Alright Psy I have been thinking about how to implement my whole new approach to Ship Damage and how it might effect the ships in game. I pretty much accept the way repairs will work after limiting hull repair rates on vessels, but using that buff

    instantActionTriggerType "OnCondition"
    instantActionConditionType "IfOwnerHasHullLessThanPerc"
    hullPerc
        Level:0 0.750000
        Level:1 0.750000
        Level:2 0.750000
        Level:3 0.750000

Would it be possible to effect ships systems as the ship takes damage example;

An Excelsior take 40% hull damage at 75% or less, but not more than 50% shield restoration rate is reduced by say 10% Beam Weapon Damage is reduced say 20% and ships speed is reduced say 20%

As usual I know its asking a lot, but......

One more thing I know I have brought this up before but given new content what size a map would be too large in kilobytes before running into issues with the 2 gig limit?

Yes, you'd just have to make them apply and remove themselves at the proper stages.  Entity modifier buffs are simple to do.

The performance problem is all going to be in processing lag.  When you start getting pauses in the game, you're way past the bottleneck.  Before it even slows down like that, you've got a lag in the AI making target selection and such take longer.

Ha easy for you maybe but for us Greenhorns it like trying to play a symphony with 2 quarters of band class.

I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest stuff from stardock about the game has their latest releases incorporated any code to utilize more than a 1 core

yeah, yeah I know its still a 32 bit game but was thinking they may have incorporated some work arounds like they did to help with the 2 gid problem.

Play hell I have not even completed a single game yet as I said, I went straight to modding the current RTS aspect of the game makes it impossible for me to play I just don't have that kind of time. I needed something more like a turned based kind of strategy game that is why I am changing the time scale so radically making ships, bases research ect  take hours to build or complete and only the space battles happen in seconds or RT.

I can do that, maybe I'll start by updating Fortune Favors the Bold map to Version 4 that shouldn't be to hard and all change some of the planets to incorporate the new planet types and bonuses.

What was the significance of attaching SOA into the planetary templates just curious like RandomIceVolcanic_SOA is that so the randomizer will use the _MIL, _MAQ, _ORI, _SONA worlds?

Alright myfist0 all whip something up and figure out later how to get it to you.

Psy you said" Yes, you'd just have to make them apply and remove themselves at the proper stages.  Entity modifier buffs are simple to do."

Any chance you could send me a small example of what you mean?

AbilityUnyieldingWill is the example you're looking for already.  It's a passive that applies and removes buffs based on hull percentage.  You can literally just copy AbilityUnyieldingWill, BuffUnyieldingWillSelf and the three stage files, remove the link to the recourse file, and alter the entityModifier entries to suit your needs.

Quick question for you. What are the requirements for other AI players to share their technology with you? Right now I am playing as the Klingons,  have a 20/20 relationship with the Dominion have shared all my tech with them and still nothing.  Is there something I am missing?

Is there any way to determine if either of those have occurred? I am guessing that the AI isn't capable of breaking those pacts and entering into new ones.

Thanks for the help!

Nooooooo 

These are SOA2 exclusive trade secrets

You are.

BuffLockBuff reduces the cost of abilities.  The structures have less antimatter than is required to activate the abilities.

BuffHoDLock1Set has an 1100 second finish condition, at which point it applies the buff, reducing the abilities to 50% cost.

First cast is determined by "LockSet", frequency by the cooldown time in the spawn ability.  There is also a third factor

The HoD spawns in particular operate off BuffUniversalLock, this functions as a check against further incursions into the same planet.  It spawns all of the HoD spawns, and based on the restricting ability residing in the spawning structure, only successfully fires the actions in the appropriate one.  In the BuffHoDSpawn1 file:

instantAction
    buffInstantActionType "RemoveBuffOfType"
    instantActionTriggerType "OnDelay"
    delayTime 4800.000000
    buffTypeToRemove "BuffUniversalLock"

This is the planet specific timer that prevents other HoD spawns.

The others are a little different.  From here, the insanity sets in.

There are two sources for Tamarian/Sona/Ferengi spawns.  The primary, from the militia colonized planets of their type.  The secondary, from the pirate base.  The spawn abilities do not actually spawn the ships, they only trigger the spawn file.  When you go looking through the files, this will horribly confuse you if you're not careful.  The actual spawn file is cast, in 10 second intervals, on every planet in the map, from the colonized planet, using "AbilitySpawnRaceSet".

In this fashion, the pirate base will only spawn ships from those sides that were on the map, and spawn then as their own faction instead of as pirates.  Once again, there are three factors, first cast, frequency, and the planet specific lockout.  In this case however, the lockouts are modified by the finish conditions for the "BuffSpawnRaceTrigger" files and specific to the faction, instead of using the universal lock.

This stuff is crazy, who the fuck wrote it?

Humor aside, all of my mod work is free to use, as is or modified.  I'm doing it for free in the first place so don't worry about it.  This means any and all nut bar ability design in SOA2 is fair game, I don't even care about getting mentioned.  We're also not actually worried about the secrecy at this point.

New OP with new logo is up. 

I challenge anyone to get a button with a rollover effect in this forum... 

Found a couple things I messed up in the last Diplomacy release. I will upload a patch once I get the new logo in the games main menu. 

mephistopheles