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[Orange Wizard]

Neat

[Flying Dice]

Oh, sweet. Turns out all you need to do to add whatever modifiers you want is use ship_modifier instead of modifier. God knows why they used the latter by default. The only sticking point is that stuff in ship_modifier tags won't show up in the ship design screen, only on the mouse-over list of bonuses on the constructed ship (and, obviously, in practice). Confirmed it just now, so I'll just have to document the bonuses outside of the game.

Alright. All that's left is combat trials to make sure the behaviors work properly.

[tryrar]

You could also add a redundant tag in the non-functional modifiers list to simply act as a display of changes.

[Flying Dice]

The problem is that some of the modifiers apparently break the ship designer UI if they're inside the modifier list, preventing the player from selecting a combat computer at all. Otherwise I would.

[lastverb]

Hello modder! Were you trying to fix strike crafts not by changing their range of fire? I have some small success with changing behavior to charge/follow with ridiculous range to return to formation (keeping engage range to 4.0). However half of the ships still don't release strike crafts (they are still near carrier) and if carrier doesn't have other long range weapon with def computer (max range behavior) it still tries to ram the enemy.
Also, did you find a way to make pd stop prioritizing strike crafts which are long outside their range?

[LoSboccacc]

Hello modder! Were you trying to fix strike crafts not by changing their range of fire? I have some small success with changing behavior to charge/follow with ridiculous range to return to formation (keeping engage range to 4.0). However half of the ships still don't release strike crafts (they are still near carrier) and if carrier doesn't have other long range weapon with def computer (max range behavior) it still tries to ram the enemy.
Also, did you find a way to make pd stop prioritizing strike crafts which are long outside their range?

you need also to change the hangar definitions to increase their range, but when I did that even if strikecraft were released afar they stayed near the carrier and shoot lasers from ridiculous distance.

[lastverb]

you need also to change the hangar definitions to increase their range, but when I did that even if strikecraft were released afar they stayed near the carrier and shoot lasers from ridiculous distance.

The point is I didn't and some of strike crafts did go 60 range to enemy fleet and started shooting from their range 6-8 weapons. SOME. And I DO have same behavior for fighters and bombers.

[Majestic7]

Bombers are supposed to go after capital ships, while fighters and scouts cover friendly ships shooting down enemy bombers and missiles. Could that explain it?

[Flying Dice]

The strike crafts' attack range is the range at which they fire their own weapons, not the range at which they attack from their carriers. The latter's what I changed. If you change the former without also pushing out PD range, you'll end up with a situation where bombers can attack with virtual impunity.

And yes, scout and fighter weapons are explicitly noted as being PD weapons; I haven't looked that carefully at strike craft behavior, but I suspect they're intentionally kept close to carriers, as they're supposed to intercept missiles and bombers.

Honestly I'm just really fucking tired and I have a long day of work ahead. I'll give it a look this afternoon. For all I know they might be bugged. But yes, there are two separate 00_strike_craft files, one in ship_behaviors and the other in component_templates. The one in ship_behaviors lets you modify their preferred_attack_range, formation_distance, and return_to_formation_distance; the one in component_templates lets you modify the actual range of their weapons. Hypothetically they should only be able to shoot from extended range if you modify the latter, and only able to fly out far from their carrier if you modify the former.

RE: PD not prioritizing close targets: What you'd probably want would be a special rangefinder computer with 0 size_difference_penalty and a very high distance_to_fleet_penalty. That's actually a good idea, I'll look into that after I get a handle on how the stuff I've already made works. I've not had a chance to test yet, but I have vague suspicions that formation_distance should be a little shorter than return_to_formation_distance, rather than the same value, especially on shorter-ranged computers.

[ZeroGravitas]

So, is the main complaint that there is a lot of things not finished, and pretty much left for DLC?

I remember when I bought EU4, that was a major complaint (pretty sure it was EU4, maybe CK2? Both?) and I still had a lot of fun with it. I remember a ton of people complaining about EU4/CK2 and how buggy it was, and pretty sure one or both of them people complained about unfinished stuff too, or stuff that needed a lot of work.

I'll probably just wait to spend that 59.99 and see how things go. A patch is coming out supposedly for Stellaris today (or is it already out?) and a 2nd one after that.

Yeah, one patch this week/next week, and another in a month. That's before the first DLC. You're definitely better off waiting, at least until this summer. The game is certainly playable right now, but not great. finished/unfinished is always a matter of expectations, but the fact that they're devoting two months of patching to finishing improving the game's core systems (sectors, basic diplomatic interactions, wargoals) means there's little reason to play now.

I doubt they will ever see 65-70k players again. 50k maybe. Unfortunately they released a pretty mediocre game straight into the rebirth of the Total War franchise, they have Civ 6 coming out in a few months, and they'll be cannibalizing their own users with HOI4 next month.

[Flying Dice]

Eh, I'm inclined to be a bit more positive than that. Stellaris has two things going for it: It's Paradox so it'll get better over time, and the premise behind it isn't "Take control of a nation and seek world domination on Earth in X time period" (or the same for "a remarkably Earthlike planet with random distribution of landmasses" in the case of Civ).

A big part of why CKII was so successful is that it deviated from that same formula by putting as much weight as it did on the RPG aspects of dynasty-building. All it really needs is for the bones of the major systems to be properly laid, which is what they appear to be doing; from what I've seen it's relatively straightforward to add additional bit-piece content like techs, modules, &c., apart from things that just aren't supported well/at all by the UI (like ships with markedly more sections). It's pretty simple, for example, to extend the ship-component techs and modules out to tier 10 for everything, just tedious.

[ZeroGravitas]

Eh, I'm inclined to be a bit more positive than that. Stellaris has two things going for it: It's Paradox so it'll get better over time, and the premise behind it isn't "Take control of a nation and seek world domination on Earth in X time period" (or the same for "a remarkably Earthlike planet with random distribution of landmasses" in the case of Civ).

A big part of why CKII was so successful is that it deviated from that same formula by putting as much weight as it did on the RPG aspects of dynasty-building. All it really needs is for the bones of the major systems to be properly laid, which is what they appear to be doing; from what I've seen it's relatively straightforward to add additional bit-piece content like techs, modules, &c., apart from things that just aren't supported well/at all by the UI (like ships with markedly more sections). It's pretty simple, for example, to extend the ship-component techs and modules out to tier 10 for everything, just tedious.

I'm not sure I disagree with anything you said. But none of that is going to lead to Stellaris making a huge comeback and regaining all the users who aren't personally devoted to Paradox to the level that they'll wait 6 months for the game to get good, and then buy $20 DLCs 2-3 times per year.

[Flying Dice]

That's fair enough. Though that hasn't stopped CKII and EUIV from continuing to make the daily "top games by player count" list on Steam consistently. There's only about a thousand fewer people playing CKII than nuCOM 2, and the latter just had a major DLC drop.

[Glloyd]

Honestly, I think the biggest issue with Stellaris is something that hasn't really been addressed by the devs. Right now, there's zero replayability. I think part of this stems from the fact that the game is an awkward mashup between a grand strategy and a 4X, but there's really no reason to play twice because once you've played to the end once, you've pretty much seen it all outside some flavour events. Putting aside the fact that right now the mid-endgame is a boring repetitive slog, something that is important in most 4Xs (and strategy games in general) is making the different sides you play as actually feel different from each other, and Stellaris does not accomplish that. Each race is only different by cosmetics, because you can customize ethics and gov type, and the ethics and gov types only provide small percentage bonuses one way or another. Playing as an individual materalist science government and a communal, spiritualist oligarchy will give you pretty much the same experience, outside of the silly flavour events that always happen for spiritualist. There's a severe lack of unique mechanics for gov types/ethics. Yeah, you're more able to have slaves as a communal species, and more able to purge as a xenophobic species, but that won't really change how you play your game. Everything still has the same boring ass endgoal, which is just to paint the map in your colour by slogging through hundreds of boring identical wars with all the federations that form. And even if the endgame events weren't totally broken, you can see all three in one playthrough, giving no reason to play again to try and find more. Even the planets you can settle makes no real difference. It's just either a boon or an inconvenience depending on how lucky you are with RNG, until you get to the midgame and the point becomes moot.

I'm sure unique mechanics for gov types and ethics will come in the inevitable rush of DLC, but they should be ashamed of the state they released the game in. By the midgame I had to force myself to keep playing because I wanted to see the endgame stuff, and once I realized how boring and broken they were, I quit. Tried again as a different race with different ethics, gov, etc, but it was just more of the same. That IGN was spot on, and I personally would've given it a lower score than 6.5, because only half of one game was any fun.

It sucks, I've been playing Paradox games since HOI2, and this is the first one that I've actively disliked. I love 4Xs and I love Paradox, but I just don't find Stellaris to be any fun past the early game, and I have no desire to play it again. We'll see what they do with DLCs, but I'm pretty disappointed.

[Flying Dice]

You could also add a redundant tag in the non-functional modifiers list to simply act as a display of changes.

I just tried this again today on a whim, and it decided to work this time. Goddamn, I don't even know. Not going to question it.