SUCCESS!!!!

I was wrong guys, spawning Titans by fleet beakon does work.

The reason it didn't work before was because I was trying to spawn another factions titan. If the titan you are trying to spawn isn't for that faction (including cosmetic titans), the titan will not appear at the planet.

So ... what you're saying is that we could setup an ability on the Titan Factory to 'spawn' (i.e. purchase) other titans?

Absolutely. I'm not exactly sure how spawned titans behave compared to their built counter parts (if time permits I'll do some more tests), so their maybe a few quirks when it comes to the level up I'd bet. And like with capitalships this technique will ignore capitalships slots (So you can end up with negative cap slots and still build more titans).

I'd be more than willing to aid in testing if you need any help with this, GoaFan. Very, very nice find! Now the question is, can we put a cap on the number of total Titans spawned via ability, or if it just works as is. Admittedly, I'd love to see what you've come up with so far, mainly to do some tinkering around with it myself.

But it still takes up fleet supply correct? (though I suppose that means you could still build these even if you run out of fleet supply).

Yes, you can't use fleet beakons to go over the available fleet supply, so 2000 / 150 means you cannot have more than 13 of them.

That said, I've come up with a separate technique that could all you to limit them to an arbitrary number, but I want to use them it in my mods first before I give all of my secrets away.

All I did was change the the AbilityPirateMercenaries because I was too lazy to make a separate file and add that to the TechRebel player file. Basically this is the code to spawn it.

buffInstantActionType "SpawnShipsAtPlanet"
instantActionTriggerType "AlwaysPerform"
spawnShipsLevelCount 1
spawnShips
    minFleetPoints 150.000000
    maxFleetPoints 151.000000
    requiredShipCount 1
    requiredShip
        type "TITAN_TECHREBEL"
        minCount 1
        maxCount 1
    randomShipCount 0
spawnShipsArrivalDelayTime 5.000000
spawnShipsHyperspaceSpawnType "FleetBeacon"

Again, this only works for the Tech Rebel titan for the Tech Rebels, if you want to spawn different titans you'll need to make a copy of it and say the Tech Rebels are the owner in the titan file.

Plz Post a Mod of this

The big question now Goa is whether or not we can trick the AI into building Titans like it builds Capital ships.

Ex: The AI goes "I need to build a Titan!" and looks at all of the available ships to build in the Titan Foundry (if you convert all the 'purchase titan' buttons to use this 'returning armada' ability will the AI still choose to build them?) picks one and builds it. It shows up (can you alter the time it takes for it to show up in the gravity well to simulate a 'build' time?) and the AI runs around doing it's thing with it.

[brainstorm]

Now seeing as how it doesn't take up Capital Ship slots (not sure how to 'deal' with this but we'll make it work), could we make Capital Ships not take up Capital ship slots but still be able to build them and have them level etc? Then we could turn the Titans into Capital ships and make them take up ... capital ship slots? Braining storming hurts.   [/brainstorm]

I would guess not. You'd probably want to just let the AI build the titan normally, perhaps let it cheat a little to get it to make its one titan more powerful and easier to replace. But humans could handle multiple titans easily.

Of course.

Capitalship slots are hardcoded, Titans always use 2, capitalships always use 1. The only way I can think of to deal with it if you really wanted to make the production based on abilities is to make capitalship slots a nonissue, say change the starting value to 99, so that fleet supply becomes the only limiting factor with what ships you can build. The price of titans and capitalships could then be adjusted to account for the fact you don't need the capitalship research anymore.

Wouldn't the AI work fine with multiple Titans, assuming the ability needed to "spawn" them is placed on the Titan factory itself (or another structure) and set to autocast? This assumes of course that the AI has access to a Titan foundry to produce it's "first" Titan.

Sure, the thing is the AI isn't really going to understand what that ability does. Its not going to equate using the ability to getting a titan, so it might either A. never use it because it doesn't know to save up resources to use the ability or B. Use it too much because it has the resources and is using the autocast ASAP.

A. The AI doesn't "know" how to save up money as it is. Though, this can be fixed by making the ability upgradable by research, and specifically an AI-only research item that decreases costs, and possibly increases "build time" to balance this out.
B. If one puts in their own Titan limit, than wouldn't this not be an issue?

Not very well. But the fact that it researches up to Novaliths and things fairly quickly seems to indicate that they do sometimes.

Well, it couldn't go over the titan limit. But then how often do players choose to go up to the capitalship limit? You may want players to have a fairly generous titan limit to give them the choice but it is probably not practical to spend most of your fleet supply on 13 titans. If you make the limit fairly restrictive, say 3 or 4 and leave titans about as powerful as they are now, yeah it won't be a very big deal.

I'm just thinking from the standpoint of how to make it so you can build different Titans (or get the AI to build different titans) and also be able to field more than one (and get the AI to field more than one titan [possibly via AI auto-cast ability that is re searchable by AI only {as in off the page research}. You're Titan Foundry would show double 'build' buttons, ones that the human can click and knows how to use and ones that the AI unlocks with it's research and builds off of but for the human player are always grayed out.)

I was thinking 1-2 for a "higher end" Titan and 4 for the "lower end" Titans. Admittedly, as SoGE is a total conversion mod, our Titans will be different from vanilla Titans. They aren't as strong as vanilla Titans, save for the top three, proportionally speaking.

Awesome! Thank you very much, I can't wait to try this out this weekend.

I've also been thinking about it and implementing a target cap wouldn't be too hard.  Levels are going to get funky.  You level up one, you level up them all probably as it's probably stored as a singular global variable because level persists after death.  That said, the exp might still get distributed between any amount of them in a gravity well oddly enough.  Levels will get so so so strange...

Multiple titans will never be a functional system (without actually making them be capitals) unless you pull some really weird magic with buffs to emulate levels regarding stats, though abilities will still be ridiculous and I don't think there's any way to restrict them artificially.  Of course, if they make it a property of the ship as it is with a capital (which is what they should do anyways), titans would be fine.

Bottom line, unless they change the leveling system, Titans could never be implemented en masse because the leveling would be so wonky and stupid that no one would want to use those mods (though I suppose it could vaguely make sense for the Advent at least because you could just say that they transfer knowledge between their ships).

Obviously it's not going to be feasible to balance the vanilla game around multiple Titans. But maybe the developers could loosen up that hardcoded cap a bit? This is going to be a very popular mod request once the game comes out, and we modders can worry about how badly it screws up the AI and game mechanics. Using fleet beacons is ok, but it's still kind of a hack.

Just call it calling for reinforcements.  If you need a lore reason, just say that economic cost of building a titan is so huge that you have to enlist the aid of other titans built by other sectors.

As before however, the problem isn't going to be making them.  It'll be making their levels be independent.

Actually this is false. I finally had a bit of time to do testing, and titans that are spawned by ability at least do not set the titan level for future spawned titans. They seem to always spawn at level 1. Not sure what happens if you build a normal titan first that dies, but its quite possible it only keeps its levels if its built normally.

This also means if that this is a great way for people who don't like titans keeping their levels to get around that mechanic and to replace it with their own.

This is wonderful news. I wonder how the AI would handle not being able to build Titans, if they would all spawn by ability... Perhaps they would focus more on capital ships and frigates? Or just flat out die and rot?

Oh, If so, that's great.  I'd assume then that any titan spawned after the primary titan was built then would spawn at the primary's level?

Okay, I think I've figured out how all of this works now. Spawned titans are always at level 1, period. Built titans will take the same level as the highest titan you've ever controlled, even if its a spawned titan, so its the process of building a titan that gives it its levels, not anything with the titan itself.

I don't know, though I have a couple of different ideas of how to set this up. The obvious is as you said just to completely replace building titans with spawning them, in which you get around the keeping levels thing completely and they basically act like capitalships.

If the AI doesn't like that, you could try keep the titans as they are, but having a separate late level (say 6-8) tech that gives players the ability to spawn titans as well. Thus everyone's first titan is built normally, allowing the AI to still function, but allows human to get multiple titans if they have a lot of resources late game. The only thing is the game won't let you rebuild a titan if you currently have one, even if it was spawned, so if your first/higher level titan gets destroyed you won't be able to rebuild it at its full levels until all of your titans are destroyed. This may not be a bad thing though, it gives a bit of reward for players who only build one titan but use it well, and really makes multiple titans a luxury you should only use for hasting the finishing blow after you've won the main battle.

The third way is for humans get all of their titans via ability but give the AI a unique research that allows it to get access to the normal titan factory. This should keep the AI more competent anyways as it probably wouldn't know how to use multiple titans to its advantage, so the titans retaining levels is a bigger bonus. Humans will always have to start their titans from level 1 but can build multiple, which is something they are better able to use.

^Not bad!

I have two thoughts on this and it may run into something that is small fry stuff but...

A.  Spawning Titans like they are going out of business could hit that 2 Gig cap with possible existing changes one might bring in to deal with the titan mass.

B.  Is it possible to cycle titan builds so you have a visual mark to tell in fast order what titan is what...  A visual interface to know them a part is in personal experience, seriously important to game play.