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 33)
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on Jul 19, 2009

okie doks, unfortunatly i cant get sins and the expack till atleast next week... payday... and a speeding ticket.. kinda.. threw me back ( im fighting the ticket  but thats beyond the point) .. but i had another question, im watching the videos. and sas i watch i was wondering.. the broadsides of the ships are weapon  battereis, i dont see them firing jsut the lance turrets, i was wonderign is that one of the feature that atm is missing since this is not complete yet? jw.

on Jul 19, 2009

no, the ships aren't supposed to ONLY fire their lances. The lances are primarily mounted forward, like the torpedoes, meaning that as the ships move into the enemies' firing line(s), they fire the Lances and Torpedoes. Lances are also mounted so that they can fire to the side on some ships.

With the Imperial Navy (that's the race in the video at present), their ships CAN'T fire ALL their weapons in ONE direction. Which does deprive some firepower, however, where the IN shines is when their ships get into the enemies firing line and the close-range assaults that ensue. The fact that they can essentially shoot anywhere around themselves gives them the ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously. While I am not sure if this is in the MOD, as you would need to up the TargetCount/Bank (basically the # of ships that it can target in one direction).

on Jul 19, 2009

Some ships don't have lances, some don't have weapons batteries, some have a mix, and some have hangars. It depends on what class ship you build

on Jul 19, 2009

Ah, I forgot to mention that. Also, NeighborKid, I AM NOT ON THE BFG MOD TEAM. I've read a couple of PDFs that I D/L from the GW site, and I do love playing the mod, plus I've read the forum posts on modcraft, so I know a little bit. But not much.

on Jul 19, 2009

ok but what im saying is this look here.  where i have circled, i was wondering those are weapons right?   thats all i was asking if any one noticed them firing if they are indeed weapons. which i dont know my self this is y im asking

on Jul 19, 2009

the top line are the weapons batteries, yes. As for the lower section, no idea. The mod team has that ship, which is the Retribution-class Battleship I believe, with torpedoes in the prow, and lances mounted dorsally (on the top). There's a screen of the Retribution firing its dorsal lances at a target.

on Jul 19, 2009

I thought so, i was jsut askiogn cause i didnt seem any ship with the weapon battery fire when it turned its broad side thats all.

on Jul 19, 2009

Well the mod team (I'm just a good friend lol) have decdied to base what weapons the ships have off the rule book, so if a class of a cruiser doesn't have a lance in the rule book, it doesn't have lances ingame. But yes those little turret things on the top of the Retribution are lances, and lances will sometimes be on the side of the ship where weapons batteries are, and they (again) look like little turrets

 

 

That captial ship has all lance batteries on the side (although it isn't in the mod... yet. It might be)

on Jul 19, 2009

as for the "wings" on the imperial ships, those have one lance turret on them but the tubes sticking out of them aren't weapons.

 

EDIT: I believe the one turret on the wings are more aesthetic and count as part of the dorsal lance battery

on Jul 19, 2009

Hey guys i see no read me in teh file, whats the path where i put the BFG 1.2 Revision 6 folder to?

 

Edit- found it   i love the mod so far took a bit for me to learn but i love it. I hope to see the Apocolypse class battlship in the future its my favorite

on Jul 20, 2009

I'm finally back to a reliable internet connection, I'll try to answer everything I can, but I'm pretty busy right now, so I won't be able to get anything more than I already have done for a while. However, I have all chaos ships other than the planet killer done (can't figure out how to make the dratted thing with an ability) and all tau ships of ther than the wardens and the orcas done, they will be wierd, because they aren't supposed to be warp capable, instead relying on a parent ship. For now, I'm just going to make it a spawning ability with a 5-10 minute duration and recharge time. There may well be a better way to make it work though, and I want to find one before I release. The orcas are included in the cost of the ships that can carry them, that's why some ships are considerably more expensive than they look like they should be.

another thing how come youtube has higher quiality when its not on youtube.com?

Because I embedded the 720p hd version rather than the standard because the standard made it really hard to see the details.

where i have circled, i was wondering those are weapons right? thats all i was asking if any one noticed them firing if they are indeed weapons. which i dont know my self this is y im asking

They are weapons batteries and they do fire, but the effects for them are still standard sins effects, and they're pretty small right now, especially compared to lances. I may ask bailknight to use his effects for WBs, which'd make them stand out more.

The retribution will actually try to fire forward, since its torps are more powerful than its side guns. That's why it doesn't fire them often. I think the wing things are sensor probes or legacies of an older design, because they show up on ships that don't have nose lances. The apocalypse will be in once we get the model done, but our modeller's computer's knocked out and I'm not sure what he can do, so I'll be devoting most of my effort to the additional races pack right now. Once I get tau and chaos I'll probably release the first version, then some combination of necrons, orks and eldar should be in the next update, which would leave admech and polishing for the third. They should be really quick to get an unpolished gist of the races, polish on the non ships parts will take a while longer.

Right now, chaos and tau use imperial buildings, but I think I'll tweak their costs and stats a bit to get their flavor right until I make them distinct from imperials. Chaos will get raiding and attacking abilities to counterbalance a weak civilian and tactical side, and tau will get stronger civilian than imperials (it may be a buff to tau or a nerf to imperium, I'm not sure yet) but weaker tactical.

Be warned, this is very incredibly alpha placeholder material graphicswise (especially now that inert's having computer problems), a lot of the tau ships are cubes, but it should be fun and add to the mod if you don't mind the placeholder stuff.

on Jul 20, 2009

so wehn can we expect this next release? jw

on Jul 20, 2009

In a few days, depends on when I get time and how much time I get. I'm rather busy, and I'm still not sure whether I want to tweak the buildings' stats. I'd say Friday or Saturday sometime is the latest it'll be out. It's pretty much done if I don't tweak the buildings, and chaos already have half of their civilian cutback complete, next is figuring out what to give them to make up for it. What I'm thinking right now is give them the vasari salvage capability and a raiding ability where they land cultists or something who divert some of the planet's production to chaos (or give the chaos player some income as the case may be). Both of those should encourage the chaos player to play agressively and make raids into the enemy's space frequently, like chaos should. At least I'm going to try that. Tau are going to get something fun on the civilian side. It might not be there yet, but I think tau are going to end up with stronger civilian stuff and the imperium will have stronger defenses, but those two will be the top choices for civilian/tactical based strategies.

 

Anyway, it'll probably be sooner than that, but it depends on how much time I can make.

 

Edit, just got the orcas done, but it's really looking a lot like friday or saturday is going to be the release date because I'll only get tonight maybe to work, and I still really want to get the planet killer working even though the tau don't have a super yet. Between that and the buildings, it'll probably take me more than one night.

on Jul 22, 2009

Well i hope to be killing planet killer ships with imperial capitols looking foward to it !

on Jul 22, 2009

hookay, I've just got to get the spawning working (and I know how to do it now, it's not hard) and chaos buildings tweaked to proper stats and I'll be releasing. Should be able to get it done tomorrow and release it friday if I'm lucky at all. The planet killer is going to be pretty nasty, it can outgun a side of the ramilies, not even counting the armageddon gun, which combines the strong suits of nova cannon and cleansing brilliance, but it doesn't have the AC strength or sheer durability. It should be really nasty though.

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