Star Trek Armada : A guide to making maps
 

Modifying the ship/unit's levels

As you know, each ship comes with a standard complement of crew, shield level, special energy level.

However, you can modify these levels. The ability to modify is especially useful for mini and yardwars.

To modify the ship, base, or the AI unit, double click on the unit, this brings up...........


 


The ONLY things you should mess around with are.... Team, crew,  shields+max, special energy+max

Aspects

-Team : it should not be necessary to change this, unless of course you want to manually change which team gets the unit.

-Crew : May be 0 - in which case the ship is a derelict, or anywhere up to the maximum level. Each ship has its own preset max. level of crew, which sadly, can not be modified.

-Shields : You may set any level of shields for a ship/base. You could set initial shields at 50% of the max. level for instance.
   One very useful possibility, is to make super strong ships. For instance, in a science ship war, make the nebula have shields of 10000.

-Special energy : Most ships have some kind of special weapon, and you are able to set the amount of energy a specific ship has. You should take account of the default settings for each ship type.

For example, in the screenshot above you can see the steamrunner class ship starts with 1000 special energy, with a max level of 1000. Each 'zap' of the engine disabler cost about 600units of energy.
So, if you want your ship to start with 10 zaps in reserve, you set special energy level at 6000. The maximum can be as high as you like. However, any number over about 100000 is simply pointless for any ship - even in a miniwar.

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NOTE : Do not go tinkering with the label, race, name index, or colour - if you do change these, they'll just mess things up.

Creating an AI (computer player) on the map

This is quite simple

For example... on a yardwar,...

There are 4 human players, with camera's 1-4 placed on the map. There is one AI on the map.

The AI, should have it's units placed as team 5

The AI can of course start with its own bases, yards, as well as any type of ship - and of course the ships can be made super strong.
A 'camera' position is NOT to be used. Only human players need a starting position on a map.

In theory, you could have 8 human players and 1 AI (the AI would be Team 0, yes, there is a team zero, but i would'nt advise using this)

 

Proceed to Setting Map Attributes

Last updated : 18/02/03