MoO3 unofficial patch (in three flavours!)

[Minor Annoyance]

Has anyone used Bhuric's unofficial patch with any of the three mod "flavors" (Vanilla, Strawberry, Tropical)? I've heard it makes this work much like a game would work. One thing that bothers me about Tropical is that changes to shields.

First a history lesson. In MoO1 shields subtracted their number from attacks (shields 15 subtracted 15 damage from each attack) so it was kind of a damage filter. Armour was just your hitpoints. In MoO2 it did the damage filter part but was also a barrier of regenerating hitpoints(the subtraction worked regardless, not dependent on the barrier being up). The damper field subtracted a percentage of damage from each attack but didn't have a barrier. Armour was an extra layer of hitpoints. In MoO3 shields worked by taking a percentage of damage but had strength limit that regenerated. Like the old damper field but without the unlimited strength (The MoO3 damper field was just a shield with instant recharge). So only a fraction of damage went through the shields while they were up, but they'd all eventually get through. Armour the extra HP but had deflection value where anything under that number did no damage. So If armour had a deflection of 10 and was hit by a 7 strength attack it would take no damage, but if it was hit by a 12 strength attack it would take 12 damage. I thought this created a great synergy between shields and armour where the shields reduced damage to a point where it would be below the deflection and bounce right off the armour. So you couldn't just have really good shields and bad armour because little bits of damage would get through. I'd be death by 1000 cuts.

In Tropical it makes all the shields block 100% of damage until they fail like in MoO2. Once they fail damage would probably be well above the deflection threshold making it of little relevance, except for shield piercing weapons most of which are still 90% blocked so the small about of damage getting through would almost definitely be deflected making the shield piercing irrelevant. Aso the damper field is also 100% but recharged fast which makes it seem like it would be unstopable and also not very unique compared to MoO2. I'd probably change that to be more like the MoO2 version and hope it doesn't impair the New Orions defence, but I'll see how the other shield changes work. I don't know if they changed shields because the have a set idea of what shields should be like, which I don't having started with MoO1 where shields were just a filter and not a barrier, or if it's an important game-play change that ties in with other changes.

So has anyone played with these mods before?

 

[vmxa]

I have not played the game since the first month it came out. Your post at least has me considering trying one of the mods. The problem I see is that the links are no longer active.

The other thing is where to get a decent write up of what to do with the game after using one of them. IOW what is the impact of the playing with these changes? The game had a long enough learning curve, which I would pretty much have to start over.

Then have no idea of what I should do to use all the new improvements. Some of the threads, if you can find them, are too long to read and comprehend.

 

[vmxa]

I found all the pieces to the UOP Vanilla and Strawberry and will install the game and see if I can get any interest going. I remember liking the massive fleet combats, but not much else, but it was about 6 years ago.

 

[vmxa]

As you probably know Strawberry has most of the Bhuric fixes applied and many other fix/mods from others as well. The important thing for me is that it has the 1024 mod so the screen is better.

I installed 1.25 and strawberry and then replaced the exe with the one from vanilla 1.61. This seems to let me keep all the strawberry stuff and use the no cd mod in vanilla. This is straight off the Atari web site, so I guess they are fine with it.

After running strawberry with the CD spinning I was about to drop back to vanilla, but I ofund that I could have the best of both.

 

[vmxa]

MY take on Moo2 is that this is a massive improvement as it fixes a number of know issues. The game is still a bit boring for my taste. I do like the combat that I have seen. If you just play in a macromanagement style you have little to deal with.

You probably want to make up a dev plan of your own, but the viceroy will do a fair job of getting colony ships and scouts. It likes to make far too many troop ships for my taste.

It took me a bit to recall how to use some of the screens, it has been a very long time. All in all, it is no longer a complete waste, but I do not find it a lot of fun. The main issue for me is I prefer to control everything and know that my choices are having an impact.

I think that is the main thing that Sid speaks about, you need to have frequent choices to make and they need to matter. I do think he forgot that in Civ4 to degree though.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

...It likes to make far too many troop ships for my taste...

Yes I remember having to mod it's ship preference to lower the number of troop ships. Something else I did was use the size of ship designs to control how they are built. Since it takes a while for a colony to build up it's shipyard capacity I would not usually have starships smaller than destroyer class. That way a new colony could only build system ships. I could do the same with troop ships by making them very large so few colonies could even built them.

 

[vmxa]

Yes you can make a design for say light cruiser and most planets not be allowed to get a shipyard above Frigate or Destroyer. Do get a MOB close by in case you need bigger ships there.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

I tested out the tropical mod for a few turns to see how things worked and it already did something I didn't like. The New Orions had a revolt immediately so they were a regular empire and not president of the senate. Which apparently is so popular a mod that they didn't even mention it's inclusion in this mod. Someone won the senate election with the needed 2/3rds about 20 turns later and the game was over in less than 30 turns. I don't know how it plays out if I don't vote someone in but I don't necessarily want it that way. Also in the last Tropical mod the races were changed a lot and I didn't like that. The Cynoid aren't the cash machines, the Sakkra are good scientists, and the Ithku don't like cold planets. That was the only known detail about the Harvesters we had before the game was released and they go against it. Also the tech fields were all replaced with generic titles. Beam, Missile, Fighter etc. instead of real scientific fields. I like a lot of the stuff but I guess I'll just have to assemble them myself. At least I have notepad++ so I can compare two documents lined up and and the differences marked. That's why I never got around to using these mods before.