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Mods / Re: [0.9.1a] Starship Legends 1.4.2 - Extra flavor for ships, crew, and NPCs
« on: August 18, 2020, 03:37:19 AM »
Excellent mod, I've really enjoyed the subtle variety it adds. I've been playing it with Ruthless Sector enabled so my feedback is largely ruthless legends oriented. Overall 9/10 as a solid mod for my 'always download' list.
In terms of feedback, I would definitely agree with some of the comments on difficulty calculation being a weakness. On the player side, say you're level 30 and are largely specced into exploration / salvage / colony traits the added multiplier to your fleet calculation doesn't work well. You could have more hull-mods unlocked, but ultimately that doesn't put you above the ai, just brings you into line. Similarly if you go down the combat line, you are improving your own ship, but only your own ship. I ultimately wound up toning the player level multiplier down to something like 0.004 instead of 0.01. If you're able, it might be better to tie the fleet multipliers for the player character directly to specific skills.
As well, I think in addition to total supply as the base factor of difficulty you could consider things like raw numbers of ships, total hull value, total flux capacity of ships, total flux dissipation of ships, total number of weapons, and damage / flux output of weapons. These might let you make a more balanced difficulty calculation for the ruthless legends variant if they are something you can access.
On the ship performance side, I found that while the heavy punishment for hull damage made sense, having to do 5.2 (base) or 8 (ruthless) times as much damage to make up for each point of damage you took seemed unreasonable. The support multiplier obviously helped with that, but I wound up tuning my individual ship damage modifier to 0.375 so to make up for ruthless legend damage I only had to deal around 2-4 times as much hull damage depending on the overall battle, which I felt was more reasonable. Like on the one hand it is bad to take 90% damage, but if you're taking out two to three ships of your size in return for that, I can't see how that isn't 'good'. That said, I think my playstyle is less meta than other players - I like a big line of ships pounding away at the enemy, trading shot for shot which naturally leads to fairly high damage taken.
If its feasible, I think for ship performance you could also consider looking at things like missile hit %, amount of hard flux inflicted, number of ships overloaded, armor stripped, pd performance, and the like.
In terms of feedback, I would definitely agree with some of the comments on difficulty calculation being a weakness. On the player side, say you're level 30 and are largely specced into exploration / salvage / colony traits the added multiplier to your fleet calculation doesn't work well. You could have more hull-mods unlocked, but ultimately that doesn't put you above the ai, just brings you into line. Similarly if you go down the combat line, you are improving your own ship, but only your own ship. I ultimately wound up toning the player level multiplier down to something like 0.004 instead of 0.01. If you're able, it might be better to tie the fleet multipliers for the player character directly to specific skills.
As well, I think in addition to total supply as the base factor of difficulty you could consider things like raw numbers of ships, total hull value, total flux capacity of ships, total flux dissipation of ships, total number of weapons, and damage / flux output of weapons. These might let you make a more balanced difficulty calculation for the ruthless legends variant if they are something you can access.
On the ship performance side, I found that while the heavy punishment for hull damage made sense, having to do 5.2 (base) or 8 (ruthless) times as much damage to make up for each point of damage you took seemed unreasonable. The support multiplier obviously helped with that, but I wound up tuning my individual ship damage modifier to 0.375 so to make up for ruthless legend damage I only had to deal around 2-4 times as much hull damage depending on the overall battle, which I felt was more reasonable. Like on the one hand it is bad to take 90% damage, but if you're taking out two to three ships of your size in return for that, I can't see how that isn't 'good'. That said, I think my playstyle is less meta than other players - I like a big line of ships pounding away at the enemy, trading shot for shot which naturally leads to fairly high damage taken.
If its feasible, I think for ship performance you could also consider looking at things like missile hit %, amount of hard flux inflicted, number of ships overloaded, armor stripped, pd performance, and the like.