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 6)
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on Dec 11, 2008

Well just remember to make the bigger ship you put in the raid to attack ships and buildings/bomb... not go after trade ships.

 

Also, the troop transport doesn't bomb by default, which is kind of annoying. Maybe you should just remove the laser it has and just make it a planet bomber?

on Dec 11, 2008

well i was going to tinker with textur'in these for you but for some reason 3ds wont import these, just the regular .mesh from vanilla sins will it import....sad i wanted to give it a go...

on Dec 11, 2008

the tau will probbly be in as soon as i get some more of the models cos at the moment i have the castelian (or however its spelt) the protector and i think its the warden. i've also already got their strikecraft prepared so as soon as inert is a little less busy i'll get him to make me some tau!

prezo

on Dec 11, 2008

Hmmm... that's very odd. If you want to try texturing, we'd be happy to set you up with on of the .objs, just ask in our modcraft forum. I have no idea why it wouldn't import our meshs, try the overlord, because a lot of them have minor errors that don't effect gameplay but may confuse 3ds.

on Dec 11, 2008

also they are probbly optimised differently and are in a text form, or they could be a newer version of the .mesh file than the importer... but i dont know what importer you are useing so i couldent exactly say

on Dec 11, 2008

i got some script of this forum, everyone is hating and wanting the first one but i cant find a file link to download the first version sadly....

on Dec 11, 2008

I think its spelled Castellan, but more importantly than spelling will the Emmissary cruiser be there? the first tau interstealler space ship i saw, and it is still my favorit

and x i agree playing with humans would be fun, and its probaly the only way to test multiplayer ballance.

(danm strikecrafts are defecting from my Emperor again, they probaly heard the tau are on the way) 

on Dec 11, 2008

So Kiernyc will make a forum post on the specifics of what we managed to test in like 40 minutes, but A) the Despoiler is probably the right size for caps and the model itself is still funky. The prow that is. Also, the IN crusier that is supposed to have just weapons batteries has just lances on the model (is it a proxy model for now?).

 

 

Its more flat than the ingame model is now too.

on Dec 11, 2008

i got some script of this forum, everyone is hating and wanting the first one but i cant find a file link to download the first version sadly....

I don't hate, I just want. That'd be awesome if you could get us even a very very simple texture. By very I mean make the prows white and the shade of team color not too heavily affected by the lighting so it looks darkish even when lit brightly and still has color when not lit so brightly. Some trim around the guns would be nice if you're feeling particularly energetic. This of course assumes you're working with imperials. Anything you could do would be a great help.

 

I think its spelled Castellan, but more importantly than spelling will the Emmissary cruiser be there? the first tau interstealler space ship i saw, and it is still my favorit

Yeah, all the tau ships will be there. Does anybody have the real forge world rules for the forge world fleet? The experimentals they have online suck (they're meh at best, too fragile and unmaneuverable and not enough firepower, and lose a lot of the character the SG tau had.

 

and x i agree playing with humans would be fun, and its probaly the only way to test multiplayer ballance.

Any time after this saturday, I'm free to play, just tell me when you're free if you want to. I'll even answer any questions you can think to ask.

 

(danm strikecrafts are defecting from my Emperor again, they probaly heard the tau are on the way)

First priority once I have some time to experiment is that and the Nova Cannon.

 

A) the Despoiler is probably the right size for caps and the model itself is still funky. The prow that is.

Yeah, it's a placeholder, and it does its job until iNert gets a good one out.

 

Also, the IN crusier that is supposed to have just weapons batteries has just lances on the model (is it a proxy model for now?).

Yep, the same reason why the Dominator has 0 damage torps on what should be an NC nose too, and why the dictator has an NC nose and launches torps out of dorsal lance batteries (odd looking, but it works).

 

Also, if you want to see it, the preliminary version of the second dev journal, a fleet tactics guide is up. It'll have to wait till saturday for me to test it, but it should be good advice, not much has changed since tabletop. Please make some suggestions/comments and tell me what you want me to write the next one about. It's right here

 

Finally, I have two things I want to ask.

1) I've been thinking about how to make escorts more survivable in battle and still survivable. What would you say to making them have a 30 second reload time on their guns instead of 20, keeping their DPS the same. That way, attacking the enemy's stern and retreating out of range would be easier to do, and you'd get more time to recharge your shields before passes. It'd also decrease the level of micro needed. What do you think?

2) I need to be reminded about all the planet types there are in 40k, but also want ideas about how to represent various planets. For example, a shrine world would quite possibly increase culture as the Imperials use it to spread the Imperial Cult or their enemies use it for propaganda/sinister purposes.

If you could make the suggestions look like this, it'd be great:

Inhabited world:
Resources: medium (2-3)
Population: medium
Appearance: Stock terran/Sins plus savannah/forest/old naval base
Extras: nothing, just bland

 

Oh, and now's a good time to segway into two announcements about the planets:

-We get to use all the resources of sins plus, which is great (thanks danman! I guess I should shill 7DS even though it's more popular than god so dl it and enjoy it, make danman and his team happy)

-Unless you guys object, different planet types will have multiple meshs. The reason for this is simple. Most of the worlds are not defined by a single climatological characteristic. For instance, if the life on catacha weren't so damned nasty, it wouldn't be all that much of a deathworld, but would still be very very green. This means that we can get a lot more variety in the meshs and make the maps look a lot more varied than in stock sins, and feel a lot more free to make planet types that have nothing to do with their appearance (do something holy on a world and it could become a holy world, it doesn't matter what kind of plants there are). The one thing about this is it'd be a bit harder to tell what types of planet everything is at a glance, so I want to know your opinions on it before I make all the planets. Thanks

on Dec 11, 2008

1) I've been thinking about how to make escorts more survivable in battle and still survivable. What would you say to making them have a 30 second reload time on their guns instead of 20, keeping their DPS the same. That way, attacking the enemy's stern and retreating out of range would be easier to do, and you'd get more time to recharge your shields before passes. It'd also decrease the level of micro needed. What do you think?

 

I think that's the way to go...otherwise they're gone pretty fast

on Dec 11, 2008

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, it was an idea I got for the eldar originally, and I think it'd work well for the escorts. One thing to remember is that escorts are not frigates. They're a lot more maneuverable and have disproportionate firepower, but are very fragile. The best way to use them (I think) is a series of slashing attacks on the enemies' rear, getting out of range before they can respond.

on Dec 11, 2008

Oh also (since I guess kiernyc is posting tomorrow now) the IN capital ships don't broadside. Granted, a Retribution vs a Despoiler and the Retribution wins. Despoiler vs an Emperor and the Emperor class gets pwnd.

 

It is funny when the IN torpedo spam one ship since the torpedo explosion is the planet bomb nuke thing.

on Dec 11, 2008

Well here's the initial issues we found...some of them have been posted by Thrawn already but I'll say them again!!

Here goes:

- Battleships don't broadside (though cruisers do yay!)

-Battleships (maybe cruisers) are way too agile...retribution goes like 328190312 mph

-Bombers freak out and just don't work for Battleships

- Despoiler is the right scale for a battleship, Imperial ones are wee little things...wayyyyyyy too small

- Chaos Carrier cruisers is also not the same scale as other cruisers

Here are some pics now :

Yes, that wee yellow thing is a Retribution....Despoiler scale ok!

Retribution compared to a Kol.

Bunch of size comparisons.

The Emperor and Despoiler go head to head!

Mini carrier cruiser

on Dec 11, 2008

Yeah, but it's such a nice big explosion.... I couldn't resist....

And yeah, it's actually a good thing that they don't broadside. Their torpedoes' expected damage is almost the same as that of the broadsides, and if they go in straight, then they can wiggle to fire all their weapons in a fast salvo. Also, when they go in, they're in the best aspect to do the most damage they can. The battlecruisers and battleships have their dorsals locked forward, so that's their most damaging aspect, plus you can make wide turns to fire all your guns. It's probably the best aspect for them.

 

Ret's the same speed as the IN cruisers, if it's higher, I'll fix it.

 

- Despoiler is the right scale for a battleship, Imperial ones are wee little things...wayyyyyyy too small

known.

on Dec 11, 2008

They don't fire their broad sides at all unless you micro it for them to move their behinds (which maybe too micro?). Also X you did notice that last picture right.... is that supposed to be that way?

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