Space combat: the TOTAL rework
A behind the scenes look at my line-by-line coding project to add tactical depth to space combat, and rework the entire mod
This update might sound boring. After all, it’s about rewriting thousands of lines of code.
But it will change absolutely everything. This is a total rebuild of every space unit and every space combat system.
Space combat. How the AI builds fleets. How much units cost. How useful different space unit classes are. The very feel of the mod. Everything.
It will also mean the mod can expand seamlessly into new eras, including some never before developed for Empire at War.
Some of which I am talking about for the first time: today.
Buckle up.
Making Age of Legends last a thousand years
When I started making this mod in 2017 - then called the New Jedi Order Compilation mod - I was making my first ever mod. I was learning everything from scratch. A lot of errors ended up being baked in to the mod’s foundations, and a lot of the code that underlies the whole edifice was ad-hoc and unsystematic.
Things like combat values for craft which tell the AI how to use things and how often to buy things were based on guess work and were hugely inconsistent. Ship prices, likewise, were based on a pretty crude system of matching similar ships up to see which was better and assigning prices based on an iterative process.
To make things worse, the scaling of ship prices, essentially derived from the base game, was wildly off. Meaning certain ship types were essentially useless.
Are two Nebulon-B frigates really the same value as a Victory I-class Star Destroyer? Why does an Imperial I-class Star Destroyer cost the same as fewer than five tiny CR-90 corvettes? That’s how they’re currently priced, and it makes players rightly think there is no point in anything below capital ship size.
This all meant the mod’s fundamentals were very rickety, a leaning tower on which I was stacking more and more stuff - with plans, bear in mind, to go up to around 50 playable factions in the mod’s main era. To say nothing of era mods I want to make for the Legacy era, the millennium years before the Battle of Yavin, and the classic Galactic Civil War era.
I was starting to dread stacking guesses upon guesses, and building something which had fundamental structural weaknesses: a lack of systematic balance which would become more and more glaring as I had to balance stats against ships from different eras in a consistent way.
The scale of the mod meant that addressing these problems might take years. The mod has nearly 500 planets in it. Thousands of unique space units. And many thousands of faction specific variants of those unit. It was simply not feasible to map what each of these stats were, much less to change them in a systematic way.
Shield stats. Hull stats. Armaments. Weapon ranges.
How do squadron types effect ship price? How do ships of different eras balance against each other? How much money should different planet types give to the player?
All of this was basically arbitrary.
I was starting to fear that it just wouldn’t be possible to expand the mod, because addressing these fundamental, structural, foundational problems was simply impossible.
Now I have a solution.
Introducing: the GREAT RATIONALIZATION!
In the last month I’ve achieved major breakthroughs using AI prompts to write scripts for PowerShell, allowing me to make global changes across all mod files.
This requires great care: a tiny mistake can result in recursive mistakes. One early experiment accidentally disabled almost all space units from the mod. (Fortunately I back-up every time!)
But it is hugely powerful. With a single script (after a bit of trial and error) I’ve managed to do things like groups all hardpoints by weapon type.
Or reorganise all ships by class: fighter, light freighter, frigate, star cruiser, etc. as you can see in the screenshot below. There are 83 different unit classes in Age of Legends: I reckon that’s more class of units than there were units in the vanilla game!
This has allowed me to make every factions’ space units a variant of a generic template, allowing global (or should that be galactic?) changes to be made to ships, hardpoints, planets, and so on. All ships stats and prices, and so on, will be recalculated based on a logical formula.
What will this mean for gameplay?
Some changes are already baked in. Others are subject to change. But I can say quite a lot already.
[I’ve made a lot of this article free, but the juiciest details below are exclusively for paid subscribers. They make all of this possible! I write below on all weapon types, map-wide artillery duels between capital ships, new warhead types and the total rebalancing of space combat - @Story_Continues]
