mrayling2012@gmail.com

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20846822/Rebellion/RamikinRebalance_2_2.reb

changelog:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20846822/Rebellion/Changelog_2_2.txt

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I haven't really played any Rebellion multiplayer games in ages, I admit this is because it got to the point where it wasn't fun to me due to the flaws of the interface (for instance, why can't I just have espionage missions on my own planets repeat themselves automatically?). However, recently I played a few games of single player for nostalgia's sake and due to my never quite expired love for Star Wars. Meh, somebody fix the interface stuff and Rebellion becomes one of the best titles in the history of gaming.

But anyway.

I noticed this before, and it came to my attention again, how seriously unbalanced this game is in terms of fighters vs capital ships. This has two dimensions: space battle and bombardment.

1. Space battles

This isn't obvious at low numbers, early in the game. If you send a small number of Y-wings against a Lancer Frigate, the frigate will hold its own. This is mostly due to the ship's shield, its power and regeneration.

However, as numbers go up proportionally, this equality collapses. If you send 5 times as many Y-wings vs 5 Lancer frigates, the Y-wings win by all focus-firing one ship. They can bring down the shield fast enough that the regeneration doesn't really matter, and then torpedoes quickly finish the job. Meanwhile, capital ships don't fire fast enough to eliminate fighters equally fast. Make the numbers big enough and you don't even need Y-wings, anything will do. T/Is if you want.

If you spend X amount (but fairly large) of resource on Star Destroyers (and their complement fighters/bombers) and I spend the same amount of resource on carriers and fighters/bombers, and we fight, I'm going to win that battle. Period. And that's a Bad Thing, because there is a whole huge tech line of cool and varied ships which are fun to build and pit against each other - but that's not the winning strategy, so - especially if I'm in any doubt of victory - I'm going to focus on carriers and fighters.

Now I'm actually not that experienced and skilled in multiplayer - won a number of games, lost a bit more - so perhaps I'm missing something and indeed there is good reason to build normal capital ships in a competitive game, so feel free to correct me, guys.

2. Bombardment

This is where things get ridiculous.

To get past a single level 1 Gencore, you need to amass a Bombardment value above its shield strength, which is 40. Disregarding for the sake of simplicity the effect of Admirals with the bombarding fleet and Generals with the defending planet, this means a simple sum of Bombardment values/modifiers of all ships and fighter squadrons.

And the silly thing is, while in the Star Wars lore bombardment is done mostly with capital ship turbolasers, in the game fighters absolutely dominate in this field as well. 1 dinky Y-wing squadron, or two X-wing squadrons, have the same Bombardment value (2) as a Dauntless Cruiser or Imperial Star Destroyer II.

That means that you need to have over 20 Dauntless Cruisers OR over 20 Y-wing squadrons to break through a single Gencore 1 (again, not counting the presence/absence of Admirals/Generals). I'm going to disregard Construction cost and just count this in terms of Maintenance, that's 20*99 vs 20*4. So 1980 vs 80. Even after adding the cost of carriers, that's still ridiculous.

Also note that almost anything that bombards "well" in this game has a value of 2. This includes ISDs, VSDs, Mon Calamaris etc. The only exceptions are the Bulwark (4), SSD (3), VSD I and II, and the Death Star (a pathetic 15. Really, Death Star, you can't break through a planetary shield on your own?). So any capital ship fit with powerful Turbolasers and Cannons does as well at Bombardment as a single squadron of outdated multirole fighters, or at most two-three such squadrons.

That's that for the long-winded introduction. Now for the...

REBALANCE IDEA

(See top of the page for the current download link).

I basically implemented this to make the game more fun for myself in single player, to encourage more use of capital ships. But it might be a good idea to try in multiplayer as well.

It had three major components:

I. Reduced the firepower of fighters in combat.

I thought to try simply halving their squadron strengths, but ultimately rejected this idea; they would not only be weaker in combat, but also die a little too easily. I don't want to eliminate fighters from the game, I don't hate them, I just want them back in line.

Instead, I more or less halved their firepower. Most important downing was of ion cannons, which are responsible for bringing shields down quickly. For example, the Y-wing used to be:

Laser cannon: 5

Ion cannon: 3

Torpedoes: 8

Currently it is:

Laser cannon: 3

Ion cannon: 1

Torpedoes: 4

Other fighters and bombers were treated similarly.

Note that bombers (all types) are still dangerous after the change, especially in numbers, and a few squadrons of them is a real danger to a capital ship or even a few of them. However, now they take long enough to bring things down that a strong anti-fighter escort can actually do something about it.

And fighters are still the ultimate defense force. For defending a planet, you can pour all your resource into them as you don't need carriers, and they are still very cost-effective. Only goes to show how much out of whack they were before I made this change.

Other changes:

- B-wing maneuverability was increased a little, from 3 to 4. There is no need for them to have less than Y-wings; vs ships it doesn't matter, and vs fighters they used to do even worse than Y-wings which is fubared. They do cost twice as much maintenance and are supposed to be state of the art.

- B-wing bombardment value increased from 2 to 3. Again, they cost a lot more than Y-wings, they should be a little better.

II. Drastically improved Bombardment of capital ships

What I did was first compare a Bulwark and a resource-equivalent force in Y-wings. A Bulwark costs 175 maintenance, which is an equivalent of about 3 carriers full of Y-wings, that's 36 Bombardment. Now my idea was that capital ships should be at least as good as fighters at bombardment. So I ended up setting Bulwark's bombardment to 40. No, I'm not crazy, bear with me.

Next I looked for a formula that would produce this value as a function of turbolaser and ion cannon values, so I could apply it to other ships and set their bombardment accordingly. I ended up doing it like this: take the strongest side of a ship (Forward, Aft, Port, Starboard), as this will be favored during a bombardment. Then add Turbolasers and Ion Cannons, then divide by 20. This produces reasonable numbers.

For instance, for an ISD, that's (100+100)/20 = 10 Bombardment. A Mon Calamari is strongest on the Port/Starboard sides, (160+20), divided by 20 that's 9. Dreadnoughts get 3, and so on.

In fact, most ships are slightly less cost-effective than fighters in bombardment, which is fine. The Bulwark is top of tech tree, outdated technology should be a little worse.

Other notes:

- I upped the VSD I and II bombardment by two points from what the formula gave them. The description says they are bombardment specialists, and indeed their used to have more Bombardment than their turbolasers seemed to warrant, so I decided not to sacrifice that concept.

- The Death Star has nominal values of 1400 and 400 for turbolasers and ion cannons. I went with that, without tinkering. So that gives us a bombardment of 90. Extremely powerful, yes, but this is one heck of an investment and in the vanilla game it is rarely worth it. Now it is.

III. Doubled planetary shield strengths

This is to balance out the other changes. The point was to make capital ships more useful -relative to fighters-, not to make planetary shields obsolete. Now if you build a bunch of ships effective at bombardment (such as Star Destroyers, Mon-Cals, or even Liberators which have considerable firepower for a carrier) and load them up with the usual complement of bombers for bombardment, that'll give you more Bombardment value than you used to get before. For instance, my favorite setup, a Liberator with 6 fighters (let's say Y-wings since we're talking Bombardment), in vanilla that's 2 + 6*2 = 14 bombardment. Rebalanced, we have 8 + 6*2 = 20 due to the considerable port/starboard firepower on the Liberator. That's almost one-and-a-half as much as before. If you use B-wings, that's 14 vs 26.

So to be safe, I just doubled the shields. A little more improvement than necessary? Yes, but as I understand it, part of the balance of Rebellion is that it's easier to defend than attack. This is because fighters are very cost effective but if you're attacking, you need to bring carriers as well which adds to the cost; a problem the defending planet doesn't have. However, this balancing factor only holds true for fighters. Now that my modification considerably lessens the huge advantage fighters had over capital ships, that balancing factor is almost gone, and the game shifts strongly towards the offensive. That's why I upped the shield strenghts more than initially seemed necessary, to keep the defensive game playable.

So I changed shield strengths:

Gencore 1: from 40 to 80

Gencore 2: from 80 to 160.

The change has worked out very well in my experience so far. Now whether I play with the usual fighter-oriented strategy, or a more capital ship-oriented one, I don't feel gimped either way. I've been having tons of fun playing with varied fleets rather than focusing on the one thing that works best, so I feel I achieved my goal here.

I'm sharing in case it interests anyone. I don't know how well that'd hold up in multiplayer, but that's for you guys to judge. I'm just posting the idea, maybe you'll find it worthwhile, maybe not. At least maybe some discussion of rebalancing ideas might spark from it. Maybe even be something for whoever was working on a remake to consider.

IV. Cards?

This updated setting clearly affects gameplay and does show in the Status of a given unit - but not in the Encyclopedia. I'm talking about fighters' lasers and ion cannon values, which have changed but the encyclopedia shows the old values still.

I can't seem to update the cards because my RebEd keeps telling me I need a complete install. That's after installing on Windows 7 using these instructions:

viewtopic.php?p=542563&sid=122e5105df8a8b2d06519ed41dfb72b9#p542563

If anyone feels like helping solve this problem, that'd be nice.

V. AI?

How does the computer read the strengths of the opposing force? It keeps fleeing from fights which, due to the lowered strength of fighters/bombers, it should probably not have to flee from. Is there a way to modify the computer's AI behavior?

2. Install the application by launching the downloaded file (you may have to click “Yes” if you encounter the User Account Control (UAC) protection, but there will be no other prompts, it will launch minimized in your taskbar. (If you see

3. Make note of your “device address”. 
If you will be joining a private network, you will need to provide this to the admin ahead of time so they can add/invite your device address as “authorized”. (Note: No one can force you to join a network even if they have your device address. They can only invite you or add you to the allowed list.) View your device address and/or copy it to the clipboard from the taskbar.

4. Join the Network – Go to your taskbar, find the ZeroTier One (0T1) icon, right-click,. 
a. Click Join New Network

b. Copy/Paste the network ID provided to you, then click Join.

c. When prompted to “enable discovery”, click No.

5. Check your connection

a. Connection Status 
Make sure your connection is live. If it is private, the “TYPE” will say “Private”. If you are joining this network for the first time, the status will say “Access Denied” until the network admin approves your connection and you will not be assigned a local IP address or be able to see other devices on this network. (If you provided your “address ID” to the admin ahead of time, you may have already been added as an authorized device)

b. Public vs. Private

Public Networks do not require approval to join. It is recommended you know and trust the network admin and others who may also have joined this network (anyone with the network ID). You can disconnect at any time and even “forget” the network.

c. My “Local” Virtual IP-

You will need to know your new “local” IP address to connect to another player in-game. Make note of your IP address.

Disconnect from Network

When you have finished your current gaming session, make sure to “Disconnect” from the ZeroTier One network client. This can be done from the taskbar icon in a simple click.

If you plan on playing again with the same player later, you can simply go to the taskbar and click on the network and select “Reconnect”

Forget Network

If you do not plan on playing with this player again (or for a while), click on the network from within the taskbar icon, then select “Forget”

http://www.swrebellion.com/rebedwiki/index.php/Multiplayer_Connection_Options

Mod/Admin: Please Sticky!

Here is the tutorial:

Step #1 (get Hamachi)

--Download latest Hamachi from http://www.hamachi.cc/download

--Hamachi installs a Virtual NIC which lets you join VPNs on-demand. For "What is a VPN," see here. For how it gets around firewalls, see here.

Step #2 (join network)

--After installing Hamachi, join the SWR network.

--name of network: swrebellion

--password of network: starwarsrebellion

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-neg0.jpg

Step #3 (find a buddy)

--Find the person you want to play with in the buddy list.

--Your "Hamachi IP" will be at the top of the Hamachi window, that is the IP others will connect to. Your buddies' Hamachi IPs are next to their names.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-0.jpg

Step #4 (get TCP/Com)

--Download and install TCP/Com 2.0 from here.

--TCP/Com is a program that makes virtual COM port to use over the Internet, which means instead of using a physical RS232 cable everything goes over a TCP/IP connection.

Step #5 (configuring TCP/Com)

--Run TCP/Com. Now one of you will be the server, and the other a client.

--If you are the server, choose "This PC Will Act As A TCP Server," otherwise pick "This PC Will Act As A TCP Client."

--For servers, make sure your Local IP address is your "Hamachi IP" address. I left local port as 1000. For clients, your remote IP is your buddy's Hamachi IP.

--On the left pick an unused COM Port (I used COM4) and change the Baud Rate to 57600. A little lower check "Create Virtual COM Port."

--Hit Activate.

--When both people activate it, it should say "TCP/IP Status: (1)Connected"

--If you are getting port errors pick a different COM Port, but make sure it's 1-4..

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-1.jpg

Step #5 (connecting in SWR)

--Patch vanilla Rebellion to 1.01 (for non-vanilla we can make a separate network)

--Run Star Wars Rebellion, go to Multiplayer (head-to-head icon)

--Pick "Serial Connection for DirectPlay" and "Setup Game" if you are the TCP/Com server, otherwise "Connect to Game" if you are the TCP/Com client.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-2.jpg

--Choose the same COM port as in TCP/Com, don't change the other settings, hit OK.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-3.jpg

Step #6 (let the games begin)

--Pick a player name, and a game name. Hit the next arrow button.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-4.jpg

--If you are server, I suggest IMing your friend and telling him to join, then patiently wait.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-5.jpg

--Finally, your friend should connect if you are server, or you will connect to your friend if you are a client. Hit the check button to start.

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-6.jpg

--Enjoy the game!

http://www.swrebellion.com/images/swr-over-hamachi/step-7.jpg

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Things To Know:

• TCP/Com is a 30-day trial and will not let you use it for more than an hour on end. You need to buy it or somehow get it *fixed.*
  
• Hamachi can be used to play most games without using TCP/Com, but Rebellion does not or cannot bind to the second NIC. Therefore it never sees the Hamachi IP (I tried with IPX and TCP/IP, didn't work). But it always sees serial ports..
  
• Hamachi currently has a network limit of 12 people (although soon will go up to 16). Please stay in the network only if you are actively seeking out to actually play Star Wars Rebellion. In the few weeks I have made information about Hamachi active I've only seen two other people online and of tthose only one had SWR (guess who). We can always make two networks but then people would have to use MSN for matchmaking.
  
• I suggest going on Hamachi whenever you aren't doing anything important, that way people can see you are on and ready to play SWR. You can join other Hamachi networks (I'm in zsnes also) if you want, look at their forums

Questions, Comments? Post Here when you join the Hamachi network.

Game ranger--

name is skitszo--- how original

Some new free install thats been working.

I´ll be the first one:

I'm a very active player.

- Gameranger: Zeratai (I usually play this way and try to stay connected most part of the year)

- khasnaradak@gmail.com (Contact me to play)

- I can also play via Hamachi

GL and may the force be with us all.

I have a clean and unmodified copy of Rebellion ready for download (just ask) with Multiplayer, Cutscenes and Tactical working perfectly!

Works with any version of Windows including XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Only issue is can't skip intro.

Easy Install:

1. Download .rar file (483 MB)

2. Extract to folder

3. Double click setup to (instantly) associate with registry

4. Play with GameRanger

Also, I favor the Empire but either way we can work something out.

Let me know if anyone is interested, ttyl. -Afterlife

I look for some multiplayer game. so i use the german version from swr (coz i am german )

contact me here if u want to play.

greetings

Therefor I am starting this thread seeking active players, people who actually want to play. By active I don't mean everyday. We all have real lives, but it seems to me anyone can play at least once or twice a week. Even if your only available the weekends so be it, but at least I and the other players know when to look for you.

My MSN Messenger email is Lebarronn90@hotmail.com I am an active player and looking for the same. There are several people on my contact list I have NEVER seen on MSN Messenger and some I have seen once or twice and then disappear. So if you're an active player, reply to this post and state your MSN Messenger email so i can add you to my list.

Contact me there or cparsons4@.com or on yahoo messenger username: cparsons4. I am almost always on and am eager for more online games PLEASE hit me up.

Also please have hamachi and tcp/com and know how to do it hehe if not i can explain though.

i am seeking for an opponent in this game for September 2011.

If someone wants to play just contact me here.

Greetings

Fir3

I have currently two Alliance multi, so I would be the Empire. 1.02 & Huge galaxy.

I'm on Game Ranger (Palpat), so feel free to contact me!

Huge Universe, no holds barred.

I work on a 4 day on 4 Day off rolling shift pattern, so would be able to play long sessions when I am not at work only.

Interested?

Drop me a PM or contact me at cole.c3@sky.com

Server:Rebellion Remnants

PW:Invasion

I also have game ranger if any one wants to use that. Also I've never played MP before and have never beaten single player so your pretty much going to slaughter me .

I'm in the central time zone. I look foward to playing any one who is interested in the future.

I am normally on around 5 pm

network: creaturemontage

pass: 123

You can also leave your email. If you want to arrange a game with someone.

khalilmohseni@gmail.com

- Guaranteed starting with 4 diplomats (jan dodonna, leia, luke, mon mothman) vs two (vader, emperor)

- 4 recruiters (han, leia, luke, mon mothma) vs 2

- Rebels don't have any garrisoned planets to start, so diplomats can focus solely on gaining many planets

- Nebulon B's build so fast and perform so well that they seem to effectively cancel empire's advantage in ships (empire can't seem to amass SDs quickly enough, and carrack's can't stand up)

- Sullustans have HUGE detection advantage for being so cheap

- Han can transport characters so fast

- Fighters play such a huge role, and rebel fighters are so much better than the empires, and not much more expensive (save for defender which doesn't seem to come out until after nebulon bs)

The only reason advantages empire seems to have is an inital fleet advantage (nullified when nebulon bs can be mass produced to outperform the few SDs that can get out in time), and the leadership boost - but leadership doesn't appear to play a huge role as combat doesn't seem too affected by admirals and commanders, and the opportunity for incite uprisings seem minimal (again note diplomacy advantage).

I don't see many people complaining on the forums though, so obviously I must be doing something wrong. Please give me some advice on how to crush the rebellion.

1. Dont rush to capture defenseless hostile planet. You can send there 10-20 spyies and get info about 5-10 enemies planets at fartherst corner of Galaxy, very easy.

2. At early or middle stages of game (until there are no horrible huge fleets) it is very useful to defend planets with 3 steps:

a. 2 shileds or 1 turret

b. 3-6 squads of commando (for Sabotaging hostile fleet)

c. 1-2 spies (working on Espinage at this planet)

main planets also need General with army.

3. Playing by Alliance, send Solo with 1-2 battle heroes (exept Luke!) to Seswenna. Usually Empire is out of forces at the beginning and Coruscant is defended silly. Capture enemies heroes, destroy manufactoring. You can even capture the Emperor!

If you havent planet at this system, board Solo on some ship and send that ship on some seutral seswennas planets.

4. If you gonna to lose planet - Scrap ALL buildings there. Let enemy to have nice clear ball of mud!

Thus, Capture every undefended enemys planet and Scrap there everething. Thus, build enormous amount of sabotagers and destroy everething you can reach at enemys planets.

I'm a mediocre level player and I prefer to play as rebels.

I like the game a little faster rather than slow.

email me at beethovenite@gmail.com

or msg me on gchat, skype, AIM (all beethovenite).

My schedule is flexible.