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Author Topic: Unlearned restrictive hullmods  (Read 3996 times)

Cyan Leader

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Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« on: April 21, 2018, 07:26:01 PM »

Full disclosure here for starters, I'm really not a fan of restrictive faction specific hullmods. As in those that can only be used for a slew of ships from a faction. Just like the mod weapons can completely change the way a vanilla ship does combat, I wish I could do all sort of experiments in combining hullmods from different factions and what-not. It's something I wish more mods would allow but well, I understand the desire of making a couple of ships more unique and balancing the hullmod only for them, so I'll chalk this up as personal beef.

What I think is damaging to the game, however, is unlearned restrictive hullmods. It's been happening quite often to me recently when I take out Remnant stations or salvage a research station in hopes of finding a rare hullmod like ITU or Optics and I find some restrictive hullmods instead that none of my ships can use. Not only you are making the good, unlearned vanilla hullmods rarer by increasing the pool, it's also frustrating and disappointing.

Please be mindful of flooding the loot drops. If you are going to add restrictive hullmods please make them learned by default.
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Tartiflette

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2018, 11:09:41 PM »

You can "Hide hullmods that can't be installed" in the selection screen for just that purpose.
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Inventor Raccoon

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #2 on: April 22, 2018, 03:34:48 AM »

You can "Hide hullmods that can't be installed" in the selection screen for just that purpose.
You still receive faction hullmods that you can't use (say, Imperium's fire control core and energised armor) from drops. That's the issue.
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gun&drink

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #3 on: April 22, 2018, 03:45:27 AM »

kind of unrelated to the final point of the post, but

Full disclosure here for starters, I'm really not a fan of restrictive faction specific hullmods. As in those that can only be used for a slew of ships from a faction. Just like the mod weapons can completely change the way a vanilla ship does combat, I wish I could do all sort of experiments in combining hullmods from different factions and what-not. It's something I wish more mods would allow but well, I understand the desire of making a couple of ships more unique and balancing the hullmod only for them, so I'll chalk this up as personal beef.
I fully agree with you on the part about restrictive faction specific hullmods honestly. hullmods give such a crazy amount of possibilities to begin with, so having them restricted is, for me, just as painful as if faction specific weapons restrictions actually existed. I do understand why people do it: it's extremely hard to balance out, as these combinations can give the player the chance of making crazy combinations while the AI is a sitting duck. I was trying to make a hullmod pack myself just to give me more possibilities, and I think that the only way to balance it out is to include with such a mod a good amount of variants using said hullmods and vanilla content, just so the campaign is changed as a whole. Of course the moment there is more than one mod in the user's starsector the ships in that mod could be at a disadvantage, and of course creating variants from every mod out there would be crazy

I wonder if it could happen as a community effort tho: people would summit optimized variants that people have made by playing several mods, and they could be compiled into a huge pool of variants, which then would appear if the combination of mods being used is in use in the player's starsector. I know Dynasector exists precisely because this is no easy task, but it sounds neat on paper
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #4 on: April 23, 2018, 02:25:29 AM »

It's not possible to remove faction hullmods from the drop groups without making them impossible to acquire in shops.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #5 on: April 23, 2018, 04:01:37 AM »

That's a shame, but I still don't think that's worth over interfering with the drops since it's negatively affecting the exploration experience. Once you start playing with 2 or 3 factions with hullmods like that it becomes really difficult to find good and available to use hullmods through salvaging/drops, hence why I believe making them learned by the default is the best option (or making them nonrestrictive).

Edit. Depending on how the game decides what to drop, reducing their rarity might also work.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2018, 04:04:50 AM by Cyan Leader »
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #6 on: April 23, 2018, 04:04:19 AM »

Neither of those options are desirable for II and I will not budge on that issue.

Note that it is technically possible to make them very rare in random loot without affecting shops, but it's impossible to straight up remove them.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #7 on: April 23, 2018, 04:06:52 AM »

Let's hope an API gets added then, thanks for reading.
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Tartiflette

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #8 on: April 23, 2018, 04:46:28 AM »

I don't get it, you can sell the hullmod chip for a profit if you don't want to learn them and clutter your list. How is that different from recieving dozens of weapons/wings that you won't use anyway and sell immediately?
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NightKev

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #9 on: April 23, 2018, 05:23:41 AM »

That's not his issue, he wants to find hullmods like ITU but they're being pushed out of the loot drops by all the other hullmods (supposedly; I don't know how loot drops work so maybe the effect is actually very minor and it's not a real issue).
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Tartiflette

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #10 on: April 23, 2018, 05:30:33 AM »

This is my point! You don't exclusively find usefull weapons and wings in the drop, you find a bunch of stuff and sell the rest. Same with hullmods: You find hullmods that you already know, and some simply not usefull.
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Cyan Leader

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #11 on: April 23, 2018, 05:45:42 AM »

@Tartiflette

Last playthrough I did I had 3 hullmod drops in a row from different research stations and I couldn't use a single one since they were all restrictive, 2 being from Approlight iirc. Meanwhile, even though I already had capitals, I still didn't have core hullmods like ITU and Converted Hangars. That ultimately drove me to create this topic but it wasn't the first time I noticed this being an issue.

This is equivalent to games like Binding of Isaac when the item pool gets flooded by a bunch of useless items or games like Terraria where mods make vanilla items rarer by adding their own mobs to the spawning pool which don't drop vanilla items. It's essentially increasing the rarity of everything else while offering little (or essentially nothing) in return.

Quote
You don't exclusively find usefull weapons and wings in the drop, you find a bunch of stuff and sell the rest. Same with hullmods: You find hullmods that you already know, and some simply not usefull.

Most rare items are useful in a way or another, hence why they are rare. You have a point about already known hullmods, but should that list really be getting bigger? Especially if most of the other stuff is unusable, even if you happen to be using ships that can equip such hullmods you will start running into other "useless" hullmods if you are running multiple mod factions.

In all, I wouldn't mind not finding something like ITU if I end up finding some neat other mod hullmod in return, but since I can't use most of them it is just frustrating.
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Alex

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #12 on: April 23, 2018, 08:18:35 AM »

It's not possible to remove faction hullmods from the drop groups without making them impossible to acquire in shops.

Hmm - looked into this, and I see what you're saying; since drop_data keys off the commodity and group columns combined, it's not possible to edit the commodity column and replace the row entirely, since that'll change the key and just add a new row.

I *think* it's possible to work around it, though - e.g. if we were editing the any_hullmod_low group, could set the probability to 0 by keeping the same commodity/group id and only changing the weight:

item_modspec:{}   any_hullmod_low   0

And then could add another entry into it:
item_modspec:{tags:[!no_drop]} any_hullmod_low 10

Which would only let hullmods without the "no_drop" tag drop from that group. Does that seem like it'd work? In any case, it seems like something I should do in vanilla anyway, to add the easy option for hullmods to opt out of being dropped. So: added the tag-check to the mod drop groups.

Edit: changed the vanilla tag to "no_drop_salvage" to differentiate from hullmods that can't be dropped after combat, since it seems like there'd be times you'd want one and not the other.
« Last Edit: April 23, 2018, 09:15:04 AM by Alex »
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: Unlearned restrictive hullmods
« Reply #13 on: April 23, 2018, 01:19:17 PM »

Ah, nice!  Thanks.
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