A few months ago, I did an experiment. I opened up the tech tree, and made all the miniaturization technologies increase starship miniaturization by like 150%. Unfortunately, the sizes of the componets had gone up too! For life support and engines, this is actually a good idea, but not for weapons. So, I deleted most of the "Sizemod" sections in the .xml file for ship sections.

Then, I noticed something when I researched the doom-ray. It has the same model as the plasma cannon 3...and the plasma cannon 3 dosen't look that cool. So, I changed it to use the particle beam weapon model. Also, the doom-ray does 22 points of damage. I know that it's the end of the beam weapon tech tree, and it's supposed to be awesome, but 22 points of damage is way too much...especially considering that the subspace blaster (the weapon right before the doom-ray) did only 8 or so points of damage.

I also decided that when playing as a good civilization, the defensive technologies sucked. For being so expensive, telepathic defense and arnorian battle armor should have far more defense. I set all their costs to 175. Also, there are 2 "good" shield technologies. It seems that one for each area of defense is quite sufficient, so I deleted the spare shield technology. I set the values for telepathic defense, arnorian battle armor, and quantum shielding (my new "good" shield system) all to 10 defense.

I also fixed ultimate invulnerability to where its defense is 10 instead of 9.

To give the "good" players an incentive to research all the way up the tech tree, I set the cost of Aereon Missile defense, Zero-Point Armor, and Ultimate Invulnerability to 150. That way, they are a little cheaper than the "good only" defenses.

I did the same with "evil only" weapons and the end-of-tech-tree weapons, so now the doom-ray, psyonic beam, black hole gun, psyonic driver, blackhole eruptor, and psyonic missile do 10 damage per hit.

In addition, I made the space on the "tiny" and "small" hulls represent that of fighters, and the "medium", "large", and "huge" hulls represent those of warships. With some miniaturization, I built a huge-hull ship with twelve antimatter torpedoes, 24 singularity drivers, and 12 disruptors, plus ample defenses and four warp drives, with some space to spare.

With that in mind, I am curious: Is there any way to force the AI to use custom ship designs? I know that when I was playing, one race was losing really, really bad, because they were using default ships (which are now used nowhere to max capacity). Then, at the very end, one of my ships encountered an enemy ship with graviton drivers plastered all over it...so clearly they have the capacity for custom ship designs.

I was also reading a modding guide, and it was describing an unused starbase feature: docking ships with them, much like at a planet's starport. And so I had an idea: starbase worlds. Right now, there are 4 types of starbases: economic, military, influence, and mining. How difficult would it be to program in a fifth, star-colony type?

If it is possible, then I want to be able to build starbases that act just like planets, complete with the planet-like grid for building planetary improvements and such. It would first start out with one usable tile (and would cost probably 10000 bc), and thus could be colonized. After that, to add more usable tiles, all you do is upgrade the starbase with the constructor ships (probably 5000 bc for each starbase planetary sector), and you build onto the newly created tile just as you would a planet. This also opens up some very promising insight, such as a class 72 star-colony (with every space on the 6x12 grid usable). Of course, doing so would require 72 constructor ships, and would cost 365,000 bc. Needless to say, equip it with a starport and some factories, and you could build ships at a star-colony

Of course, you run a slight risk of having an undefended star-colony colonized by your enemies. Furthermore, just like any starbase, they could be equipped with battle stations, which would make them impervious to invasion. Also, a way of designating that enemy ships should not fire at an unarmed star-colony is needed, that way they could later be invaded.

Now, how do I go about programming star-colonies into the game? (I will probably use the same model as the economic starbase)

Also, does anyone know how to make the defensive shield effect bigger as hull size goes up? I usually end up with structures sticking through the shield...it looks wierd. and while I am adressing random battle effects in the game, how do I speed up projectile animations so the bullets and missiles fly faster? I am tired of waiting on certain weapons' rounds to hit during battle...especially the graviton driver.