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 28)
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on Jun 26, 2009

Okay, good to hear an explanation, I did not notice it causing any problems, so I thought that entrenchment was handling it all right. Apparently not in all cases, so I'll fix that immediately.

on Jun 26, 2009

the minidumping is mostly when mods are stacked, and if there is a ship,planet or planet module in a mod in the stack without the rendershields line  there is a significant chance of a minidump

harpo

 

on Jun 26, 2009

Ahh, gotcha now, I'm cleaning it out now regardless, but just know that basically everything's changed in this mod so that stacking mods is a royally bad idea. Mostly that's because all the armor types are entirely different and all the planets are changed. Also, I've been something of a lazy bastard and haven't fully made the mod use new file names so some things might be overriden oddly. However, if that is the case that it's stacking related, I'll put off releasing the patch till sometime most likely next week when I've got all the current issues done and gotten in a bit of testing. If you can't get it to work even if it's the only mod you have, I'll send you the revised gameinfo folder once I've gotten all the version mistakes worked out if you pm me.

Thanks a ton for the help, harpo!

on Jul 01, 2009

Im new in Sins my Questions is there any version of this mod für Sins of Solar Empire version 1.17 the version ive downloaded didn,t Work

on Jul 01, 2009

kacklabble, the mod is for entrenchment ONLY as stated at the top of the OP

harpo

 

on Jul 01, 2009

I do believe there is a way to make it work, somebody else on the modcraft thread got ti working, it had to do with deleting old files, I'll try to get you the method.

 

Other note, once I get the dauntless class light cruiser models from inert I'll be releasing the patch which should fix a lot of problems. The most improtant stuff I've dealt with are the issues with stacking (it's now truly native 1.03 entrenchment, I fixed that screwup), reduced transport damage to bring up logistics more often, increased gravity wells, fixed weapon effect speeds to be faster than ships in all cases, added shields to all three gun platform types (and added the weapons battery and torpedo kinds), reworked colonzation researchs so both mining worlds and energy asteroids need just one and nerfed turrets a bit. Finally there will be two (maybe three) new ships, the torpedo and lance nosed Dauntless light cruiser and maybe the attack craft carrying version.

on Jul 02, 2009

Finally there will be two (maybe three) new ships, the torpedo and lance nosed Dauntless light cruiser and maybe the attack craft carrying version.

 

Sweet! Looking forward to those.

on Jul 02, 2009

Suggestion for new capital ship --> Avenger Grand Cruiser (Pwease ) I know I've said this before but it is the most unique GC in my opinion and you don't really need ALL of the variants (unless you want) The Imperium is going to need more than 2 capital ships.

on Jul 02, 2009

PLEASE RELEASE SOMETHING WITH TAU AND SPACE MARINES!!!!

THEY ARE THE BEST (EQUALLY)!!!

FOR THE GREATER GOOD!!!!/COURAGE AND HONOR!!!!

on Jul 02, 2009

Suggestion for new capital ship --> Avenger Grand Cruiser (Pwease ) I know I've said this before but it is the most unique GC in my opinion and you don't really need ALL of the variants (unless you want) The Imperium is going to need more than 2 capital ships.

Yeah, I know about the imperial/chaos generic gc, I just don't know where to come by pics and my camera's so bad I'm not likely to buy one. Do you have one? If so, the best way to get it in is to give us a side view, top and bottom and front views. Also, I'm so gonna dispute that uniqueness claim in favor of my favorite chaos ship, the repulsive. First off it has a unique chassis and all that, and it also has sweet nose weapons and a dorsal lance battery to go with its heavy guns. I want that, but really, if you want that ship, we need pics.

PLEASE RELEASE SOMETHING WITH TAU AND SPACE MARINES!!!!

THEY ARE THE BEST (EQUALLY)!!!

FOR THE GREATER GOOD!!!!/COURAGE AND HONOR!!!!

Tau are most likely next major race after the 'crons. They have the easiest gun setup to make work with abilities for multiarc weapons. Which is good, cause tau are my first 40k army and I loves em. The spess mahreens are sometime, not sure yet. I need to figure out how to make mahreen color schemes work though. it may be texture packs for your favorite chapter or something else, I'm not sure.

on Jul 02, 2009

I've got a few quick suggestions if you don't mind taking the time to read them.

 How about a space marine strike cruiser as a heavy cruiser? It could be an expensive but incredibly effective planet assaulting addition for your fleet once you reach a certain research level (those Imperial guard transports are fragile, but I think it would be good to have something more durable and effective later on in the game). And you could add a Space Marine Battle barge as an effective and very durable flagship to spearpoint your assaults. I'd say that it would be a serious threat to any enemy planet but as such, would be a seriously expensive Capital and require a very high level of research. Much like a Titan class ship in other mods.

That and you really don't need to cancel out the vanilla races in the mod just yet. The current release would be so much better if you left the default models in game and replaced them every release. The same process would work well for the research as well (at least from a gameplay perspective. I've no idea whether it's possible with the coding you've done so far.), and allow for the construction of space stations until such time as you have the game modded to your liking. I hadn't realized that space stations had become such an incredibly important part of my strategy until I was missing them in your mod. 

Watching random beams shoot out of technicolored cubes kind of put me off, which is kind of a shame because I really dig what you've done with the gameplay. Good job so far though. Keep it up.

on Jul 02, 2009

How about a space marine strike cruiser as a heavy cruiser? It could be an expensive but incredibly effective planet assaulting addition for your fleet once you reach a certain research level (those Imperial guard transports are fragile, but I think it would be good to have something more durable and effective later on in the game). And you could add a Space Marine Battle barge as an effective and very durable flagship to spearpoint your assaults. I'd say that it would be a serious threat to any enemy planet but as such, would be a seriously expensive Capital and require a very high level of research. Much like a Titan class ship in other mods.

Strike cruisers are actually light cruisers in tt (and consequently the mod), they just aren't nearly as big, but they're very well armored so they're nearly as tough as full cruisers. Plus, the space marines are their own race with their own setup and goodies. Plus, the battle barge is just a very very large battleship (second biggest after the necron battleship and almost as tough).

The titan level stuff is gonna be a lot better, but very rare. The imperial one is going to be the ramilies class star fort. On its own it's roughly equal to a midgame fleet in power. Each quadrant can outshoot a battleship handily, it gets 16 fighter squads on its own, 4 battleships worth of hp, and on top of that you can add the rest of the world's defenses. The downside is stuff like that is going to be limited to only a few per game (and lost ones count against the limit, you'll be given constructors at the start of the game and that's it). Other stuff we've been thinking about making 'titan class' for their respective factions is the chaos planet killer (guess how that does at bombardment), an eternal crusader style ship fortress monastary (the eternal crusader is a giant oversized heresy era black templars battle barge about as powerful as two battle barges with docking bays big enough for escorts).

Anyway, less about titan class stuff and more about what the imperials might get. The imperials are the turtling race, their tactics tend revolve around absorbing the enemy's attack and then following it up with a counterstrike while the enemy's weak so the transports are their main assault option. The tau are more of a fleet based race with neutral priorities, they can mount a mobile defense or attack with equal ease and hopefully all carriers will be able to launch a few waves of troops mounted in mantas (but I'm not sure how that'd work quite yet, and about all their caps are carriers to some degree) and chaos is all about the psychotic attack so they should get occasional nasty stuff and their titan is the planet killer which is going to be able to pretty much instagib a planet (although it'll be habitable after a little while, but their style is mostly attack till the enemy fleet tries to stop them, kill it and keep killing and taking planets with transport mounted traitors and the odd marine raid/assault, so leaving planets to a mop-up wave of transports isnt' a big deal).

Also, we've been considering making some source of severly limited (IE set number in a game) allied ships, and one the imperials would get is an inquisitorial black ship, which will definitely have some serious planet hurting capability, but you wouldn't get but one or two. Same goes for traitor marine ships in chaos and deimurg for tau (well not the planet hurting but the limits bit), so something a lot like your idea might just happen (plus the modeller found a basis for the model that he loves, always a good sign).

That and you really don't need to cancel out the vanilla races in the mod just yet. The current release would be so much better if you left the default models in game and replaced them every release. The same process would work well for the research as well (at least from a gameplay perspective. I've no idea whether it's possible with the coding you've done so far.), and allow for the construction of space stations until such time as you have the game modded to your liking. I hadn't realized that space stations had become such an incredibly important part of my strategy until I was missing them in your mod.

We do need to cancel out the vanilla races, it physically doesn't work with the armor/damage types and having them would violate GW's IP regulations and end up with the mod destroyed or something. I have no desire to make lawsuit bait. Researches are coming soon, and they'll be rather different, we just want to get the ships and basic mechanics working before adding research. And don't worry about star bases, quite a few of the races will get them, including the imperials (soon), although the imperial one will have quite a few civilian options as well as the traditional defense stuff.

Watching random beams shoot out of technicolored cubes kind of put me off, which is kind of a shame because I really dig what you've done with the gameplay. Good job so far though. Keep it up.

Defensive buildings are coming soon, don't worry. They're the next thing I'll be chiding the modeller to make =p. Well, those and the starbases. They won't be in the patch I'll release tomorrow or so, but the next version will have them. Glad to hear you like the gameplay.

 

And seriously, I'm a huge fan of long posts, especially about my mod, so lay it on me . Just don't be surprised if I have a lot to say in reply.

on Jul 03, 2009

Wow guys, you have really come a long way! Dunno if you remember me, but I was around when you guys started out. I dont have entrentchment yet, so I cant play test just yet, but i will soon. Keep it up, your all doing great work! Once I get entrentchment, Ill help any way I can. One area I figure myself to be good at is filming/film editing, so I can make some trailers for you guys if you want? Just a tip (I know it was rushed) but in that IN trailer up top, dont pan so fast, takes the scale/majesty out of it. Otherwise, it all looks awesome so far!

on Jul 03, 2009

Yeah, I know about the imperial/chaos generic gc, I just don't know where to come by pics and my camera's so bad I'm not likely to buy one. Do you have one? If so, the best way to get it in is to give us a side view, top and bottom and front views. Also, I'm so gonna dispute that uniqueness claim in favor of my favorite chaos ship, the repulsive. First off it has a unique chassis and all that, and it also has sweet nose weapons and a dorsal lance battery to go with its heavy guns. I want that, but really, if you want that ship, we need pics.

 

You can still put repulsive in for chaos only and then avenger in for imp only. Makes sense to me

on Jul 03, 2009

Chang739
Wow guys, you have really come a long way! Dunno if you remember me, but I was around when you guys started out. I dont have entrentchment yet, so I cant play test just yet, but i will soon. Keep it up, your all doing great work! Once I get entrentchment, Ill help any way I can. One area I figure myself to be good at is filming/film editing, so I can make some trailers for you guys if you want? Just a tip (I know it was rushed) but in that IN trailer up top, dont pan so fast, takes the scale/majesty out of it. Otherwise, it all looks awesome so far!

I remember you back when you were galacticacag (think I got the name right, but I remember the change). I was actually wondering whether that was you who submitted a mix of IN ships and space marine ships to gothicomp. Thrawn knows it's poor by his standards, he slapped it together in a night before he left for vacation. How've you been? Also, glad to see you back.

You can still put repulsive in for chaos only and then avenger in for imp only. Makes sense to me

Once we get the avenger style hull, the 4 versions of it should be a relatively simple bay swap.

 

Important question, does anybody know how in the world the line: firingAlignmentType "Default" can be changed to make the dauntless fire its strong nose lances rather than its weak side guns?

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