Anyone experienced with the different mods and a high level summary of each one?

[Ryanmildiner]

So me and my wife have been playing BOTF for many many years, but only started to look at the mods since we found the all in one conversion install. we stopped playing when the game was unstable on Win 10 but with this new install it seems super stable!!

Anyways we have had a quick look at the Ultimate dominion Mod and the balance of power, both seem great. but its tricky to get a feel of the overall high level summary of what each mod offers.

For example we noticed that the BOP mod doesnt require you to upgrade your main infrastructure as much which is great because in late game (tech 9) you could be looking at 36 turns just to upgrade all your buildings to t9 on a fresh system. additionally it seems to free up more time for ship building. Therefore I get the sense that this mod focuses more on ship building and conflict as you have more time and resource to dedicate to that. however the description doesnt really highlight this.

Is anyone able to outline some of the best mods here and what their overall feel is about? Any which focus more on micro management? any that focus more on war or more on expansion maybe even intel etc

[Deimos]

I play both of those mods, each seems to have its own uniqueness, including more ships, buildings and generally just a lot more fun.

UDM is my favourite mod by far, but I also modify it before playing.

Like you, I hate the fact most of the mid-late game is constantly upgrading the main infrastructure buildings, it just seems so redundant.

I tried to remove all the additional levels of each structure, but it always results in a game that crashes after a set time and can't be played further.

So I decided to set a very low build cost (around 5 credits) for all of them using the group building edit function, so upgrades are done in a single turn.

I know, that seems overpowered and such, but I can't think of a way around it otherwise, plus there also appears to be a downside to doing this, the Automatic planet management stops upgrading those structures, so you have to manually queue it up, I'm not sure why.

I also set the research points from the labs to 1 point, so researching takes a LOT longer, but I find that makes the game much more enjoyable.

As the research costs increase per level, it sounds like it would take an age to get to the next tier, but it doesn't, as long as you build a lot of research buildings and populate a lot of planets, plus, minor races who provide research bonuses become that much more important to your empire.

There are a lot of great mods to choose from, another I liked was Ultimate mod 5, but I think the downside with that one, was each star system had a LOT of small planets in it, so that adds a lot of tedious clicking for terraforming.

[Dewbacca]

UDM is probably the most balanced, up to date mod, but like the above poster, I further mod it to eliminate the upgrades using the BotF patcher and a patch Thunderchero made to auto update structures.

BoP is a great mod, but I tend to think of it as "older" and more suited for competitive Multi player use.

Here is the patch tool:
viewtopic.php?f=126&t=2515

And the patch itself is here:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3693

[Deimos]

Nice, didn't realize there was a premade patch, thanks Dew

[thunderchero]

that patch is from Mirror Universe mod

[SiskosPimpHand]

Wait, so am I reading this right that there's a way to "mix and match" mods, or port one mod into a different game? Because on one hand, I love the "Mirror Universe" upgrade and colonization system, on the other hand I'm not a big fan of playing in the Mirror Universe

[thunderchero]

Wait, so am I reading this right that there's a way to "mix and match" mods, or port one mod into a different game?

no you can not mix and match mods, you can take patches from one mod and add them to other mods.

but this some time causes code conflicts and that will cause trouble or ctd

[SiskosPimpHand]

Gotcha. I'm a player, not a modder myself; so my translation of the answer to the question is "no"

[SiskosPimpHand]

that patch is from Mirror Universe mod

One of the things I absolutely LOVE about the Mirror Universe Mod is the colonization/upgrading feature for infrastructure. Is there a "baseline" version of that mod without the "Mirror Morale?" Or alternately, is there a version of the All Ages Mod that incorporates the Mirror Universe Mod's infrastructure features?

[thunderchero]

"no building upgrade mod" is the first mod to use no upgrades. it is close to vanilla

[SiskosPimpHand]

"no building upgrade mod" is the first mod to use no upgrades. it is close to vanilla

Downside of "vanilla" is that ship speeds/ranges, while they fit a "classic wargame" model, don't really match the setting. For example, there's no reason why a Galaxy class starship should be short-range with a speed of 1. Love that in MUM, the advanced ships have range/speed in-keeping with the Star Trek setting.