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Modding: increasing carrier strike craft complement


ToxicFrog
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Having upgraded my computer, I reinstalled BCM (now that I have enough space) and returned to playing it. This time, though, I looked around a bit and found the Assets.ini. I've been fiddling around with it a bit, and my ultimate goal is to have carriers that can field a lot (16+) of fighters. Thanks largely to the comments in the header, I've been able to play around with the Firestorm and give it 16 fighters, but I've run into a problem with the pilots. It seems that you can't have more than one instance of a special NPC class (pilots or bridge crew) per ship, and multiple declarations are discarded. Since there are only 8 fighter pilot classes, it won't let me have more than 8 pilots - which kinda removes the point from having more than 8 fighters. I have yet to try this with AI carriers, but I suspect that I will have no better results.

So, I've got some questions. Hopefully, someone who's more experienced than I at modding BCM can answer them.

-Is there any way to get it to create multiple pilots of the same class?

-If not, can new pilot classes be created?

-Failing that, can other crew be commanded to pilot the fighters effectively?

One thing I though of (but haven't had time to try yet) was to increase the maximum number of pilots, but not the initial number, and clone a few once in the game. I have no idea if that's even possible, though, since I've never used the cloning system before.

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I believe the max number of FC the game allows is 16 per ship. As to your other questions, no you can't have other crew piloting the ships or create more pilots. (could be wrong but I'm pretty sure you can't)

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A thousand thanks, SC.

Thinking on it a bit more, I'm starting to think that the only way to do this would be to somehow get it to allow multiple instances of the same pilot, since I doubt that I have the tools or the ability to create new pilot classes from scratch. Once I get home from work I should be able to put some serious time into this. Based on what I've seen in the GBS2 threads, if this would require GBS to implement I'm pretty much doomed and I might as well drop those extra 8 Ravens on Jupiter...but I'm hoping that's not the case.

On the plus side, massive ground-assault forces are probably quite doable, since engies and marines are nonclassed.

My ultimate goal is still a dedicated carrier, though - designed to launch large numbers of fighters into the battle from afar while it lurks around a jump node ready to retreat if things go bad.

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You cannot change or add any personnel classes. That should be obvious by now. And having 16 fighters and 8 pilots is not moot. Where does it say that you must have 16 pilots in order to have 16 fighters? What if you have 16 different fighters and want to launch 4 of the best ones?

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quote:

Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

You cannot change or add any personnel classes. That should be obvious by now.

That's why I'm not trying to anymore. I'm guessing from the general tenor of your comment, however, that my other plan (adding multiple pilots of the same class to the crew list) is also untenable.

quote:

Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

And having 16 fighters and 8 pilots is not moot. Where does it say that you must have 16 pilots in order to have 16 fighters? What if you have 16 different fighters and want to launch 4 of the best ones?

I never said that having more fighters was generally useless, merely that it was for my purposes - which were to be able to have carriers launching up to 16 fighters at once, thus leading to even more epic (albeit CPU-crushing) battles.

At least I can give myself a personal Raven to fly around without needing to drag the pilots out of it first. I appreciate the help, and apologize for wasting your time.

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