The samples

Five mods ship with the game in mods/, off until turned on. Their source is in the repository under samples/.

Bounty

A small C# mod, built step by step in getting started: credits for every enemy ship destroyed, by its hull, sometimes double, and a message for the player who earned them. Its numbers are in settings.toml.

Bounty (Lua)

Bounty again, as a Lua script (main.lua), with the same settings and the same rules: the Lua scripting page walks through it. Its kills are counted under its own id, so the two can be on together (and pay twice).

Arsenal

A content pack, no code (content): data/content/arsenal.toml adds a beam weapon past the game's best, a stronger shield, an orbital farm improvement (a 51st improvement; colonies make room for it), a crystalline planet type nobody can breathe but rich in wealth, and a premade cruiser, the Lancer, built from the new weapon and shield. Each new tech copies one of the game's (like) and changes what differs.

Night Menu

A data pack: the Game Start picture at night. Its picture is made at install time from the player's own game data (samples/NightMenu reads the imported picture, moves every color to the palette entry nearest a darker, bluer one, and writes the pack), so no game art is in the repository. See data packs.

Simple Combat

A large C# mod that replaces battles. There is no battle screen, and the game never stops for a battle.

• A fleet that attacks a fleet stays engaged with it.
• Fleets at war also engage on their own when they come within 50 of each other (the original's battle joining distance) or circle the same uncolonized planet.
• At a colony only an attack starts a fight, and it is a siege: the attacking fleet goes into orbit and besieges the planet.
• Either side can reinforce. Any enemy fleet in the planet's orbit joins the siege, and any fleet of the owner's or an ally's there joins the defense, including a computer player's new fleet sitting on its shipyard planet. Computer players do this on their own.
• The planet lists show each colony's rating, "+attack ATK +defense DEF", and with ATTACK waiting the pointer shows an attack's chance.

A round

Every few steps a round is fought. The original's battle rules become sums, their rolls replaced by expected values, so nothing is drawn from the game's random numbers.

• Each side's firepower is its weapons' best range band by condition: beams (energy, projectile, area), missiles, drones (three craft a flight), point defense and bombs.
• Beams and drones hit at aim minus hull defense plus 50 in 100. Missiles hit at tracking minus ECM, less the target's fighters' missile defense, plus 100. Neither ever drops below 5 in 100. Orbitals aim at 100 and have no hull defense or ECM.
• Point defense in full, plus half of short range guns (reach 500 or less) and half of a side's own drones, stops incoming missiles and drones, shared between them, at most 80 percent. Drones dodge by their defense.
• Fire is shared over the ships it falls on, the bigger drawing more of it, so a fleet wears down together. Each ship's share meets its own shield, which cuts beams and drones by its percent and soaks up to its capacity, but never stops missiles. What a destroyed ship could not take goes on to the rest, the weakest first.
• Some of what lands goes into a ship's parts instead of its hull, as the original's hits do: the share is the original's chance of a hit landing on a component, which grows as the ship is battered. It is spread over the sensors, ECM, shield, weapons and specials by the room each takes. Damaged weapons fire weaker and a damaged shield stops less, so a battered fleet fights worse.
• A fleet joining a siege first flies in under the defenses' guns when they outrange its weapons: the reach they have past its own, over its slowest ship's battle speed, in rounds of fire it takes without answering (approach_steps_per_round, most_approach_rounds).
• At a besieged planet the fire falls on the defending fleets, then the orbitals (missile bases, battle stations, fighter bases), then the mine fields the besiegers can see. Only then does it fall on the people, where every round lands as in the original's bombing: bombs in full, other weapons in part.
• Mine fields strike the besiegers every round, through shields. A side with no minesweeper of the field's level or better cannot see the mines: every strike lands and the field cannot be fired on. With one, most strikes are swept aside, and the sweepers and point defense clear mines each round.
• Experience counts as in the original: a ship's level raises its aim and its hull defense. After each round every ship of a side that fought gains a point, plus its share of the kill credit (a tenth of each enemy ship's structure, and of each orbital unit's hit points). Training bases still train ships up to level 2 outside battle.
• The colony falls to the besiegers once it has no defenders and no orbitals left and its population is near zero. Mine fields nobody could see go with it.

The attack's chance

It compares how long the attackers would last under the defenders' fire (mines included) with how long the defenders would last, plus, at a planet, the time to bring its people down. Even odds mean the two would wear each other out together. The attacker's own and allied fleets already circling the planet count with it.

Its numbers

Every number is in simple-combat.toml in the mod's folder, each with a note on what it does. Copy the mod to your user folder's mods folder to change them; that copy then wins over the shipped one.

The API it uses

OnBattle takes every battle over; OnStep fights the rounds; Game.ReportFights puts the fights on the system view; OnColonyRating and OnAttackOdds give the planet list and the pointer their numbers; DamageShip, DamageStructure, Bombard, CaptureColony and DeclareWar change the game. See the reference.