Setting single engines/thruster for any ship's kind

[Realspace]

Aiming at a more X3 kind early game, I'd like to change the modularity of ships into fixed ones.

In my REM mod I already went into this direction by changing the engines into 3 kinds (basic, standard and advanced), not nine. This however is not enough to make every ship unique.

Indeed if I can set every ship to have a single engine and thruster, these can be change accordingly with ship's unit to make every ship different (say agile but slow or fast but having more drift, so on).

Also having a fixed engine/thruster is a nice touch to make a pirate game available, so that captured ship has its engines and requires no wharf to upgrade.

I started this thread because I'd like to know by others who maybe tried a similar approach (I am sure a lot had the same idea) if it is viable or they found some harcoded limit... I've spent already too much time modding X4

(One tool that I'd like to discuss is TAG, can I create new custom tag? For instance an engine has the tags only for the Nova, another only for the Eclipse, so on)

[Shadow1980]

Take a look at the Sapphire Ships mod (Nexus) as that uses this approach with a tag.

The ships only accept the specific modded engine. I'm pretty sure what you're trying to do is pretty trivial.

However, you could accomplish the same by just giving all ships the same basic engine and then using the ships mass, drag, and number of engines to do the rest. That would be less work too?

Or at least use groups of ships that use the same engine to make your life easier.

Either way yes you can absolutely do this.

[Realspace]

Thank you very much. Yes I do that in REM by changing drag and mass to achieve different behaviors but was not satisfied by the modularity itself. Also it does not allow a good bailing experience as true pirate (enemy to all).

In REM I simplified engines to 3 kinds, I could indeed even make only one kind and change only the unit's values. I used the approach of standardizing engines because we don't know which engine the game could set as default (say an mk2) so removing them is not a good idea, I standardized them, removed from the market and changed the names (to be the same).

A nice touch would be simply adding a tag for traders/miners, mixed use ships, combat ships.

Thrusters would be also a nice touch, not depending from the drag (I set it to very low to all ships to have inertia) but different for the kind of ships, so say: S trader/miner thruster (the mk1), S combat ship (the Mk2), S heavy fighter (the mk3)...

Problem is always that any ship created through md in vanilla could call for an engine that I remove through tag

edit: I took a look and yes that mod uses a custom tag so it seems that the game recognizes any tag if set in the wares..good to know

[Shadow1980]

No problem at all!

I was just looking through those files yesterday for someone else, so when I saw your question i thought I'd point you in the direction of a good example.

[Realspace]

I've ended making a massive rework of all items, ships, engines, shields etc and using tags could achieve the result of making each equipment specific to class, race etc. No more every ship can mount everything. Game looks much more as X3 now. Take a look:
https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/848