They can harvest scalables, including Hubworlds (assuming no quarantine - IIRC, quarantines block harvesting). Is there a specific resource you're having trouble with? I'm pretty sure none of them (except artificial ones) were marked as unstealable, but I can check the files.

Harvesters are fairly poorly armed - it's more of a token defense so it doesn't fall prey to something ridiculous like a size-64 frigate. Remember, they only deal 25% of a normal ship's damage, so while they do have the advantage of size, they may be unable to do much harm.

Not sure about tile development.

This is coming in 0.5.0. I have no idea when that's coming, but...

I've tried harvesting a Vast Plains (and one other type, forgot), and in both cases is left the planet with the barren marker but the resource still being on planet...

What classifies an "artificial resource"? Is there a list somewhere of what resources cannot be harvested?

Ah, yes, of course. Vast Plains can't be harvested because they're more a 'trait' than a 'resource'.

Artificial resources are resources that are constructed by a player empire - Ringworld, Artificial Planetoid, Soylent, Water (Comet or native water is okay, but Hydrogenators are a no-go), Altar and stuff. If it's an innate property of a planet (being artificial or having a vast surface), or if it's attached to a building, then you can be sure it's not going anywhere.

Edit: Also, when in doubt, consult the data files. There's not a single gameplay-related thing, in either ABEM or the vanilla game, that can't be thoroughly analyzed by the inquisitive - it's just a question of how easy it is to find what you're looking for. (In this particular instance, any resource with a 'Stealable: False' line in their definition can't be harvested.)

Re-edit: One minor thing I should note is that while a lot of resources are labeled as 'artificial' in the files, the game uses that to determine whether the resource should be destroyed by terraforming. This is not the same thing as a player-constructed resource, which is what I was referring to in my previous post.

Alright, after 2 games as ringworlder and more scalable resource planets consumed, it's clear now. I guess somehow the first scalable resources I tried to consume turns out to be the only ones that can't be. Although there still needs to be a note ingame on what worlds can or cannot be consumed that doesn't rely on the player to dig through files =P



Btw, I think I noted this once in the main forums several months ago but... the AIs in ABEM are terribly bad at aggression. A savage AI (any race) in vanilla SR2 will raid me with their starting ships and attack me with more ships every 3-4 cycles. Against multiple savage AIs, this means getting hit every cycle by increasing ship sizes, and the AI usually has bigger ships than me until I can get a proper production world set up and start pumping out size 800+ ships. This sometimes get so tense I end up *buying* time with patriot surge cards, waiting until their ship run low on supplies, before hypering in my smaller vessels to chase them off. But in the ABEM mod... even against multiple savage AIs they barely touch me (they settle like normal, explore like normal with legacy mode on, but just... doesn't build ships much). When playing as ringworlder race, I can leave a starting carrier in the home system and they won't even harass me until I have the ringworld at size 5, and which point they'll finally harass me with size ~300 ships while I'm already moving onto size 1000 warships.

The only other issue with ABEM is how terrible support ships are at staying together with their flagship. I can't even use carriers to chase an enemy ship because the mere attempt of it will have the support ships scattering across the wastes of space. Changing flagship destinations during mid-flight also routinely make the ship overshoot (and again, its supports scattering into space), even when it shouldn't (and wouldn't in vanilla SR2) because the target location is far enough. Basically, it seems like the ships' velocity controls are broken and can't tell when to accel/decel if there is even the slightly change in orders.

1. I'm not sure where we'd put it. My descriptions can sometimes be overly long-winded as it is, adding a list of 'forbidden planets' won't help. :/

2. AI shouldn't be 'bad at aggression' (in fact, combat is the only thing they still have any idea how to do, assuming they see the enemy), they should be 'ludicrously bad at building up'. I'm not sure what might be causing the situation you've described - except maybe your starting Ringworld, but that might be a bit of a stretch.

3. We really haven't done anything to change the way the game handles navigation or fleet formations. They're just as bad at doing what you've described as they were in the vanilla game, design differences notwithstanding.

In both #2 and #3, I can say for certain that ABEM performs noticeably worse than the vanilla game. I'm not sure what you changed to have caused it, but the problems definitely exist. In fact, they're one of the big reasons why I stopped playing ABEM and went back to vanilla in my first attempt months ago -- when I discovered that for whatever reason, saving/loading a game in ABEM while a fleet is in transition between systems causes that fleet to fall apart (its supports scattering into space. I'm not sure if this is still a problem, since playing as vanguard my combat flagships don't move as much. But I did notice my support ships still scatter often if I use conventional drives... for example, trying to chase down a withdrawing enemy ship is just asking for the flagship to lose its fleet (as a result I use carriers for only the head-on fights and use destroyers for mobile engagements; which is silly since destroyers actually have the speed penalty due to higher mass).

The reduced AI aggression was observed playing other races too. In fact the first few games I played ABEM months ago, I couldn't verify that the AI built any non-scouting ships (they do, just really, really, slowly). If this is due to the fact that the AI has poor buildup, then somehow the AI is much worse at buildup in ABEM than vanilla -- their ships just don't size up anywhere near as fast.

If the problems exist (and to be fair, I still don't think they do, at least not at the level you're describing), it's either an unavoidable effect of other changes (for example, AI being completely incompetent without special concessions and not too bright even after them - mostly traceable to sensors, but there's a few other things here and there that might throw it for a loop) or completely impossible to track down.

You can look over our code either in your mod folder or on GitHub, and you can compare it to the vanilla game, and if you have better luck finding an explanation than I'm having, then I'd be glad to try to fix it. Until then, everything I know about the stuff I've made is telling me that this is a wild goose chase. That's unfortunate, but out of my control.



(Putting my ranting aside, there's one thing I couldn't help noticing: You use the Carrier Hull for all your carriers? Between the mass reduction and the increased support capacity, it's not inconceivable that they would be incapable of holding on to support ships. If this is the case, you might have better luck if you increase the acceleration on your support designs.

Personally, I've found that Alar's hulls are quite situational - a dedicated ship built with one of them might serve a purpose, but I find myself defaulting to the (no pun intended) default hull for most of my flagships. I imagine a missile-heavy Destroyer could be pretty handy, though, as the firing arc reduction doesn't apply there.)

I do enough programming during my job to not want to do debugging for a game ^^' (though I'll post if I come up with any better ideas on what's causing this). At any rate, I'm just reporting the problem. I don't know how much you test against AI; I believe you once mentioned that you mostly do multiplayer. But as it stands, when running this mod the AI becomes quite terrible, which makes any single-player experience pretty lacking. Sadly, the niche aspect of SR2 + it's a real time 4X game = my friends aren't interested. =(

As it stands, I find myself playing this mod as more a 'empire-building simulator' than a 4X game, using the constantly growing revenants in Expanse mode universe rather than caring about the AI opponents (who are more nuisance that raid / oppose diplomacy than anything else).

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I do design flagships to have a lower acceleration than support ships, so that's not really an issue.

My trend is... I use the default flagship hull in early game because (1) it takes a lot of shield research to make carrier hull worthwhile and (2) defense generation is too low early game, which means support ships are mostly built via budget, and carriers rely on more support ships than I have money available.

However, a carrier-focused flagship with support ships is far more effective in combat than a weapons-focused flagship of similar size. The huge defense surplus in late game also generates more support ships than one knows what to do with, thus I end up switching over to carriers (mid-game being a transition phase depending on resources).

Once I research covariance shield + shield capacitors + harden shield + crystal armor, it simply becomes more worthwhile to switch over to building carriers. Its huge shield boosts more than make it worthwhile to counterbalance the reduced armor strength (crystal armor + high repair does an excellent job of helping keep the shield up. So at this point carriers start dominating my 1st rate battle fleets, with older 'standard hull' models delegated to less important roles.

Meanwhile I use the destroyer hull for specialists; big examples being:

chaser ship -- designed to chase down fleeing foes; equipped with a single massive laser with long-range in the front (for that instantaneous engine damage); sometimes with 4 small lasers on side for dealing with support ships. The ion cannon eventually makes this ship obsolete.

assault ship -- extremely heavily armored destroyer, equipped with rocket pods on the back only; designed to lead assaults by hypering/moving straight into the enemy fleet concentrations and drawing their fire.

Originally posted by zanaikin:

I do enough programming during my job to not want to do debugging for a game ^^' (though I'll post if I come up with any better ideas on what's causing this). At any rate, I'm just reporting the problem. I don't know how much you test against AI; I believe you once mentioned that you mostly do multiplayer. But as it stands, when running this mod the AI becomes quite terrible, which makes any single-player experience pretty lacking. Sadly, the niche aspect of SR2 + it's a real time 4X game = my friends aren't interested. =(

As it stands, I find myself playing this mod as more a 'empire-building simulator' than a 4X game, using the constantly growing revenants in Expanse mode universe rather than caring about the AI opponents (who are more nuisance that raid / oppose diplomacy than anything else).

Well, we used to test against the AI, but that practice went the way of the dinosaur with 0.4.0, just as it became impossible for it to work.

... Aaaand I know exactly how you feel multiplayer-wise. It's reached the point where I'm trying to actively mod a game that I don't play at all, because I like what can be done with it but can't find anyone to play with. >.<

I do design flagships to have a lower acceleration than support ships, so that's not really an issue.

My trend is... I use the default flagship hull in early game because (1) it takes a lot of shield research to make carrier hull worthwhile and (2) defense generation is too low early game, which means support ships are mostly built via budget, and carriers rely on more support ships than I have money available.

However, a carrier-focused flagship with support ships is far more effective in combat than a weapons-focused flagship of similar size. The huge defense surplus in late game also generates more support ships than one knows what to do with, thus I end up switching over to carriers (mid-game being a transition phase depending on resources).

Once I research covariance shield + shield capacitors + harden shield + crystal armor, it simply becomes more worthwhile to switch over to building carriers. Its huge shield boosts more than make it worthwhile to counterbalance the reduced armor strength (crystal armor + high repair does an excellent job of helping keep the shield up. So at this point carriers start dominating my 1st rate battle fleets, with older 'standard hull' models delegated to less important roles.

Meanwhile I use the destroyer hull for specialists; big examples being:

chaser ship -- designed to chase down fleeing foes; equipped with a single massive laser with long-range in the front (for that instantaneous engine damage); sometimes with 4 small lasers on side for dealing with support ships. The ion cannon eventually makes this ship obsolete.

assault ship -- extremely heavily armored destroyer, equipped with rocket pods on the back only; designed to lead assaults by hypering/moving straight into the enemy fleet concentrations and drawing their fire.

Heh, I have a constant preference for huge battleships over swarms of support ships. It may be a weakness, I'm not sure - but it's how I like playing things. :P

Still, I can definitely see why you're doing it the way you're doing, and your use of the synergies there is admirable. :)

By the way, I don't know if the localization says so, but Destroyers have a 30% boost to shield capacity in addition to their 30% armor HP boost. It could work quite nicely too.

Oh I don't intentionally use swarms. Think of my carriers more like 'fleet command/logistics ships', with massive support ships (we're talking a size no smaller than 1/20th, up to 25% the size of the flagship). A standard size 1000 carrier of mine will usually have ~4000 command capacity, divided between size 256, 128, and 64 ships. My own experience in the design sandbox and gameplay tells me that support ships are where the firepower truly lies...

Meanwhile, my carriers get only a single missile tube (in the back) so it can use the attack command.

From what I can tell, shields aren't as efficient as armor because (1) repair speed goes up faster than shield regen, even with the combat repair penalty and (2) layered armor offers all kinds of damage reduction, while shields only have shield hardeners which degrade as combat goes on. This means that if a ship has bonus to both armor and shields, armor > shields. The only reason I'd use shields at all on a destroyer is so I can afford to leave the rear unarmored -- the shields will hold until the ships turn to face with their heavily-armored front.