31
Mods / Re: Metelson Faction Mod developments: New Ships !*Update 9/28/14*![Demo and Art]
« on: October 02, 2014, 08:22:20 AM »One more coding technical note. If you are trying to get your ships in balance with vanilla I would have to tell you that a frigate sized carrier is not a good idea. It is impossible to balance, hence why you don't see any in vanilla. If you want some good reasons, talk to Mesotronik, he and I had an in depth conversation on the subject when I tried the same thing.
If you want to still be able to launch the Nail fighter from the Aenet, consider changing them to a drone. That would make it more balanced. If you want to keep the PD drones as well, keep in mind that you can give drones drone systems effectively giving your ship two drone sets. Just be careful not to go overboard with that.
Anyway, keep it up! You have the talent and potential you just need to refine it (hell I still have a long way to go). Everything is a step toward getting better.
Hehe, we've never really had the intention to do a frigate carrier, but a frigate drone Carrier though is far more likely! Hence the Drone ship system.
I have no plans currently to do that, it sounds fun for a test, but for overall game play it wouldn't be as much fun simply because you'd stomp too many people too fast with such a swarm... *shudders*
Spoiled to reduce size.
Spoiler
Alright, I gave your two ships (I skipped the fighter) a run through. Here are my findings
First, aesthetically, the ships look a little color-pencil-y. This obviously doesn't fit in with the vanilla ships. but that is up to you. Spriting (as I know from experience) is not easy and people all have their own styles. IF you want to get closer to SS style ships, I would read some blogs on spriting which I posted links somewhere and if you want them I think I can dig them up.
Operationally, both ships ran out of their effectiveness very quickly. (much quicker than the vanilla ships) Which made it difficult to have longer battles which will come up in my next point.
Next, the weapon choices forced any engagement to be very long. In my example I made a quick mission pitting the ships against 1 brawler and 1 hound.
The Aenet was dreadfully slow which made it hard to go toe to toe with the hound. Though, I was able to fend it off with the hypervelocity driver enough to be able to vent when needed. I definitely would have been able to win that fight (eventually) if the Aenet didn't run out of combat effectiveness so quickly. The inevitable malfunctions meant my demise as no matter how hard I tried I could not destroy either ship quick enough with the HVD.
The Spade was definitely more maneuverable (almost too maneuverable with the turning speed)and I think had a balanced level of flux for its speed. I couldn't head on with the brawler but that I think is justified. The two ion cannons were useful in fighting the hound, but the low real damage of the weapons meant I had to rely on the others to actually destroy it, unfortunately the PD laser was always pointing the wrong way and the sabot SRM was easily defeated by PD with a salvo of only 2. Again I could have eventually won that battle basically doing ion drive-bys but the combat effectiveness wasn't enough and again the malfunctions killed me.
So, in summary, this seems like a start, From your description this seems like this will be a mining industrial/civilian fleet. These two ships didn't really feel industrial or civilian with their "military grade" style weapons, but it is still early. Consider creating your own civilian conversion style guns like re-purposed welding lasers etc. It would make it more believable and interesting. Also definitely up the peak CR and CR/second, these ships will get murdered otherwise.
Keep it up, this mod has potential to fill an interesting niche not particularly filled by another faction mod (the Free Miner's Guild might be relatively similar though I don't know how complete or supported that is right now).
[close]
Regarding ship stats:
Aenet I'll bump up it's speed just a little bit.
The Spade will get a slightly lower turning speed.
Both will be getting a revamped Peak CR time and CR loss per second.
Regarding ship weapons:
Civilian grade weapons won't be in effect until we figure out the sprite work and the code. (Which I'll take a more in depth look at today and get a head start on.)
Good point on the PD laser, but if it were omni directional it might lend a little bit to much power for the frigate (at least I would think that). The Swarmer SRM was chosen due to the lastest set of dev notes, especially regarding it's change from fragmentation to Explosive Damage.
Spoiled quote below.
Spoiler
Miscellaneous
- Randomized ship deployment order within each row between ships of the same size class
- Ship AI:
- Much better survivability/not rushing into a bad situation
- More dangerous with missiles (aware of how many missiles are in play & how many to fire for a kill)
- Harder to bait out missile fire
- Conserves higher-capacity missiles (e.g. Harpoon/Sabot Pods)
- Missile overhaul:
- Changed missile behavior to reduce clumping and slightly increase pressure on PD
- Added nicer-looking continuous missile trails (rather than current particle effects)
- Harpoon MRM: significantly improved maneuverability, increased hitpoints by 50%
- Sabot SRM: fires 5 2nd stage projectiles instead of 1. Higher overall damage, much worse vs armor due to being distributed across 5 hits. Fired in a spread, less likely to miss completely.
- Annihilator: increased speed to 400 (from 250), increased acceleration
- Reaper torpedoes: faster, much higher acceleration
- Atropos torpedoes: faster, higher acceleration, very poor tracking
- Salamander MRM: improved maneuverability and top speed; much more reliable.
- Swarmer SRM: doubled ammo, first 4 shots per burst, 75 points of HE damage per missile instead of 300 fragmentation
- Pilum: improved top speed and acceleration. Can still be dodged effectively, just harder. Deadly vs non-omni-shield frigates w/o PD
- All missile pods: increased burst size to 4 and doubled rate of fire
[close]
That being said, the Spade's loadout makes it very lethal to low Tech. frigates, fighters, and some destroyers if you can keep out of the LOS!
Hrm... the reminds me, the Aenet will be getting it's own drones soon, so the ones you see will be no more! ^^ Some time this month, November will likely be a very dead month due to black Friday’s fast approach.[/list]
