compete later in the game.