
Anyway, I was interested in getting a few of the ships some way back to the way I know and like them (such as most of the Klingon vessels, number of which had had the ability to cloak taken from them), so I fired up the Ultimate Editor and soon discovered that it wasn't going to be as easy as I'd thought...
Upon opening up stbof.res in UE and going to 'Ships' - 'Ship Stats', I quickly found most of the variables I was after laid out before me on a single page, alongside some I'd never come across before such as 'shield penetration' and 'shield level'. Still more surprising was the absence of any listing for 'attack rating' (although defense is there) and no sign of 'damage control' (which I'd planned to increase for the various Borg vessels in the mod) either.
So, I was wondering if any kind soul who's in the know might enlighten me as to exactly what the more esoteric terms actually mean, what they affect in terms of gameplay, and how I might go about tweaking them???
Agility is fairly obvious, but I suspect my understanding of the 'defense' value is quite possibly incomplete. Does defense work in relation to 'attack'? What's the 'attack rating' of a ship based on?
'Shield penetration' and 'shield level' would seem to be of some importance as they're there, but how precisely do they function? (Is it like with cloaking devices? - ie 'Cloak I', 'Cloak II', etc? )
As far as damage control goes I understand it's primarily a function of crew experience with an increasing bonus applied for each progressively higher level (from 'Green' to 'Legendary') with an additional bonus if the ship is in a sector with a shipyard or starbase (either one of yours, an affiliate or ally), but I'd expected it to have a base value that the bonuses affected, one that was perhaps race related (y'know like Klingons suck at repairs, but Starfleet's engineers are the finest in the quadrant sort of thing.
