First off, my mission statement: To create the most realistic and epic experience possible in EAW while still maintaining a semblance of balance.

I'm making some good progress on this, so I wanted to get this started, get some ideas people might have, and generally make everyone aware of what I'm doing. Here's what I've done so far:

-- Galactic travel times increased 5x, and the trade route bonus further cut to a third(roughly) of what it was. It is still a bit fast but in the right ballpark I think.
-- Ships now cannot move when their engines are disabled(was a 60% reduction in speed).
-- Maximum credits cap and hero respawn time both increased to the point where they effectively don't exist.
-- Space pop cap now 60 for all factions. This may go up or down depending on what balance issues there are in the rest of the mod.

What I'm working on now:

Galactic Economy -- Mines are far too powerful(tripling planetary income? Puh-lease), base amount of income is too high, as what it means is income on a nearly undeveloped planet, trade income is a bit problematic but I'm not sure what all can be done with that. If possible I intend to give a negative income to all military buildings(i.e. maintenance and support), but I am very unsure if this can be pulled off. All build times and costs will be increased, espescially the times -- building capital ships in a day? Nuff said.

Further steps:

Basically I want to reflect the fact that the imperial military(land and space) should be more powerful than the Alliance. I can only do this to the extent that I can give the Alliance compensating advantadges, however. As of now I plan on giving them the following:

-- Higher accuracy for their ship weapons: they should have better, more determined pilots though not the tech that the Empire does
-- Better heroes/nerfed heroes for the Empire(with the exception of course of Palpatine and Vader), for similar reasons

Other ideas in this vein include:

-- Ability to train limited amounts of 'cannon-fodder' indigenous-type troops
-- Much faster development of planets under their control as opposed the Empire to simulate local support
-- Faster training times than the empire for new units as the equipment/training is much more basic: the Alliance problem is money and technology, not men; Empire the other way around as conscription, training, outfitting etc. is much more costly for them in terms of credits and time.

Once I get a handle on that, I plan on making a number of combat changes: specifically the totally ridiculous spawning units from garrisons and star destroyers, and also making the Alliance fighters the real strength of the military as this is what they should be.

I am open to any suggestions, ideas, flames, harrassment, etc.

Sounds good, how about you work together with MistenTH who does the other realism mod? He has already done work on space battles.

Some of his stuff is similar, and some I may borrow and credit, but his goals are a little different than mine, particularly in that I think he's keeping the fast-paced nature of the game and trying to make units balanced. To a certain extent I want it to be decidedly unbalanced. But his work appears quite good and will appeal to a lot of players.

Hey Zorro, nice to see someone else bringing EAW closer to the Star Wars that we all know and love. You've set yourself a large list of changes, and I can't wait to play the end result once it's done!

I don't think my goals are that different from yours. If you've tried my latest version, capital ships and fighters both last decidedly longer in battle, and the rebel fighters are pretty nasty, while the Imperial fighters can still stand their ground when in large swarms.

I wouldn't mind a collaboration if you're interested. After all, I am only doing space combat whereas you are doing Galactic & Ground as well. We'll see how things develop :)

Best of luck!

Thanks! I've made one other change: when you capture a planet, there is 'development bonus' factored for a second or two. It's not a bonus, its a penalty, which at first takes away most of your income and then scales gradually down to zero. What the point is of having it there for a second or two I don't know, since credits are updated only on a daily(45 seconds default) basis. I made this time period a lot longer, so that you will have a period of 'assimilation' when conquering a planet.

I'll take a closer look at what you've got in a while, I'm at the point where I'm going to go through and take a detailed look at the combat stats for the various vessels, and then see what I want to tweak. I've got to get this settled before I can do any serious work on build times/costs, heroes, etc.

MistenTH and Zorromorph, me and Orao are working on the "unofficial patch" for the same balance purposes as you do. Maybe we should join our forces, what do you think?

Mail me in athanasiostsiolas@gmail.com so that we coordiante our work.

Ive been working on basically the same thing Zorro which I saw you posted to my reply on the other forum. Maybe we can all get together and make something happen.

If anyone wants to see what ive been working on you can look at the forum post I made on the thread Empire at War Realism, just scroll down till you see my name

That will be very good. Btw I found a freeware of XML editor which I use for EAW. It is very easy and intuitive to work with. Moreover it will check if tehre is any code error in the file for you.
XML Editor (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=123425)

BTW Athanasios friendly fire for bombing runs can definietly be added.

Sounds pretty cool, I hope it works out. :)

I wouldn't mind us getting together to build a better mod! We'll be able to accomplish more and learn from each other while being able to work less.

However, we all have our own differences of what SW realism would be, which would cause some problems if we don't settle it at the very start. Can we get a private forum somewhere to share and develop this, and see if collaboration is possible?

On my end, I've only worked on the Space Combat, so any conflict would be limited to that. Also, one thing I don't agree with is throwing the battle caps wide open. When I play 2 on 2 skirmish, that's a maximum of 80 cap worth of units in space. I estimate that around 40-50 cap onwards, my system begins to lag badly. For ground battles, max cap is 28, and ground battles lag HORRIBLY for me once it gets past 20+ cap.

My system is a P4 2.66 ghz, 1 gig ram, Nvidia 6600GT fyi.

Orao, that XML editor arranges things nicely, but it's too slow for my taste. Nicely organised, but slow for fast editing. Good though to avoid being overwhelmed.

Do you use MSN Messenger? We can settle a chat there (multiple session is available) and set the bases (unless everyone agrees).

I use Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition for the XML editing. It's like Dreamweaver, yet it has some handy functions and it's competely free (yet i still try to figure out how the line numbers are shown :)).

As for the diffrent opinions on balance issues, someone proposes few tweaks with a logical argument, the other adds/disagrees and so on. Yet, from what i've seen so far, i don't see to disagree on major things (the cap issue *cough cough*... :)).

Orao: Yup, yup.....i got tired of getting smashed by those bombers while their whole bunch of forces are in the middle of my base and they survive this nuclear run............

***Because LF databases have common stability problems, i suggest we exchange (privately) emails and meet on MSN. Before this weekend ofcourse (we must get things moving).

Yea I agree completely we could easily setup a yahoo group where we could post and we could meet on MSN/AIM whatever.

I have been spending most of my time in land battles and with you spending most of your time in space combat that already seems to be looking like a good match.

Ill setup a yahoo group and then send you all private messages here

PM responded to. I have AIM or can give the others an email to reach me at if needed, but I don't use MSN. I'm not sure that our visions will mesh well enough to pool it into one mod, but I'm certainly open to the possibility.