A collection of developer journals for the Battlefleet Gothic mod for Sins of a Solar Empire.
Bringing the Warhammer 40k universe to Sins
Published on December 8, 2008 By xthetenth In Sins Modding

The Battlefleet Gothic mod is now compatible with Entrenchment 1.041 as of 1/17/10, and has a new version (1.30) out as of 1/17/10


This mod contains the Imperial navy in a fully modelled state, and Chaos, the Tau and the Orks in a proxied state.

 

BE WARNED: THIS MOD IS STILL RATHER BETA AND IS MISSING MANY FEATURES, INCLUDING:

-A research tree (unlocks, colonization, fleet supply, cap ship crews and long range jumps are quite literally all that's there (well, there's a missile tech, but it doesn't do much, and you WILL be able to get late game ships early)

-GUI elements. some 2D icons aren't done yet, and the ones we have are a bit odd. They will be fixed eventually.

Things that we know about (IE we know about it and it's odd, but it's either a design decision which will be explained or something not implemented):

-Counter description text. It's wildly off and somewhat arbitrary, but the ship descriptions are pretty good and should give the player a decent idea of what to expect, and I'll write more on them on our forum (link here).

-Shield Mitigation. It's gone, but it says it's at 15%. Trust me, it's gone.

-The Emperor Battleship. As a compromise on its heavy dorsal armament that can be fired to either broadside, we made it have the strength of the dorsals and a broadside point forward, and slightly stronger broadsides. We think it works pretty well, but please tell us what you think.

-Chaos ships and tau ships in the Additional Races Compendium are odd. The chaos prow weapons are locked to fire left, so they can broadside well to one side without turning into brawlers and tau weapons are locked forwards so they can concentrate fire, but they lost their ability to fire at half strenth to the sides because multi-arc weapons are impossible in sins as far as I know.

-No stock sins races. GW wouldn't let us include them, and they have a very different gameplay mechanic anyway, and need a very different setup for damage types, much to my chagrin, seeing as I want to know how it'd end up .

 

Okay, now that that's out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. The ships are working great. If you know the tabletop game you'll know the key things that I need to tell everybody else so they understand the game.

-Ships turn and fire SLOWLY. You need to think ahead, and you can fit in a lot of micro if you know what you're doing. This is intentional.

-Shields recharge VERY VERY VERY VERY FAST. This is a legacy of it being a tabletop game where focusing fire is a big achievement. Shields will fully recharge in the time it takes for you to fire a second salvo of your weapons. Firepower supremacy is big here, and so is using your weapons to their utmost. However, hulls repair rather slowly, so protect them.

-Ships will go up like popcorn, even caps if your fleets get big enough. A fully experienced cap has quite a bit of damage absorbing ability, but it isn't even close to invincible. They're about twice as valuable as a cruiser, and if you're careful, can absorb 3 times as much damage easily. It's a great bargain, but they will die, don't get attached to them.

-Oh right, cruisers. There are cruisers in this game, and frigates are now fragile scouts and flankers. Frigates are cheap, expendable, and surprisingly dangerous in numbers. Cruisers are a lot bigger, much tougher, and carry a good bit more firepower, but a really big price tag. Battleships come in on top, and are really durable, and host a lot of long ranged firepower.

-The weapons are different too. Weapons batteries and Lances are your basic weapons. Lances are focused beams of energy that do best against escorts (accuracy) and armored ships (penetration power, but with just the imperials that isn't that big an issue). Weapons batteries are massed guns that do best against battleships because they can actually be expected to hit a lot. They aren't that different, and the range and strength of the guns means more than their type. Torpedoes are great. They punch through shields 100% of the time, but tend to drop off against bigger targets, which boast the point defense turrets to shoot most of them down. They make great escort killers, and are your best weapon in smaller fights.

-Attack Craft (fighters and bombers) are also very different, they come in squadrons abstracted to one ship, and are much more fragile. They're also much more dangerous. They, like torpedoes pierce shields and can do a lot of damage, especially against smaller ships (including cruisers, battleships are nasty to them though). However, every ship has turrets that can kill them, but if they stagger their waves, they can hit home very hard. They also replenish quite fast until their parent ship runs out of antimatter, so they're really quite good. Fighters are quite capable at interception duties, if you have more fighters than the enemy, your bombers will be able to strike enemy ships while your ships are safe from enemies.

 

Please note!

-Planet capturing is quite different from in standard sins. The transport is your one stop shop for planetary warfare and colonization. They land troops instead of bombarding. The whole idea is a little bitcomplicated, and I encourage anybody who's interested to read the thread I'll post on our forum shortly. The short version is that you build transports, use their bombardment ability to pound your enemies into dust, and then return them to the munitorum depots (they have the advent antimatter recharger icon for now, shouldn't be hard to find on the screen) to refill. It should especially suit the Imperium's style of defend and counterattack.

 

Now that you know the basics of the game, you can download the mod here:

DOWNLOAD (7ZIP, 109 MB) (This should work properly but I've been having lots of problems with it, if not, please tell me so I can remove the link while I fix it. )

7zip or winrar both can open 7zip files, and both are available for free, and much smaller than 50 MB.

DOWNLOAD (ZIP, 162.63 MB)

And please visit our forum at Modcraft if you want to learn more about the mod and what to expect, volunteer or give detailed feedback:

OUR FORUM

 

Dev Journals: These guides will help you know what to expect in the future and understand the current state of the gameplay.

Dev Journal 1: Ships of the Imperium It explains all the imperial ships and their fleet's way of fighting. Should be useful.

Dev Journal 2: Fleet tactics of the Imperium It focuses on the use of the Imperial ships in a fleet. Definitely good food for thought, may apply more to tabletop than the mod, I need to test the theories some before I fully endorse them.

Gratuitous screenies:

Gothic class cruiser pummeling a dictator class cruiser

Gothic class cruisers pummeling a Dictator class cruiser with lances and torpedoes

 

Retribution class Battleship firing at an enemy cruiser

Retribution class battleship firing its prow lances and torpedoes at an enemy cruiser.

Finally, the trailer for the Imperium (thanks again, Thrawn!)

 


Comments (Page 27)
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on Jun 22, 2009

Anyone have any suggestions for the research tree? That'll be the next milestone

on Jun 23, 2009

Liking the mod but I have a question for you

I saved the game before taking a break, hoping to get back to it later. When I tried to load the game later, it caused a minidump. I don't know if this has been reported, but thought I'd send this anyway.

Edit: Never mind, worked when I tried it again.

on Jun 23, 2009

I saved the game before taking a break, hoping to get back to it later. When I tried to load the game later, it caused a minidump. I don't know if this has been reported, but thought I'd send this anyway.

Edit: Never mind, worked when I tried it again.

It crashed during the loading process? That's really odd if that's what happened and I have no idea what could've caused it. Glad to hear you liked it though.

 

For the researches, it looks like we get three 8x11 spaces to play with, so I was thinking of splitting it into three chunks for the imperials: Munitorum for combat upgrades, Administratum for civilian upgrades and Ecclisiarchy/Inquisition for the really tricky/neat stuff I come up with. The munitorum will have a lot of room taken up by various upgrade trees for various aspects of the imperial navy. Combat upgrades will be a major way in which I make battles stay a good length later in the game. The various trees on the combat upgrades section will be of different lengths in order to emphasize the strengths of the various races. For example the imperials will get their weapons power and armor boosted the most, while chaos will get their range and firepower boosted but remain comparatively fragile so that they have their usual early advantage in ranged firepower while the imperials try to close. What do you all think?

 

The main things I'm considering changing right now that I want some feedback on are increasing the gravity well size so the ranges aren't quite as ridiculous (jumping in and being able to fire on a fleet sieging an asteroid might be a bit much), making transports require refills a bit more frequently (more iNert's idea than mine, I think it should be fine with properly fortified planets) and finally increasing the tactical cap on most planets so they're more capable of defending from a decent sized attack.

What do you think of all these ideas? Don't worry if you only have something to say about one of the things, I just want some feedback.

on Jun 23, 2009

I think the tech tree should be fairly large, as in Sins the tech tree is ridiculously short.  I do like the fact you are making the racial tech trees much more different to each other than they are in vanilla Sins.  Be sure to give Chaos lots of culture researches and the Imperials lots of culture-stopping researches to counter.

If you increase the gravity well, be sure to increase planet sizes as well to match.  The scale in Sins is horribly off.

 

Increase the tactical cap, and make sure most planets can have more than one starbase.  A Fortress World should have at least 4 or 5 maximum, especially if you are expanding the size of the gravity wells.

on Jun 23, 2009

Hull upgrades hull upgrades hull upgrades... if you don't change the way the current system (things explode too fast). You could always lower ranges rather than increase gravity well sizes, but hey thats up to you.

 

And yes, planet defenses should really be a major part of this game, but starbases being few and far between, unlike Entrenchment. Maybe you should have a cap on those too, sort of like Captial ship crews.

on Jun 23, 2009

I think the tech tree should be fairly large, as in Sins the tech tree is ridiculously short. I do like the fact you are making the racial tech trees much more different to each other than they are in vanilla Sins. Be sure to give Chaos lots of culture researches and the Imperials lots of culture-stopping researches to counter.

I'm going to make a ton of researches, don't worry, and chaos will have quite the insidious culture spread. There'll be a fast spread but more importantly they'll get an insurgency style upgrade to harass their enemies' planets. The imperials will get plenty of resistance to spread, don't worry, and one thing I hope I can do is make starbases have an upgrade to resist the spread of culture like capital ships.

If you increase the gravity well, be sure to increase planet sizes as well to match. The scale in Sins is horribly off.

I will if I can, but that's more on iNert's plate.

Increase the tactical cap, and make sure most planets can have more than one starbase. A Fortress World should have at least 4 or 5 maximum, especially if you are expanding the size of the gravity wells.

I will increase the cap, especially on lower levels, but remember that a fully upgraded decent planet can muster ~30 attack craft squadrons and some passable firepower from the orbital docks. Add a starbase to that and it'll be dead nasty. If you really want to make the planet impervious, you could add one of the ramilies star forts we're adding soon instead of the basic starbase. Each arc of those babies can outshoot a battleship in each arc (1000 lance and 2400 weapons battery strength per arc), carry 16 AC squadrons and spray 1800 points of torpedoes at an unfortunate enemy, so if anything once the starbases are added, the top level of defenses might need to be reined in a bit. Also, don't forget that shipyards can repair, so if you absolutely need to hold a planet you can throw in a few of those for combat repairs.

 

I'll say more later, got to go, and yes, hull upgrades. Also, the regular imperial starbase will be highly civilian oriented, and more to make planets customizable than as a ubiquitous defense feature.

on Jun 23, 2009

Excellent! I shall take a scanner and recon this new version and report back to the admiralty at the first possible moment!

on Jun 24, 2009

Awesome, can't wait for you input.

 

In the interim, allow me to present a bit more tl;dr bait, actually a bit shorter than usual.

 

Hull upgrades hull upgrades hull upgrades... if you don't change the way the current system (things explode too fast). You could always lower ranges rather than increase gravity well sizes, but hey thats up to you.

Don't worry, there will be hull upgrades galore. gotta balance out the tons of firepower somehow.

And yes, planet defenses should really be a major part of this game, but starbases being few and far between, unlike Entrenchment. Maybe you should have a cap on those too, sort of like Captial ship crews.

What I was going to do is to give the imperials a generic, defensively weak starbase they can build anywhere to add a bit of defensive firepower and allow the player to choose between defensive strength or a stronger civilian setup. Thrown into the mix will be a very very small number of ramilies star forts. I mean one or two for the whole game. These will be able to anchor an entire flank with only defenses if supported properly. However, the way I'm thinking right now their only source is constructors you start with based on game size, so if you lose one it's a big loss. They will be movable if that is the case, don't worry. I really think that's the best way to implement super weapons for each of the races, limiting the number you can get in a game because it's the only thing that can really apply to any type of super project. What do you think about giving the imperials customizable starbases with a matching cut in civilian/tactical slots on their planets and making the unique units limited in the number the player can possibly have?

on Jun 24, 2009

Well, I messed around with the latest version. First off, by the Emperor's left ball, the visuals are incredible! I love the new buildings and the ships have even better details! The only concerns I have are about things you have intentionally, so I don't expect vast, if any, changes:

Ships die VERY fast. Now, I don't mean an über battle of a hundred plus ships. I mean, ten minutes into the game I have a cap ship and some frigates taking the nearby planets held by rebels and the like and the dinky frigates on both sides die within seconds. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if the armour and hit points and damage are to remain as they are, I feel weapon ranges might be reduced a bit. I could barely enjoy seeing my meagre yet impressive (visually) excuse for a fleet enter a system and open fire. Within seconds, all rebels are destroyed. And that's nearly halfway across the awesomely huge gravity wells. The huge range, in my opinion, defeats the new big gravity wells. But I love the large size. Now the porous core has a noticeable affect on gravity wells!

Either here or on your forums, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has brought this up already, but I will ask anyway: what about prices? With the short life spans of ships, should the costs be so high in both resources and population? It is... difficult to get a bunch of ships until you've taken a dozen planets or more. And even when you do, they die bloody fast, so it's hard to replenish them quickly. Again, might be intentional, but I wanted to ask nevertheless.

Also, I was looking at the diplomacy tab and seeing all TEC names got me thinking; maybe someone already thought of this, in which case this is pointless, but better safe than sorry: for names of computer, you could have the different Segmentum fleets, such as Segmentum Pacificus or Scarrus. Chaos would have legion names or corrupt fleet names perhaps, same for Marines (albiet with chapters), and so on down the list of different factions/races that you decide to include. As for markings, which could be a problem since my beloved Space Wolves do NOT use the same markings as those panzy "ultra"marines, just use the basic symbol for each race/faction: star of Chaos, Aquila for Imperials/Marines, some Eldar rune, the basic Tau symbol, and so on for whichever races make it into the mod. If you want to have such decorations on the ships, of course.

The imperial shipyards are wicked cool. I had to mention it. Perhaps there will be a research upgrade to allow the frigate factories the ability to make three ships at once, since they appear to have three docking berths or whatever? That would be cool

Well, there are my two Imperial Crowns. Take or ignore at your leisure

on Jun 25, 2009

Made a mockish trailer. Sorta bad/ rushed since I'm going to Ireland tomorrow. I'll do a better one when I get back. HD should be up soon

 

 

 

on Jun 25, 2009

Tyndaria, sorry about the late response, meant to get to it yesterday, but steam's browser ate my post (no more posting while feeding my empire total war addiction, I guess).

Ships die VERY fast. Now, I don't mean an über battle of a hundred plus ships. I mean, ten minutes into the game I have a cap ship and some frigates taking the nearby planets held by rebels and the like and the dinky frigates on both sides die within seconds. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if the armour and hit points and damage are to remain as they are, I feel weapon ranges might be reduced a bit. I could barely enjoy seeing my meagre yet impressive (visually) excuse for a fleet enter a system and open fire. Within seconds, all rebels are destroyed. And that's nearly halfway across the awesomely huge gravity wells. The huge range, in my opinion, defeats the new big gravity wells. But I love the large size. Now the porous core has a noticeable affect on gravity wells!

I'm almost definitely going to do something to make the ranges smaller proportionally, don't worry. I'm leaning towards making the ranges bigger so you can make the fleets a bit looser so the ships can support each other without ramming each other, but that's just my opinion. The amount I'm looking at is about a 50% increase in range, maybe a bit more so that only nova cannon can engage enemies next to the planet when they jump in. This should also give escorts the room to outflank enemies' fire arcs and make them more effective.

Either here or on your forums, I wouldn't be surprised if someone has brought this up already, but I will ask anyway: what about prices? With the short life spans of ships, should the costs be so high in both resources and population? It is... difficult to get a bunch of ships until you've taken a dozen planets or more. And even when you do, they die bloody fast, so it's hard to replenish them quickly. Again, might be intentional, but I wanted to ask nevertheless.

Yeah, I'm not sure on the pricing. On one hand it does preclude large battles early. On the other, it keeps the battles in a smaller range where they avoid the problems we're having with large battles being likely to kill ships very fast, and they tend to be more tactical at smaller sizes. However, I do think that frigates should be slightly cheaper (not too much, cobra spam is rather threatening if alarmingly vulnerable to bombers. Still, once you get to later in the game when cruisers are at risk, the attrition frigate squadrons'll take will be balanced by their quick construction and cheapish price compared to cruisers and the fact that the odd cruiser might get taken out. The prices also make rebuilding a bit slower so the winner can capitalize on his victory, at least until the transports run out of antimatter. Once the research is made, it could well make larger fleets work better, in which case I would make it easier to get them.

I would highly recommend using cruisers as the backbone of your fleet because they're pretty much the best choice to absorb damage with and let you pin down the enemy and outflank with your escorts to keep them safe. Well, experienced battleships are just nasty and can help a lot but deliberately risking them might not be the best idea. If you're doing that, I'm not sure what to advise other than if you're even with the enemy, luring them into range of your defences could work well (although they really need a price drop).

Also, I was looking at the diplomacy tab and seeing all TEC names got me thinking; maybe someone already thought of this, in which case this is pointless, but better safe than sorry: for names of computer, you could have the different Segmentum fleets, such as Segmentum Pacificus or Scarrus. Chaos would have legion names or corrupt fleet names perhaps, same for Marines (albiet with chapters), and so on down the list of different factions/races that you decide to include. As for markings, which could be a problem since my beloved Space Wolves do NOT use the same markings as those panzy "ultra"marines, just use the basic symbol for each race/faction: star of Chaos, Aquila for Imperials/Marines, some Eldar rune, the basic Tau symbol, and so on for whichever races make it into the mod. If you want to have such decorations on the ships, of course.

Yeah, I'm still thinking of fleet names, but the segmentum fleets might work, I'm not sure about that. Some generic naval unit designations might work as well, and full segmentum fleets duking it out would end the imperium so that's an issue. And yeah, I'm thinking about 5 or so markings for most races along these lines, Chaos star and the gods' symbols for chaos, Tau sept insigniae for tau, Eldar craftworld runes, Crons various glyphs, a dark eldar symbol or two, some marine chapter symbols for the most common ones (don't worry, I play templars, I love assaulty marines, so space wolves symbol is in and so is the blood angels one for sure), ork clan insigniae and I'm not entirely sure what for the imperium.

Maybe make the imperium insigniae those of the major organizations? So you have the =I= seal, the admech crest, the aquila, the navy crest and so on.

The imperial shipyards are wicked cool. I had to mention it. Perhaps there will be a research upgrade to allow the frigate factories the ability to make three ships at once, since they appear to have three docking berths or whatever? That would be cool

Wish we could, however I do think that I'll make the frigate shipyard able to repair multiple ships while the capital shipyward can repair one ship quite fast.

Made a mockish trailer. Sorta bad/ rushed since I'm going to Ireland tomorrow. I'll do a better one when I get back. HD should be up soon

And me I thought that it was pretty good/well done and good enough to stick on the main post. However, by the time you get back, I'll probably have released the patch thingy which among other things will make large mixed fleets act and look better and fixes the battleship exhaust. (There's a lot more, but those are the main aesthetic things).

 

on Jun 25, 2009

Yeah i can't seem to get this mod to work. I keep getting mini-dump errors each time i try to load it.

on Jun 26, 2009

Hmm, that's odd, what version of sins are you using? I know it works for entrenchment 1.02 and it should work with 1.03 without complaint. If you don't have entrenchment, I'm sorry but we're going to need it for features we're going to add. If you do have one of those versions, I don't know what the hell's up but it may be fixed in the next version when I make it natively 1.03 (it was made with 1.02 entities but works with 1.03 for everybody on the team so it should work for everybody). If you are running 1.03, could you try loading it with show errors enabled and tell me what it says before it minidumps if you know how to? Thanks a ton and if you don't know how to run sins with show errors enabled, don't worry about it.

on Jun 26, 2009

Hi all. Been lurking in this mod since the beginning, great to see things back on track. The mod is great the ships, and the new structures are great aswell. I never played BG but i did play 40K for a few years and still enjoy it from time to time. I had an idea about the cost of ships mentioned further up. You could use a research option to lower the cost of ships, place it maybe at level 6 or 7 in the research panel, it could be called forgotten building techniques, that the mechanicum found. It could reduce the price of frigates and cruisers by a set amount maybe 25% or someting like that. That way you could avoid frigate spamming early on and allow for larger battles in the late game. Just an idea I thought might work. Once again great mod.

on Jun 26, 2009

xthetenth there is a significant change in the entities between entrenchment 1.02 & 1.03 that does cause minidumps

the added line is the rendershields (true of false) after the sheildmeshname

eg

ShieldMeshName ""
renderShield FALSE
 and

ShieldMeshName "the name of the mesh for the sield on the entity"
renderShield TRUE

hope this info helps

harpo

 

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