jump tech

Hello,

I'm a new player of Twilight of the Arnor. I didn't explore all the tech trees, but I'm looking for :

1) A ship that can contains others ships (tipically a mothership which contains light fighters)

2) A space jump travel tech for travelling from one place to another in an instant

Do These techs exist ?

Is there a mod that add them ?

Is it only possible to implement them in a mod ?

 

Thanx for your answers

7,308 views 18 replies
Reply #1 Top
1) No. Also see the 'official carrier thread'. The engine simply doesn't allow carriers or motherships.

2) No. There are wormhole anomalies that will do that, but they disappear after use and can't be placed in the editor or generated through technology.
Reply #2 Top
About the best you can do for #1 is to fleet together a large/massive-hulled ship, with a few tiny hulled ships. It doesnt actually "carry" the smaller ships, but you can pretend it does  :p 

And the wormholes only work for ships with a survey module, also.
Reply #3 Top
Further addition to the response to point 2:

These wormholes also teleport the ship randomly. Meaning that reloading and using the wormhole again will send it somewhere else entirely. Also, only ships with a survey module can enter a wormhole...
Reply #4 Top
About the best you can do for #1 is to fleet together a large/massive-hulled ship, with a few tiny hulled ships. It doesnt actually "carry" the smaller ships, but you can pretend it does   And the wormholes only work for ships with a survey module, also.
End of quote


Yes, but your fleet will travel with the lower engine speed of your ships.
I would like to have a mothership very fast carrying light fighters very slow (but well armed)



Is it possible to have carry tech and jum tech in a future patch (I can dream) or is it to complicated to add them in the current game ?

thx
Reply #5 Top
Carriers, from my understanding, will never happen. I think the devs don't want them in the game.
Reply #6 Top
In ToA the Terrans have Warp Bubbles, that increase the total speed of the fleet, when put on a ship that is in that fleet.
So you could make a huge-hulled ship and add a Warp Bubble, so that it can speed up slow fighters. "Carry" if you will.
Reply #8 Top
I would think you could mod the game to create an engine with 90 speed or something I think. That would simulate warping to another location, though to use it fairly you wouldn't want any non-human players to have it, and you would want to limit yourself to more realistic per-turn movement when not simulating a jump.

You could probably also mod the game to have "fighter bay" as a weapon class, and do up graphics so that instead of firing a "Missle" or "laser" the ship fires "Fighters" at other ships. Then you just add a fighter bay to a ship like adding any weapon.

The second option would take a lot of work, but the first one wouldn't be to hard as far as I know from my limited experience with the editing tools.
Reply #9 Top
The downside to making a 90 speed engine, as has been pointed out to me, is the possibility for abuse. That actually makes a ship with 90 turn points. It could move 10 units, attack six ships orbiting a planet, move 4 units, attack five ships orbiting a planet, etc. You can subdivide that 90 speed, whereas a true warp engine would need some sort of "move a maximum of 90, but only 1 move" limitation.
Reply #10 Top
yes, A 90 speed engine is too powerfull !
A good balanced jump tech should have limitation like :
- only 1 jump every x turn (need to recharge batteries)
- cannot jump too close a planet (x cases, need to use normal engine for the last moves)


but I think it is not possible to make a mod with this kind of tech
I'm wrong ?
Reply #11 Top
No, you're right. Anything resembling such a jump drive simply can't be modded.

An additional weapon tech-branch for fighter could be possible, but they would still have to be treated like one of the three existing weapon classes.
Reply #12 Top
Still saying that the Terran ToA warp bubble can do wonders for "carrying a fighter fleet", of course it's not a carrier, but it's the closest thing to something similar. It requires no modding either...
Reply #13 Top
I've never cared so much either way about carries. As i see it, the idea doesn't come out in the type of battles that this game has. As suggested, having a bunch of tinys is almost the same thing. Carriers would be not much more than a graphical thing and not add anything to game play.


However:
An additional weapon tech-branch for fighter could be possible, but they would still have to be treated like one of the three existing weapon classes.
End of quote


I'd go for this idea, if nothing else a forth weapon / defense type would add a lot of possibilities to the game. Pretty much make it harder to play which is a good thing. So you would have Drones which get stronger and increase in muber with new techs and you'd have something like anti-aircraft (spacecraft ?) guns on your ships.

But to really make the idea work it would have to be more than just a new weapon type. You would want a ship not necessarily targeted by the drones to be able to take them out, this would be different than anything the game currently does. It would be like having a shild ship that can protect other ships in the fleet.
Reply #14 Top
Still saying that the Terran ToA warp bubble can do wonders for "carrying a fighter fleet", of course it's not a carrier, but it's the closest thing to something similar. It requires no modding either...
End of quote
That's exactly the way I've been handling it.

I've got a race that uses a bunch of tiny/small ships (mechs, actually), and I just put a larger hull in the fleet that has a warp bubble and other assorted fleet-wide bonus modules, and assume that that ship acts as a command carrier.

I'd still love to see proper carriers, though. They aren't just a "graphical thing" unless you make them one, by treating fighters as just another weapon. That, obviously, would be the over-simplified and kind of lame way of handling the whole thing.

Reply #15 Top
Problem is also that you can't decide what ship takes damage on any given turn.
Reply #16 Top
Problem is also that you can't decide what ship takes damage on any given turn.
End of quote
Heheh. Sadly, you kind of can.

I've played nearly two games using medium-hulled vessels to support fleets of tiny ships, and not once in any battle has an enemy ever targeted a tiny ship if a medium-sized target was available.

I know the AI likes to go for warp bubbles and fleet-support modules, but I honestly don't know why it's so reliable.

The only time I've ever lost a tiny ship was when a planet was attacked that was defended by only tiny vessels.

-Note to self: Do NOT defend a planet with swarms of tiny vessels unless you have an Orbital Fleet Manager!

While odd, I don't think this behavior should be changed. It's fun, and that's the only thing that matters.
Reply #17 Top
Yes, there are now effective "shoot me!" modules  :D 

There are times when you want an OFM and times you don't. If that fleet would lose anyway, you gain more by having the invader waste several moves killing tiny ships individually.

Of course, defending in orbit is always a sub-optimal choice.
Reply #18 Top
My large hull + Warpbubble3 and defense coordinator, a single nightmare torpedo and tons of missile defense, functions perfectly when it comes to speeding up my small hulls and soaking up damage...