Spawn-killing the flagship upon death of the Vorastra should work wouldn't it though?

It will be spawned from game start as the "flagship" and your titan will simply make a second one when it dies.  Giving you two losing events.

That's fine.  The idea is that you place more emphasis on your Vorastra, increasing its combat presence but also gambling that you'll keep it alive, lest you lose.

If you want to make it important and singular, you could just make the titan a one off.  If it's a research locked passive off an unbuildable, spawned on game start structure at your homeworld, once and only once is pretty easy to do.  Just build the cost of the titan into the research itself.

The idea is that you can build the Vorastra as normal but a research-locked passive fifth ability significantly increases its stats but killing the Vorastra results in a loss.  If someone elects to play flagship victory, I do not want them to start with the Vorastra as that would obviously be OP.

Because of this, I think I'll just make it spawn and promptly kill the flagship when it dies unless there is an alternative way to ensure loss without impacting gameplay with other victory conditions.

Sometime this weekend I'm going to bust out my web editing and fix a main page for this thread.  I was tinkering in the html today and it just has issues all over.

Basically shoot for a more organized and graphical layout up top (i.e., "more helpful").

Sweet, but the current layout seems fine to me. Love your book icon.

Heh--thanks.  There are a few online generators for the Idiot's books still floating around out there.

I think I can squeeze a little more use into the space up there by categorizing--the more topics the easier to do that and the more need for it.

I don't think that entity modifier works on anything but SC....if you look in the damage tables, you will note that each weapon type has a chance to hit fighters, bombers, and capital ships...I believe the chance to dodge directly affects that value, which is non existent for frigates and corvettes...

How do I change up the game's ship formation logic so that capital ships and frigates are treated equally, instead of frigates always being in front of capital ships?

formationRank

Also, spawn-killing the flagship doesn't cause loss of the game, even when playing with flagship victory.

Nice tip on formation rank.  It drove me crazy trying to figure a way to change that.  Thanks.

I know Harpo's tools has an entity.manifest update tool.  Does he have anything for string files and/or the GSD?

Has anyone tried them if he does?

Not that I know of. And there is always Eclipse for the other two.

I do have one little tool for strings I made myself if you're interested. Basically I got tired of having to hunt down every little string Starclad changes with each patch. So I maintain a file with all my changed and added strings. When a new patch comes out, I copy the new String file, and run the program. It then puts my changes on top of the old ones and updates the count accordingly. It requires Python to be installed on your computer though, and is certainly not a fancy GUI like harpo does.

Hmmmm.  I guess I'll pack my files over to you *cough* when I finish.

Actually the string tool would be great.  I hate checking for typos and accidentally cut periods and commas.

For an alternative method, what about making the Titan the flagship, and having it come with a crippled initial power.

You can research lock it's abilities and weapons without even doing something fancy.

Sinperium won't use Eclipse until I make an auto-installer. Therefore he won't be using Eclipse.

On the string thing I keep all my string separate then merge them together with custom Ant scripts. I support a bar delimited string file that makes editing names and descriptions easier. The mergedata generically merges files like string info's, sounds, explosion data, etc. 

At it's simplest maintaining your mods strings separately from the games and manually merging them together is still better than lots of one offs in the main English.str. Any duplicates for things you change string entries for from the base will work if they are at the top of the English.str (i.e. any duplicates listed after the first are ignored).

<target name="merge_string_data" depends="generate_race_stringinfo">
<mkdir dir="${mymod.dir}/String"/>
<mergedata dataCountName="NumStrings" dataFileName="${mymod.dir}/String/English.str">
<fileset dir="${mymod.dir}/String" includes="${race.name}_English.str"/>
<fileset dir="${diplomacy.reference.dir}/String" includes="English.str"/>
</mergedata>
</target>

<target name="generate_race_stringinfo">
<generatestringinfo stringInfoFileName="${mymod.dir}/String/${race.name}_English.str" stringInfoTemplate="${project}/Templates/${race.name}_stringinfo.txt"
baseStringInfoFileName="${project}/Templates/${race.name}_English.str"
prefix = "IDS"
appendnamewhennodescription="false">
</generatestringinfo>
</target>

In my house, we kill ants...smart alack.

That looks a lot like xml.

I have 15+ strikecraft types to add in.

Keep poking me and one day I'll use your tool just to spite you.  Also, if you want to properly promote your tool you should have provided a link in your reply there.

(lol--check our karma)

lol, I gave helpful advice too.

Ant scripts are xml based which then call ant libraries based on the tags. I have a dozen or so custom ant tasks I've written.

I feel no need to promote what is obvious. People who feel they are better served by continuing with Notepad++ just like driving mopeds while everyone else has the Ferrari.

Ya, your # of replies have also exceeded mine. People apparently give lots of karma for silly.

"Style"...it's style--not "silly".  

You may beat me at development chic but I win at social engineering.

If it makes you happy, I am re-installing it now.  It is pretty darn easy (Oh Grud, now I'm gonna hear it).

I'll let you know if my brain melts when I try to output something. I also spilled sugar on my keyboard and still see no ants in it. 

 And if it doesn't work out for me, I can always entertain myself sending you fake bug reports on it.

A zombie's worst nightmare.

Can you list the plug-ins or whatever somewhere needed to ouput strings and manifests and the like?

I'm not supporting my ant tasks publicly that build manifests and string files, just the Eclipse plugin for mod validations.

Harpo's manifest generator works great and should be used by most of the modders.

The eclipse plugin will validate your English.str for correctness and will validate your entity files reference a valid String entry. 

It will also do several GalaxyScenarioDef validations too.

Some of us still use the original notepad...