Noble713

I made quite a bit of progress on a Clone Wars conversion until I got frustrated importing new 3D ship models. I might be able to dig up a large number of completed character/unit cards for you....

1. Star Destroyers were predominantly built at Kuat, whereas the HQ of Sienar, the maker of TIE fighters, is at Lianna. While it is possible that fighter inventories are kept at Kuat to fill brand-new ISDs as they come off the production slips, they still have to get there *somehow*, probably transported by Imperial Escort Carriers, which can be done in-game already. It's an extra step of micro-management, but it also presents a point of attack for a Rebel player, and, IMO, is much more believable than having the fighters appear there magically. 2. De-coupling fighter and carrier production allows the player greater flexibility, by not having to pay for fighter craft that we don't need or want. While the original Rebellion game and most of the post-ROTJ Expanded Universe material depicts X-Wings as taking a dump on every capital ship out there in large numbers, I much prefer the position vindicated by the Prequel trilogy and the new Clone Wars series, where battles are largely decided by capital ships exchanging fire, and starfighters are very much a useful but non-essential supporting arm. A group of Star Destroyers should basically be able to whittle down several squadrons of X and Y-Wings using their point-defense cannons while taking no significant (i.e. mission-impairing) damage.

I've always been a fan of the Hearts of Iron research model, and I think it would fit in well with a Star Wars game. Technologies can be researched by tech teams. In Star Wars, I would associate the availability of different tech teams with the control of planets, as the source of most military hardware that people will be researching is major industrial corporations, which generally have a homeworld associated with them. So controlling Kuat gives you Kuat Drive Yards, controlling Coruscant gives you BlasTech Industries, etc. While any tech team can be assigned any technology to research (assuming prerequisites have already been researched), each team has certain specialization areas. Likewise, each tech has specialization areas. Matching up the appropriate teams and research projects greatly accelerates research. You can also simultaneously research as many projects as you have tech teams, an additional incentive to controlling key worlds. Tech Team Examples: Kuat Drive Yards (Industrial Theory, Capital Ship Design) Corellian Engineering Corporation (Escort Ship Design) Kaminoan Cloners (Medicine, Decentralized Tactics) Baktoid Armor Workshop (Droids, Blaster Weapons, Industrial Theory) Sienar Fleet Systems (Starfighter Design, Centralized Tactics) Research Project Examples: Imperial Star Destroyer (Capital Ship Design, Industrial Theory) DP-20 Corellian Gunship (Escort Ship Design, Blaster Weapons) Clonetrooper Regiment (Medicine, Decentralized Tactics) TIE Interceptor (Starfighter Design, Centralized Tactics) Battledroid Regiment (Droids, Centralized Tactics) Here's a more detailed description of the HoI2 system: http://www.paradoxian.org/hoi2wiki/index.php/Research

I've got more useful data now, as I just finished a game and took pretty heavy screenshots. Settings: Random 1vs1 map, CIS (me) vs Republic (random Hard AI), Large Fleets, Fast Income, Pirates Inactive. These are my normal settings for now. Battle 1: I sent a scout into a system with a plasma storm and found a huge enemy fleet. Fortunately my entire navy was just one jump away at the desert planet that had become my forward fleet base. While my fleet was heavily loaded with bombers, it seems they can't fly in plasma storm systems so my ships would be fighting with no support. I held back my Geonosian Dreadnought and a Lucrehulk DCS with only 30% shields for about 10 seconds, as I didn't want either getting targeted early. http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/OOB-battle001a.jpg I'm outnumbered 147 to 25. My 6 TradeFed carriers are essentially useless, I have only 13 real cruisers to the AI's 23, but I do have 6 capships to the AI's 2 . Should be a pretty bloody matchup, right? It turned out to be a complete rout. The AI fleet tried to flee as soon as I arrived but the Geonosian DN's gravity well made sure that wasn't happening. (full desktop screenshot) As you can see I'm not even stressing my economy to accomplish this, and while I've used up my current logistics capacity, I'm only about halfway up the tech tree for that (somewhere around 800 total supply, I think). All I lost was a single Recusant class, with minor damage to a few other vessels: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/battle1-aftermath.jpg I pulled the Lucrehulk DCS (not letting my Lvl5 capship get killed!) and a damaged Providence out of the fleet and sent them back for repairs. The rest pressed on to the next system, which I expected to find lightly defended. I was wrong. Battle 2: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/OOB-battle002.jpg Of course this was a much smaller fleet than the last one, and also I was able to employ my fighters this time around, unleashing those nasty CIS bomber swarms that I mentioned in my first post: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/battle2-bomberswarms.jpg There were about 3-4 other major battles after this but they are pretty much repeats of the above, with the AI fielding 1-2 cap ships at most and getting wiped out with no ship losses on my side. The next bit of interesting info is the post-game statistics: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/frigates-destroyed.jpg 15:1 kill ratio for frigates for the whole game http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/frg-strength.jpg Here you can see the timeframe where the bulk of the fighting took place. Notice how the AI's total frigate strength fell by 135 ships in 5 minutes, whereas mine fell by....one. I wasn't building anything either, so it's not like new construction was compensating for losses on my side. http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q209/Noble713/SoaGE%20screens/hulldmgtaken.jpg 35:1 ratio for overall internal damage I have more shots (frigates destroyed at different timeframes throughout the game, going from 80 @ 1h58m to 400+ @ ~2h45mins), but I think you get the idea. When I play as the Republic on Hard it's like beating my head against a brick wall, and when I play as the CIS it's a breeze. I'll need to sit down at look at the actual ship stats to narrow it down (and right now I'm probably not familiar enough with the game mechanics for that to be much help), but I think the CIS frigates are far more powerful than the Republic frigates, and the mainline Republic capships (Venators/Victory's)can't be fielded in large enough numbers to compensate. The top-of-the-line CIS capships appear far more destructive than their Republic equivalents as well.

Ok, I've only been playing the game for about a week. I love the mod (and Warlords) but I'm a little frustrated at my troubles playing as the Republic. I played as the CIS first vs the Republic and things went pretty easily, so since then I've been playing as the Republic. I've tried the 1vs1 map against both Hard and Normal AIs and keep getting my teeth kicked in. I just can't seem to find the right fleet composition to give me an advantage against the AI's mix of large numbers of fighters and frigates/cruisers. I play with large fleets and fast income, so the size of my battles probably makes it more difficult to discern the nuances of each ship's merits. I have a preference for survivable ships because I build few shipyards, so my nearest frigate factory is often 2-3 systems away and waiting for a bunch of reinforcements to arrive is rather boring. Capital Ships (general): They just seem to die....very quickly. It makes them not worth the logistics investment or price. You try to micromanage them because they come across as individually important but 30 seconds later they're an expanding cloud of debris just like your nameless/faceless frigates anyway. Venator: This is the only vessel that can deploy a decent number of fighter squadrons, which against the AI bomber spam makes it somewhat mandatory. I tend to load them up entirely with fighter squadrons, and then train them up to Lvl 3 so they can get 2 levels of "Flak Burst". It doesn't help, as they still seem to kill only a few bombers before dying. I've tried fielding large groups of Venators (5-10) and they simply get overwhelmed by dozens of frigates. Victory's: I don't build these often as I'm not sure what they bring to the table. The Venators have better shields and carry more fighters. Perhaps they are better against bigger ships, but I don't run into enough of those to make it an issue. Procurator: same Praetor: I've found this to be the most survivable Republic cap ship, and it's pretty nasty against frigates....at least until the rest of the fleet gets wiped out and it is subsequently overwhelmed. Fortunately they tend to live long enough to jump back to a friendly planet. Mandator II: With the Targeting Uplink and higher Hull/Shields than even the Praetor this looks great on paper, but it seems to die faster. I've sent both ships into a system simultaneously (big fleet with numerous supporting frigates) and the Mandator went down first. Frigates/Cruisers: Dreadnaughts: I probably build these the most, as they are cheap and decently tough. Acclamator I: Possibly the best Republic ship from an overall utility perspective. Just one is often powerful enough to clear out an entire system of independents and then colonize the planet before moving on. I don't use them in combat fleets though, generally keeping them back waiting for the target system to be secured so I can snatch up the planet quickly. Vindicator: Packs more of a punch than the Dreadnaught but has a pricetag to match. Due to the much higher supply cost (7 vs 4), I generally prefer to build a far greater number of Dreadnaughts instead. Patrol Ships: I only use two of these: the Invincible Heavy Corvette as a disposable scout ship, and the Botanijef (sp?) Armed Freighter for quick, cheap, planet captures. I've tried fielding Carracks and they seem decent, but I think I compared them to Dreadnaughts and chose the latter instead. Most of these vessels get blown to pieces in seconds, and like I said, I hate having to wait for a bunch of replacements to arrive. So basically the Republic fleet lacks the fighter capacity to meet bombers head-on, the Flak Bursts lack sufficient power to be an adequate substitute, and the capital ships seem more than a bit fragile for the investment. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Am I building the wrong ships? What should I use to cut through bomber swarms like a hot knife through butter? What do Phase Missiles do? In contrast to the above, I found the CIS fleet very durable. I could take a Lucrehulk (either model) with half a dozen each of Recusants and Munificents and conquer an AI system with fairly minor losses. Both of those designs kill enemy frigates rather quickly. The TradeFed carrier seems easily abused, being an affordable frigate with a 6-squadron capacity. I've only built a few of them (it's a relatively unknown ship to me) but I've been on the receiving end of a fleet that had ~10 and it wasn't pleasant. I think I'll start another game as the CIS on hard to get a different perspective. I'll also try playing at Normal fleet sizes to see how the ships perform in smaller engagements.

It shouldn't be complicated at all. IMO, the way Rebellion handled the Galactic Civil War it was less "Superpower vs Insurgents" and more "Major Power vs Major Power". This roughly parallels the Clone Wars. Hell, you could have a single "mega-campaign" starting circa the Battle of Geonosis, and the only things you'd need to add would be scripted events to change the Republic into the Empire, the Separatists into the Rebellion, and changing the list of available characters/equipment. The essential game mechanics are unchanged. As for artwork, as I mentioned in a thread over in the other modding forum, EvilleJedi's Homeworld 2 mods have practically every Star Wars ship you could imagine, and they are clean, well-textured meshes with a decent poly count. For 2D stuff.....well, I've been sitting on an unfinished Clone Wars mod for Rebellion for most of a year. I stopped working on it due to the extreme frustration of trying to get the 3d models into Rebellion. I figured it would calm my nerves if I just waited for someone to release a Rebellion sequel and just plug all my stuff into that.

You bring up a lot of good points. I play single-player exclusively, so issues like networking never even crossed my mind.

I'm always searching for the ultimate Star Wars 4X fix, which led me to two open-source games of interest: Free Orion and Thousand Parsec. Free Orion is the more developed of the two (IMO) and really the only thing it lacks (besides AI) is a combat simulator. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to focus on developing a strong, accurate (to the source material, i.e. the SW universe and to a lesser extent the Rebellion game) combat simulator to be "plugged in" to much of the existing code from Free Orion. Then simply add characters and missions, and remove some things like ship design. I bet that would require far fewer man-hours in the long-run than developing entirely new engines from scratch like the Rebellion community is largely doing now. Just my 2 credits...

I've got a 15" LCD (had it since 2001) with a maximum resolution of 1024x768 (what I'm running right now), so of course that's fine by me.

When the Space Empires series transitioned from 2D to 3D, I was initially a HUGE fan. Then I played it....and hated it. I like 3D graphics but the engine is sluggish and the UI is terrible (worse than Rebellion's IMO). I've gone back to playing SE4 because of it's speed and efficient design. Rebellion's UI makes terrible use of the on-screen real-estate but I think with some re-organization it would work decently. I tried playing the Warlords mod for Sins of a Solar Empire, and I found that controlling and interacting with multiple solar systems to be excruciatingly painful. I wouldn't want to use it to simulate a galaxy-wide conflict like the ones we have in Star Wars. Take a look at Freeorion (www.freeorion.org). I like how they handle the galaxy map and system displays. One thing I've learned from the Space Empires series is that having full system maps where ships can move around is largely unnecessary, since it's mostly unused dead space. You can easily handle multi-planet systems without this feature.

Looks gorgeous!

I don't like the Padawan idea either. By Revenge of the Sith is she already dead, or did she "graduate" to Jedi Knight and go off on her own? As for "additional Sith", the impression I've gotten from reading Wookiepedia is that Dooku had a number of Dark Side Force users working under him, but none of them were really "Sith" per se. Here's the review that I posted on another forum: [quote name="Noble713"I just watched it last night and I wasn't impressed. 6/10. It's just too kiddy for me. It was like watching a really long episode of a Saturday morning cartoon' date=' and not even a good one like Exosquad. This series is meant to detail the most devastating conflict the galaxy has ever known...and it features a teenage Jedi as one of the main characters and a baby Hutt as the object of their quest. WTF?! The battledroid "comic relief" has been taken to an all new low, Aasaj Ventress doesn't get enough screentime IMO, we find ourselves visiting Tatooine AGAIN, the importance of Jabba (and to a lesser extent, the Hutts as a whole) to Galactic affairs is WAY overblown, and in general there is no real feeling of danger, despite the fact that Clonetroopers get gunned down left and right. I suppose it could be considered mindless eyecandy, but the animation style used totally undermines that.[/quote]

EvilleJedi's mods for Homeworld 2 are the best source for game-ready Star Wars meshes. I've already done a good deal of the gruntwork converting them into .x format (and trimming the fat on a few) for a now-defunct Space Empires V mod. PM me for details. I tried to watch your 10MB mpeg video and it crashed Windows Media Player 11, but the Youtube version worked. I would thin and lengthen the turbolaser blasts at some point; they should look more like needles. Overall it looks great. Keep up the good work.

Are you sure you aren't thinking of Space Empires V? SE4 has been out for years, and there are TONS of mods out for it. SE5 was released about 2 years ago, and there are several good mods, but they are mostly lacking in the multimedia area (graphics and whatnot, SE5 is much more graphics-intensive than SE4 and with such a small community of hardcore wargamers, there aren't many who can make high-quality 3d models and textures).

*bump* Does anyone have a copy of this TC? I'd love to take a look at it.

Have you considered uploading to http://www.megaupload.com in the meantime? I'd love to get my hands on this mod. Inaccurate cartography is something that has always bothered me in games.

There are so many ships available for construction in this mod that it can sometimes be difficult to find the most effective ones, or to find uses for all of them. This thread is meant to be a collection of how people use different Imperial ship designs. Feel free to start a second thread for the Rebel Alliance. My general play style: Big ships, and lots of them. Fighters are annoying to control and coordinate, and they don't perform all that well against Rebel fighters anyway. I tend to just pump out heavy ships, hyperspace to the enemy's base, and engage their cap ships and shipyards. TIE Interceptor: One of the only fighter types I build. Cheap, and packs more firepower than all of the other low-cost alternatives. It usually takes me 10+ squadrons to get any real results with them. Use solely for intercepting X/Y/B-Wings and as a general Combat Space Patrol. Virtually useless against ships. Skipray Blastboat: I love these things. Excellent protection allows them to deliver huge torpedo salvos and survive to pull back to a carrier and rearm. Combined with the hyperdrive, they can be brutally effective hit-and-run units. TIE Bomber: Take away all the cool things I said about Skipray Blastboats and you get these. Draw your own conclusions. Lancer Frigate: I haven't found these to be as effective as they were in Rebellion. They are fragile and tend to draw a disproportionate amount of fire. They don't seem to kill fighters any more effectively than TIEs. Carrack Light Cruiser: I don't have much experience with these. I sent 8 to take out a crippled refinery ship tonight, and all of them died in the process to a single Mediator (I know, a pretty big ship) and some fighters. Not very durable, and if they can't survive to destroy what they were sent after I don't see much use for their speed. Eidolon Cruiser: A solid heavy frigate design. In the few instances where I build all-frigate fleets they are almost always the last ones to go down. Imperator II: The backbone of the Imperial Navy. They could use better protection, but man they can dish out some serious firepower. Sovereign: The superlaser never seems to actually hit anything. The ship is also SLOW. If you want it to get to a battle in a timely manner, hyperspace jumps are pretty much the only way. Beyond that, I sometimes wonder if the super-caps are as effective as an equal RU cost of smaller ships such as ISDs. Very long-range turbolasers. Correllian Gunship: Similar to the Lancer Frigate, minus the "fire magnet" aspect. I'll need to play more games using the other classes before I form any real opinions on them.