"...It also presents a formidable obstacle to any unscheduled transfer of goods or personnel, reducing the odds of Pather terrorists gaining a foothold on the ground... If the colony actually has customs inspectors in the first place, of course."
This is a mini-mod that changes the mechanics of the planetary shield generator; I found that, with its vanilla implementation, I never actually wanted to use it - so I modified it to offer an additional option to help deal with Pather terrorists.
This mod is safe to add to an existing save! And, yes, you'll get the new behavior immediately, including on any shields you've already built. (Starsector
will display a mod compatibility warning; it is safe to ignore it.)
It is not safe to remove once you've added it, but there's a settings file that lets you swap it back to vanilla behavior if you want to turn it off. (In the mod folder, open the "wyv_ps_settings.json" file, and on the line with "revertToVanillaShieldBehavior", edit false to true, and then re-start Starsector.)
The exact changes are:
Details
Flat Ground Defense BonusA planetary shield is an exceptional defensive benefit for a small colony, restricting the available avenues of attack and allowing existing planetary defenses to be far more effective. This benefit tapers off for a large colony, however; it's still useful, certainly, but when your ground batteries already have comprehensive coverage patterns, the addition of a shield is less dramatic.
- Game Mechanics: Provides +300 ground defense strength, with an additional +100 for improvement or installing an alpha core, instead of the vanilla multipliers. Note that the flat bonus is multiplied by the normal bonuses from, say, Heavy Batteries; if you want a high planetary defense strength, build both rather than relying solely on either.
- Gameplay Justification: This change makes the shield generator actually useful for defense on a size three colony, while being less overpowering for a size six colony. This is, admittedly, less of an issue now than it was when colonies could get up to size 10... but I personally still like this better.
Reduced Terrorist Risk For Non-Freeport ColoniesRestricting surface access to specific places and times makes it difficult to avoid cargo inspections - at least, if your colony bothers to employ customs officials in the first place. The upshot is that - as long as your planet isn't a free port - it is much more difficult for Pather terrorists to establish or maintain a presence on the ground. ...Of course, give them enough motivation, and they'll find ways around even these restrictions.
- Game Mechanics: The shield generator reduces "pather interest" values by -4 for the base installation, an additional -8 for story-point improvement, and installing an alpha-grade AI core or having defeated the Pather Crisis are each an extra -12.
- Gameplay Justification: While not quite as effective at keeping Pathers off your worlds as giving them a PK is, this should be enough for all but the most extensive deployments of domain technology, at least once you've cleared their crisis. Filling your planet with AI cores will still get their attention, but there's room for judicious deployment of AI technology - and it's not like filling your planet with alpha cores is a situation that really needs buffs. Additionally, since the pather interest reduction only applies if freeport is off, this provides some reason to consider that - which the vanilla game really doesn't anymore, with 0.97's removal of Hegemony and Luddic Church expeditions that used to be triggered by using freeport.
- Known Issues: Negative pather interest values won't be displayed in the tooltips for pather cells. The shield generator's effects still apply, however - and are shown in its own tooltip. It's also worth noting that Pather cells may take some in-game time to dissolve once their interest has been reduced; this is not a bug, just how it works. Additionally, the exact value of interest needed to cause cell formation can vary with installed mods.
Changelog
- 1.6
- Updated for Starsector 0.97a
- Adjusted pather interest values; significantly improved interest reduction if the pather crisis has been defeated.
- 1.5
- Updated for Starsector 0.96a
- Increased planetary defense bonus.
- Decreased pather interest reduction to account for alternative measures enabled by the new Hostile Activity event
- Removed -25% hazard reduction for colonies with meteor impacts in favor of the new vanilla implementation of suppressing the full 50% hazard rating of that colony condition
- 1.4
- Fixed a bug where the combination of Nexerelin random mode and the Industrial Evolution mod caused PS:AC to crash with a null pointer exception.
- 1.3
- Updated mod for 0.95.
- Removed accessibility and growth penalties.
- 1.2
- Fixed a bug where, on the initial install of the mod, any AI cores already installed in shield generators would be destroyed.
- Fixed a bug where, on mod install in Starsector 0.9.1, all under-construction shield generators would be instantly completed; as a side-effect, this mod is no longer compatible with Starsector 0.9.
- Fixed a bug where the shield generator would apply its penalty to colony growth even when disrupted, under construction, or toggled back to vanilla behavior.
- Removed the x1.2 defense strength multiplier, leaving just the flat value boost.
- 1.1
- Fixed the planetary shield blueprint's description.
Credits:- SafariJohn & Mesotronik: provided the initial ideas for the mod's secondary effects.
