Sins Of Freespace - Tactical Combat mod

Hello folks,

this is the Freespace - Tactical Combat – Mod for Sins Rebellion, this mod was only possible because of the great work of Hoho5000 (and his group if he had one) who started up with the mod and did all the modeling as also had the main ideas. Unfortunately his work did stop some years ago and it seems his mod isn’t developed any further, so I decided to take over and make it work with the latest version of Rebellion. (The old site of the mod is here: Moddb.com)

What is it all about? Main Features in current state (Demo):

The main idea of the mod is to turn Sins into a tactical simulator of the Freeespace – battles, so all ships have in-system-jump-capability. You can give orders to your wings and then let them jump to the designated position. Then the jumpdrive has a cooldown for some minutes. So you need to have a plan what your wings should do because they are too slow to return immediately when your caps get attacked by the enemy jumping in. If you know the strengths of your ships you can let them jump directly into the perfect attack position. For example if your main guns point forward then rotate your ship in the right direction and jump right behind the enemy to give him the first blow before he can fire back. Its advised to weaken the enemies with bombers before go into direct attack, because the big beams really hurt.

Features:

• GTA and GVI Ships and fighters/bombers
• Original Ship-Stats from Hard-light.net, with some exceptions for game limitations and balancing (speed), however the position of each weapon on the ship is not always clearly described so I took some freedom of choice.
• Freespace-Soundeffects and Voices (which is one of the best features I think)
• Each weapon is of a certain type which counters a certain type of armor, so if you see the weapon types on the ship you will know, what it is good for.
• Jump capability within the system for all ships, small ones just jump to their current target or ordered position, capital ships can precisely jump and will keep the direction they were pointing before the jump (use that)
• Fighter wings of different roles: Fast Interceptors, Heavy Fighters, Faster Bombers, Heavy Bombers (balancing is not finished yet) each with pros and cons. Some only cons (in my opinion) as I just took the original Freespace stats and some fighters were just crap.
• The scoutship can leave a navbuoy wherever it is, which functions a a phasegate and is cloaked.
• The game is very slow paced (the perfect solution for ship speed is not yet found), because jump is useless if all ships will get everywhere in no time. So use jump and navbuoys often!

In Development:

• Adapted Research Trees
• Vasari as Shivan Race (only stat-wise, cause I have no clue about modeling)
• Adapted Advent just for some more variety
• Add in one or more graphic mods to make it look better
• Better ship descriptions
• Further Balancing
• Manual

Changes to the original Mod

• Cap Jump ability changed to be similar to Vasari Titans Microphasejump for better tactical use
• Removed abilities: Flak, Heavy Flak, LRFlak, cause it rendered almost all fighters useless and killed them too fast (will maybe return weaker), Militia has kept the flakability to give you an idea of how it worked, hope for some feedback if you want it ingame or prefere another solution.
• Changed ship speeds to accelerate game a bit
• Gave most cap abilities Levels (Boost Morale, Jump, Divert Energy Power to Weapons)
• New Ability for caps:
  • Elite Training, passive, gives bonuses to a lot of different things, jumps, weapons, rotation,…
  • Flux Cannon for the GVI Typhon
• Changed all weapons into modules. That means the Large Green Beam module is always the same on every ship (range, DMG, reaload, armor penetrating type). Every module can only attack in one direction. I took the number of modules that a ship should have from the hard-light.net site and put the weapons equally around the ship with slight emphasis on frontal firepower, except for carriers and siegeships. Antifighter beams are fitted on the sides first. For example the Typhon has 2 LBeams, 2 LTurrets, 2 AFBeams: I put 2 LBeams to the front, one AFBeam and LTurret to each side. So main Firepower goes to the front. Rear is undefended. On the other hand the Orion: 3 LBeams: one front, one each side; 3 Slashbeams: same as LBeams; 3 AFBeams: Same as LBeams; 4 LTurrets: 2 Front, one each side
• That means the Typhon has better frontal damage since 2 LBeams are on the front, BUT the reload of one Beam is around 30s (on Typhon the beams fire sequentially because of energy reas shot every 15s maybe will change it back) and so the Orion can rotate after firing the frontal LBeam to fire the side Beams and so outclass the typhons damage since the Orion has an additional Slasherbeam each side.
• That’s the way the mod is intended to be used.
• Fighters have different roles, try to annoy the enemy with fast fighters and keep the enemy away from your bombers or attack them when they want to take down bombers, or use heavy fighters as escort. Fighters are still subject to constant change since balancing is not perfect yet they die a bit fast…

Hope I haven't forget something substantial, pls report for any minidumps if you encounter one (I didn't so far)