https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1587065869

bonjour compatible avec version 2.5 ?

Apocalypse Probes are now available! http://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1310366667

Note "explored" is not "surveyed". If you want actual survey data, you still need to send science ships in to investigate.

The latter. You can't order probes to go into unexplored systems, but by moving them closer, they should push back the fog of war and the systems will be marked as explored.

So can a probe with sensor range 1 be sent to an unexplored system even if it can't see into it, or does it need sensors 2? And with sensors 2 can it see into the system without making the trip?

Nevermind, panic over! It seems that with sufficient range, sensors can in fact uncover unexplored systems (it seems that this reduces the effective range by 1).

I need to set up some more localization, but the base components are online and functional as far as I can tell.

Here's the thing - how it seems to work now is;
If a system is completely unexplored, you cannot see into it, period.
Only a science ship with a scientist can enter an unexplored system and allow vision into it.

It doesn't matter what sensor range you have, if a system is unexplored, you cannot send anything into it other than science ships with science officers.

Whilst I could make the game consider them science ships, they would still need science officers, and that may allow them to survey things - in which case, why ever use regular science ships ever again?

The changes to sensors are very... mechanics-y, and don't make a whole lot of sense. I'm hoping it will be reconsidered for future patches.

Could it be easier to treat the Probes as Science Ships? Or keep them as Warships but give them an inherent Sensor Range bonus?

Also unfortunately due to the way ship sensors have been changed, it looks like I'd have to change the define for exploration to allow non-science-ships to enter unexplored systems.

An update will still come, eventually. I'll need to do some tinkering and see what I can do.

It's going to take a little longer for me to rig this up than anticipated, as Paradox went ahead and actually made the size_restriction function work properly. As a result, I need to go in and manually add custom reactors and custom thrusters for probes.

I myself am curious as to how probes will be able to accomplish their explorative purposes with the new change to the military ship capabilities. I look forward to that triumph.

Military ships aren't incapable of exploration per se in 2.0. They just need to get a +1 Sensor Range bonus from something, e.g. by being fitted with a tier 2 Radar. As I understand it. So if you can give the Probes an inherent +1 bonus to Sensor Range, they should work fine.

Oh boy, those Cherryh notes.

I will definitely be updating this for 2.0, and taking whatever steps are necessary to ensure the probes are still capable of independent exploration.

Unfortunate indeed. I'd prefer to keep both mods.

Looking at the mod's page, yeah, that's about what I figured was happening.

Not much that can be done save releasing an entire seperate version of this mod or something, unfortunately.

The conflicting mod is Combat Balancing - Game Combat Improvements.

I'll try to find out which mod might be causing this conflict.

The probe uses the same FTL drive set as any other vanilla ship, so something you have must be messing with the drive definitions.

The only other thing I can think of is that you'll need to make sure to select the probe core section at the top, since it doesn't autoselect that after one of the changes I made, and that might be messing with it. I need to see if I can revert that at some point.

Afraid not. I'm unsure what would be the cause of that. ISB? Realistic ships? Those are the only candidates I have for remotely touching that since none of my installed mods really mess with FTL components.

I suspect he's using one of my Pre FTL mods, which are still 1.8. Looks like we may not play nicely together anymore in 1.9. I'll watch for that in my update.

Must be a conflict with another mod. Are you using anything that messes with the FTL drive entries?

I can't seem to complete a design for a probe. It prevents me from saving the design with the error "SHIPDESIGNER_SAVEFAIL_WRONG_REQUIRED_COMPONENTS". This I assume comes from the fact that the probe has no FTL drive, though it does not allow me include one. Other than that, it has a reactor, and a sensor.

Yeah, Belarron. Paradox really botched this feature. I love their games, but its stuff like this that just drives me up a wall. Civ would be practically unplayable without the auto-explore option.

It's unfortunate that the auto-explore issue is so problematic in regards to modding the probes.

I'm not going to ask for the attempt, as it really just sounds like far too much of a pain with the current structure of the game.

But I definitely hate having to control individual ships for that kind of thing. Tedious as hell.

It's more 'unavoidable behaviour'. I assume that if you're intelligent enough to go through the process of designing a probe, you understand how newly built ships are immediately added to orbiting fleets, how to avoid that situation if necessary, and understand how to split them out if they are merged.

Probes use custom sensor components that have I think twice the range of standard ones (but no modifiers to accuracy/tracking, since they're unarmed). You can mouseover the module to see the range. Upgraded probe sensor components unlock alongside regular ones.

The hull by itself currently has no FTL/STL bonuses, though they are extremely fast. The speed value shown in the designer is accurate (and should always be even if the hull had its own modifiers).

Now, the Probe is classified as military and automatically joins my Corvette fleet, when I build one at the start of the game, intending to use it for solo scouting.

Is that intended behaviour?

Also, what are the Probe's bonuses, in terms of Sensor range, FTL speed and/or STL speed? Is there a place I can see them in-game?

Maybe they're hacking into orbital satellites and just kind of flinging them at city centers or something. Who knows. Justify it however you have to.

Hopefully Paradox can seperate out stances from class and such in a more modding-friendly manner, expose shipclass definitions for modding, or similar.

My god we've found yet another way to commit crimes against civilization in Stellaris

So wait... If probes can do propaganda bombardments... At limited or full does that mean instead of pops being blasted into subatomic particles they're comitting mass suicide...

Also fixed the version number at last. Thought I'd done that already.

Updated. Probes are now classed as military ships and have stances reenabled. They can now be attached to fleets as well.

They can now technically bombard planets from orbit to degrade defenses, but I figure that might actually be vaguely plausible as like... propaganda warfare or something.

Yeah, that's what I would recommend going with until a proper fix is found. I have "is_civilian" set to "no" for the time being. Evasive stance isn't an option, but passive is, which is much more important IMO.

And obviously I can't really set it to scienceship, colonizer, or constructor if it happens to open up those shipclasses to other interface options like surveying, constructing, or colonizing.

That's not a bad thought. I might have to change it to shipclass_military in the end anyway, simply because the vanilla drive modules do actually have shipclass restrictions in place. If they ever actually fix that working, I'd have to overwrite vanilla files.

Been trying to look for a way to fix the missing fleet stances. The only thing I can find is that stance options are somehow tied to "class = shipclass_xxx". Since shipclass_explorer isn't an actual class in the game, it doesn't have any stance options. If there was a way to add it as a class, or somehow find a way to modify stances it might be possible to fix it, but I can't find an option anywhere to do that. I really hope it isn't hardcoded.

Okay.

afaik the only way I can do that right now is to subclass them as science ships, or else fuck around with event/??? logic that might make it impossible to control them.

Neither situation is ideal. Probes aren't survey ships, nor do I want to take that control out of player hands. And I definitely don't want to spend hours/days fucking around with the event/edict/whatever handling trying to add a kitbashed autoexplore.

Of course, you might feel that Probes shuldn't be able to Auto-Explore at all, because then it becomes too quick to find other empires and make friends. Which is fine. I'm just asking.

Any chance you can enable Auto-Explore on these probes?

I use another mod that enables Auto-Explore from the game start (year zero), but it only works on Science Ships, meaning that there must be some kind of flag in the game files that means that only that particular Ship type can have an Auto-Explore button.

So if you can find that flag and add it to these Probes, then it can synergize with the other mod just fine, and those who don't use that other mod won't notice anything amiss, because they get the Auto-Explore Tech later into the game after the Probing phase.

Great mod. Good to hear you're working on fixing stances.

Cool, nice to know it's still working.

Damn, I loved these since they can easily be sent out past dangerous systems since they are cheap and Semi-quick. No longer wondering if my sience ship will die if they come in the next system.

Heads up: 1.8 has disabled stances for the probes. This just means probes are locked in as passive stance and will automatically run away when threatened/can't be ordered into systems with known hostiles.

I need to figure out how to reenable the stance options for them, but aside from that they seem to work fine under 1.8.

Should be. I've built the mod in such a way that it ought to be 'future proof' barring any massive updates.

Compatible with 1.6.1?

Unfortunately I don't think it's plausible to implement such a functon right now, not without it being super hacky.

I get that they are not survey units, I was just hoping they had some sort of auto explore functionality with them with wich they would be a set and forget type of scout.

Depends what you mean by 'worked on'. I keep it up to date where necessary and it's more or less patchproof to begin with due to the way I implemented things.

And no, no autoexplore. They're not actually survey units, just eyes and ears.

is this by any chance still worked on? and do those probes have auto explore on them?