Birth of the Federation

An experimental patch has been developed that extends taskforces from a maximum of 9 ships to 18 ships.

You can get it here: BotF Taskforces Patch at sourceforge

This patch has been under development on-and-off since 2011, but was too unstable for use. With contributions from thunderchero, it now seems quite stable, but the patch needs further testing.

There are some caveats to using this patch:
It breaks compatibility with existing SAV files! You can't load up your old savegames, nor can new savegames be loaded up with an unpatched version.
All participants in a multiplayer game must patch the game with the same ships per taskforce limit (e.g. all players with 18 ships).
As a workaround for an instability in the patch, the AI has been prevented for forming taskforces (i.e. the AI has only 1 ship per taskforce).

Other notes:
Because of the complexity of this patch, it does conflict with other patches such as the Instant Terraforming bugfix and the Ship Scrapping exploit fix. Therefore the taskforce patchtool will check for these patches, and automatically adjust them. So if you want those patches, install them first, then the taskforces patch!

Finally, if you are modder, make a backup of your trek.exe. The patch has no uninstall option right now.

AWESOME!!!!!

Thanks again for your efforts on this QD,

It is a great improvement in game play.

just a couple notes on settings

on 800 x 600 the lower panel will not display all ships in task force 4 top row and 8 on bottom row (other ships appear as ships are removed)
(you can squeeze 5 on top row, 10 bottom row using 55 as width)

with replacement wdf files you can get all 18 to display see this post
viewtopic.php?f=298&t=3247&p=43291#p43291

here is best settings for 800 x 600 on 1024 x 768 the lower panel will display all ships in task force 7 top row and 11 on bottom row

here is best settings for 1024 x 768 thunderchero

awesome work!
and limiting ai to one ship per fleet really is no flaw, I always struggled counting them

Thanks for this patch, I'll test it soon
Is this patch compatible with mpr++?

many thanks

Thanks for the update via e-mail. Would have missed this announcement otherwise. Great job!

Maddin1701 wrote:Is this patch compatible with mpr++?

yes, I tried to test all possible combinations. but if any one finds something that is not compatible let us know.

but as QD noted this should be final thing installed. using some patches may show conflicting locations or show red due to changes

thunderchero

yeah baby !!!

great news , at last we won´t have large list of 9´s, lol

thank you guys

Wow guys! Thats amazing! You guys never cease to impress me. I'm gonna get my friends together and lan out a test session for this asap!

thunderchero wrote:
yes, I tried to test all possible combinations. but if any one finds something that is not compatible let us know.

but as QD noted this should be final thing installed. using some patches may show conflicting locations or show red due to changes

thunderchero

Thanks for reply

Its a good thing we all know how to count by 9's, makes counting by 18's so much easier

18, 36, 54, 72, 90.. Thanks so much QD you are amazing

Awesome work QD!! that's a massive breakthrough, and another box ticked. My wishlist is getting smaller and smaller (still dream of more minor races, and fixing the damn late game turn lag!)

Thanks guys for this patch; and thank you QD! i'll give it a try for sure.
Just in case it does not work for me, since it does not uninstall, all i need is to backup my trek.exe, right?
I have a suspicion that part of the turn time, is due to large AI fleets, the not grouped ones; i'm thinking the Ai needs to decide on 9 ships instead of one group; with this patch i could get a feel if grouping AI ships has an effect of turn time.

adi wrote:all i need is to backup my trek.exe, right?

correct, this patch only edits the trek.exe

the changes for the *_ship.wdf is the hard coded locations within trek.exe and does not edit the wdf files.

thunderchero