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31

Mods / Re: Project Valkyrie V1.5 [0.65.2a - Vanilla Friendly] UPDATE! 15/03/04

« on: March 04, 2015, 06:55:54 PM »

What era is this forum from, 1999? Marquee tag and no unicode?

On another note, sadly, variants aren't carried over by Save Transfer...

32

Mods / Re: Neutrino Corp. (v. 1.81)[0.65.2a]

« on: March 01, 2015, 08:13:33 PM »

What's the unused Gravity Plating ship system do?

33

Modding / Re: Stargate Mod

« on: March 01, 2015, 07:43:12 PM »

2. You're probably better off just reversing the bar and having low flux = high energy in consideration for the AI. If you want something like depleting shields you can make shields cost hard flux, which would be easy.

3. Take a look at the vanilla ship system code for e.g. the Tempest and replace the drone with your fighters.

Off topic, but Debido, why is the code for rotating the penetration plume with the hit ship commented out? Too intensive? Doesn't work properly? It would be super cool.

34

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Hiigaran Descendants v1.1.0

« on: March 01, 2015, 07:37:04 PM »

It does mean it's unbalanced. The issue is not whether it's better or worse than an Astral (that's a meaningless comparison, the Astral is for a totally different fleet composition). It's that it has a flight deck, the best missile/fighter-sweeping system in the game, and enough speed to indefinitely kite most ships smaller than cruisers, for the same logistics cost as the two vanilla non-combat carriers, with no drawbacks. That's bad. Due to AI targeting priority drone systems are also much better than they seem to be at first glance.

If you buy two of the freighters, you get the capacity of an Atlas for 2 logistics less at 5 burn instead of 2. They also at least have some chance of escaping in a pursuit. The Atlas is the most efficient freighter in vanilla because it has almost no other advantages and is an incredible liability in combat. For reference the Tarsus and Buffalo are the next most efficient at ~140 capacity per logistics; the Tarsus's advantage is burn drive, and the Buffalo's advantage is being cheap, which isn't really a concern. Past early game you're not deploying freighters as support, so these freighters are best in class with no drawbacks, which is bad.

Funnily the Neerin is actually much less of an issue; I haven't looked at a more detailed stat breakdown, but you get 2500 cargo for 8 logistics (a little worse than an Atlas) in exchange for competent defenses, 1 more burn, and 160 ordinance. Still an overall much better deal, but at least it's not an unquestionably better choice.

The Ox has literally no advantages aside from having a tow cable, and uses 5 fuel/ly. No ship in vanilla uses less than 1 fuel/ly, tug or not. The Luun's only drawback is 4 logistics; if you take out 1 for the tug, you have a 200 cargo freighter for 3 logistics, which is bad but not awful, given that it has shields and mounts. But 0.6 fuel/ly makes all of that completely irrelevant.

35

Mods / Re: [0.65.2a] Hiigaran Descendants v1.1.0

« on: February 28, 2015, 05:26:47 PM »

I see multiples of the pirate carrier for sale in the black market of almost every decently-sized system, which is probably not good. I've yet to see it in an actual fleet, though.

You may also want to do a stat balance pass on the ships eventually. There's a lot of problems all over the place here; one of the most obvious examples is the drone carrier, which is only 4 logistics (the minimum baseline for a one-deck carrier, essentially) but has a PD drone system better than the Astral's, competent flux stats, and 90 speed. The other really obvious ones are the base freighter, which at 500 cargo cap/logistics is more efficient than an Atlas (~300), and the tug, which only uses 0.6 (!!!) fuel/ly.

36

Modding / Re: Modding Guidelines

« on: February 25, 2015, 11:13:11 PM »

SS+ compatibility: include null checks as necessary to avoid NPE crashes for code interacting with shields, to account for ships that don't have shields or ships using Shield Bypass. I suspect Sundog is not the only person to have stepped on this particular issue; it might just have gone unnoticed elsewhere because Shield Bypass is such a niche option. This might also apply to things other than shields in the API, I didn't look closely.

A guideline on logistics to flight deck ratio would also be useful. It seems to be around 4 logistics per deck, +/- the ship's individual combat utility and survivability.

37

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.4

« on: January 17, 2015, 01:50:20 AM »

Noticed this elsewhere; SSP is so ubiquitous that maybe a warning is due for other mod authors regarding adding null checks for getShield() for when players use Shield Bypass? I saw some scripts for AI and unique built-ins (and probably other stuff) getting NPEs over that. Or, heh, change the return for ships without shields from null to a dummy that turns calls on it to no-ops and make everyone's life really difficult when debugging.

That, or maybe I could just take a look around and tally up which ships you can't install Shield Bypass on.

Great mod as always, by the way. What are your plans with SSP's balancing tweaks regarding the upcoming version's changes to ballistics and beams?

38

Mods / Re: Neutrino Corp. (v. 1.8)[0.65.1a]

« on: January 17, 2015, 01:42:54 AM »

Neutrino is my favorite mod, and it's great to see it back.

Will you be doing a balance pass on the missiles for parity with vanilla? I also noticed that slight imbalance when I was playing with Diable Avionics.

39

Mods / Re: ICE Faction

« on: January 17, 2015, 01:39:46 AM »

If anyone's home, there's a compatibility issue with Starsector+.

You need null checks for the result of getShield() on line 19 of data/weapons/beam/NovaBeamEffect.java and line 61 of data/ai/weapon/NovaDischargerAutofireAIPlugin.java to account for people installing Shield Bypass on the Abraxas with SS+. I just added a short-circuit.

Code

    public void advance(float amount, CombatEngineAPI engine, BeamAPI beam)
    {
	ShieldAPI myShield = beam.getSource().getShield();
        if(myShield != null && myShield.isOn()) {
            myShield.setActiveArc(myShield.getActiveArc() * (1 - beam.getBrightness()));
        ...

Great mod. Plays completely differently from anyone else, which is awesome.

By the way, I think the fuel costs for the capitals are unreasonably exorbitant and make them effectively unusable in practice. Abraxas uses 50/ly, which is absurd. Apocrypha/Voidreaver have 20/ly which I think is barely reasonable even if one of your faction's weaknesses is fuel inefficiency. For comparison the highest among vanilla capitals is 10/ly except for Onslaught, which is 15/ly; among vanilla cruisers, 3/ly except for Dominator, which is 5/ly. I took a quick look through my other installed mods and the highest cost in any class that I saw (that wasn't on an intentionally imbalanced ship) was a Mayorate capital at 20/ly. I'll leave it to the balance experts since I'm pretty new, but my suggestions would be 24/ly for Abraxas, 18/ly for Apocrypha, and 12/ly for Voidreaver, which are still 50%+ greater than other ships in their class, but makes them a viable (and expensive) choice in fleets. The other ships are pretty high too, although most of the problem there is that the Seraph is both a vital support ship and a tug, and often you don't really need a tug but are forced to eat the 9/ly.

Shalom is also 40/ly but I guess it's not really a ship you'd have in a player fleet, and 40/ly sounds pretty reasonable for a flying habitat.

40

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] The Knights Templar v0.9.3b

« on: November 17, 2014, 12:26:21 PM »

As a minor issue, there are so many asteroids in Antioch that the system map lags badly when you try to open it.

41

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Scy V0.8 (12/11) Rearmored Update

« on: November 17, 2014, 12:18:21 PM »

I'm guessing that it is intentional that various missiles e.g. heavy swarmer, MIRV payloads, swarm missiles, and EMP missiles use MISSILE_FF, but for what reason? It's especially noticeable with heavy swarmer's spread pattern seeking through friendly ships, since you frequently lose a large portion of the missiles against allied ships.

As an aside, since custom UI elements seem to be making their way into mods (e.g. Templars burst indicator), might it be feasible to make an at-a-glance indicator of the status of attached armor plates?

I also think that quad strip trails really fit well on missiles in the style of SCY's mini-missiles and short-range rockets, but look less good on LRMs and some torpedoes. It's a big improvement for heavy swarmer, but I think the old smoke-puff trail looked better on e.g. Reaper torpedoes.

42

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Starsector+ Vanilla Enhancement Mod 2.0.6

« on: November 17, 2014, 12:02:12 PM »

Regarding some savegames becoming unloadable due to memory constraints: turning off savegame compression seems to make some level of difference, although I haven't investigated in detail. I've been able to maintain usable savefiles into level >45 in crowded systems where it was previously impossible, but it could be a fluke.

43

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Tradewinds II

« on: November 15, 2014, 11:49:48 AM »

You can see the technical problems when you encounter a fleet in a neutral posture and decide to disengage.

44

Mods / Re: [0.65.1a] Scy V0.8 (12/11) Rearmored Update

« on: November 14, 2014, 12:32:15 AM »

Ran into the same crash as k2arim99 today, except the circumstance was that I used up the last of my fuel as my fleet was starting the hyperspace jump animation into the right jump point. I downloaded my copy at 3:30pm EST, so I can't tell if it's the version where you've fixed it. Or maybe it's a different problem.

Also, the amount of lag caused by the heavy modular swarmer seems to have greatly increased since the last version. 3-4 of them firing at once causes a noticeable framerate drop.

45

Bug Reports & Support / Re: Combat Exploit

« on: October 08, 2014, 03:27:53 PM »

In a somewhat related situation, when fighting large AI fleets with civilian ships in tow, I frequently run into the following:

Say I've destroyed all, or nearly all of the enemy fleet's combat-worthy ships. They now have a few fighters and maybe a destroyer or similar, all at very low CR, say, 30%. What I'd like to do is go blow up their civilian ships. However, the AI will frequently then force me into a series of engagements in which it deploys only a few fighters or 1-2 small ships at a time, while on my end I have to deploy at least one ship per combat (if I'm not using this exploit, that is), which costs me a bunch of supplies and CR, often more than the AI is spending. In combat, the AI will generally retreat after taking some negligible losses; I get to harry, but that only takes off a few % of CR, and the remains of the AI fleet, despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned by my fleet, will come around for another engagement and force me to deploy a ship again. Sometimes this happens 4-5 times in a row before they retreat and allow me to pursue their reserves.

What I'd like to do is be able to force the enemy reserves to engage in some way. If I win an engagement and the enemy is not in retreat, I should be able to force some enemy reserves to enter combat. Of course, then, there's some cases where this wouldn't work out, e.g. I shouldn't be able to snipe a badly damaged capital in reserve out of an otherwise fully intact fleet if they deployed 50% of their intact forces against me and lost.

It is partially my fault for not bringing ships with favorable CR deployment costs along, but it's a bit ridiculous when the AI has the option of shielding their six freighters and ten mothballed ships by deploying a measly two fighter wings against my pile of capitals and cruisers.