[karajorma]

If the weakness of the Shadow and Vorlon ships bothers you simply press the special hitpoints button and give them more

Problem solved. You don't even have to worry about distributing modified tables with your missions or any nonsense like that.  

[IPAndrews]

And if you do modify your tables and come up with any nice values tell me about them eh? I'm happy to take onboard suggestions.

[karajorma]

I'm sure you wouldn't mind if someone went away and rebalanced everything to use the new armour system either.


Not that anyone is going to do that much work without demanding an avatar for it

[IPAndrews]

I'm not convinced the armour system is worth the effort of rebalancing all the ships.

[Raapys]

Well, I took your advice and spent the last 6 hours or so trying to balance out the new ships. The ships/weapons that have been modified are Shadow, Vorlon, and Minbari.

Now, I haven't done any testing with the existing campaigns, but I did do extensive testing with all the First One's ships versus other races ships, tweaking them in the process. I believe I have found a balance close to the show, but note that there's *significant* changes from the old setup.

The strength of the First Ones should now be pretty similar, with the Vorlon Cruiser being somewhere between the medium and biggest Battlecrab in power.
There's a big difference between the smallest and largest BC.

Vorlon Fighters are much stronger than Shadow fighters and any other fighters(the Nial being the ship with the most chance against it). There is a problem with Shadow fighters, however, and that is that the Difficulty Level makes a BIG difference in their efficiency(Difficulty level does not seem to affect beam fighters at all). At Insane they hit almost all the time, but at medium it's about average. I optimised these changes for Medium difficulty, any higher and they become too powerful. It should be noted that Shadow fighters have a hard time hitting Centauri Sentries, for instance, this because of the small size of those ships. But again, that's just realistic.
Other than that, the S.Fighters are about as strong as the Nials, depending on which opponents they fight.

I don't think the changes to the Minbari ships are significant enough to ruin any previous campaigns including the Minbari, but it would be nice if someone could test it.

Anyways, for the big ships you now need about 3 Sharlins to take out the biggest and medium Battlecrab, and about 2 to take out the smaller one. This varies, however, since even a single beam missing it's target for the Shadow ship can make a huge difference.
Missiles will unfortunately work extremly well against the shadow ships, because of the complete lack of AAA beams.
And because of the Freespace capital ship AI, there is no chance the Vorlon or Shadow capital ships will be able to fight anything in close proximity, so all actions by these ships would do well to be scripted, for best performance.

Anyways, the files are uploaded here.

http://home.ripway.com/2005-7/355794/TBP/ships.tbl
http://home.ripway.com/2005-7/355794/TBP/weapons.tbl

Placing them in your TBP folder\data\tables will make them override the current settings(make sure to backup any old files you have with the same name in that directory), and deleting the files again will restore the 3.2 release defaults.

Any comments, flames, criticism, etc. would be welcome.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Raapys
I see the problem. I would suggest that you aim for a realistic 'which ship wins against which' setup, and leave most of the balancing up to the modders. That way the mission creators just have to be careful to balance up the stronger ships with numbers, when the first ones are involved, but we would still get that 'awe' feeling when seeing a shadow/vorlon ship tearing up the younger races' ships as if they were little more than insects. That's part of the charm, I think.

Let me tell you that I spent maybe 2 or 3 years working on the balancing of tables for this mod before anyone on the outside even had to play it.  I see you've posted some tables there and hopefully IP can use them but let me tell you that it takes a long time to get things precisely the way they should be.  You have to keep in mind several things:
1) Gameplay
2) Balance
3) Authenticity

People making campaigns will have less issue with this than someone who throws two ships into a mission and tells them to attack each other.  Its not the way mission designers do it for FS2 and its not the way its done for TBP.

I haven't looked at things in a long while, but I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring for a bit here.  Lots of time and effort spent balancing things back in R1 and R2...I think those things still probably are alright and some issues still exist with new ships.  Thats not surprising.

[IPAndrews]

Thanks Raapys. I'll be sure to have a good look at those tables ASAP and see what I can use. I may not use everything exactly as you have it but I'm sure the work you've done will be helpful.

The balance of the new 3.2 ships should be better in 3.3. At which point people will probably have some comments on the balance of the new 3.3 ships. The alternative is sitting on new releases for months working on balance before release. Personally I think this way is better. I can get a guage as to what people think of balance much quicker in a thread like this after release, and people get to start writing missions with the ships. This has all been very useful feedback and will enable me to nail the balance for 3.3 which shouldn't be too long away.

[-Norbert-]

by Raapys
And because of the Freespace capital ship AI, there is no chance the Vorlon or Shadow capital ships will be able to fight anything in close proximity, so all actions by these ships would do well to be scripted, for best performance.

You could always blame it on the telepath you claim to have stationed on your own capships

[Carnage]

I think most of the ships need only an upgrade in their rate of fire. Remember, in the last episode of Season 2, the Centauri Ship attack 3 targets at once, at you can see that nearly 20 "red dots" flying against the targets

[Raapys]

You could always blame it on the telepath you claim to have stationed on your own capships

I was thinking the same thing. Though telepaths doesn't work on Vorlon ships.

I think most of the ships need only an upgrade in their rate of fire. Remember, in the last episode of Season 2, the Centauri Ship attack 3 targets at once, at you can see that nearly 20 "red dots" flying against the targets

The younger races' ships aren't the issue. The two newly implemented races, the Vorlons and the Shadows, are. I think I've managed to balance them pretty neatly in the files I posted though, but it's meant to be true to the show, so there's a big difference on the two races. Where originally a Sharlin would easily take any Shadowcrab, you now need 2 Sharlins to stand a chance against the smallest crab, etc.

[IPAndrews]

I figured I'd do the telepath thing with different AI classes. Only the AI.tbl does not seem to want to be expanded at the moment. Whenever I try and add new classes to it the existing classes become corrupted and their names become a mess of random characters.

[-Norbert-]

Well the telepath thing was a joke.
I never thought that it would be handled any other way than sexp scripting.

And we don't know if Telepath would work against Vorlon ships, because in the show noone ever tryed it. The Vorlon ships have their own intelligence, but they are controlled by the Vorlon they belong to.
For me that makes 2 instead of 1 potential weaknesses against Telepath.
1) Block the connection between Vorlon and Ship. The Ship itself MAY still be able to do somthing, but surely less effective.
2) Blackout, influence or mess in any other way with the ships mind (if it has a mind as such).

For both you would need stronger Teeps than for blocking shadowships, but it COULD be possible (even if your not an 3rd space alien )

[IPAndrews]

The AI table is the perfect place for it. You can just reduce the ship's accuracy. That hurts a Battlecrab a lot. it's all powerful ship mincing death ray is useless if it keeps missing. Add to that the fact that you've got a change-ai-class sexp in there and you can do some nice scripting too. A ship full of teeps arrives, suddenly all your battlecrabs go dumb.

[-Norbert-]

But at least one or the other should be completely frozen in space, additionally to the other things.
But since that needs a strong telepath, of which not so many exist, your way makes a lot of sense.

[Sigma957]

Vorlons probably have a way of blocking a telepaths influence over their ships or made their ships immune since they technically created telepaths from most of the  younger races

[-Norbert-]

But still Kosh Ulkesh (the 2nd Kosh) couldn't stop Lyta from reading his thoughts even when she was still a P5.
So what could a good trained P12 do?
And I don't think the Vorlons ever thought of the Telepath turning against them.
Why would they have created free thinking telepath than instead of a kind of telepath drone?

[Sigma957]

He soon taught her a lesson though and she was already modified by them at that time and still he ended up making her reveal the trap set,by then it was too late of course.

[Raapys]

But still Kosh Ulkesh (the 2nd Kosh) couldn't stop Lyta from reading his thoughts even when she was still a P5.
Actually, he did. He noticed at once that she tried to scan him. And he blasted her halfway across the room, before he asked if she would want to know what was on his mind. And he forced open her mind later, before they tried to kill him. And all this when she had been enhanced by the vorlons to become even more powerful. She was no longer a P5.
 
The reason shadow ships can be influenced by telepaths is because of the person inside the ship who controls it.
Vorlon ships doesn't need anyone controlling them, so even if any other telepaths was strong enough to stop a Vorlon, it wouldn't help, since the ships control themselves.

And I don't think the Vorlons ever thought of the Telepath turning against them.  Why would they have created free thinking telepath than instead of a kind of telepath drone?

The Vorlons hardly feared the younger races. Millions of years ahead of them technologically, and superior both in numbers and ship power, no one except the shadows could stand against the Vorlons. But that wasn't what it was all about, anyway. The Vorlons gave the other races telepaths so they could oppose the shadows on their own.

The Shadows can't be influenced by telepaths either. If you remember the episode where Mr. Morden is picked up by station security, and Sheridan has Talia walk past him. As she does, she tries to scan him. The Shadow guardians quickly ruin that attempt.

The 'evolution' goes like this; Normal person->Person who can read thoughts->Person who can move objects with his mind(telekinesis)->Being of energy(Vorlons & Shadows).

[karajorma]

Yep. Notice that Ironheart said that humans would meet up with him in a million years. Fast forwards a million years and what do humans look like?

Lyta was well above P12 after the modifications the vorlons had made to her (She hadn't fully explored her powers at that point but after Ulkesh was killed the vorlons made no further modifications to her so everything she had the power to do in season 5 must have been implanted before his death).

[-Norbert-]

The ships have a mind on their own, yes.
But think of that.
The ship is used to be orderd around and doing nothing whatsoever without an order.
Now take out or block out the being who gives the orders. Either it sits thight waiting for orders, or it is disoriented.
It may not be taken out completely, but it's surely less effective.