Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8]

Author Topic: [0.97a] Stardust Ventures ship pack v0.8.3  (Read 107758 times)

Egren

  • Ensign
  • *
  • Posts: 20
    • View Profile
Re: [0.97a] Stardust Ventures ship pack v0.8.3
« Reply #105 on: March 16, 2024, 05:50:52 AM »

Tried this one, but had to cut it due to balance issues.

One example is Fel PDS. A small energy turret with 400 energy dps for almost zero flux is insane. You can't just take a vanilla vulcan cannon and convert its damage type to energy. Frag damage weapons are balanced around the 25% damage effectiveness vs armor and shield. Now, granted, you did "lower" its dps from 500 frag to 400 energy, but you also added 100 EMP dps and 50 range.

To put it into perspective, Light Dual Machine Gun, which is terrible at everything except flux efficient shield dps at close range, deals the following dps vs different layers:
416 dps vs shields.
104 dps vs armor.
208 dps vs hull.
Poor PD performance. (turret rotation, accuracy, projectile speed, etc)

Vulcan cannon:
125 dps vs shields.
125 dps vs armor.
500 dps vs hull.
Great PD performance.

Now, compare that to Fel PDS:
400 dps vs shields.
400 dps vs armor.
400 dps vs hull.
100 EM dps.
Great PD performance.

Ergo, Fel PDS takes the most powerful aspects of two (three*) highly specialized weapons, Vulcan Cannons and Light Machine Guns. Vulcans and LMGs are allowed to be as powerful as they are in those specific scenarios because of their equally terrible performance in other scenarios. Fel PDS has none of those downsides.

Here's my suggestion:
Reduce energy DPS to 200 AND remove EM dps. Alternatively reduce energy dps to 150 and keep the EM dps.
Reduce range to 250.
increase OP cost to 6.

This post is long enough already, but the medium version is similarly problematic at 880 energy dps for 80 flux/s.

Don't take this criticism the wrong way, I want your mod to succeed, and good balance is much harder to achieve alone without rounds of feedback from the community, so here's my feedback! Cheers.
Logged

Mephansteras

  • Commander
  • ***
  • Posts: 100
    • View Profile
Re: [0.97a] Stardust Ventures ship pack v0.8.3
« Reply #106 on: March 16, 2024, 09:35:09 AM »

Yeah, they're due a balancing pass.

I am curious, though, have you seen them do much in practice other than be decent PD? Because despite having set up some ships to try to use them for damage I've found that it is very rare for them to have much of an effect as an anti-ship weapon.

Have you found a build that effectively uses them in that role?
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 6 7 [8]