While my thoughts are bubbling, is there any way to have a ship give a speed bonus to other ships in a fleet? If so, that could serve so simulate the carrier abilities of the big B5 ships. Use the drive setup above, but also make it apply the +10 speed to all other ships in the fleet. Then having one big expensive ship with a bunch of small cheap ships dragged along becomes a valid strategy.

If this isn't possible/practical, perhaps we should rethink the idea of having missile weapon tech and change it to carrier fleet weapon tech, representing swarms of small ships carried by the ship. It would mean even the smallest ship represented in the game isn't a one man fighter but maybe around a white star.

have a ship give a speed bonus to other ships in a fleet

It kind of works that way when you add a ship with a high speed to a low speed fleet - the average is lifted (not sure what the exact equation is). The problem is that only a crazy man would sacrifice the speed of his capitol ships to boost the speed of fighters.

Not sure about the need to increase the cost of barriers if high-end lasers have a much higher damage anyway.

@Finder: I noticed the minor races thing too and it's very annoying because I personally find that minors really bring something to the game. The randomness of minors spawning seems to get significantly tweaked in every version of gc2 so it's hard to track down. I think that making sure I have at least as many minors as default gc2 is about the only thing I can do (will do...).

New majors are definately in the works - my basic idea is to make a major out of any race with enough (cannon) hulls. The next two will probably be the Drakh and Clark's evil Earthforce. Still going back and forth between wanting the league nations as minors or a collective major - am leaning towards keeping them as minors atm.

I love the idea of those two new races. I never thought of having the Shadow influanced/Clark's earth force.

Well as you said about the minor races, in the orginal GC2 I enjoyed seeing them often and interacting with them. Made me feel as if I was being a bully, charitibale or an isolationist superpower. In the B5 Mod I just don't get this feeling and I'd love to have it again. I think having the league as a collective power might be the right choice as they do not have enough cannon ships for the different lvls but together they do. The small Vree Ship could be the med ship, the Sunfire could be the large ship and the large Vree ship and the Brakiri Avioki could be the the huge ships.

I think this would be the best course of action in the long run. You could just keep the default minor races the same as in GC2 then. So I guess I disagree with how you are leaning currently but maybe you may change your mind.

I can not wait until the next update!

The problem is that only a crazy man would sacrifice the speed of his capitol ships to boost the speed of fighters.

Which brings us back to the carrier issue. One could perhaps give tiny ships the same speed the carrier ship has as long as they are a fleet. Thus it would be like the carrier had the fighters in Bay till being attacked or launching an assault itself.

On the minor races issue I made the same observation. Also I only met the Pak'Ma'Ra and Vree so far. Never the Drazi or Brakiri.
But -apart from the Pak'Ma'Ra having stolen Vorlon tech and selling them to me- in my last game Fundamentalists against evil spawned at a certain point and nicked a few worlds from the Centauri. That came in quite handy because they were waging war against me. All in all it seems to me that only one minor pops up from scratch.

There is a cheat if i dare say.
Use the cheat and spawn minors instantly.

Cheat Mode
Add the "cheat" command line parameter to a shortcut to the application and you need to add it *outside* the quotes that enclose the application path in the shortcut.

CTRL + SHIFT + [D] Spawn a Minor Race

I am not sure if it will work in the mod.Just fixed my comp few days ago,freshed installed GC2.Downloaded B5 mod,just have to try it now myself...

That probably calls the in-game event and as far as I know they are completely hard-coded. Only alignment events can be modded. Eventually... hopefully... whatever insane mathematics currently used to determine the number of starting minors will get ditched for a nice slider.

Slider would be awsome option.
I have been playing few hours yeasterday and no minors encountered,exept that Centauri and Shadows have declered war on fundamentalist.Have no clue as to who or what they are...
I really like to play with lot of civilisations...by the way,spawn minors cheat doesnt work in the mod...

Thank you for great mod rav8...

Have no clue as to who or what they are...

At a certain point there is a certain chance that the Fundamentalism event is triggered in a game. It's effect is that a number of worlds formerly owned by evil civs are taken over by the Fundamentalist Faction.
Happened to me once while playing Narns and having made some evil decisions when random events occurred.

Ah that are fundamentalist than...played new campain,found gaim and those with long name ti ti'tot'li'mar,whatever,something like that.Funny ones...looks like dinosaur.
Wish i could play with all existing minors.Slider sounds like a charm.

Watched series again...does anyone know race name that attacked babylon 5 in episode 5x04 View from the Galery?

Rav,can you please tell how does one mod the text in diplomacy?

Or if you have link with something close to tutorial,can you show?

Thanks...

Eclipse

I've played all the races but the Vorlons. I like it. I can't wait untill the next update to the mod. Need at least 1 or two more races and the minors ones need to be in there for sure. Right now I've never had more then one minor race

The Dilgar(though as uncanon it would be) would be a fun random minor race(kind of like the Fundamentalists), maybe they were trapped in some alternative universe like "The Hand"(oh and speaking of wich, what about adding them? As a evil race besides the Shadows, and Centauri, to even the scales?)

does anyone know race name that attacked babylon 5 in episode 5x04 View from the Galery?

Oh, you mean the Alien Fire Fighters?
I think they have no name.

As for "The Hand" it's like I said before. Bring 'em in and take a pic of Diego Maradonna as their leader.
Seriously I'd rather have the Drakh as another evil faction. Also THEIR ship models should be available.

A few more evil minors wouldn't hurt either. I'd like to see i.e. the other Shadow henchmen like Streib or Wurt.
One other thing about minors is that, except for one game, the minors never ever colonized other single planet.
In my last game the Pak'Ma'ra built loads of freighters and colonizers but they all stayed in their shipyard.

Oh, and EA does seem to be a bit on the losing end all the time as someone mentioned before. Even after I gave them valuable techs for free they didn't make anythingh of it and instead gave up their worlds to me in my last g ame. In th egame before that they didn't last too long either.

hey gang, just wanted to drop in and say Iam still alive.

its extremely hot over here which makes sitting in front of a computer a pain, also been having exams and still lots of work ahead of me so I didnt play GC2 for ages or had much time to work on more models really. ^^

Ive been trying to do the Asimov, but encountered problems with the texture/UVW maps (pain in the *** there due to GalCiv2 not supporting tiled textures) which I didnt manage to completely fix. also 2 times when I was just about done with it my programm crashed and most changes were lost. therefor I stoped to work on the Asimov in frustration and instead finished the drakh cruiser. its pending for aproval in the library now...

edit:
its approved already

pain in the *** there due to GalCiv2 not supporting tiled textures

Think you just solved something that has been really frustrating me!

I have been getting a bit sidetracked looking for models and trying to import them - maybe we should keep a thread updated with what models are currently being worked on? I was just about to start on the Drakh Cruiser

Have some figures on minors...
All games were started with six majors and me as the custom race. Each setting was tested 30 times.

Large, rare habitable planets, common number of planets, abundant number of stars: 0.83 minors on average.
Large, rare, abundant, abundant: 0.83
Large, abundant, abundant, abundant: 0.87
Huge, rare, common, abundant: 2.00
Gigantic, rare, common, abundant: 4.40

There seems to be a maximum of nine possible minors as all the above tests were done with 11 minors in the raceconfig file but only the first 9 were picked up by GC2. Only gigantic galaxies seem to start with more than 4 minors (7 max).

uploading the Drakh Mothership at the moment.

still have a couple more drakh ships available (shuttle, tanker, raider/fighter). I dont know if I will have time to do them over the week, but will definitly do another one or 2 next weekend.

So is there a nice trick to converting tiled textures or is it a slow and painful fix?

I am an absolute newb to modelling but I think I've got it figured except for models with tiled textures. Your modding example was very helpfull Coplann, don't suppose you could bestow some wisdom?

Yesterday I played a huge map with all other settings on random except for tech and all majors and encountered Drazi AND Brakiri.

Btw, has anyone thought about modding random events so far?

@Coplann,
concerning it being hot outside: Tell me about it. Yesterday before the thunderstorms I felt like what 3CPO said. "Help me! I think I'm melting!"

there is no real good solution for tiled textures. if the UVW map of the model fits inside the texture, but is just missplaced you can move it to the center/main texture-tile with the UVW-unwrap-menu. however if the UVW map is all over the place and you cannot isolate the sub-structures from each other there is not much you can do except maybe using clustering methodes of the unwrapper and/or then recreate the UVW map piece per piece for the whole model by hand. you can also cut the provided textures into multiple textures for specific pieces and apply them by hand and standard UVW-mapping methodes like Box, sphere or plane etc. nevertheless its probably not worth the trouble.

in the case of the asimov however the UVW-map is 1 long rectangle consisting of 2-3 dozen smaller rectangles. the texture itsself (center-tile) only covers 2.8 (e.g. the third rectangle laps from the center-tile over to the next tile) of those smaller rectangles so moving the large rectangle arround doesnt do any good. I have tried to cut the larger rectangle into pieces and place each piece per hand, however because the texture doesnt fit into exactly 2 or 3 of the smaller rectangles it doesnt work really well. also tried to modify the texture so it fits exactly over 3 rectangles. I had to decrease the size of the UVW map horizontal size then some, but anyway the result didnt look good (textures werent connecting correctly).
best solution would probably be to divide those hull parts (e.g. main hull of the asimov) into smaller parts and apply the texture to each by hand (like a puzzle). but thats way too much work in my opinion. ^^

@ star adder:
man its like 30+ degrees Celsius here still, even tho its cloudy today. the air coming out of my computer's tower is cool in comparison, lol.

that sounds totally gay

Well at least the ten day forecast calls for temps dropping to ~23°C by the end of this week.

It's too bad that the custom race can only use the ships of one of the major races.
Otherwise one could play as Drakh already.

Btw, does anyone know if your ally is likely to be pissed when you snatch worlds from him through building of influence starbases?
Currently I'm in league with the Vorlons who are the strongest force. But I want to win by influence and I wont be able to before I own 75% of the galaxy. Without a few of the Vorlon worlds however that wont happen.
Still I don't want them to break off the alliance.

funniest thing is I catched a cold today. outside it is 30+ °C and I sweat like whoa, then I go into one of our PC-pools @ university where its only 18 °C. half hour later I have a sore throat. lol

Drakh Mothership is now approved.

I hope Stardock allows more ship styles in the future.

Just to say awsome work copplan...looks really smooth.

Will you be modelling Clarks Forces?

I will look into it after I did the other drakh ships

Yup. Sehen echt super aus.

I just had another idea concerning minors.
How about the first ones? One could outfit them with one huge ship fully equipped from scratch to prevent early eradication and the home planet(s) could have unique tiles.
Models of two of em(volcano, Walkers of Sigma 957) can be found here:
Shipmodels

I used to have a bookmark of a page with all of em but lost it.