Thanks for the well-written, comprehensive feedback, Pesci. I really really appreciate it.
Now that I've got every single Blackrock ship in my current campaign, I've noticed a possible balance issue with the new Ironweaver megashardshotgun. Specifically, its range. The projectiles take a really long time to fade away, making its usable range more than five times its listed range. The Ironweaver can fire farther than the default radar can show ships! I really don't think a Shard shotgun is supposed to have more than twice the range of an Antimatter Lance or Solenoid Quench Cannon.
Yeah, this is a side effect of the new buckshot script, and it's something I haven't fixed yet. The fadeout time isn't supposed to be like that.
I wouldn't say the Karkinos is terribly imbalanced as much as it is uneven. It's as lethal to your own fleet as the enemy in the hands of the AI, thanks to the AI not realizing how much damage the Deracinator does to the Nevermore I'm piloting when it teleports next to me to get that pirate Lasher off my tail, sending the Nevermore spinning out of control with half its weapons disabled. The Deracinator also sometimes hits the Karkinos. I find this happens most often when I teleport really close to an enemy capital ship with its shields up. I guess the bow wave of torn spacetime bounces off the enemy's shields or something?
Hmm, you aren't supposed to get dumpstered by allied deracination anymore, except for the freak accident where a Kark literally parks on top of your ship (and that's something I've seen twice ever, and both times I laughed out loud)
If this happened while playing one of the two recent builds then I guess I need to adjust some numbers. You really aren't supposed to take any hurtful damage from friendly deracinators unless you were already completely crippled and armorless, in which case one weapon or so might be EMP'd offline. Or you might die if you had like 20 hp left and zero armor anywhere. Which I think is fine. Give those ships a wide berth if you are in that kind of situation. If you want clean, no-pain teleportation, Tri-Tachyon™ corporation offers alternatives. : >
Blackrock Driveyards is at the moment my favorite mod faction and it feels almost vanilla balanced. However, there's couple of minor but fleetwide imbalances. First, BRDY does not properly value mobility. Mobility is a valuable commodity in vanilla Starsector, but BRDY ships seem to have everything their vanilla counterparts do, plus a little extra. There are three tech levels in vanilla, and BRDY feels like the level four tech level. While everybody else in the dying galaxy is running as fast as they can just to stay where they are, BRDY is strolling casually ahead. Their "our vents are better than yours period" free hullmod exacerbates this as well; a BRDY cruiser with full vents dumps its full flux load in the time it takes the vanilla frigate of your choice to do the same.
I disagree that BRDY "sits outside" vanilla balance. Mostly they just play like glorified midtech ships. However, I agree that the flux hullmod is a bit ridiculous, especially when combined with skills or the flux conduits hullmod... and that it has inflated faction strength slightly, over time. The idea behind the hullmod was that it makes up for the ships' bad shield ratios and bad flux stats by letting you play very aggressively and venting under fire.
As it turned out, the AI does not do this often enough, but the player can make good use of it. Since then, there has been a bit of power creep as I adjusted things to make the AI competitive. I still think the faction is fairly balanced, but I am probably going to end up making the hullmod less powerful, and other things here and there. I think adding more CR timers might cut it, and would reflect the comparative "youth" of the tech compared to Domain tech. Another thing I've intended to do is force the player to field smaller fleets through supply consumption.
Designing within the limitations of the AI is hard sometimes, because you can do things that feel amazing in the hands of the player, but end up being mostly a handicap in the hands of the AI. Which has given me a lot of respect for what Alex has accomplished with the vanilla ships.
Heya Cycerin.
i have been really enjoying your mod but a while ago (few days) it suddenly stopped working. it seems to have problems finding Brdy_stormcrow and Brdy_stormcrow_cyc hulls/Ids. i've deleted it and re downloaded the mod but i still get the same problem.
Hey, glad to hear you enjoy the mod.
The stormcrow and nevermore B have been removed from the recent builds. They were outdated content that I feel don't really serve any purpose in the mod.
The stormcrow was just made as a boss ship for an old Uomoz' Corvus build. (which is why its variant has like three times as much stuff on it as the ship's actual OP limit allows) It hung around in Exerelin without me knowing for a while - and even then, now its role as an elite ship has been supplanted by the Asura and Imaginos, which are much more fun to pilot anyway, and the Nevermore B's ideas were eventually recycled into other ships.
I'm sorry about that, but I decided to take a hard stance on this because if a ship exists in the mod, but isn't functionally part of it, it serves no purpose but to remind me that I have outdated, nonfunctional content hanging around in my own files.