Ideas and suggestions for the Vaygr Thread - R.E.A.R.M. - The Unofficial Classic HW 2 Expansion mod for Homeworld 2

Post all suggestions and ideas that you have for the Vaygr right here.

Suicide drones! Kinda like proximity mines, except you can move them after they've been deployed! (meh, I know. Probably not the best suggestion, but Pouk seems to have the Vagyr down pat... so I am just throwing out whatever comes to mind.)

Seems like it'd make a great capitol killer when used with fighters and bombers... Or you could give them a really big splash damage radius, and would help frigates and bigger ships clear out those pesky interceptors and bombers...

closest to the suicide drones is this thing:
Shipyards.relicnews.com
It's also there:
Shipyards.relicnews.com

From some reason everyone thought it was an interceptor, but I always saw it as a missile/ missile drone. It has even a schematic in which the warhead is detached.

I will try to include this into Vaygr drone class someday.

Dude, that's pretty badass... I like it! Can't wait to see what you do with it man! Your work so far has been 120% *thumbs up*

I personally always saw it as a small drone or probe from the concept art. I think my favorite interation of it in a mod so far is a Prog fighter in FX. But for this mod? Hmmm... Whatever you do with it, do it better than anyone else has! Would love to see it in-game exactly as it is in the concept art though (no-one has bothered to create it with true to the art textures so far). Okay, maybe without the black/yellow checkerboard, but still, looking foreward to see what you do with it.

Huh, that first one's my avatar from RN, would be pretty choice to see it in-game.

(Uh, Hornit, would you mind deleting the duplicate thread, I keep opening up both.)

Hell_Diguner:
In the best case it should work like on the concept, the warhead detachable from the body, but it won't be easy.

tadamir:
You're right, that is your avatar.

It's not duplicity, he've made the other one for Hiigaran, while this is Vaygr thread.

Duh, sorry Hornit, didn't notice the one key word, dumb of me.
IGNORE!

Had another idea for the Vagyr... I noticed that the Higgy "Gunships" aren't quite gunships... they're more like tanks with really crappy guns... But why not make a vagyr equivilent that isn't such a pussy? I can most definitely see the vagyr taking a corvette or frigate design, stripping off alot of armour, then slapping on as many guns as they can fit into the hull... Viola! You have a pilot sitting on top of an engine, armed with a ridiculous amount of guns for the ship's size!

Just an idea that I'm throwing out there....

I see gunships as tanks as well, but I don't believe that their guns are that crappy. The true is, that Relic choosed the ships to be tougher, to stand more damage (or as you see it, that they choosed weapons to be weaker, but that's really the same thing, just different point of view.) I respect that decision, I'm not going to change the "weapons against armor" balancing in the whole game and I'm certainly won't do such exception for just one ship. The true is, that the weapons appear as weaker, but it also means that your ships won't die as often.
It actually gets worse (the weapon/armor balancing) with the armor upgrades, because there are no weapon upgrades, just armor upgrades. But to be honest I also agree with that. Because you have three options:
1)-to make both armor and weapons upgrades. And it actually do have a problem with this solution, in this case it isn't just about me keeping the game as it is, I really don't like it. Before Homeworld I've played Haegemonia. The game was nice, I liked it, but it was based on some very wrong concepts. First of all, there was the unit limit, just like the unit caps in Homeworld, but instead of limits for each unit class, you could have like ten squadrons and you could fill it with ships from any class you wanted. And because the smallest ships were useless compared to larger ships in this game (not like fighters and bombers in HW2), you've ended up with the fleet of battleships everytime, anything else would be worse. And because of that, the only way how to increase your chances was the research. But there was both weapons and armor research. And it didn't mean anything. Your ships weren't improving relatively to the opponents ships, because he was researching the same things. You could make it worse by not researching, but if you did research, the situation was exactly the same, you didn't see any improvement at all, because the damage grew together with armor. So better way in my oppinion is to allow resarch of only one aspect:
2)-weapons researches, which means that at the end the ships will die faster.
3)-armor research, which means that the ships will stay longer.
And I believe the last option, the one we already have, is the best.

Except the fact that I was talking half of the time about something else, I hope I've made my point.

And now about the weapons itself:
I'm glad you've mentioned the tanks. Because I like to compare smaller ships to tanks, because tank uses the same concept -strong armor and the main firepower concentrated to the single weapon. The thing is, that I really like it this way and I really really hate it the other way. Anytime I accidentally come across some japanese anime (except the "Ghost in the shell" of course), I feel like the whole world gone mad. (You know what I'm talking about, mechs shooting thousands of missiles from their chests.) This mod is trying to be an exact opposite, I love mostly the ships as the Pulsar gunsip or similar, those with realistic armament. And this factor together with the fact that I love Homeworld just as it is and I want my ships to blend in, not to stand out, this everything shapes the mod. This is the mod philosophy and this is something I will keep and this will never change. This is also the difference from lot of others. Lot of mods want to amaze the people with spectacullar large powerfull ships (well, I'll have some too, but you know what I mean), while I want keep the beauty of this game and I want it to be in perfect ballance. I don't know if i can explain it any better, I hope you get the idea.

But yeah, I also could use the short answer as "this is something which will never happen and it's exact opposite to what I want to do", but I wanted to be fair and give you the explanation.

Edited by: Pouk

Fair enough. I respect your decision, it is yer mod after all. I would just like to say that, to me, I would see the vagyr sacrificing speed and armour for firepower. I guess I didn't go about saying that the right way... I was more or less thinking of the Vagyr having a corvette equivelent of the Farichild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, but a bit more fragile. You know what I mean? I guess the best way to portray what I am talking about is to tell you to look up them Scorpion IFVs, you know... the LAV25 with a 240mm cannon instead of the crew compartment/20mm cannon... But as I said, I respect your decisions, you've made a kick ass mod so far (which I look forward to seeing more of...) I'm just carrying on with this because I get the feeling we are talking about 2 different things... If not, then I apologize. Most of all though, don't ruin the awesome balance and thing you got going here because of my rambling... Because I ramble... alot... if you can't tell...

And to be honest, as much as the Higgy gunships are pussies when it comes to damage... I still like em. To me, I wouldn't have it any other way. It'd be like forsaking the Merkava (most heavily armoured tank in the world) for the M1a1 Abrams... Which in my opinion is a piece of shit compared to other modern tanks in today's world. The only thing the Abrams has going for it is its beast of an engine, and its exceedingly sophisticated electronics.

And to be honest, I haaaaate anime. I grew up on BattleTech and Warhammer 40,000. The whole "billions of missles coming out of a robots chest and robots with swords behaving with more agility than a goddamn cheetah" thing is quite... well, I'll be blunt... stupid. SO we are in total agreement on that front.

You know, I got the gunship idea, more or less, from your Vagyr Armed Refinery...I was looking at it and thought to my self "if those collector docks were removed, and some sort of high calibur weapons put in their place, that would make something really f***ing beastly! I would be afraid of that thing!" I don't know. I'll keep playing, I've always got crazy ideas popping into my mind. So with that... Cheers! Keep up your awesome work! Can't wait to see more awesomeness!

Yeah, but that's something slightly different. Your A-10 or LAV-25 examples makes perfect sense and I totally get it, but it doesn't sound the same as "You have a pilot sitting on top of an engine, armed with a ridiculous amount of guns for the ship's size".

Did you read about the "gunboat" idea? We have been talking about the new ship class between the corvette and frigate, which moves as a corvette but it's a lot bigger than corvette (and probably in a squadron of 2). I believe your description is about something like this.

(I could also call them gunships, but there would be a collision with the Hiigaran gunships. So I'm not sure what's better, gunboat ot gunship. I actually wouldn't even mind calling them gunships, why wouldn't Hiigaran call everything under frigate and above fighter as gunship, I think it's possible, I have no problem with that. But gunboat term is also problematic, you would have gunboats above gunships.
-I have an idea, what do you think: Let's call the Hiigaran ones Gunships and the Vaygr one Gunboat, it does make sense, right?)

Vaygr corvettes are almost finished (two ships to go), so I don't think I want to add something there. But if you want, we can talk about the Hiig and Vaygr gunboat diferences.
I see Hiigaran gunboats as a mobile scaled down frigates, while for Vaygr I'll make something completelly new, some new chassis. Hiigaran gunboats (or whatever we'll call them) will have more armor. Vaygr gunships can be faster or stronger.

Edit: And I know I was quite off topic in the previous post, but I think it still worked well, because it was all about the weapon damage as a reply to the large amount of guns.

Edited by: Pouk

Well, it was my fault for not communicating my idea properly. Instead of saying a pilot on an engine and a bunch of guns, I should have said a pilot on top of an engine and some really big f***ing guns... Hence my idea spawning from the armed reifinery.

Well, the way I would see the Vagyr/hiigaran Gunship/boat differences would be like this:
The Hiigarans would have the equivelent to the Russian MiL-24 Hind Gunship... Lots of armor, and a seriously big cannon... Being that the Hiigarans are more defensive, I think this would make for a great class of ships that would work very well in support of smaller units.
The Vagyr I would think would have something more like the American AH-64 Apache... Sacrificing survivability for stopping power and flexibility... Being that the Vagyr are offensive, I think this would work great as the heavy hitter in smaller fleets.

Anyways, I gotta leave for work, so cheers!

So basically it's what I meant - Hiigaran gunboats will be closer to frigates and Vaygr gunboat will be closer to corvettes, while the Vaygr ones will be more agile and more powerfull, but with less armor.

I guess I've finally decided for the gunboat name. In HW2 fighters are basically seen as real life fighters/airplanes, while frigates and everything above are like real life ships. So when gunship is term for combat helicopter and gunboat for a ship under the corvette size, I think it can work from our perspective, even the ship > boat (the size is the only problem, but I can ignore it, I don't want to change corvettes to gunboats so I can make my own corvettes, because there's no name for ships between frigates and corvettes).

The naming convention you have chosen works fine I reckon, and it seems better to use real-world names that most people are familiar with than to try and make up fictitious 'cool' sounding names that mean nothing.
I'm glad you think this way too, some other mods have some incomprehensible names for their ships which just end up being confusing.

It seems that part of what is drawing people to this mod is your very good understanding of original Homeworld 'rules', and your excellent affinity for the Homeworld 'style' and art direction, on top of your creativity and originality of ship design.

Before my PC shat itself I loaded vanilla HW2......it felt so empty, sort of hollow - without your ships.
Even the menu screen looked boring and....lesser, without the R.E.A.R.M splash screen.

I think your mod is the closest we'll ever get to a real HW2 Expansion, that looks and feels like the original, so thanks for that.
I'm gutted I won't be able to immediately install the next release, more incentive to fix my rig asap eh.

Keep up the great work!

Yeeesh, and entire forum converstion while I was away for a 24 hour period of time! But I like where it ended up. I agree w/tadamir, and agree with the idea of Hiig are small frigate, Vay large corvette. Though the Hiigs should get some new chassis appearence love too.

Add me to the "We Hate Gundam, Macross, Evangleon and Almost All Anime Military Technology Club". My exceptions are Ghost in the Shell, and Zoids. But they both are pushing it IMO. Have you guy ever browsed ConceptShips.org, and ConceptRobots.org? There's some pretty amazing stuff out there, some of which is perfectly within bounds of reason.

Well, I hate Macross/RoboTech mainly because Harmony Gold sues everyone who makes a BattleTech (MechWarrior) game... That's why FASA went under. At least Smith & Tinker resolved the case with Harmony Gold, and can continue to make MechWarrior 3015... Which looks sooooooo sweeeeet... That is one game that better live up to the hype... or I'll have to kick the living sh*te out of someone.

But to get more on-topic, and to continue what I was saying... Macross and RoboTech took things in the Gundam direction, which I didn't like. BattleTech at least had that gritty, industrial feel... plus the sheer complexity of it was absolute fun! Everything was so realistic in behaviour! A 13-story-tall mech had its limits in maneuvoribility, and (most of the time) generated tremendous amounts of heat!

I guess that's why I like this mod so much. Everything just makes sense. If there were real life space battles, I think it'd be something like what Pouk has going here... minus the perfect balance... But games are supposed to be FAIR whereas life isn't so much... So I most definitely like where Pouk is going with his mod... so keep it up, mate!

tadamir:
New slogan: R.E.A.R.M. -the closest you'll ever get to a real HW2 Expansion. Anyway, this is nice thing to hear, because what I do is supposed to be close to real HW2 expansion. Maybe we actually should start to call it an "unofficial expansion" or something, because it captures the mod essence very well and people will immediately know exactly what to expect. Plus it may drag more people in. You know, the same thing like the unofficial 2.0 patch, it's mod but it's called patch, so this can be unofficial expansion.

Also about the vanilla Homeworld emptyness -I did feel the same. I hope it's a good thing.

Hell_Diguner:
The topics of the threads here are keep changing and they are almost never about what they originally say in the name. For example the thread about Hiigaran modular destroyer is more about Vaygr gunships, thread about Frigate (fun)ctionality is more about mining bases and small carriers...
The thing is, that although I should attempt to return the thread back on track, I'm not doing it and mostly I don't want to (except specific cases like screenshots or tactics). The reason is because the free discussion here produces a lot of very interresting ideas. So I guess we should get back to Vaygr ideas, but if not it's still fine, because this way we'll talk more and eventually it may become more interresting. And we may return back to Vaygr anytime.

why not give the vaygr a Mine Destroyer? It would dork like a mine trap but could lay mines or fire them at the enemy strate away and would have some mini anti-fighter missile PDS.

There is a problems in this idea. First of all, the minelaying ships have to be fast or at least have to have some empty space around their center. The artillery frigate should have been also a minelayer at first, but everytime it shooted the mine out, the mine stayed in a distance for a second, but then it returned to the center of the frigate and smashed into the frigate body. Even I could solve this problem, the destroyer is way too slow to lay the minefield itself (at least this classic way I know).
So the drone destroyer for example is possible, the one which would build the minelayer drone (or corvette) and the minetraps or something similar to minetraps. But it would be practically the same as the Artillery frigate, except much larger.
Or you can have the mine destroyer, which would launch the salvo of mines (like the minetrap itself) and could build smaller minelaying ships.

Pouk;
In my mind I already think of REARM as the Unofficial Expansion to HW2

Do you think it's possible to use the missile explosion animation from the mine trap, and apply it to HW2 mines? If so, then maybe you could change (add a new) the mine wall to a mine sphere, where the positions of the mines are very close to the end of the explosion animation. This would allow a slow unit to lay indivitual mine "puffs". Then again, mines are more of a defensive weapon, which would make it more Hiigaran. But you managed to make the mine trap very Vaygr in my opinion, so perhapse it could be made to work. I always thought space minefields would be better as spheres, instead of walls/cubes.

I like v.3b but I can't use the options at all and many of the vaygr ships don't have more then numbers, it would be SO helpful Pouk if you could give every thing there names before you work on any thing else. Any way, GOOD WORK MATE!

Everything do has a name. Are you've put the "locale" folder into the Homeworld Data folder and " -locale english" into the mod shortcut as the readme says?

Yep. All fiddle around with it though...

What the vaygr need is one ship that is completely given over to defense, like the defense carrier in FX, I love that ship and I use it agenst kad and all races with missiles. the mine destroyer would be a ship with heavy missiles,] light missiles (from the Missile corvette) and could launch mins like Hell_Diguner said. Basically it would be a ship that that the vaygr could use for most defense situations.