MOD: STA2 Upgrade Project 2014 - A stock A2 mod in FO

posted on February 13th, 2014, 8:43 am

I'm so glad I found this mod. Playing A2 with a facelift is great. And the mod plays smoothly (except the first Fed mission. The planet colonization event isn't triggering)

HOWEVER..
A2 was never a game that was nicely balanced.

ATM I'm re-balancing it for myself simply because many thing bother me - scale of ships, crew, their survivability. Even ships like the Saber aren't that small of fragile. And especially the Defiant.
Borg swarm you instead of being the massive bricks that they should be.
Heck, if anything, ship in ST are very durable - even shuttles have been known to take a ridiculous amount of abuse.
so my goal is to make each ship feel as a large, expensive unit.

So far I've added a Galaxy-X (as an upgrade to the Galaxy), played with the scales, trippled the cost and build time, vastly increased the durability of ships, added more weapons on some of them, put the Vor'Cha as the klingong battleship1, etc..

I plan on adding some ships from the SFO, like the Miranda, Ambassador, Excelsior.
Since you seem to want to re-balance the game yourself, I can give you the files once I'm done. Maybe you can use them.

posted on February 13th, 2014, 3:25 pm

basically ive adjusted torpedos so they don't do loops coming out of their launchers.. (omegaturn = 0) and such. Also adjusted the size of the phaser flares so they aren't so big... LOL always bothered me. Changed all Federation photon torpedos so that they do the same amount of damage.. because they should..and quantum torpedos to about double the damage of a photon.

posted on March 6th, 2014, 4:57 am

Well, for the scope of the mod I wanted to keep it as stock as possible, but yes I did make some initial re-balance changes that I felt personally are better or that I wanted however, beyond that I wanted to keep it closer to stock than not.

Once I've completed the mod to my satisfaction I would like to explore making a mod that uses this mod as a parent and visit re-balancing the game and see how that goes so would definitely consider anything at that point. I've been scouring old posts on stock A2 balancing, but not sure if anyone every followed them through?

I've just completed editing every instant action and single player mission maps so my goal is to release the next version in the coming days. I've been working on the AI and feel it plays better, but will let others be the judge of that and I also want to write new build lists and provide extra build lists for maps with limited/moderate/high resources respectively so that the AI isn't stuck with one set of build lists for all map environments.

The next version will have a name change for the mod as well so I hope everyone likes it. Will post more soon.

posted on March 8th, 2014, 11:43 pm

wow. Haven't been here in two years or so. Place looks nice. Good job guys. Saw this thread and thought I'd help a little with keeping the old girl alive and kicking. A2 has now followed me to my seventh laptop. As a FleetOps mod, lol. Still play it once in awhile. I've done everything with it I possibly can think of to do. Nice to see people still do other things with A2. Couple things below to help.

1. To the OP - Please help yourself to anything I've released anywhere(FF, MSFC mostly) to help your mod in any way you see fit. I think I did a planet mod and I know I did some new planets for the BSG Half Race Mod which turned out rather nicely. There are also some Terran Empire ships available at MSFC which Jetfreak and I did, I think. The permissions in the mods were specific at the time, but I am rescinding them all for you. If anyone has a problem with my doing this, they can reach me via email.

2. the 'wavy planet texture thingie' is an ODF mod and pretty simple.
Find the following line in a planet ODF - turbulence = 1. Reset the value to 0 and you're all set. Please note since this is an ODF mod, it automatically breaks multi-player for A2. I am unsure if this will affect FleetOps.

posted on March 9th, 2014, 1:27 am

TF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Whats up buddy!!!!

posted on March 9th, 2014, 1:40 am

Awesome to see you here TF. Thank you for the offer to use your works. I had talked to KJC over at MSFC and he said he'd drop you a msg for me regarding the ImpSP Campaign mod usage so I assume this is in response to that? At any rate thank you very much and cool to see you. Stick around some as I'll be releasing the next update to this mod hopefully by tomorrow.

I'll definitely use your wavy cloud fix. Wow, glad I logged on. Don't be a stranger so much

posted on March 9th, 2014, 5:15 am

Thunderfoot! I missed you! How have you been?

posted on March 9th, 2014, 6:00 am

Well, thank you guys! Certainly wasn't expecting the warm welcome. Although considering the quality of the people around here, I should have. Been off doing other things and got a little homesick for A2 lately. Suffice to say I think for now I prefer my Star Trek, ahem, offline.

rifraf - I never got around to doing the Borg part for the Improved SP Campaign. I would imagine a little Find and Replace Action in Notepad would work to get something going. Add it in, along with the Physics Project, if you like. The last version of the Physics Project finaly dealt with the fact Starbases never miss and people could shoot further than they could see and everyone had the same ranges for everything.

What I was mostly trying to do was make the AI a little scarier and a lot more challenging. The released version is actually toned down quite a bit from what I originally made. That one was terrifying. One of the things I noticed was the Dev team at Mad Doc always seemed to take the easy way out. They would cheat instead of trying to make the AI play under the same conditions as a regular player does. The problems were they bottlenecked the AI at both resource gathering and asset production. Then they just ignored resouces and build times when they increased the difficulty level.

The SP Campaign was my somewhat poor attempt to level the playing field so the Borg and the Cardassians did things the way players are required to do them. I did the build lists in the order I and Freyr built things and this order made sense. I adjusted some of the boolean logic so that when the AI decided to attack a Starbase it was with a proper fleet.

Permission to use anything I've ever done is hereby granted to everyone. No point in spending all that time making a mod if no one plays or uses it. I only ask this:

Some of my stuff is actually "our" stuff. Please go and ask the others listed as authors/contributors if it is olay with them to use it prior to using it.

EDIT: rifraf, you and anyone who helped you with this is a frakkin' genius! Just D/L'd and installed this thing and I've really enjoyed yself this afterrnoon. Minor problem with fahreS' Planet Atmospheres in game but this is a ScaleSod issue and easily fixed.

posted on March 10th, 2014, 3:39 am

Mod v1.0 is now ready. LInk in first post with new intro description.

posted on March 10th, 2014, 2:01 pm

Hello,

There's something wrong with the wf*.tga files -- they are 24bit instead of 32. Missing alpha layer means there are black square backgrounds around the wireframe icon in gui. You might already know it. Just want to remind you since the problem remains in both 0.9 and 1.0 releases.

And thank you so much for the great work! Please keep modding!

posted on March 10th, 2014, 4:19 pm

Edit: I checked all the wireframes and they display properly in game so I figured I misunderstood you. After I reread what you said I realized I did. They are all in fact 24bit tga's and there is no option to choose 32 bit when saving them. They are as Aad Moerman made them. I could try another image editing program and see what it comes up with? I guess I never gave it a second thought how they looked?

I did find a mistake though. I never included the textures for the klingon kyard. I added the missing texture zip to the first post with the mod download. Sorry about that everyone.

[yochenhsieh]

posted on March 11th, 2014, 2:11 am

Last edited by yochenhsieh on March 11th, 2014, 2:33 am, edited 2 times in total.

I use wfbattle.tga and 8472_battlewire.tga for example, so you can see the difference:

wfbattle.png (59.4 KiB) Viewed 765 times

8472_battlewire.png (51.69 KiB) Viewed 765 times

The 8472_battlewire.tga has alpha channel layer to control transparency, can your graphic program add/edit/remove alpha layer?

addalphalayer.png (50.86 KiB) Viewed 765 times

The program in above pic is GIMP. After you add the layer, you need to create a "mask" on it so the black square can be transparent.

posted on March 11th, 2014, 2:20 am

Here I show how I did with the new alpha layer:

alphalayer.png (23.66 KiB) Viewed 762 times

editalpha.png (50.24 KiB) Viewed 762 times

Final image should look like this:

final.png (55.58 KiB) Viewed 762 times

posted on March 11th, 2014, 2:46 am

I see what you're saying now. I have GIMP so that should be no problem. I guess I just never thought much about them even though I saw that they weren't a transparent background in game.

I'll double check with Aad and make sure he won't mind if they are redone and then add that to my list of to do's. Thanks for pointing it out and the demos.

Also, a few pics of the lighting additions:

FOScreenShot_140301_190748.png (1.51 MiB) Viewed 757 times

FOScreenShot_140301_190718.png (1.51 MiB) Viewed 757 times

FOScreenShot_140301_190731.png (1.55 MiB) Viewed 757 times

posted on March 11th, 2014, 12:37 pm

Hiya

I help Aad out quit a bit (animations and stuff) I know he doesnt normally mind people editing his stuff but if you guys are wanting I'm currently looking into improving animations i made for him (and chiletreks 8472) so when done I can send over