Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

More ships

758 (23.6%)

More weapons

484 (15.1%)

More campaign features

481 (15%)

Space monsters

707 (22.1%)

More lore

209 (6.5%)

More music

132 (4.1%)

More portraits

157 (4.9%)

Subfactions

278 (8.7%)

Total Members Voted: 1431

[OOZ662]

Given how squirrely a Desdinova is to begin with, this scares me a bit.

[Megas]

Played the new version a few days ago.  I did a casual playthrough in Nexerelin (aside from Imaginos in a mission since stations would not spawn it), not a thorough QA examination.

The main gun on Imaginos is much easier to use, and it is fast enough to blast ships after teleportation just like Hyperion can with blasters.

Megaceras seems okay, aside from possibly excessive top speed.  Feels much like a mule.

Scalaron Pulse Launcher is nice.  Slow, but does some serious damage on a hit.  Feels like an energy mini-Pilum.  The only (minor) problem is I have hit myself with them on my faster ships.  If I have OP to spare, I use this.

Now that Achilles regenerate, they have replaced Salamanders as my go-to missile choice.  Achilles may be somewhat overpowered, as they seem to be balanced against old Salamanders when they used to do 500 damage to hull.

Darts may regenerate, but like Swarmers, are too weak to be useful aside from killing a few wings before ammo is gone.  Also, AI does not fire them at everything.  I will stick with Achilles or Scalaron missiles instead.

New descriptions on Shard weapons is very useful.  Simply put, I underestimated what critical hits did.

Shard Cannon is top-tier, and easily competes with Railgun.  Same OP range, same range, one has perfect accuracy and the other has no windup and explosive shots.

Other weapons (aside from gems like Argus PD and Scalaron repeater) still remain alternatives to use if the best standard weapons are not available.  For example, I use not use Ferrogun, Gale, or Squalls if I have Needlers, HVDs, and Maulers, but I might if the only standard guns I have are junk like Thumpers and Assault Chaingun.

[Cycerin]

Thanks for the feedback Pesci and Megas. Sounds like a lot of the changes worked out well, I'm relieved. We'll see how the Megaceras pans out, it's pretty weird with the lack of a single Medium slot, but it lets you be pretty creative with outfits provided you have access to a wide range of weapons.

The extra tooltip info is kind of a mess. A lot of weapons with scripted hit effects deal a tiny bit extra damage if they don't hit shields, due to initially being copies of the Shard crit. I'll probably make them all do zero extra damage and simplify the tooltips. Next patch will contain more polish, and I intend to create some more promo material/a more well-structured OP in the near future, too.

In other news I added a donation button to the OP. I've been at this mod for around three years, and I can't spend as much time modding as I used to, 'cause things have gotten tighter the past year. Having more financial freedom would give me more time for my own projects. I always felt like I shouldn't accept money for doing something like this, but I realized the other day I've worked harder at this mod than I've worked at many of the actual formal jobs I've held in my life. And the mod itself will always be free. Any support is greatly appreciated, and a big contribution would have to be rewarded somehow, but for the time being I don't want to make a big deal out of this. Mod development will continue even if there's no money in it, as long as Starsector remains a great game to make content for. I just realized I want there to be an option for those who wanna support the mod.

[OOZ662]

I don't know about donations specifically, but you don't need a Paypal account to make a payment through them unless you're directly transferring from a checking account. Maybe not even then; been a couple years since I checked.

[OOZ662]

If I could discern what portion of the URL refers to the encryption system and which points to the account to donate to I'd just toss you a link, but their vocabulary isn't very clear. You could just try changing to a US URL; take whatever you get when you click it and change it to paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/

It's kinda fun seeing some other service screwing up with language. I've had a GMail account for longer than I can remember and merged it as soon as Google bought YouTube, and yet sometimes YouTube randomly decides I get to explore another language through their emails for that day. Generally German, rarely others.

[Cycerin]

For some weird reason my donation page was in Norwegian. It should be in English now. Also you don't need an account to pay using paypal, just to recieve payments. Same as when paying online at any website. Unless something changed really recently.

But seriously, thanks Pesci. (: It's really cool to hear that. I used to mod C&C Generals too, and the biggest mod I worked on (ShockWave) wanted to bring back all the cut content from Zero Hour. If you still have the game installed you might wanna check it out!

Are you realistically going to put the Void Beasts in the mod any time in the near future, like this year?  The little cartoon devil on my left shoulder says that you've decided that stuff is beyond the scope of the mod and you'll get around to it "someday" (never) when you get more time.

Well, I haven't talked about the space monsters in a long time. They're something I've wanted to do since I first played Starsector. Kinda where I want to go when I take this mod to the next level. I already did some work charting out how I'd do it, how things would look, why it would be fun to play, audio and sprite concepts, etc. Because the campaign layer has lacked important tools, and because the existing content still needed a lot of work to meet my own standards, I haven't done a single thing related to them in-engine yet.

I find the ideas I have too cool to give up on, but it'll also be a ton of work. You may have noticed that BRDY has never climbed above 1.0 version number, and that's because I only consider the mod "1.0" when all its discussed, planned or promised content is in. I never really expected this mod to be "released" in that sense until Starsector is also basically a finished game. So same pace of development.

Also I was thinking I'd change to accepting donations through Bandcamp in the future, when the mod's soundtrack is more complete. Donate any sum and get drm free album in any format, incl. lossless, yada yada, along with some other digital stuff.

[Cycerin]

Haha, awesome. It was such a huge and messy mod, really. Any good idea or any piece of decent work someone had thrown together was considered. In the end, it became an enormous undertaking. All I did for that mod was sound effects and some concept art, it was a large team.

People still play it, actually. Hunter (the lead developer) still gets a bunch of emails about Shockwave stuff. The same people are still modding Generals, amazingly enough. They've been working on Rise of the Reds for years and years, and I think a new release of that is around the corner.

And believe me, nobody wants to see space monsters happen more than I do.

[doofball13]

Hey, new to the forum but a long-time lurker.

I've been playing a lot of BRDY as a part of Nexerlin/SS+ lately, and really enjoying it. Just want to say, kudos on making a faction that is (IMO) both interesting and at-home within the Starsector universe. No gallingly different, out-of-place ships or weapons- just interesting variety from vanilla in a fairly balanced, cohesive, and most importantly, stylish additional faction.

All that being said, I'd like to offer a little (nitpicky) feedback:

First, the Scalaron Pulse Launcher seems at least a little too strong right now. Between the regenerating ammo, decent damage, low flux cost, good range, EMP and extra damage when hitting armor... It has too many advantages for the slower speed disadvantage to matter. It also seems exceedingly tough right now; enemy PD seems to have serious trouble shooting down pulses, especially in bursts of three or larger swarms from many Scalarons firing at once.

Also, the shard weapons could use a little buffing, imo. They do great vs shields, but against armor I would rather use, for example, a Hypervelocity Driver/Railgun than a Heavy Shard Cannon/Shard Cannon. The extra energy RNG mechanic does help a little vs. armor, but they still fire lots of low-damage projectiles which just can't keep up in armor damage compared to the high-damage low fire-rate projectiles of a Hypervelocity Driver. Basically they shred hull and shields enough to be worth the slot, but other weapons do that just as well in addition to having an EMP utility and better damage against armor. And the Large slot shard weapon- Ironweaver ADC iirc?- is very underwhelming. Again, it has good shield damage- but so does a Gauss Cannon, from a longer range, whilst still stripping armor better and delivering EMP.

[Tartiflette]

stuff

While I agree wholeheartedly with your first point, I think the shard weapons are quite good as they are. Thee are the kind of weapons that scale veeeery well in numbers: 2 aren't worth much but 6 or more suddenly are both deadly against shields and quite efficient against armors thanks to the "hidden" random damage.

[Cycerin]

Thanks for chiming in. I kinda agree that the SPL needs some adjustment. Shard weapons are fine for the moment and that includes the Ironweaver, going to allow for more time to get a feel for what the recent changes did.

Your comparison with the Gauss Cannon is off, I think - the Ironweaver both deals more DPS at medium-close range and especially against armor it's vastly superior. It's not good at max range, though.

E: Also like Tartiflette points out, if you stack Shard weapons, they get way more powerful.

[Cathair]

Also, the shard weapons could use a little buffing, imo. They do great vs shields, but against armor I would rather use, for example, a Hypervelocity Driver/Railgun than a Heavy Shard Cannon/Shard Cannon. The extra energy RNG mechanic does help a little vs. armor, but they still fire lots of low-damage projectiles which just can't keep up in armor damage compared to the high-damage low fire-rate projectiles of a Hypervelocity Driver. Basically they shred hull and shields enough to be worth the slot, but other weapons do that just as well in addition to having an EMP utility and better damage against armor. And the Large slot shard weapon- Ironweaver ADC iirc?- is very underwhelming. Again, it has good shield damage- but so does a Gauss Cannon, from a longer range, whilst still stripping armor better and delivering EMP.

If you're using the latest version, I disagree with this as well, and I had a strong dislike for Shard weapons prior to their recent buffs. I'm a big fan of Railguns and I think Shard cannons compete with them pretty well for Small hardpoints right now- to me they seem to have noticeably better performance vs armor in exchange for slightly less shield damage. Sure, they struggle against the heaviest armor, but so do railguns or any other kinetic weapon. I suppose it helps that I'm usually either using 3+ at once, or using them in conjunction with something heavier in a medium mount.

I do tend to favor HVDs over dual shards for medium slots, but to me it feels like a playstyle choice more than an objective one. The much higher dps of the dual shard lets it do things the HVD can't, especially in cases where a ship has only one medium mount.

[doofball13]

Woops, I mixed up Mjolnirs and Gauss Cannons. My bad.

Anyway, I know that the numbers show shard weapons should have better DPS, but that's not the experience I'm having.

Although, most of my experience is from fighting heavily armored Onslaughts and Imperium ships- maybe the shard weapons pull ahead when the armor levels aren't ridiculous? Maybe the issue I have with them has to do with armor-stripping on exceedingly tough ships, and not with DPS against ships with standard armor?

I'll give shard weapons another shot.

[Tartiflette]

I'll give shard weapons another shot.

Try a shard only Scarab/Desdinova/Nevermore fleet and you'll never go back to HDVs ^^

[Harmful Mechanic]

I've been using Shard/Scalaron (Blaster and Repeater both, depending) and Railgun/Squall setups in the current version - both do about the same amount of damage, but the former feels much more general-purpose. Where Shard weapons really shine is punching up against fast, high-tech ships; an all-Shard Scarab can maul a Tempest, and the Ironweaver is scary-good for area suppression of shielded fighters.

[doofball13]

Yeah, after more testing, I realize I underrated Shard weapons. It does take them longer to effectively strip armor- but not that much longer, and they shred enemy ships much faster once the armor is gone.

The Ironweaver especially seems to have problems with distributed damage against armor- A Mjolnir cannon is more effective at that. But an Ironweaver is so much more effective if you can strip that armor another way- like with an accompanying salvo of Scalaron Blaster shots- that it ends up being more than worth it.

Also- my god, does it make popping shields easy at close range.

The SCPL is definitely broken though. Outfitting a cruiser for missile spam should not let me take out a SS+ Citadel one-on-one. Then again, maybe that is the fault of other mod makers for having so many small missile/ small universal mounts.