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Author Topic: Vacuum - Build a Stellar Empire. (0.62a ALPHA build 34) (TC Mod)  (Read 418449 times)

xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #90 on: August 13, 2013, 11:22:10 AM »

New build.

Changes:

Various fixes and tweaks for the Repulsor Field.  It's not quite as powerful, doesn't effect Phased ships, has smaller area of effect.  The Exigency Corporation ships still aren't balanced for the mod very well, but I should be able to get to that on the next pass.  I'm also working on a Frigate for them.

Done:
« Last Edit: August 13, 2013, 11:46:21 AM by xenoargh »
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #91 on: August 13, 2013, 06:21:36 PM »

New fighter for the Hegemony, since they're a little sparse.  Here's the Longsword, an energy-weapon based fighter (what weapon is TBD).  Based on a design by Medikohl.  Next up, I need to find time to do something for the Conquest...

« Last Edit: August 13, 2013, 06:23:10 PM by xenoargh »
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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #92 on: August 13, 2013, 08:16:31 PM »

OK, I think I'm happy with this editorial change for the Conquest. 

This gives the Conquest a Really Huge Gun, drops the missile hardpoints, adds a couple of greebly areas I may give to support / pd roles.  I think this fits the Conquest's weak spots; it needs more frontal firepower that it can use while still keeping its weak front shield in play, at the start of engagements. 



If anybody has an opinion as to what kind of Really Huge Gun this will end up being, feel free to say what you'd like to see.  I'm leaning towards something like those ridiculous spinal cannon the Warhammer 40K battleships had, where it takes forever to load, but when it fires... well, let's just say that being in the way is a Bad Thing. 
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Cerevox

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #93 on: August 13, 2013, 10:24:33 PM »

That's a crazy huge amount of firepower on the conquest. It was all about its broadside, and it covered both sides equally, so each side was like a full cap ship. With a big gun in the middle you might want to boost its FP and cost by a bit.

Also, the punkjunkers are really strong. All their ships seem to have near absurd amount of armor and health.

Also, the mining fighter, the prospector? is by far one of the strongest fighters due to it having the armor of a cruiser and the hull of a frigate.

Energy weapons are a bit on the weak side, ballistics both make up the vast majority of options, and have a wider variety. Ballistics have both better and cheaper options than energy weapons. It feels like energy weapons are supposed to be special, but they simply don't have anything special going for them.

On the latest version I have still not seen any faction cap any station except their starting one, not even make an attempt. Also, you can only pick three factions to start with, pirate, hegemony and tritachyon. None of the other factions come up as options. They are still in the game, you just can't play as them.

The mod is cool, im sinking hours into it, the balance just feels really strange.
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FasterThanSleepyfish

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #94 on: August 13, 2013, 10:28:48 PM »

I just wanna say that playing this mod has been a really unique experience. It almost has an arcadey feel to it, if I might add. But anyways, the conquest should have a giant shield piercing Ion cannon, but the shpts are really slow and require a large amount of leading to hit the target.
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #95 on: August 14, 2013, 01:41:18 AM »

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That's a crazy huge amount of firepower on the conquest. It was all about its broadside, and it covered both sides equally, so each side was like a full cap ship. With a big gun in the middle you might want to boost its FP and cost by a bit.
I'm just hoping it's finally worth its current FP, honestly.  It's been the weakest link for quite some time now, due to the lack of frontal armament.  The broadside sounds cool, until you realize it's only firing half the weight of an Onslaught no matter how it turns.  If you haven't fought an Onslaught in the mod yet, prepare yourself ;)  

It really needed a boost; I was killing Conquests like flies in an earlier game where I snagged an Acanthus early.  It just doesn't seem right that such a cool-looking ship should have so much trouble vs. anything more dangerous than the usual being-flanked-by-Frigates stuff, which most of the capships can handle without breathing hard.  The thing about the Conquest is that in a frontal firefight against a heavyweight, it's actually at a severe disadvantage, due to range differentials that result from its long, thin profile.  The Glaug Annihilator had the same problem, but it wasn't quite so bad.

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Also, the punkjunkers are really strong. All their ships seem to have near absurd amount of armor and health.
Yeah, but they have a serious weakness (hint: check out what Hull Mods they don't have).

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Also, the mining fighter, the prospector? is by far one of the strongest fighters due to it having the armor of a cruiser and the hull of a frigate.
I've found that they generally gets wasted vs. anything substantial- they just don't have the guns to do much good.  They tank great vs. early fleets, but really get stomped later on.  

If you've found a good way to use them past early game, great, and let us know what tactics make them work for you!

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Energy weapons are a bit on the weak side, ballistics both make up the vast majority of options, and have a wider variety. Ballistics have both better and cheaper options than energy weapons. It feels like energy weapons are supposed to be special, but they simply don't have anything special going for them.
It's a mixed bag imo.

I think that right now, the main problem with energy weapons is that their DPS/Flux ratios may not be quite good enough for the plain old "pew pew do some DPS" types.  

The beam weapons are fine; they have a special role to play and they're quite useful in their niche.  

The special-purpose weapons (AM Blaster, Plasma weapons, the eeeevil that is the Moljnir, etc., etc.) are all just fine and are totally useful.  

It's just stuff like the IR Pulse Laser that feel pretty flat and un-attractive to me atm.  I'll think up a buff.

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On the latest version I have still not seen any faction cap any station except their starting one, not even make an attempt. Also, you can only pick three factions to start with, pirate, hegemony and tritachyon. None of the other factions come up as options. They are still in the game, you just can't play as them.
Yeah, really meant to go look at that, but have been too busy with a million other things :)

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The mod is cool, im sinking hours into it, the balance just feels really strange.
I'd be the first to say that the balance is pretty Alpha atm.  If you've got specifics you'd buff / nerf, I'm always willing to listen.  Keep in mind that I've played this a lot, so I know where most of the problem children are... the issue is coming up with fixes that don't just create new problems :)

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I just wanna say that playing this mod has been a really unique experience. It almost has an arcadey feel to it, if I might add.
Yeah, the balance and way it plays are really different than Vanilla.  

I like more high-speed gameplay, and there are few things more satisfying than killing Cruisers with a Daisho in this mod.

You can play the mod very much in the traditional, green-eyeshades style, though; if you max out Tech, you can build fleets that will just totally crush the opposition with pure math.  But the money system keeps people from just building the Uber Fleet of Dewm and rampaging through the System forever (although you can go almost forever if you can build a fleet that can win a major fleet battle every day or more- it's 100K+ in loot and credits for each big battle fleet taken out, on average).
« Last Edit: August 14, 2013, 02:07:41 AM by xenoargh »
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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #96 on: August 14, 2013, 07:05:28 PM »

Tactics to make them work? Just keep leveling armor skill. They end up with 4k hp and 1.7k armor at level 10. Then spam 15 or so in your fleet. They tear entire fleets apart and because there are so many and they all mix together and are so small, the AI can't seem to focus and eliminate them one by one. I roll around in a fleet with an onslaught and a full set of 20 of them to fill up the onslaughts hangers, and the onslaught only has to actually fire its guns once every dozen battles. It just sits in the back and spams its 4 annihilator rocket pods.  I have yet to actually have a battle go so long the onslaught runs out of rockets, and i just randomly attack every fleet I come across.

Late game is where the mining fighters really shine. :D
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #97 on: August 14, 2013, 09:30:30 PM »

That's really funny; I would have thought they'd get eaten alive once you meet late-game defense fleets with multiple capships :)  

At any rate, about the only effective nerf I could give them that wouldn't cripple them in early-game would be to take away their High Energy Focus or to drop their armor and give them a modest shield.  

Probably the other fighters aren't as competitive because the difference in their Flux Dissipation rising vs. the Armor bonus isn't nearly as great, so other fighters are still getting Overloaded on a regular basis while the Prospectors are still taking hits and carrying on.

As an alternative, I could change the way the Armor buff works, to keep it more sane, but that would have knock-on effects throughout the balance.

Anyhow, I'll take a quick look at the non-existence of invasion fleets; clearly something's borked there and I need to get that fixed.
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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #98 on: August 15, 2013, 03:00:19 PM »

In big fights with multiple cap ships, a wing or two of them might die, but they are so cheap it is ignorable. I think the real problem is a combination of their armor and their size. Most of the guns in this mod seem to have a lot of spray and wide arcs of fire at longer ranges, so I suspect that most shots are simply not hitting them. the few hits that do land would be enough to blow away other fighters, but the prospectors just shrug them off.

The punkjunk fighters, squire?, are not quite as tough but have a lot more damage and you can do something similar with them.

On the flip side, the sidecar fighters from exi need a buff. They are like tissue paper.
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #99 on: August 15, 2013, 04:52:56 PM »

OK, I'll nerf them and the PJs a bit, buff the Exigency fighter... we'll see how that goes :)

I have gotten the problems with "invasion fleets" fixed; I finally figured out what was causing the issues.  Should be able to push out a new build as soon as I'm done scripting the Exigency's newest weapon...
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #100 on: August 15, 2013, 11:36:34 PM »

New build up.

Fixes:

1.  Various issues with the Repulsor.
2.  Smallish issues with the Macross Missile script that kept missiles effected by it from interacting with Repulsors correctly.
3.  Invasion fleets now show up.  May have gone overboard on how often, please let me know.

Changes:

1.  Exigency ships all got buffed reasonably well for the mod.
2.  Various balance changes to Exigency weapons.  They're a little closer now.
3.  Nerfed the Prospector and the Squire; buffed the Sidecar.
4.  Less-laggy behaviors on rocket-spam; rockets now hit peak velocity much faster and engines burn out much faster to reduce particle lag.
5.  The Conquest is back, and he's mad.  Or something.  Currently equipped with a Gauss Cannon on the frontal mount, but that will get changed when I have a chance.  Conquest is pretty reasonable now as a capship.
6.  Various other changes and improvements.

Adds:

1.  Exigency ships have the Ball Lightning Gun, which is a very whacky AOE chain-lightning PD weapon.  It's fun and quite useful against missile barrages and fighter clusters but uses a lot of Flux and is pretty worthless as an offensive weapon.

Oh, and... if anybody's using a shortcut to the mod file so they don't have to go back to the first page every time I update, the link has changed to make it easier for me to maintain.   Sorry about that.



Next up:  adding some new content Stuff, trying to get around to Thule's ships. 

Tackling energy-bolt weapon balance (I left it alone this build, had my hands full).

Maybe adding a new gun if I have any really good ideas.  The mod already has a lot of whacky stuff, but it's always fun to come up with new things.  I have a couple of concepts I think may work, though, like a gun that shoots a fighter (i.e., like those one-shot catapult things they used in WWII).
« Last Edit: August 15, 2013, 11:44:10 PM by xenoargh »
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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #101 on: August 16, 2013, 01:47:04 PM »

New build.  Adds some new Exigency sounds by MesoTronik and me, adds a non-generic icon for the Repulsor while it's in action.

That faction's finally starting to feel reasonably polished; just need to get the Frigate, their Interceptor and another of their top-secret weapons in the mod and they're pretty close, other than civilian stuff and a Destroyer (although their Cruiser kind of sits in that gray area atm, imo) :)
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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #102 on: August 16, 2013, 02:05:39 PM »

Did another pass on the Frigate:

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #103 on: August 16, 2013, 07:06:01 PM »

The exi cruiser appears unkillable. I have wailed on them with that 25fp pirate cap ship with its blood god ability on for +500% damage for minutes at a time and been unable to even make its HP bar twitch. Luckily, the auto-resolve thinks they are terrible so once the rest of the fleet is gone you can just auto-resolve and win.

The prospector is much better now, they actually die when they get into a fight with cap ships or other high damage ships.

Wages appear to be disabled.

Can only pick pirates/hegemony/tritach to start, which makes getting a conquest to try it out a bit harder.  :-[

You might want to normalize missile ammo across different weapons. Some missile weapons have enough to fire for 30 minutes straight, while others are out in a minute. In some cases it makes sense, but in some it doesn't. Things like rocket pods I can see blowing through their ammo very fast, but the MRMs having such a huge amount of ammo compared to the LRMs is kind of weird. You might want to boost the LRM ammo.

Edit: And the storm needler seems to be set to point defense. It is shooting at missiles instead of other ships.

Edit2: Okay, managed to kill an exi cruiser. It took 4 hellbores at pointblank with rockets to overcome its regen. At least, the cruiser appears to have some kind of massive hull regen or something along those lines.

Edit3: Also, some large missiles might be nice. With the extreme effectiveness of flak in this mod, the mirv missles are not cutting it.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2013, 07:25:40 PM by Cerevox »
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xenoargh

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Re: Vacuum / Exerelin Alpha 1 (Total Conversion)
« Reply #104 on: August 16, 2013, 07:36:44 PM »

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Wages appear to be disabled.
Yeah, I caught that tonight, will fix.

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Can only pick pirates/hegemony/tritach to start, which makes getting a conquest to try it out a bit harder.
You should be able to hit "next" on that screen at the bottom and pick the others.  Works over here :)

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Edit: And the storm needler seems to be set to point defense. It is shooting at missiles instead of other ships.
Yeah, it's meant to be ultimate spam-cannon, but it tends to eat ammo up on stuff it shouldn't.

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You might want to normalize missile ammo across different weapons. Some missile weapons have enough to fire for 30 minutes straight, while others are out in a minute. In some cases it makes sense, but in some it doesn't. Things like rocket pods I can see blowing through their ammo very fast, but the MRMs having such a huge amount of ammo compared to the LRMs is kind of weird. You might want to boost the LRM ammo.
The main issue is that Alex decided for some weird reason that only missile weapons with 30+ shots could be on Autofire, which is less than ideal.  Anyhow, I'll look at that and at balance for them in general again; I'm not happy with the MIRV, which isn't getting through PD enough, same with the Sabots.  On the other hand, they aren't as massively OP as they used to be, so it's a question of crossing a fine line.  Having another big missile that fills a role between the torpedoes (which are totally worth using on things like Exigency, btw) and the MRMs / LRMs might be worth doing; again, there's a fine line there between having something that's so useful it's ubiquitous and something that's cool-looking but fundamentally useless.
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