Birth of the Federation

Locustus wrote:It's just the "Ooh, it's so cool, look at the 4800 shields!" That is completely irrelevant, all game elements are relative to each other.

I've not seen a single person say something like that. But I will say this: the mod was designed to be more realistic, and give you a chance to sorta live in the events of Deep Space 9, not reduce lag.. Anyone who's played this game for a few years, or like me, since it's incarnation, will tell you that lag is inevitable, it's a major design flaw thanks to rushed production.

and about the vista part of your double post: I don't think anyone has tried botfed in 64-bit vista before... most of us have XP, or dual-boot..

And to respond to Siggys post at the top of this page: Of COURSE they're destroyers, they destroy almost everything within weapons range!

I have a suggestion for the modders: try to scale down all the stats, including weapon numbers and damage. Test it. See the difference. I'm sure it has to be there somewhere

Then do the same thing for ship costs & maintanance, fleets will be back to normal in case you now get 10 times the ships. Though you probably wanted them in the first place.

You're probably thinking I have no sense of humor or appetite for large stats, but it's better to look small than lag

the mod was designed to be more realistic, and give you a chance to sorta live in the events of Deep Space 9, not reduce lag..

There is nothing more or less realistic about a scaled down model. It has the same meaning. Pair 4800 with 60 or 480 with 6.

If you really want stats, you guys should mod the game so that it adds 5 random decimals to stats and sticks them like a picture (so it doesn't take processing space).

How about we don't. The longer battles is one of the major draws to this mod for me, the battles in vanilla were ridiculously short. A fleet of cloaked ships would completely ransack your fleet but in UDM3 you have to a chance to recover if you can use some good tactics. The lag is inevitable and personally I've had some huge battles in UDM3 that run fine. Let's not completely change the foundation of the mod, as this will alienate alot of people. I dont understand why all of sudden people want to change everything in this mod ???

Unfortunately for me the game crashes in the ship list with or without editing the stats. I had barely entered to check out the ships and it crashed. Crash rate is 30 percent per ship select!!! Am I doing something wrong? The vanilla or UM3 only crashed in battles and with as many as 25 ships.

Since the game works with you, is there something I can fix or is it the system? I'll try one more with xp compatibility.

........ ok, I had Windows 98 compatibility activated by accident and I removed it, now it doesn't crash.


I found out that the game uses very limited registers. When I multiplied ship costs it gave negative values in-game, or, the last time I checked, a very small value for the top dominion ship: 500 cost to build.

I think the dominion ship cost for the ultimate ship was bugged from the start (misspelled?). However, the game still crashes if I click too rapidly in the ship list.

Try editing the stbof.ini file in your botf folder. Change the 3D=3DFX to read 3D=SOFTWARE. That might help you out.

trevtones wrote:Try editing the stbof.ini file in your botf folder. Change the 3D=3DFX to read 3D=SOFTWARE. That might help you out.

this should only be changed if you are having a problem with video card.

thunderchero

Oh I thought he was having problems crashing at the research screen. Thats what happened to me but I guess I misread his post.

The game is running great now. I chose to play a game with cardassians. The Battleship is huge !(started with maximum tech) I can see that you used the points well, first ships were below the vanilla settings even before I made 50%. I also doubled ship build and maintenance for the playable races.

I just have to restrain myself from rapidly clicking between ships in research.

The game finally chashed at entering combat around turn 14. Saved my eyes, I'm trying to reduce and divide my computer time (spent all evening finishing a game and dealing with the mod).

There actually IS a group edit for ships.

I just realised I was running an old version of UE that DCER asked me to test for him aaages ago. I must've deleted the wrong the version when I downloaded the final release version. It helps to have right version...

Since I used an old version of UE, I don't know if the shiplist.sst file I made of you will work. I'm glad you were able to learn how to do it yourself though, so at least you didn't run into any problems from my potentially buggy file.

Since there has been pretty much of a discussion going on regarding the shipstats, I feel compelled to give my two cents on the issue.

Personally, I find absolutly nothing wrong in people discussing and questioning the Mod, the values, and why things are how they are. After all, that's pretty much the reason why this thread exists :-). Every inquiry, suggestion and constructive remark is very, very welcome and everyone's highly encouraged to continue providing them.

The ship stats in UDM III have been given a great deal of thought, back-and-forth consideration and trial-and-error. There certainly is a point in asking how the absolute values came into existence, since the relation of the different ship stats in game could be maintained with lower absolute numbers.

Well, I'd like to disagree slightly. Higher absolute values allow for more fine-tuning of ship stats and thus improved balancing. The difference may be very subtle at times and some might consider it even neglectable, but the decision to go into this direction was not born out of thin air.

Without exaggeration, I may say that several years by now have been spent on trying and testing and changing almost every aspect of the mod. And, while the current version is still considered a Beta, I dare say, we finally settled in for a general direction ;-).

The current stats came into existence by creating a rather complex scheme of tabulations, equations and calculations, which were scratch made and not at all based on any values from the vanilla game. Without going too much into details, the basic approach was to have certain basic values for every ship class, weapon etc. Those values would then be modified by applying a large number of multipliers dependant of race, tech-level, ship type and so forth. This way, the final values were calculated on a huge Excel Spreadsheet.

This was done to create a new balance for the game, aiming for longer and more realistic battles and to give every ship type more unique characteristics. The seemingly large absolute numbers are a result of those calculations. Since I personally never noticed any impact on performance, I tried to keep the numbers of weapons as close to canon as possible and their strengths were determined by the spreadsheet calculations. Of course, shield and hull values were equally 'enlarged'.

Regarding the stats of the Nebula: Direct comparison with the Galaxy may be misleading in assessing the ships 'real' power. Given it's prominence and importance as a Fleet Command ship, the stats of the Galaxy have been enhanced by a 'special ship' multiplier when the stats were initially calculated. There is one such class for every empire, btw ;-). Thus, the Nebula may appear underpowered in direct comparison. Moreover, Strike Cruisers are a special case anyways. They are intended to be less powerful than contemporary cruisers on purpose, since they are used primarily (keeping in-line with vanilla BotF) for planetary assault. To make them distinct from 'normal' cruisers, they were given seemingly weaker stats, so they would be forced into a supportive role during large fleet engagements.

You shouldn't expect to win battles with Strike Cruisers, that's not what they are there for. I once had a battle when I fought and almost won out a Romulan Stormbird with a single Centaur-class Surveyor. The battle lastet the maximum number of turns possible in BotF, and the game then declared the battle inconclusive. When confronting destroyers, you will find your Strikers to be in deep trouble if you let the enemy get too close, since all Strike Cruisers have very limited close-range weaponry and their torpedoes are only useful at long range.

Even though I personally never noticed any difference in performance relating to the absolute values of ship stats, I'd be interested in some testing. If battles indeed go considerably faster, we may consider tuning the values down a bit, while keeping proportions.

So, if anyone can provide further insight into this, any comment would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Siggi

Locustus wrote:However, the game still crashes if I click too rapidly in the ship list.

you might want to make sure you are using latest patch "UDMIII3.0.f update with hotfix.exe" it can be found in siggi's shared folder or my shared folder (see lnk below).
what you are discribing sound like your video card not being able to switch 3D images that fast. I also get that if I fly though screensaver too fast. The best fix for that I have found is to just slow down.
the model in UDMIII are higher poly count than vanilla (1000-3000+ for UDMIII and 100-650 for vanilla) so the 3D engine is under a much bigger load than vanilla so speeds of this mod will never compare to vanilla.
but with other tweaks and hades I feel speed of 3D combat is very good, and for battles lasting longer I have found always use large numbers of ships to just over power my enemy. that way battles are shorter.

thunderchero

Thanks for the attention

I think you might try to encourage a new BOTF game and find a way to take part in creating the official game. It could be much better than modding (since I am looking at this, it is still very interesting as is). It would certainly become stable and ulock many things.

For example, I don't have access to all energy powered buildings because they don't have room on the display and I can't power them up. Also, orbital batteries have always annoyed me and with 25 of them, I'd probably need 10 battleships to bombard a system only to kill most of it. I couldn't even get 3 of them to destroy batteries when there were 3 batteries.

Also, strike cruisers seem useless for planetary assault. Can anyone tell me how they are special for it? Can you tell me how planetary assault works? I want to know everything . Damage ships take, what anti ship defense means, why there is an alien called orbital battery and a building with the same name, and finally about ground combat. I do know that orbital batteries will attack one ship each in the order you told them to attack, each task force being taken in its order. And if one of the ships dies it moves on to another. How the "alien" orbital battery's stats work along with weapon technology: do the weapons fire once a map turn, multiplied by tech? How the shield generator affects things (and why it doesn't help with aliens).

I think strike cruisers should be a much better thing for assaults than command ships. I don't know if you can mod that. Fire from outside the battery range.

About ships, the battleships/dreadnoughts seem terribly overpowered, although slow, considering their build cost and maintenance.
What happended to the supremacy of the Heavy Escort? I compare it to the Sovereign and find out I have no reason to build it. In edit, it seems to have worse defense (evading power) than DreadnoughtII, it has the same speed, its cost/maintenance does not justify the stat difference.
I also compared ultimate ships from each playable race and I find the sovereign potentially underpowered compared to cost/maintenance Is the shield recharge that good? Or defense? Is it because of speed? Do shields still regenerate after reaching zero in UDM3?

About crashes, I get the feeling it crashes 10 times more with the federation research list, could there be something with the edited interface?

I didn't yet see a battle involving the Sovereign and Galaxy class, I heard that they should be about the same length with the Sovereign being obviously smaller (being thinner).

I can't increase the costs for battleships because around 50000 the registry for the stat caps. The only way would be to reduce the productivity of industry structures.

.......
Oh yea, clicking on the Heavy Escort in research always crashes the game. I'm sure it's not a lack of processing capability from my video card. It's just system incompatibility or software error.

Locustus wrote:I didn't yet see a battle involving the Sovereign and Galaxy class, I heard that they should be about the same length with the Sovereign being obviously smaller (being thinner).

They're close to the same length; the Sovereign is slightly longer. Galaxy Class is 640-ish meters in length, Sovereign is 680-ish. That's a difference of only about 6% in length.

Hey.. does UDM3 require Standard for Modders? If so, how do you install it, because it has no readme. Place files in botf folder or stbof?

Actually, what is the optimum install? Joker english patch 1.02 + UDM3e + hotfix_f ?

rec install order of UDMIII

uninstall BOTF from control panel remove programs
delete BOTF folder from previous installed location (default C:\BOTF)
fresh install of BOTF with max install
Botf-102-W2K-XP-9x-English-German.exe
UDMIII3.0.e.exe
UDMIII3.0.f update with hotfix.exe

Hades, Standard for Modders is not needed they are pre installed in mod files.

NOTE; no other patch have been tested for UDMIII and may cause Conflicts.

thunderchero