Introduction
WIP
Zone Capture
In order for the player to claim an unowned zone, or capture a zone from a Faction, certain prerequisites must be met:
- An owning faction must have no ships or stations in the zone (zones can be bigger than Skunk radar or visible ranges).
- No other faction may have a military capital ship in the zone.
- You must have an owned capital ship in the zone.
- You must have enough credits (10-20 million).
CM_config.xml file
This file can be edited and controls several features in the game. Look through the file to customize your experience. Everything is explained in the file with detailed instructions.
Retaliation Fleets
These can be controlled via the CM_Config file. If an enemy station is destroyed, there is a chance that a retaliation fleet or fleets will spawn and jump directly into the zone. Be careful when invading into enemy territory. These fleets are different from normal enemy fleets.
Jobs.xml
This file handles almost all of the invasion and defense fleets. This file can be edited to customize your experience as much as you want. There are plenty of notes in there to get things working as you like but it might take a little studying to figure out all of the features. This file handles what ships spawn, how many, at what interval, at what location and also specifies where they will travel.
Shipyards
Shipyards of varying types can be built by the player. Some of these can be built through CV's purchased at faction shipyards. Some can only be built by capturing unique CV's that travel throughout the galaxy in various places.
Shipyards require significant amounts of resources in order to function well but will provide a very lucrative income source. When you order a ship at your shipyard it will appear to be asking you for money to build the ship but this is only
for show. The shipyard will only appear to take your money but it will not take your money. You still need to have the credits in your bank account, though, in order to build the ship. This is an unfortunate limitation but there is no way known to get
around this. Once you build a ship, you can sell the ship to your own shipyard dealers for a profit markup of 50% of the base cost. When you go to sell your ship, it will only initially show the base cost of selling the ship without taking account
of the extra 50% income. However, once sold, you will receive the base cost plus 50% of the base cost into your bank account. The same goes for small shipyards.
Ships built at NPC shipyards will actually have a purpose now. Military ships will go on patrol, trade ships will go on to trade and mining ships will go on to mine. If you sell a ship to a faction shipyard, it will also be used by that faction and could help them in their wars.
Spawning behavior
This mod doesn't change the spawning behavior much. What that means is, most ships are spawned just like in vanilla with some major differences. First, ships for a faction are only spawned in certain zones considered home zones or base zones. If you conquer those zones. That will stop the ships from spawning for the most part but you must hold the home or base zone for a period of time (depends on when the job suppression script is read which could be as little as 1 minute or as much as 2 hours). Weakening a faction by conquering its' zones (either by you or another faction) will also limit its power and it may spawn less ships (be careful though because they will spawn fleets in other places to try and take back their lost territory).
Shipyard resource consumption and ships sold to/produced by a shipyard
Some ships that spawn will drain resources from a shipyard but not all. Ships built at a shipyard will have a job to do. Military ships will patrol and can help a faction turn the tide of battle. Ships you self to a faction shipyard will also be used by that faction. Trade ships will trade and miners will mine. The shipyard will still produce ships at the same pace as it does in vanilla.
With all that being said, a war of attrition is possible but it is done by controlling zones rather than destroying an economy. Of course stopping a shipyard from producing ships will also help your war cause but it isn't a huge impact since most fleets are spawned by zone ownership. This could be changed, we have the code in place and capability to flesh this system out in a more complex fashion but that is not a goal at this time.