Normal Gaming Modes Thread - Star Trek: Continuum mod for Homeworld 2

On line gaming or skirmish. Post anything about your experiences with the MOD normal deathmatch or classic game mode. Build times, armor values, anything related to the normal game mode.

Why is the Galaxy class more expensive then the sovereign? To be honest I have not looked to see what the respective Armor, weapons are but should the Sovereign be better?

I wanted to post a little info about the ships and tactics for STC deathmatch.

Let's start with the grunts first:

Romulan Star Empire: This race uses the simplest approach and requires the least amount of gray matter to prevail. They're strong and hard to beat. The weaponry is slightly less potent than the other races but only with regard to size. These ships pack less punch pound for pound but have the most armor. They also have the largest ship in-game for deathmatch and because of our balancing techniques, the larger the ship, the more armor and firepower it has, but also cost more and takes longer to build. Cloaking ability comes as standard equipment. The Romulans are slow and methodical. It's not crucial what ships you use, you'll do good with any combination however diversity is the key to a swift victory.

Klingon Defense Force: Klingons are not known for their tact and don't put a lot of emphasis on defenses. Instead they tend to go for the "up front, in your face, pound you into the ground" approach to warfare. Their motto is "a good defense starts with a great offense". These ships pack the most punch and pound for pound have the most hitting power and the fastest ships in the game but this comes with a price. They have a "glass jaw" so to speak. They also have the least armor of any race and their ships don't take a pounding well. Tactically, the Klingon ships do best in a first strike offensive stance. Concentrating firepower will make swift work of any enemy. Klingon ships do the best when you diversify and mix them up. They also rely heavily on their smaller craft for quick strikes and diversionary tactics. To play Klingon you need to be thinking and move quickly. You have speed and stealth to exploit. Don't forget about the boarding ship. You may need it.

Federation Alliance: The mainstay and most versatile race of the game. There's a ship for just about any tactic you would want to use. No cloak but good sensors if you know where they are and how to use them so utilize this to your advantage. Weapons are average as is their defenses. They have no great strengths except their diversity and this, when exploited, will give you victory over your enemies. Here is the epitome of diversity. The best approach is to have a wide range of different ships available because they will compliment each other very well. Protect those shipyards and don't neglect the mine-layer ability. It's here for a reason.

Summing it up: The common thread that weaves through all the races is diversify. Keep as many different ships as possible and don't rely on any one ship class or you'll not fare well. Romulans have armor and size, Klingons have speed and hitting power. Federation has the most ship choices and options.

Play long and proper...

Edited by: herbyguitar

andrew657 wrote: Why is the Galaxy class more expensive then the sovereign? To be honest I have not looked to see what the respective Armor, weapons are but should the Sovereign be better?

The galaxy is not more expensive or stronger. You're overlooking the subsystem the Sovereign can have. The Sovereign comes in two versions; standard exploration vessel and upgraded, fully armed, Battleship. To build it takes time and cost. Add this up and you'll see that the Sovereign can cost more and can have more punch.

There are a few ships that are upgradable with subsystems. Both the Federation and Klingon have them.

Edited by: herbyguitar

Someone wrote: The galaxy is not more expensive or stronger. You're overlooking the subsystem the Sovereign can have. The Sovereign comes in two versions; standard exploration vessel and upgraded, fully armed, Battleship. To build it takes time and cost. Add this up and you'll see that the Sovereign can cost more and can have more punch.

There are a few ships that are upgradable with subsystems. Both the Federation and Klingon have them.

Yeah just noticed that opes thanks

Just played a few skirmish games with a few friends and it appears that the Romulans are too strong. Normally I wouldn't object as they're my preferred race but their ships outlast 2-3 ships of the same calibre which does make it too easy. We have also had a few dysync issues during large battles/explosions.

Talynsun wrote: ...it appears that the Romulans are too strong...which does make it too easy.

The Romulan race takes the least amount of skills and effort to play. It's a brute force militaristic (old Soviet style) approach to the game.They have no subsystems to build and no tactical advantages other than armor levels which are set 10% higher than Federation ships. This comes with a price and that is weapons have 10% less abilities. The problems you are having are going to be normal to new players until you figure out how to play the other races. Romulans are the given of the mod. They are the easiest race to play at first. The Klingons are the hardest to play. They don't use what would be considered a normal, up front, game style. You have to figure out how to play them. Federation is in the middle. They can be played well with not too much effort.

We set this up purposefully for these reasons:
1) To have different and distinct races.
2) To have different learning curves for different races.
3) To keep you interested and not get bored too quickly.

We have also had a few dysync issues during large battles/explosions.

I've taken note of this and will be discussing it with the others.

Can anyone give me a run down on exactly how ship experience works?

Experience:
Ships gain experience by ship kills. The heavier the killed ship is, the more XP is gained. If you kill a ship with a group of ships, the XP is splitted between all attackers. Then the heavier ships get more XP (they did most of the work), the weaker ships less.
Now there is no continuous boost depending on the XP of a ship, but ranks. Once a ship reaches a certain XP niveau, it'll rank up or to be exact: a ship ranks up once it killed a certain number of ship equivalents (ships of equal strength).
There are 5 ranks: no rank, blue, silver, gold and red. The last rank will almost double the ship's strength.

I hope that's what you wanted to know.

Edited by: Stargazer42

Stargazer42 wrote: . The last rank will almost double the ship's strength.

so that means that the firepower becomes stronger only

No, the ship gets an overall stat boost (damage, accuracy, health, regeneration rate).

So far, I've tried only skirmishes (no one around to play with me yet) and fighter rush seems to work well with AI (even with expert). The rush must focus on those little miner vessels. After the rush, a continuous harassment would weaken the AI greatly and I can simply wait until I have big ships to have some overkill.

AI builds a lot of turrets which might be better if the resources are spent on ships instead.

Klingon K'Vort can make a easily destroyed AI shipyard early in the game. You just have to distract your enemy by attacking the mining operation with fighters and strike with 6 K'Vort from behind. 6 K'Vort can drain 75% of Romulan shipyard HP in single full attack run (full attack run = attack from max range and continuously attack until it reaches min attack range and veers off). If properly controlled, 6 K'Vort can destroy the shipyard before enemy responds with 4-6 surviving K'Vort.

From my observation, Klingon AI seems to be the weakest AI of all.

Fed has great mining capability. With only 2 mining ships (each with 6 miners), it can sustain your entire fleet quite well until late game. Romulan mining is quite average while Klingon mining is also the weakest.

I feel that Raptor is too strong somehow with the tricobalt and long range beam. Still this is only for skirmish game not multiplayer which surely would be entirely different.

Also, how can I identify the ship rank?

Edited by: casojin

Klingon A.I. is weak, I agree. It could use some tweaking.

You're discovering how to play the Klingons
If done correctly you can win easily, even against other players. The mistake most people make is assuming the bigger the ship the better their chances. This doesn't always apply. Also, the races aren't all optimized to use the same techniques. What works for one may not work for the others.

Hit the enter key to see what rank you have for a ship. this will show you all the rankings for all ships. There are 5 ranks: (none), Silver, Blue, Gold, Red.

Edited by: herbyguitar

As casojin i only played against the ai. Balance might be different in multiplayer, but there seems to be a gap between the federation and the other two races. The Klingons are really interesting. They lack small ship killers in the beginning, but they can quickly build a strong fleet if you manage to draw damaged ships out of the battle. Thats even better through the warp inhibitor fields, as it makes attacking a base a big risk. Right used, they can also defeat the tough romulan fleets. Theses fleets also develope much firepower if you keep them together and raptors are a great fire support. In the end, both are fun to play and are still good balanced.
On the other hand, the Federation is also interesting. A good, balanced fleet and some unconventional ships like the nebula. But at least in skirmish, they don't really stand a chance against the other species. Against the klingon, they might have stronger hulls, but they just lack the firepower to take advantage of it. Instead, the klingonscan more than compensate this advantage with their weapons. Against Romulans, the Feds are just to weak. The cruisers have already as strong hulls similar to the federal battleships. Just compare a norway to a veles. Even a small cost difference can't balance that out, and the feds generally lack the firepower to deal with the defensive advantages, especially with their weak cruisers. The federation also don't really has a ship class to stand as the backbone of the fleet. Their destroyers are good, but they work just against small ships. Federal Battleships are interesting, but they are to weak to balance the weaknesses of the smaller ships. They aren't just a heavy fire support like the klingon ones, but they also aren't strong enogh to act as the center of the fleet like the expensive romulan dreadnoughts. In my opinion the problem of the feds is that they are either bit to balanced or generally to weak. They need a more clearer fleet composition for their ships to fill the roles they need to support each other and to counter the other races.
Aside from that there is a odd thing about the star fleet: from the numbers the nebula class seems to be the most powerful ship of the federation, even more when equipped with additional torpedos. I always thought the Nebula was supposed just to be a heavy armored fire support or something like this?

Edited by: Temeter

Your observations are good. I have found that the Klingons are usually the first to fall and the battle ends with the Romulans wining. This is a pure AI game though. With human players it depends a lot on how well you know your ships. The reason your finding the Federation ships to be weak is that you haven't considered the weaponry of the Fed. A littl background is in order:

Romulans have 110% Armour, 90% firepower, 90% maneuverability and speed.
Klingons have 90% Armour, 110% firepower, 110% maneuverability and speed.
Federation has 100% Armour, 100% firepower, 100% maneuverability and speed.
These statistics are calculated from ship size. We use the two largest dimensions of all the models to come up with a formula to balance every ship. If the ship is bigger, then it cost more, takes longer to build, has more Armour. A race variable takes care of the percentage difference between races. Kng=90, Fed=100, Rom==110

Strategically Kng are the quickest and cheapest race on almost all points. Quick to build, quick to move, cheap to build (except for the shipyards) ; then Fed, then Rom being the slowest to move and to build. If you want to succeed with Kng you need to play fast and take advantage of the speed of things and don't neglect the smaller ships. You'll need them.

Weaponry differs widely between races with Kng having the middle ground with an average number of weapons per ship. Rom takes the bottom with the smallest number of weapons on average per ship. Fed takes the high ground having the most weapons per ship. This is where the strategy counts. Here's why... all ships have a weapon number. This number is parallel to the ships mass number or size. So every ship only has a set weapon number to divide between all its weapons. So a ship with a size number of ???X??? has a weapon number of Mass*Race/Constant=YYYY. There's no fudging of the rules but there are a few special case ships and I'll get into that later. If a ship has a small number of weapons then those weapons are going to be very powerful when directed at a single target. When a ship has a large number of weapons those weapons are going to be very effective in a swarm. The key to utilizing Fed potential is in concentrating ship formations so the firepower can be directed outward from the center of battle. Fed ships do the best when surrounded. Keep the formations as tight as possible or, go the other way and surround the enemy but don't let them just fly where they want. A lone Fed ship is a dead Fed ship. Kng and Rom will flounder like fish out of water when surrounded. Kng and especialy Rom will do well in a frontal attack where the target is directional. Rom is very potent when confronted from one direction and weak when divided. Fed can take excellent advantage of this by diving right into the middle of a Rom formation and letting the fur fly.

The special ships: The Defiant is one such ship. It has a mine layer ability that when used correctly will rape any attacker. The Nebula, Sovereign, and Akira are also special ships with added weapon abilities. There are more as well but I'm not going to tell which ships they are. Finding these ships and using them correctly is another key factor in knowing your ships and how to win.

Edited by: herbyguitar

I tested your tactics a bit and you are right - the feds can also be powerful and quite mean. They succed in holding a position and aren't easy to defeat, but i think still that they have some problems. There are few scenarios where the fed is superior to their enemies, on the other hand it is to easy to use their weaknesses. If you manage to draw their fleet in different directions, they get big problems. And a few medium class Romulan ships can already draw a sightly amount of federal ships, then something like a attack on the fed resources and you have good chances of victory. Additional to that, they have also problems with smaller fleets, which are to weak because you can't really concentrate your fire. That makes defending less important positions more difficult. In my experience, the federation is a bit inflexible. Are there also ways to counter these tactics?

Edited by: Temeter

As long as Fed vessels use many weapons these idiosyncrasies are unavoidable. Changing the weapon stats is not an option because it would break the rules of balance and create Fed super ships. The solution is to learn the race; their strengths and weaknesses and capitalize on them. You see, there are bonuses to having races set up this way. You can have 2 players of equal talents playing and still have a good match or you can have 1 player that is not as good as the other so you let that player use the Rom race. Personally I think it's a good setup with Rom being the easiest to play, Kng being intermediate, and Fed being the hardest.

The balance of races is good. The difference is in the learning curve.

Unfortunately we didn't put strike groups into the mod. For the next release there will be custom strike groups that will help in establishing attack/defense styles for the different races. This will help in keeping formations of desired configurations.

One thing I've changed for the next release is the shipyard stats. I've standardized these so they all have the same build times and armour stats. The Kng shipyards are building too slow and this can put them at a disadvantage.

Stumbled upon this mod after making fun of "Trekkies"for years largely because I was too immature to get the humor and thought the emphasis on morality incredibly dull. However after watching the TNG, I was shocked how much I was enjoying ST and really wanted to experience the ship side of it, which led me to this site and impressive Alpha Release. Having been an RTS fanatic since my first click, I appreciate the emphasis on balance but was a little disappointed with the "feel" of Federation and Klingon.

After nearly (several months admittedly) chain watching ST episodes, I jumped into the mod but after constructing my first Sovereign/Galaxy was astounded to see it go down in nearly seconds while I hardly did lasting damage on enemies. I think my first games were more about raiding refinery ships, mining asteroid bunches and using multi-pronged attacks to distract the AI while I back stabbed their outposts.

However, it really doesn't feel like it should, the series-feared Galaxy-Class Starship is easily overcome and the Intrepid-Class anything but intrepid (imho, it did not fit the greater mass=greater firepower concept mentioned before, as it was more mass and less firepower than it's cousins). So while I can sense the balance, the actully game play "feels" like it lacks what we saw in the series. A good example of course, is Romlans, who are hands down powerful- still in the series they actively use guile carefully avoiding federation. According to what I determined from a dabbler's perspective was that, Romulans and Federation ought to be on par firepower, and armor wise, with Cloaking giving them an advantage. On the other hand, the ability of Federation crews to adapt tended to balance this advantage resulting in STNG being essentially a standoff.

That kind of game was really what I was hoping for, one cruiser being able to match another cruiser- but that doesn't seem possible. To be honest, I think giving Romulans better armor creates a vicious cycle as armor subtracts the damage actually done, so you would be, by increasing the armor, also increasing the regeneration's effectiveness because less damage is done. For that reason, I'd actually say either increase Fed/Klg regenerate rate or decrease Romulan armor.

Anyways, I just hit preview and saw the size of my warp signature. I'll post my solutions in the suggestion thread, but mostly wanted to respond here because it was related to gameplay. I'll just sum up and post suggestions in the other forum.

tl;dr

Saying "Ok, noobs play Romulan" + "Pros play Federation" = equal opportunity, disproves balance. As it stands, a skilled Romulan will unequivocally smash any equally skilled Fed/Klingon player. Essentially I see the use of armor,firepower and speed for determining the strength of a race but don't believe using those traits is very true to the feel of ST nor works in balance. Still for an ALPHA release, the mod deserves enormous Kudos, I feel like I should donate something.

The problem with what you're suggesting is that it works very good with a one on one battle or a small fleet game style however, when capable of building dozens of same type ships and amassing a large ship roster the balancing becomes a matter of race vs race balance and individual ships must be tamed and brought into line. I can't make the ships act the way they do in the show because there would be no balance at all and no reason to build more than one type of ship. This is where the mod was in the past and we found that we had to move away from this otherwise game play would be very linear and boring with no distinction between races what so ever. Yes Noobs play Rom. What you're missing here is the fact that Rom can only do so much and once you reach that point Fed and Kng are still able to adapt and grow. Rom has no added subsystems or extra weapons. Fed and Kng both have special weapons and surprises built in that only need practice and skill to unlock.

In the future you will see longer battles where ships pound each other relentlessly (like in the shows) before shields give up. I'll take your suggestions and ponder them carefully though. There is always room for improvement. Thanks.

Cool, thanks for the reply. I look forward to seeing where you take Continuum. It does make alot of sense and I know from experience how the game engine limits creativity. Best wishes!

Are we not supposed to get both defensive and offensive enhancements? I had assumed upgrading was a choice between the two since a ship's icon disappears from the research list as soon as research is finished on one enhancement.

@ SkullFour

You get to choose Defensive OR Offensive enhancements, we have perfected the script for the research so there's no way to get both anymore