Birth of the Empires

There are fine preset values for the kinds of ships that are available, but once you advance in the tech tree, the older presets are then old revisions and so they cannot be made. This means that if you know that is going to happen, then a smart player can anticipate making certain earlier types before completing the tech.

Example:
It's a waste to add a lot of armaments plus armor/shields to colony ships as they are lost during the colonization process. However other colony ships have to risk traveling across contested terrain.

One of the first military strategy games to allow customizable units was Alpha Centari. GalCiv2 similarly used that feature which exists on BotE. Most players probably won't bother with it, while especially bright frugal players certainly might to effectively get a few more custom ships for the same price or create entirely novel ships which fit a "niche". Typically brilliant players will refer to a spreadsheet database of the ship types and look for a way to exploit or counteract an enemy ship too. These sorts of ideas are gamechangers for the harder levels where every bit of money saved is vital versus the AI which will use the default ship types.

Typically in a military strategy game, the various kinds are put in a spreadsheet in order to help the player know at a glance the various attributes and strengths and unique abilities. And then a techtree is also made as a kind of truth table.

In the android version, the file is in an .obb format so this is not visible. However if the data is available somewhere, I wouldn't mind creating both in standard formats that are then put in a pdf. Just point me in the right direction, and I can start documenting it. Then error check it, then assemble a draft pdf which others can double check. I'm glad to volunteer given the enormous work that went into the free program.

I could use the existing data by poking around, but these values may not be consistent across versions and platforms.

Edit
Here is the github link to the ship types and attributes and requirements...with the caveat being it is partially in German.
https://github.com/bote-team/bote/blob/ ... 130686.rar

Within that compressed file (.rar), there is a Excel format spreadsheet which partially explains this.

If anyone wants, I could do screencaps of say the default Klingon ships within the research database like this.
It would be too many attachments but could be zipped up as a reference. For the better advanced ships, screencaptures would cut off the special abilities.

I was trying to think of a faster way to populate the wiki or even have a comparison of this Federation heavy cruiser versus that Klingon version. I think that is the kind of useful database that helps new players know what is available.

I could do the same thing for major race troops or for the techtree progression which allows recruitment too.

Now once a player know the default version versus the default competition, the obvious customization would be far easier to justify. It's like when Picard asks Geordi for some way to modify the ship to deal with the Borg cube. It would stimulate that kind of engineering discussion versus security/tactics/weapons operations.

The ships are a bit of a black box as they show armament, shields/hulls, manueverability, warp drive range, and scanning range, whereas the troops have values. So the combat results are not straight forward. This makes it difficult to compare the two.