Zarkov

Teradyn, There's a couple of fan made patches available that will allow you to run the game on most computers incl. winxp. It also allows you to change the resolution of prophecy. WC5 in 1600X1200 = yay. All off these patches are available on www.wcnews.com. There's also a remake of wc privateer available for download on www.gamershell.com. Greets, Zarkov

Hmm.. ill see if I can just tone down some of the hero abilities. The more I look at the problem I don't think multiplying the respawn time will solve the problem. Unless hero respawn time is changable per hero. I think R2D2 and C-3PO are derstroyed every time they steal a tech and thus have to respawn. In the demo Bobba Fett has the same damage setting as a Mon-Cal cruiser which seems a bit excessive, but it shouldn't be a problem to tone this down a bit or change his speed. But ill wait to see how the final game ballances out, before I start to do any edditing. I'm assuming the hero's will be alot weaker in the final game. This is one of the main reasons why PC's are still my favorite (and only ) gaming platform. PG has designed a game that they like and towards a certain audiance, but with a bit of creativity and patiance I can change the game to whatever I like. I plan to do some serious tweaking to the game files once I've finished the campaign games. I.E. a lot slower on with far more expensive ships and only slightly above average heroes. If possible with larger space maps and more units for those with heavy duty pc's. Greets, Zarkov

The heroes themselves are also easily tweaked and are located in a file called Namerheroeunits.xml. So it's not that big a problem to tone them down a bit if enough people want that. Greets, Zarkov

I think this should be easily moddable. There is a file called Hyperconstants.xml. It has the line Default_Hero_respawn_time. It's set to 5.0 now. (i'm guessing five days?) But I see no why it cant be changed to whatever you like. Greets, Zarkov

Hi a quick question about Interdictors. I’m not in a position to play the demo at the moment but does the presence of an interdictor cruisers stop you from flying in reinforcements until it’s destroyed? I’m fairly certain it stops units from retreating from the battle, but it might be unbalancing if it also works the other way around. Does anyone know? Greets, Zarkov

Hi first post, I agree fleet repairs would be nice, but it’s going to be harder to implement than people might think. The ability to repair a ship by either method (credits or time) isn’t that difficult to code but making sure the AI makes good decisions on when to send or when not to send ships is. The AI probably doesn’t have an overall battle plan. (I.E. it’s not going to know which ships it will need at what point during it’s campaign.) It’s just going to expand until it meets a barrier (most likely the player) and then start building troops to overcome that barrier. Add some research abilities and a strength analysis so the AI will perceive threats and weak points and you have a pretty robust AI. But it’s not going to plan it’s battles in advance so it won’t know which ships should be repaired first. Which kind of debunks the repairs for credits idea. The idea of having ships repair gradually over time could be coded in provided you set some general guidelines such as ships should not be sent if hull is <50% or engines, shields 50% of turbo lasers are destroyed. But this does require te AI to adjust it’s threat analysis to damaged units is doable but would require a lot of extra coding. An ISD with its right turbo laser and ion battery destroyed is how much of a threat? And remember the AI is going to have to do these calculations hundreds of time per second (or however often the AI re-evaluates it’s situation) on the galactic map during an advanced game. This could be a problem for people with slow computers. I think it’s far easier to change the depth of the game buy adjusting other parameters such as build time, build costs, hyperspace speed for ships/stations and land units and hyperspace detection ranges. From what I’ve seen from the modded demo the ai can be aggressive enough to warrant the player to at least leave some units on most of it’s planets. The increased cost of ships (in both time and money) in combination with the slower response time caused by a slower hyperspace speed setting and need to protect your planets should result in every single ship to become much more valuable and at the same time prevent massive uber fleets from being created. Thus making a successful hit and run attack far more devastating, if you or the AI destroys a ship it hurts. If the AI is foolish enough to leave a single ship in orbit somewhere than you should be able to destroy it with a hit and run attack. Think 3 x-wings and 3 y-wings for a small ship and a couple of Nebulon B’s with fighter support for an ISD. If you can’t destroy an ISD in the middle of a fleet of support ships then ‘tough luck’ an ISD or mon-cal is a massive warship and shouldn’t be al that easily destroyed by a bunch of rebels old pieces of junk or arrogant imperials in shoddy sub-contracted equipment.. Now what was I trying to say? Oh yeah, instant repair is in, well Méh!. It’s not what I would have wanted In the game, but it’s nothing to get upset about. The demo has proven flexible enough that more depth can be added trough modding of the game parameters. Well that’s my long winded drivel I mean 2 cents on the subject. Back to the demo and my heavily modded SWR Greets, Zarkov