After a full run of this mod I feel like I can give a fairly good overview on it
First, the good:
-I like the spritework, could use some work in some areas but so far I love most if not all ships
-as far as ships go, they seemed fairly balanced and had a unique role to fulfill (with some exceptions) within the fleet, which is really nice and not something that I see with every mod. I had tons of fun from bravely fighting remnants with the Loyalty to absolute domination with the Terror, and things like the Rage active system give a ton of possibilities, with broadside warfare being a new favorite of mine from now on. If you ever consider it, do a IBB Bounty for the Ships and weapon pack go for it, there's tons of potential in here
-very good sound choices, which is often unappreciated with this kind of things
First of all, thanks for your feedback, I see you took the time to write all this down and I appreciate it, like I have already said countless times, I do enjoy listening to other people's feedback since that is what really helps me put all this together to amke something you (the players) will enjoy.
The sprite work is not mine, all credits should go to MrDavidoff. I am using his sprites with his permission as placeholders to replace the old (in)famous 2k long pixel ships and I do plan on reworking all the current sprites, even if only a simple polish.
Regarding ship balancing, All ships have been through loads of stat changes, you can look at the changelogs for yourself, and before I even released the first version of this mod further work has been done to put most ship stats to a "decent" level with further tweaking after release thanks to the
feedback of some Discord users
I have considered making an IBB ship several times, I even have a couple of sprites reserved for that/those ship(s), although that is not quite a priority at the moment and I will have to discuss further details with someone, possibly SWP's creator, to know exactly what are the needs and work that needs to be done.
Again, most of the sound files are also from MrDavidoff, although I have pulled some from other Star Wars based mods like the one mentioned in the credits section. And no, sound is not
"unappreciated", at least not for Starsector. Just ask literally anyone what is their opinion on Blackrock's sound quality and you'll see what I mean.
The Meh (not really sure if bad or not that bad or it's me misunderstanding things):
-the gravity well active system needs either some big weakness (maybe the moment the ship goes past certain flux limit or receives some decent damage it automatically deactivates) or some time limit per use. I love the idea, I really do, but as it is right now it's a really cheap way to invalidate an entire fleet of frigates
-The Loyalty sprite looks a bit ugly when damaged:
*snip image*
-Right now there's no dedicated, big carrier in the entire catalog of ships. It specially hurts because the fighters are so damn nice, and some cost their fair cost in OP, so justifying the investment in hullmods and a dedicated carrier officer when you are going to be using 2 bays at best seems a little underwhelming. Reading previous posts I learned that the Terror had +4 fighter bays in the past, and while I do agree that it needed to be balanced some ship in the fleet needs to take that place, even if it's at the cost of firepower
Unless you were going for a kind of battle doctrine that doesn't like to put all the eggs in the same bag, then I can understand why so many battlecarriers and no actual carrier
-the hullmods didn't really give me that much
-the Submission claims to be a freighter in the description, but it's labeled as a cruiser
-Remnant dagger and Council spear are pushing it a little with flux efficiency, but it's kinda justified due to OP cost and slow firing rate. more about OP cost below
-some of the battleships could use an slight paint job to distinguish them. nothing too brutal, but some simple differentiation that can give me a better idea of what am I deploying or what is different of what when someone is not that familiar with the mod and the similar silhouettes confuse you
I have tried balancing the Gravity Well with a value of flux generated per second to limit the time the system can effectively stay active, but the ship is already quite vulnerable as 20% of the ship's flux capacity is automatically filled with hard flux, the ship can't vent while the system is active and it takes 30 seconds both to reach full power and to finish the cooldown, not to mention decreased shield efficiency while the system is active (unless I switched something and it actually buffs the shields, need to test it carefully). Other than that I have tried to make the ship more of a support ship with stats comparable in some levels to cargo ships or combat freighters, and code restrictions to prevent multiple ships to deploy their system simultaneously when there should only be one active at a time, both to prevent a null-area over a given region and to prevent performance issues.
The ugly sprites when damaged are not really an issue that only affects the Loyalty, and that may be due to a number of reasons, one of them possibly the excessive amount of greebles in all ships making the damage sprites even more noisier. I will see what I can do about that...
The Terror had 7 bays in the past, so you have seen nothing
But yeah, the lack of a carrier is damaging the faction as a whole because some ships have 1-2 wings but nothing over that. This problem only exists because I am using sprites that are not mine and I have failed to find a proper carrier sprite from the collection that was given to me. This is definitely an issue to be fixed in the future because I really would like this faction to have more fighter power.
Ohh and fighters will be balanced someday, its another item in my TODO bucket.
The doctrine for the ships is still being considered and drafted. A valid choice would be heavy slow battleships and cruisers and fast frigates, destroyers and fighters, as it would fit the current lore, but this is also an item in my TODO bucket, which is starting to turn into a barrel.
The hullmods should be only two, one of them built-in in the Rancour, which I consider to be quite powerful as it is. It allows the ship to move with the 0-flux boost at up to 20% flux, 4 times what vanilla gives you through a skill iirc. The other is a mod that decreases repair time by 50% and the time the ship remains disabled by 10%, which should quite powerful as well.
More hullmods would certainly spice things up, and maybe even add a faction-wide hullmod similar to Neutrino's to give the ships some special effect, but that has to be analysed first.
The descriptions are a work in progress, as all the mod is in fact. At first the Submission was supposed to be a large combat freighter with a dedicated combat sibling, the Remorse, which has been removed in the previous update. They both are cruiser sized, it might have been a lapse when naming/labeling the ships, thanks for pointing that out.
The ships should be easier to distinguish right now. As of v0.4.0 there should only be two battleships, one of them with fighter wings, and two dreadnaughts, one of which is currently only available in a custom mission. Before this update that problem was severe, and still is, but now it should only really be a problem for fighters and frigates, which still have some "duplicates". Were you referring to the Hatred/Suffering or to some other ship(s)?
The not so good:
-as a general criticism to weaponry, a big chunk of the weapons in the mod tend to go for really high OP cost which I find hard to justify,specially with the medium energy weapons(which is a big deal when there are so many medium slots in the ships). to put a pair of examples, the heavy beam(which is a neat idea and I can see that you actually took some time to balance it based in the graviton beam) is indeed an improvement from the graviton beam, but 14 OP seems a bit too much of an increase when the weapon itself already pays the price with range and efficiency. and while the Remnant dagger is a neat weapon too, 18 OP is really pushing into Large slot OP cost. I have only seen medium weapons reach that cost with Templars, and that's supposed to be a boss faction really.
This inflation in OP points for medium weapons makes outfitting cruisers and battleships with the same mod weapons a bit awkward, specially if you want to pair them with Council Spears in the Terror.
-I really, really struggle to see some use to the heavy battery blaster/autoblaster weapons. it's pretty hard to get into range with them, and when you do, something feels... wrong. I see the numbers and they shouldn't be this hard to make use of, but I feel like I'm paying an stupid amount of flux cost and OP for it. on top of this they feel like you are changing very little besides the color of the projectiles.I noticed then that I couldn't find any energy weapons with explosive damage in this mod, so one possible solution to this could be giving them a different damage time so that they can complement each other and have a better role. also the dual autoblaster canon inherits part of these problems, while the quad battery doesn't for the simple fact that it's dirty cheap for a large weapon slot (only 4 more than the medium version, which again puts into perspective the medium weapon OP inflation I talked about) and it's more efficient that their medium counterparts, so I could see some use for it at least.
-hydra torpedoes struggle with any amount of PD. they need either more hitpoints, or more ammo. they are fine in the bomber version, but any decent distance and some minimal PD makes them useless
Ahh, weapons.... One update almost entirely dedicated to weapon balancing, but mostly targeting damage and flux values. The actual market price and OP cost still needs tweaking, obviously, and like with the ships many weapons were also removed in v0.4.0 as they weren't really adding anything different to the game. Needless to say, there will still be changes to most weapons.
In any case don't give up with this mod, just for those active systems alone I'll have it as a regular in my runs from now on
Once again, thanks for all the feedback! I really want to make a mod that people will enjoy, and leaving a "Star Wars" mod left to oblivion again like many other did is not in my plans, progress may be slow but I want to see this mod stand in the Mod Index some day, once it has reached a proper level of balance and content.
Edit:
I do suggest that you update the mod, a closer look at the screenshot and I quickly see that you must still be using v0.3, that may fix the similar ships a bit