Galactic Empires (Wesnoth in Space)

[Anonymissimus]

I saw it in "The Settlers of Wesnoth". There you can read the Rules also if it is not your turn. The Rules are the "start screen", which you can see again by rightclicking all the time. Not only in your turn. So it seems to be possible...

What you mean is the objectives dialog. It is possible there only because the rules are only a very long text. If there was something else to display it wouldn't work. Such as the image which belongs to the help, I need to leave it away in the objectives dialog, but luckily it isn't really needed. So depends on what the "techtree" looks like and whether it needs graphics.

[jonius]

Will Galactic Empires be available for Wesnoth 1.10?

[lgmmrm]

Will Galactic Empires be available for Wesnoth 1.10?

my question exactly

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Will Galactic Empires be available for Wesnoth 1.10?

After two years, the answer is yes. I've just uploaded Galactic Empires onto the add-ons server for 1.10. There's been quite a few changes too. Here's some of them:

- Fancy new icons for all the ship, planet and HQ upgrades
- Replaced lots of the Terran faction artwork and added a new lvl2 unit
- Created a brand new fourth faction: Dwartha (can you guess what they look like?)
- Tweaked unit stats to help make planet invasions more likely
- Removed missiles as they were spammy and clogged up the gameplay
- Entirely rewrote the beaming code so units now retain XP/HP when they are transported
- Added a number of new maps, including more 2p and 3p ones
- Added a few bits to the tech tree

Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions. Enjoy.

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Another big update: 2.6 is up now. Changes include:

- Numerous bug fixes including the mystery of the missing passengers
- I've reinstated the sci-fi theme (the interface looks all futuristic)
- Lots of the ground troops now have nice attack icons
- The player settings (empire size/tech level/alien life) are chosen at game start and are listed in the scenario objectives
- You now launch ships using the regular right-click recruit option (this means you can survey unit stats before recruiting)
- There is also custom spacey music!

[Andrettin]

I played it for a bit, and found it fun

If only the AI could colonize planets and etc. as well!

[Ironcladkitty]

Hi, I've played with few of my buddies, and the mod is allright. I also love Master of Orion 2 so after some thinking what could work in Wesnoth and what not, I've came up with few ideas:

Gameplay:
-Ever considered adding 'Decomission a ship'? It would dismiss the spaceship and return 1/2 (or 1/4, even) of its initial Gold cost. Of course such thing could be only performed at a planet with spacedock.
-Space debris! Hulks of ancient warships filled with technology bonuses. Or maybe actual, working ships of some playable race... or maybe there's a giant space monster that's quite pissed someone disturbed his comfy wreckage he lived in and is now after Player's ships Or you could just gain few Gold for recycling the debris.
-Planetary events:
"Omg hi! I crashed on this planet and you rescued me! Lemme join your spacefleet with this sexy shiny Mayfly I have!". Bam, a loyal unit for us.
Or there could be natives that can only 'farm' the planet for food? They could have terrible fighting stats and would be unable to 'work' so it would be more worthwile to use them for gathering food rather than to conquer enemy planets.

Cosmetic:
-Ship names! They could be specified by race, even; pompous names like Victory or Invincible for Terrans, crafts&industry names like Prospector and Opportunity for Dwartha, some creepy ones - Rlyeh, Shoggoth - for Vendeeni... and something else for the Iildani
-Tech names, just so you have some 'technobabble' instead of Warpscience 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on

EDIT:

After some testing, we found some bugs (some evidence included):

-'Radar' planetary upgrade does not work. It also seem that planets have no line-of-sight at all, actually, besides adjacent tiles: http://i.imgur.com/PwNTQAr.png
-'Shields' planetary upgrade doesn't seem to work ('Squidfly' portrayed here dealt 5 dmg to planet Ursula): Nevermind, shields work, its just hard to notice difference with small damages.
-'Darksphere' trait of Moth ship does not work (as in, adjacent tiles remain Neutral): http://i.imgur.com/7mngTAL.png
-Scenario 3p: Gamma Quadrant auto-sets 'aliens' to Barren at Turn 1, is it supposed to be like that?

We also believe that some ship upgrades don't work (Targeter and Armor being main culprits). We might've been blind though. Nevermind, we were blind, they work OK.
Also, hostile aliens do not seem to get their own turn or attack animations; all that tells you they did attack is your unit suddenly starting the turn with lower health. Spotted this behaviour with Braineater (who doesn't seem to move as well despite having movement points). They work perfectly now (??), must've been due to those OOSync errors we were getting back then...

[Heindal]

I remember this game and even used some of it´s ressources. I like/liked it. Thank you for uploading and recoding it for version 10. Just tried to play the tutorial in a local game and even tried a single server game. The music and the change of the ui look great. Unfortunately it seems that the helpmenu is broken.

I can not use "right click based" actions, such as population control. They just don't show. I'm using 10.07. So unfortunately I can not play.
I even deinstalled and installed it again - no effect.

[Ironcladkitty]

Did you set the era to 'Galactic Empires'? I had the exact same problems before I noticed I was playing on 'default'

[Heindal]

Thanks, that worked - ^^

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Hi, I've played with few of my buddies, and the mod is allright. I also love Master of Orion 2 so after some thinking what could work in Wesnoth and what not, I've came up with few ideas:

Thanks for the ideas, Ironcladkitty. I would love to add things like that when I've ironed out the remaining bugs and tweaked the factions. Any help on that would be much appreciated. (Ship names would be easy to include, but since they are technically the same race as ground units they'd all have the same names.) The radar and darken bug have been noted, thanks. Whoever created the 3P Gamma map didn't include any aliens, so isn't technically a bug (there was a time when a couple of people made their own map packs for the mod, I've included a handful of them).

[Limabean]

Hey Bob, love all the new changes. One thing seems strange though: the aphid no longer appears to be recruitable for the Vendeeni at the start. Instead they can get the Mite from the beginning. Is this a bug or an added feature? I haven't played a real game with them yet, but it seems like it might unbalance things since a Mite, with its long range broadside, is more of a combat ship than the scouts that the other races can get from the beginning.

[Ironcladkitty]

Balance:
-Yeah, Mite is the starting unit, but costs 31 gold and has rather terryfying broadside attack, which can easily early-rush enemy forces. A proper scout ~25 gold cost would be better.
-I believe you should tweak the planetary Defense Laser somewhat; most of anti-matter weapons are long range, whilst Def.Laser has short range, making it useless against most 'planetary annihilators', as I call such ships. Maybe make the laser react to all ranges of weaponry? You could lower its damage to 5-3 as a drawback to this.

Moar ideas:
-Ever considered making the maps 'shrouded' from the start? It's easy to plan your expansion merely because you can see the terrain composition on the planets, not to mention seeing if there are tech upgrades or not on the planet. If one plays the same map few times, memorizing which planets have hostile monsters isn't a problem either.
-How about a randomized map? Planet surfaces could be always the same; just the positions of planets themselves on starmap would be switched?

Race idea:
-Space elves! (bonus points if they get matriarchal hierarchy and blue skin ) Their scientists could have some-sort-of-magic powers, and many of their ships would have access to healing, nanite poison and stasis fields; the drawback would be the overall squishiness of both their ground units and their ships (or crappy resistances, or crappy terrain defenses, or both?)... but that's rather huge addition, dunno if you feel like it v:

[Computer_Player]

Hi. So I've been playing this mod for a while and its been really fun. It really has a novel Wesnoth gameplay experience that really has a good core concept AND captures that core concept well in terms of gameplay.
Thanks for making this mod XD

Some issues:

In addition to the above, there's problems with petrification
- petrify/static does not disappear immediately when Explorer is killed. It also sometimes persists indefinitely
- petrify/static is dispelled mapwide when an Explorer moves (or when static is otherwise dispelled in somehow).

Balance wise- petrifying a flagship is a major blow since it cannot be recalled and unless the enemy chooses to kill it, the user with the captured flagship is at a major disadvantage for the rest of the game. Now "trapping" flagships and not killing them can already be accomplished by Zoc.. the difference being you commit 2 ships to do so and the flagship can attack or move, or at the minimum, provides at least line of sight regarding its whereabouts- helping possible rescue missions.

My suggestion is, change static's mechanics to regular wesnoth slowing. What do you think? It would require changing Explorer's attacks and cost maybe, but I think it neatly bypasses all the above problems while still providing tactical depth.

An alternative is to make petrification a turn-based status affect. So it petrifies say 2 turns and ends at the opponents turn so he can maneuver it or at least have the above benefits at least for one turn before being petrified again (which needless to say forces a counter attack hazard again).

By the way, I played a long time ago, a version when missiles were enabled. I do agree that at later stages they overshadowed the ship-to-ship space opera battles, and it becomes tedious to manage a veritable barrage of missile. However, they gave an element that I think is crucial to the setting- that is, it allowed the planets to "fight" so to speak. I think missiles have a place, however they should be made such that they don't over-shadow ship-to-ship battle. For example, utility missiles such as planet wide poison, or slowing, or perhaps healing (with requisite costs) might provide enable new tactical/strategical styles of play. Missiles were a problem for ships because they wasted a unit attack just to shoot down essentially a 1 strike attack. Perhaps missiles can be shot down without wasting unit attacks? Or make them not worth the cost of spamming?

Anyway ... will continue to play this

[Bob_The_Mighty]

Thanks for all the feedback. There's a new update. This will be the last one for a little while, hopefully everything is working smoothly now.

Changes in 2.8.2
- Each faction now has an individual Transporter bonus
- I've tweaked lots of the unit stats to make each faction have a different speciality and hopefully a different style of gameplay
- Ship upgrades cost less
- Transporters and bombers cost less
- Higher level ships cost less, to reward research
- Passengers now heal 2HP during transit
- Planets have more HP
- Rubble is treated now as hill (gives 2g for workers)
- Ice mountains and flower terrain are now workable
- Fixed the bugs with stasis, radar and thrusters
- Vendeeni Aphid and Mite were mixed up, no longer
- Fixed darkspace generator (weird workaround)

Balance tweaks are always welcome. I've tried to tailor each faction in certain direction, let me know if it's worked out as planned.

- Dwartha are meant to play like regular dwarves: slow and tough. Their forte is destroying planets due to availability of antimatter attacks.

- Iildari - A cross between elves and drakes. High mobility and defence, but low hitpoints. Their ships are expensive, but they have the edge when it comes to research.

- Vendeeni - Cheap and nasty, like the orcs. They excel at colonisation and do well on dust planets.

- Terran - Verstaile and solid, with lots of healing/repair and a variety of differing attacks.