Star Trek: Continuum news

G'day all and welcome to the inaugural news post of the Star Trek: Continuum mod!

First and foremost I would like to formally quantify the split that the developers of this project have had with the founder of the Star Trek: Homeworld 2 (STHW2) mod.

Stargazer, Herby and myself were responsible for the creation of the vast majority of the content developed for the STHW2 mod, being ships, scripts and effects. After the release of the v0.5 beta work continued at a furious pace generating the beautiful planets and the mesmerising trailer that still grace the STHW2 mod page even though we asked for them to be taken down because it no longer represents work in the STHW2 mod.

For the majority of the duration of our work with the STHW2 mod founder our relationship with him was one of benign neglect, we did our mod and he showed up, demanded this or that be done and vanished again. We would consider and usually disagree with his spurious advice, life and modding went on.

Over some sort of school holiday period the mod founder had more time to dedicate to the mod and came to a loggerheads with the three developers, refusing to respect majority votes or even basic team etiquette. It escalated for a while until us developers saw no reason to tolerate the STHW2 mod founder any further. We removed ourselves and the majority of the assets generated after v0.5 was released from STHW2 and started up this mod, Continuum. (double entendre intended!)

Now that the obligatory disclaimer explaining who we are and what we're on about is over onto the actual news!

Resource Management

One of the major flaws that plagued the v0.5 release of the STHW2 mod was the fact that your resource collectors, while warp capable, would have to trundle across the map on their own to distant asteroids to extract dilithium for your empire/coalition. This left your miners vulnerable and extended resource collection times considerably towards the end of a game when your nearby resources were exhausted.

Traditionally the collector/drop off paradigm in Star Trek games revolved around a stationary refinery installation and mining freighters going to and from it and the resources, a good example of this is Star Trek: Armada I and II.

Homeworld 2 did not have a similar construction capability, while a station could be "warped" in and moved into place its movements needed to be made so slow and ponderous to look correct that that it became an undesireable solution. The kiss of death for that idea was the way that the AI treated such installtions, abusing the privelage of its movement to make it move in all sorts of hilarious, but ultimately unusable ways.

The solution was in the mining freighters, having a heavy cargo ship with small resource craft was reminiscent of the Resource Controller and Collectors in the default Homeworld 2 game, this meant that not only would the AI be able to move it properly but there was also a convenient pre-existing coded relationship that we could take advantage of.

Federation Dilithium Freighter:

Klingon Mining Freighter:

Romulan Mining Freighter:

I hope you enjoyed this newscast, stay tuned for more (probably irregular) news!

Continuum Corp'