Ultimate Mod 4

Ultimate Mod; showcase and support/discussion/questions/suggestions/reviews

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Locustus
Cadet 4th Year
Cadet 4th Year
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Joined: Sun Apr 27, 2008 2:00 am

Ultimate Mod 4

Post by Locustus »

:D This is a great mod.

It is the most stable incarnation of the game yet (least crashes, patched vanilla included). It is a lot of fun, with opponent empires performing reasonably on hard setting. They gather realistic forces before commiting an attack.

So far, ship balance is fine. Yet, I edited ship stats to further halve the number of weapons and to double hull points for all (thereby making things more realistic and as a side effect giving cards more of a fighting chance - don't know for sure if they were already balanced). I also helped the roms with some extra damge on their weapons, since they won't deal as much on the first tactical turn.

I greatly enjoyed Ultimate Mod 2 years before, but 3 crashed all the time and didn't seem as much fun either. With this one, you managed to slip in the Dominion quite nicely and not in an out-of the ordinary manner. I never got to play Ultimate Dominion Mod as it crashed all the time and the enormous power of system defenses was a turn-off for me. They also made a mistake in increasing shields / hull overall instead of reducing the number of weapons, putting unnecessary strain on processing and eventually crashes. By the way, it seems the new Editor is more friendly and feels less like it would induce crashes.

I don't think the ferengi were all that bad. It's quite funny, actually, considering most mods like to take the bite of their torpedoes away.

I enjoyed Balance of Power almost as much when I tried it a year or so ago. :)

As I see it, what you might want to improve on this Ultimate Mod 4 is: first fix cards: they can'tbuild outposts / starbases - only empire with this bug. Perhaps cards have trouble with their bases because you places their starbase in defense of Bajor?
Also, improve race meeting audio (for example, meeting some of the custom races, including the previously existing bajorans, has very odd audio especially when playing Klingon) (better keep the old audio there, more voice acting on new races if possible).

Maybe, one day, you would participate in creating a successor to BOTF, I am sure it would turn out much better than the trash coming out of the industry about now.
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Dafedz
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Post by Dafedz »

Well thanks Locustus. And regarding your last comment I already am, in a sense - I am one of the developers on the Supremacy project (botf2).

I was never personally happy with UM4, too many unresolved instabilities. The over all vision of the mod was fine, but the execution was not. Regarding the newly inserted audio clips - they sound a bit 'unnatural' because they are just that! They are not human voices but created artificially with a special robotic voice program. I personally lack both the accent and the acting ability to voice them myself ;)

If you liked UM4 though, UM5 is on the cards. I'm currently in the process of building a platform for it.
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