Raising Capital Ship Max Supply

nevermind, I figured it out after I downloaded the Forge Tools (which I wasn't aware that I needed at the time).

As an aside, some of the file formatting has changed a bit since the Intro to Modding document, so unless that was updated some things in it might not be completely accurate

That said, I don't know of any other tutorials, but if you have any further questions I'd be happy to help

I'll take you up on your offer.  At the moment im not at home so I can't think of how I would do it without looking at the files, but how do you suppose I could disable the Iconus Guardians "Shield Projection" graphic?  Im also thinking about replacing it with a more simple effect, such as "Target Uplink" aura icon.  Last game I played against the AI he built so many of them since the game was a drawn out stalemate, and I had to fight 40 of them at once, and when they all cast it at the same time it really slowed things down and made it impossible to see what was going on in the fight.

I'll give you a general rundown in abilities along with it so you get a better idea of how it works. All abilities have two or more files to them. There's an Ability file, and a Buff file. The Ability file defines the basic concept for the ability: who it can target, the range, costs, whether it needs research, etc. Then the Ability file refenrences the Buff, which is the meat of the ability that tells you what it does. Sometimes an ability can actually be multiple buffs.

Shield projection is a good example, actually. AbilityShieldProjection refrences BuffShieldProjectionCaster. When you open it, you see it does two things:

buffInstantActionType "PlayPersistantAttachedEffect"

and

buffInstantActionType "ApplyBuffToTargetsInRadius"

The first one is the graphic effect that you're looking for:

effectInfo
  effectAttachInfo
   attachType "Ability"
   abilityIndex 0
  smallEffectName "Buff_ShieldProjectionChanneling"
  largeEffectName "Buff_ShieldProjectionChanneling"

attachType can be one of a few settings that basically decide where the effect appears. There's Ability, Above, and Aura (aura being below the ship model), and I *think* there's a Center.

The second applies a second buff, so it also contains targetting info, and refrences BuffShieldProjectionTarget, which then says that all the ships it applies share 33% of the damage.

Now getting back to the effect, TargetingUplink has two: one for the caster, which is the aura below the ship:

effectInfo
  effectAttachInfo
   attachType "Aura"
  smallEffectName "Buff_TargetingUplinkSelf"
  largeEffectName "Buff_TargetingUplinkSelf"

And one for the affected targets, which is the crosshair thing above them:

effectInfo
  effectAttachInfo
   attachType "Above"
  smallEffectName "CapitalBuff_TargetingUplink"
  largeEffectName "CapitalBuff_TargetingUplinkLarge"
  soundID ""

You can just replace the Shield Projection one with whichever of those (or any other buff effect) you like!

Great, thanks for the help; I took out the buff effect for shield projection entirely.  I'll have to eventually figure out what I want to replace it with but I thought about it again and I'd rather not replace it with an existing buff effect cause I might confuse myself or others in the future if they play my mod.  But the main point was to remove it because of how graphic intensive it was, resulting in huge amounts of lag, and now thats not a problem anymore.