Swizzle's Balanced Zombify Everything

[swizzlewizzle]

So I love being able to zombify even the largest ships - having my own hunter killer go out and wreck stuff feels epic.

*However* - as it is right now, the "zombify everything" button is basically a cheat button, because you only need 10,000 zombification damage to zombify *anything*... a single Mk1 parasite could zombify a world cracker, as long as something else killed the world cracker.

This sucks.

So I created a simple mod that makes it *much* harder to zombify ships larger than guardians. The algorithm is mainly based off of the hull points of a ship (which encapsulate how "advanced" it is, as well as how durable it's hull/systems are), and then is further modified by the armor thickness of the hull (to simulate the difficulty of nanobots getting through extremely thick/dense armor).

Simply install this into your main game folder and play. (clicking the "zombify everything" button in-game is also not required)

Honestly, I think vanilla should be updated to allow anything to be zombified in this fashion, as having a "hard block" on zombification being completely useless against a large portion of the ships in the game doesn't make any sense at all. Chris/Keith, if you are reading this, I do hope that you consider pulling these changes and working zombify-all into the main code trunk.

Enjoy.

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v1.2 Update
- Cleaned up some xml stuff - more patch resistant now

v1.1 Update
- You can now zombify almost anything - actually (vanilla AIW2 does not allow exogalactics/golems to be zombified - now you can)
- Algorithm for zombifying extremely large things (like motherships) tweaked. Expect to need LOTS of zombification to steal these extremely powerful ships.

[Parch]

Thanks for this!

[swizzlewizzle]

My pleasure.

[ArnaudB]

That's a pretty interesting mod and I'll test it. It'd indeed be much better than the current setup, as otherwise parasite get frustratingly useless in some scenarios.

A note on the mod, to clean it up it'd be better not to rewrite the stats for all the units in GameEntity. With partial record and updates to xml modding, you no longer need to. The current mod would override stats of later update, so if the units get rebalanced later on, you'd need to redo the mod.

It's still young so that kind of optimization can wait.

[swizzlewizzle]

Interesting, didn't know partial record went that far - i'll tidy it up later, but as you said, it doesn't matter for the time being. ^^

[-NR-SirLimbo]

Does the mod still work in the more recent AIW2 versions? It has been quite a while since the last update.