Halo MOD? » Forum Post by Dark

Bah, double post, sorry.

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-This is exactly what we are doing and has been said multiple times.

Oh, ok, my bad.

-Their sheilds will be strong, but for gameplay and balance reasons I am toying with the quick recharge idea. Its the only way useing the game mechanics that we can have certain weapons "punch" through the shields. Its not totally true to the series but its a sacrafice that should be made IMHO.

But that's just it, no weapons beside the SMAC platforms could "punch" through covenant shields, even MAC rounds took several hits to bring down a covenant ships shields. So by making them super strong, but with low recharge rate, you could show this ingame. Staying true to the series and keeping it balanced for gameplay.

-The MAC gun being a regular weapon would have a long reload anyway. If it doesnt use anti-matter there is no use making it a special ability and have to code it in. I only see if worth being a special weapon in that autoenable can be turned off cand players can focus fire them on their own.

If it's a normal weapon, I can't micro manage it. I want to be able to tell something as powerfull as the MAC when and where to fire. I don't want to see such a powerfull weapon be wasted on a frigate with no health because the stupid computer told it to.

-The bit about slipstream. I've wanted to do this but the accuracy is code into the game constants I think and you cant just affect one race. What we can change individually [I think] is the speed of travel. SO I'm going to give the Covenant a higher speed.

Well I'm not sure, I do know that in RTS' like this, the ALL attributes to the races can be individually changed, how, or how hard it is, I have no clue though.

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But that's just it, no weapons beside the SMAC platforms could "punch" through covenant shields, even MAC rounds took several hits to bring down a covenant ships shields. So by making them super strong, but with low recharge rate, you could show this ingame. Staying true to the series and keeping it balanced for gameplay.

I think there is some confusion here. A single frigate wouldn't be able to take down the shields of a Cov ship or even scratch it because it's damger per second would be lower than the recharge rate for covvy shields. In order for UNSC ships to even damage covvy ships would be to gang up on them. The quick recharge rate is to simulate that covvy shields go down and only stay down for a short period of time.

If it's a normal weapon, I can't micro manage it. I want to be able to tell something as powerfull as the MAC when and where to fire. I don't want to see such a powerfull weapon be wasted on a frigate with no health because the stupid computer told it to.

I'm modeling the mod after the style of the game; you really cant micromanage frigate weapons in Sins and it should also be noted that the MAC cannons wont be the end all of the UNSC ships. The two weapons UNSC ships will have for ship-to-ship combat are the Archer Missiles and the MAC cannons.

About the slipstream thing. Its under the constant stats that affect all races.

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The UNSC's only big gun was the MAC, nukes, mines, archer missiles, railguns were all the standard weapons employed on their ships. But the MACs were the super "special" guns. The ones that took several minutes to charge between shots, and the ones that did epic ammounts of damage. The MAC EASILY classifies as a special ability, and should be made as such. If people don't want to micro-manage they simply set it on auto-enable, like standard abilities. But for those of us who don't want this epic weapon being wasted on nearly dead frigates, it'd be nice to have manual control over it.

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The UNSC's only big gun was the MAC, nukes, mines, archer missiles, railguns were all the standard weapons employed on their ships. But the MACs were the super "special" guns. The ones that took several minutes to charge between shots, and the ones that did epic ammounts of damage. The MAC EASILY classifies as a special ability, and should be made as such. If people don't want to micro-manage they simply set it on auto-enable, like standard abilities. But for those of us who don't want this epic weapon being wasted on nearly dead frigates, it'd be nice to have manual control over it.

Manual control like that in large fleets would be difficult, but would the Covenant plasma be the same?

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The covenant didn't have a counterpart to the MAC, as their base plasma weapons were powerfull enough. And as for the large fleet thing, it actually wouldn't be too difficult, hotkeys make it easy to micromanage unit abilities, and hey, if that's not for you, you can allways set it to auto-cast.

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Colt... For capital ships, cruisers, and say Orbital Super MAC platforms their MACs will be special abilities but for frigates it would be too much.

LRM frigates have powerful weapons in Sins but yet you cannot manually control them.

EDIT: One thing that is going to be a Special Ability on frigates and most other UNSC ships are the Shiva Missiles they will carry. They will be pretty powerful and be AOE weapons.

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I think you're doing it backwards for the frigates, personally. Shiva's were common-place weapons, like archer missiles (albeit, not AS common, but certainly more common then MACs.) And also, you're forgetting that a MAC round had almost the same power regardless of what ship it was on. A frigates MAC round does almost as much damage as a Marathons round. ALL MAC's, EXCEPT the SMAC, should be special abilities. The SMAC should be automatic since it's a defense platform.

But UNSC ships launch shivas, and archers, and use railguns, all automatic. Like the lasers and projectile weapons in Sins. MAC's should be the special ability all UNSC ships have, the heavy hitting weapon that has a long cooldown time but does heavy damage. As I've said if people can't micro it, just have it on auto-cast, most cap ship abilities start with it on auto-cast. It's best of both worlds. Because frigate or not, I still don't want it wasting MAC's on stupid targets.

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Colt556 Frigates only carried 3 Shiva Warheads per vessel while they carried many Archer missiles and 6 MAC rounds.

I also dont believe that all MACs had the same power. The power of any railgun lies on both the power pumped into the system and the length of the rail for accelerating it. Frigates had smaller MACs that were probably slower and used smaller projectiles while ships like a Marathon-Class had much longer rails and heavier projectiles.

However, if its gonna be this much of a fuss I'll just make it a Special Ability that is defaulted to the autocast mode.

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Great, I personally think that is the best option as it makes everyone happy.

Also I did some wiki-ing, and all UNSC ships were outfitted with point defense guns that fired 50mm high explosive rounds, that were used to down plasma torpedos and seraph fighters. (It said a fully shielded seraph could take up to 200 of those bullets before taking any serious damage). Also, it said that a shiva nuke was more powerfull then a MAC, so I guess I was wrong there. It said a single direct hit from a Shiva could destroy a covenant ship. Also, it said that ships like the Marathon or Halcyon carried upwards of a thousand archer missiles, however they did virtually no damage unless a MAC round had previously broken through the shield. So yeah, hope this info helps regarding human weaponry.

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The covenant didn't have a counterpart to the MAC, as their base plasma weapons were powerfull enough. And as for the large fleet thing, it actually wouldn't be too difficult, hotkeys make it easy to micromanage unit abilities, and hey, if that's not for you, you can allways set it to auto-cast.

What I ment was the Covenant plasma was incredibly powerful like the MAC and should be an ability like the MAC if the MAC is going to be an ability.

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The problem is, the plasma was incredibly powerfull, yes, but it was also the covenants main weapon like the UNSC's archer missiles. The covenant didn't have any "super elite weapon that was only used once in a while". The two main weapons covenant ships used were plasma torpedos, and plasma turrets. Both more powerfull then a MAC canon, but used as regularly as archer missiles. So unless you made up a fictional weapon for them, they don't have a weapon that suits a special ability.

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Great, I personally think that is the best option as it makes everyone happy.Also I did some wiki-ing, and all UNSC ships were outfitted with point defense guns that fired 50mm high explosive rounds, that were used to down plasma torpedos and seraph fighters. (It said a fully shielded seraph could take up to 200 of those bullets before taking any serious damage). Also, it said that a shiva nuke was more powerfull then a MAC, so I guess I was wrong there. It said a single direct hit from a Shiva could destroy a covenant ship. Also, it said that ships like the Marathon or Halcyon carried upwards of a thousand archer missiles, however they did virtually no damage unless a MAC round had previously broken through the shield. So yeah, hope this info helps regarding human weaponry.

Yeah the Point Defense weapons of UNSC ships are the reason no sort of flak frigate is being put in-game.

Yeah missiles are going to be a supplement to the MAC cannon.

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The problem is, the plasma was incredibly powerfull, yes, but it was also the covenants main weapon like the UNSC's archer missiles. The covenant didn't have any "super elite weapon that was only used once in a while". The two main weapons covenant ships used were plasma torpedos, and plasma turrets. Both more powerfull then a MAC canon, but used as regularly as archer missiles. So unless you made up a fictional weapon for them, they don't have a weapon that suits a special ability.

In the novel, The Fall of Reach, there is a massive Covenant ship that has what is called an energy projector(at least that's what I think its called). It could slice through multiple UNSC ships with ease.

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The war does seem to favor the Covenant so balancing is an issue but you forget that humans have 2 huge advantages; AIs and Spartans. AIs gives the humans supurior movement and targeting ability. In the novels it says that at the start of the war humanity would loose 1 spartan while the covenant lost a flag ship. In the one novel the first strike I believe; we learn that befoe Halo 1 Johns original mission was to capture a flage ship. With some help from some other spartans he destroys an entire armada heading to earth.

So,

AIs give humans better management of ship movement and supply routes. They also provide vastly superior intelligence, because they can hack into the covenant battle net. They can also take control of ships systems.

Spartans are massters of infiltration they can take control of covenant ships. This could be implented as an active ship abilitys of UNSC warships after a long line of research including things like genetic minipulation, portable shields, and majorin armor for example.

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The war does seem to favor the Covenant so balancing is an issue but you forget that humans have 2 huge advantages; AIs and Spartans. AIs gives the humans supurior movement and targeting ability. In the novels it says that at the start of the war humanity would loose 1 spartan while the covenant lost a flag ship. In the one novel the first strike I believe; we learn that befoe Halo 1 Johns original mission was to capture a flage ship. With some help from some other spartans he destroys an entire armada heading to earth.So,AIs give humans better management of ship movement and supply routes. They also provide vastly superior intelligence, because they can hack into the covenant battle net. They can also take control of ships systems.Spartans are massters of infiltration they can take control of covenant ships. This could be implented as an active ship abilitys of UNSC warships after a long line of research including things like genetic minipulation, portable shields, and majorin armor for example.

Some UNSC ships should have an ability like domination so you can use covenant ships as well as UNSC ships, that is what the PoA was designed for(I think).

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the thing is tho u would have to supersize the covenant ships and make em super powerful cause we all kno they could tear through unsc fleets. liek it says in all the books the unsc onley won when they outnumbered the enemy 3 to 1 and then even barely so i think u should make the covenant like really powerful but they earn money slowly and build times r slow and shit while the unsc is really weak liek theyre guns suck unless they use special ability mac gun but to like find equality in the game they earn money at a fast rate and build ships in a matter of seconds. also in the halo universe ive never seen a covenant world like they seem to be nomadic, with high charity and all a d if there are world that belong to the covenant i know they are few and far between cause u gotta remember theyre on a hreat journey to find the rings so it makes sense that theyd be nomadic , u cant find sumtin if ur standing still

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The covenant has many worlds, MAAANY worlds, more then the UNSC. They take the worlds occupied by the races they conquer. Whatever planets the Hunters, or Gunts had owned before being brought into the covenant, came into the covenant with them. Ontop of that they take colonizable worlds as they find them, and have built up quite a large empire. That's how they manage to build so many ships, and can outnumber the humans so easily.

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No I think that If anyone makes this mod. They would have to make a twist to the halo story....yes I know I said it. The twist would be something like the humans have Larger fleet numbers in mass and all. And the covenant have smaller fleet numbers but stronger ships. And No we would not hve to substitute the mac cannons it can easily be put in the game as a cannon being fired from the ship.Dont get me wrong the covenant in the real story are much larger much stronger and more dominant.Human fleets were getting torn apart. Just like the fall of reach it was like 130 human ships vs like 35 covenant ships and the covenant Almost lost due to the MAC gun orbital space stations. But 320 more covenant ships arrived for back up and Boom. They glassed planet reach. But take it into consideration that This is a game and were adding a mod to it. We want to have fun andfor it to look like a freezing cold glass of water on a 105 degree day. That means for it to look great for those of you who are.....Special. so If anyone makes this mod please do not put the halo story into a huge consideration because everyone would be playing Covenant kills humans.

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Yeah, I do plan on making the Covenant have stronger, larger, ships but they will also cost accordingly stronger.

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Well I've made a little enhancement to my little Frigate, she's only missing one thing now (point defences), and that enhancement is the addition of nuclear ordnance, I bring you my first attempt at the Shiva-class nuclear missile.

And She's away

Gotta feel a little sorry for this pirate he's probably never seen a nuke before

Boom?

And NONE where left

(even though it looks like it in the pic the nuke doesn't deal friendly fire...yet, the pirates just happened to get a lucky last few shots off

)

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Wow I really really like that effect! The only thing it really needs now is more polygons and a skin/texture.

Now I need you guys input on this. The first ship I'm coding up is the UNSC Scout: The Prowler. I'm at a dilema. The Prowler is a very advanced ONI ship and as such I am wanting to make it pretty expensive with pulse lasers [possibly a tech needs researched before hand for this to be used.] It will be powerful weapons-wise [6 can take down a Covvy Destroyer] but it will have low hull and armor.

The other option is to make it cheap and weak like Sins scouts.

Also, does anyone know if Stealth can be implemented in-game?

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Oh the effect inst mine...its either a default sins one or from bailknight_graphicmod_v1.2 I wouldn't know I never used the ability its from without that mod installed so don't give me credit please

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Well Acolyte, I'd stay true to the series. If the prowler was super advanced, and powerfull, make it so. You can allways add in a fan-made scout, like an exploration ship to find new systems, while the prowler would be used for intel and sabotage missions against the covies.

Also for the nuke affect, maybe try to go the route of BattlStar Galactica, they had really cool looking nuke explosions.

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hey guys, im a halo fan-freak and i am somewhat good at texturing
i am looking to join the dev team for the mod

let me know requirements, and whatever

oh, and please, lets get a www.moddb.com profile going????

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