I have a unit idea which could work for any race.

Name: Unstable Mass Convertor
Tech: 4 (Not a Game Ender, it's more of a defensive unit)
Race: Any (I'm leaning towards Cybran or Aeon, Seraphim already get a T4 PD in BO:U)
Type: Structure (Could be a big mobile unit too though)
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Description: A medium sized structure with several arms that extend out and reclaim (friendly,neutral or enemy units) around it. It converts the mass of these reclaimed units into energy which it then fires at it's target.

The damage done by the energy projectile is equal to the amount of HP of the units it has reclaimed. So if you wanted a very high damage shot to snipe an enemy experimental, you can have it reclaim some high HP units that would otherwise not do well against that particular enemy unit.

The charge up (reload) time for each projectile is just the amount of time it takes to reclaim all the units. You can give this structure one or two engineering upgrades that will allow it to reclaim units faster (and thus shoot more powerful projectiles at a quicker rate).
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Problems: I'm not a modder so I'm not sure if my idea is even possible. For one thing, I can see reclaiming units to be quite annoying. Would it be possible for it to auto-reclaim units that you send next to it? Or another idea is for you to be able to select a group of units and tell them to go to it (like you would with a transport) but instead once they get there they'll get reclaimed.

Another problem is would it even be possible to have the damage of the projectile scale with the HP of the units it reclaims?
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Anyways, if anything I hope you can at least get some sort inspiration from my idea!

EDIT: I wanted to add this yesterday but I didn't have time

Aesthetics: I think it'd be neat to have two parts to this unit. A base platform that does all the reclaiming, which then shoots an energy beam directly upwards which is then captured by the floating gun platform above it. This way the gun would have better line of sight to everything around it so you could make it a beam weapon.

That would be unique. I haven't seen any gunship that has dedicated anti-naval functionality. All gunships of any race of any tier seems to just use their anti-ground weapons on surface navy units...which is quite...well, you basically just have the same kind of gunship that differs in looks irregardless of faction.

Now a gunship that can threaten submersibles...ah, now there's something unique, and frankly I can see the Seraphim having such a unit.

This idea would be quite insulting to your opponent. It's like taking the corpses of your enemies and throwing it back at them. ^_^ Such disrespect! Such dishonor! GASP!

Re: the Stellar Generator adjacency posts in the BO:U thread, here's the code for it if you feel like adding it.

Unit Blueprint:


/lua/sim/AdjacencyBuffs.lua hook:
http://pastebin.com/Q7e0nyB2

I think found the mass adjacency of the T3 fab to be a little weak, so I upped it 33%. If you just want to use the T3 fab adj, you don't even need those massbuildbonus definitions in there, just the table at the top (which would need to be changed to refer to the T3 mass fab mass build bonus buffs).

Hmm an anti-naval gunship might not be that bad of an idea. Will check with Knight on it but I think I have an idea for a weapon system for it.


Mithy thanx for the code. Though to be honest I am not sure how I feel about adjacency on the Star Gen. Its getting a production nerf in the next release so it "gaining" adjacency won't be as powerful but I am not sure if I want it "giving" adjacency.

Call it fictional reasons if you want but imo an adjacency bonus would be a hard lines wire conenction to assist the structure its connected to. Storage hooked to a generator helps boost system stability and thus output capacity. Hooking a shield to a power gen would be like running a deticated tap to draw power from that source for better efficiency (no power loss from wireless transfers).

In the Star Gens case though do you really want to draw deticated power directly from something thats containing a minature star? *Waits for the back surge to disrupt the containment shield*

From a functional point of veiw there is no reason I couldn't but I am just not sure on it to be honest

fyi, PhoenixIV made a sera t3 gunship that drops torps ...plus i already made a t3 gunship for sera , though it could be easily changed if enough people desire it.

Hmm well that sux lmao
Too many dang projects out there

Uhm, why da heck does the Seraphim only have a T1 and T2 sonar structure?

Probably because they're the only faction with a t3 sub hunter. A t3 sub hunter that can rape torpedo bombers. Combine those with t3 hovering mobile shields and you can just about forget about naval superiority.

Well, that's the case in vanilla FA, anyway. With the addition of the Wraith and Leviathan they're more easily countered.

that reminds me, a T3 sonar would be a nice addition to the sera..
LAMBDA SONAR

You talking about a t3 sonar that has a Bulwark sized lambda field, or a bouy sized field? I think the former would be much better, and there's even some precedent for it in the awesomeness of the Cybran t3 sonar. Balancing it would suck though, even one Yathsou in the middle of ten such buoys would almost be unkillable.

Part of the problem with balancing lambda at all is that the faction that uses it also has hover T3 mobile shield generators. The amount of effective HP of the average platoon of say, 8 lambda bots and 4 athanahs is through the roof - we're talking 3-5 times the amount of EHP as a similar group for any other faction (Cybran really get shafted in comparison, not having any mobile shields).

Really, the ROF and number of generators is just too high on most units that use it, and the fact that they affect torps at all is somewhat overpowered given the comparative low ROF/salvo size of torp-using units compared to surface units.

I've gotta agree, especially on the torpedoes. Lambda destroyers currently ignore torpedoes, but it's still almost impossible to do damage.

Even a level 1-2 ACU is virtually untouchable in 2.9 without something like 100+ projectiles per second hitting it, or over 30 all at once. The no-overkill change to lambda scripts made them significantly more effective, and their ROF hasn't been brought down enough since that change to keep them balanced. I think Ex said he was lowering the ROF in 3.0 ACUs, but pretty much all of the lambda units in Unleashed need some tweaking too.
If anything, fewer emitters would help the most, so that they a) don't have as much performance hit what with using 3-8 collision entities per unit, and b) synchronized fire from some easy micromanagement (set units to hold fire for 1 second, then set them back to return fire) overwhelms them more easily.

And yeah, lambda should ignore torpedoes entirely. Make up some fluff excuse about how water is too dense and torpedoes move too slowly. Hell, you could just make them ignore any projectile that moves slower than something like 20 speed, and even reduce their performance (deflection angle) vs non-ballistic projectiles. It'd be easy enough to do.

I was trying to do a from-scratch re-write of shared lambda/redirector code before my keyboard and then my drive with FA both died horribly, but I got too ambitious and it was taking forever. I've learned enough that I can make the current scripts' redirection behaviour a bit more reasonable, so I should probably just reinstall FA and take a crack at revising the originals. v0v

Lambda is not exactly ment to be reasonable or predictable which makes them hard to balance at time. And your wrong about them having 8 emitters per unit. Since my last rewrite of the lambda there are only 2-4 emitters for most unit and my ACU only has 4 of the redirectors I do believe. They are just that dang efficient now

ANyway I can't remember if i tweaked them further so i will add that to my list to double check before the next releases.

also, my Lambda bot only has 2 emitters, transport 1, t4 PD like 3-4, i think all of which i lowered the RoF, but hell, i have yet to get any feedback regarding them so w/e. i'll take a look at my lambda units again and see how they are. i know that 3 titans can kill a lambda bot easily,

Why name it Lambda?

Go watch Full Metal Panic
Basically it was a defence system used on the next gen arm slave that converted willpower into physical force... Mostly used as a shield aginst projectiles

If this is the case, then it sounds like you've worked out most of the major unit-specific problems. I haven't looked at lambda unit stats since 3.2, when the lambda bots were pretty fierce and the transport was untouchable by sams.

I didn't ever worry much about the T4 PD being overpowered because those are expensive, take a while to build, and don't do a ton of damage (and have trouble hitting fast units) - I always just used them as insurance against T3 artillery for my SMDs/SMLs in long 20x20 games, something they'll be good at no matter how much you lower their lambda rof (and I think this is ok v0v).

Well its been decided. I am tweaking Lambda some more for the next releases. From the next release on Lambda will no longer fire on torpedos (any emitter). We got the actual antinormal projectile density working how we want it but because torpedos are so dang slow the field becomes rediculously OPed against them...

So units with lambda (including the commander) will now have to fend off torpedos the old fassion way... Will hull plating

What is OPed?

Overpowered, contrast with UP or underpowered.

Ah.

Version Update

A new version is avalible for download. Check the first post for links or download the mod from the vault. I have updated both SpecWep & the Naval Rebalance.

Guess it seems I broke something else in BOGIS in the last release... I plan to do a patch mod release this comming weekend (which means updates to all blackops projects). If you find any bugs or issues needing immediate look at please let me know before friday so I can tyr and include them.