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[Typo91]

in the menu it still reads BUILD 7? or am i missing something?

this is the first time i have ever downloaded this mod, moments ago, so its not anything from an old version.

[Annex]

in the menu it still reads BUILD 7? or am i missing something?

this is the first time i have ever downloaded this mod, moments ago, so its not anything from an old version.

File size for build 8 is different from 7 so you should be good.

[xenoargh]

I forgot to change that, lol.  Oh well

The other thing thats happening with build 7 is that when I had a small fleet, when I docked at hostile factions stations, I could buy/sell/repair there still. However once my fleet got big enough (think at the 2 battleship mark) I could no longer do that, and the only option when going to a hostile station was to try to capture it. While im fine with that in itself, that leaves very few friendly stations at that point to dock at. If that is left as is then what would help would be to have 1 neutral uncapturable unaligned station in each system that the player can use as a fallback point for buying/selling.

There is no limit on fleet sizes.  It's all about relations.  Once diplomacy is in place, it'll be possible to make peace with a faction, for a price, and faction relationships will change over time- you may make peace with one faction but go to war with another one, and part of the goal for having a difficulty setting is determining when the other factions will decide to make war on you (i.e., eventually, you'll have to defeat everybody, if playing on the hardest mode).  But that's basically how it's supposed to work right now; if they aren't friendly, they're hardly going to welcome your fleet with open arms.  If you don't want to lose access to stations, don't attack their fleets

[Annex]

No limit? Well that would explain why at level 5 all my systems look like this:

http://www.nexworks.ca/starsector1.jpg

This was not the case with build 6. At this point the only way a player can get something they can handle to fight is by asteroid mining. Everything else is giant blobs of death.

[xenoargh]

Well, earn 1 million credits and build your own Stations.  You're supposed to take over the Sector and all that

Seriously though... from what I see there, you just got a really bad dice roll (if the Independents rule practically everywhere).  I'd just start a new game and re-roll for now.  I will be addressing that issue in Build 9, for sure- if nothing else, because I seem to always get games without the Glaug, who are my favorite things to fight.

[Annex]

Yeah the Glaug are fun to fight. Thanks for your hard work!

[Annex]

Tested out the station capture mechanics, few observations:

- the boss is 6 stations, all of which spawn outside of the visual map. The stations are still within weapons distance of your ships but you cant see what youre shooting at

- the stations are capturable if you have marines, and in the last fight I captured 3 of the stations, all of which can be deployed later by the player in battles. Not sure if thats intended or not, but they do make for a nice rally point!

[xenoargh]

The Stations should not be capturable, and their physics is buggy (they used to something entirely different in previous versions of the mod) which is why they're not moving past the starting borders. 

Fixed for the next build.

[Annex]

Another bug: in my latest station conquest attempt, the station "boss" retreated after I shot one of the stations a few times, and I won the battle. Guess he realized his 6 stations were no match for my 5 battleships

[Annex]

So far best I can tell Glaug need to be buffed at least 25% and exigency nerfed by that amount. Takes me 10 min to kill the glaug fleet + starbases, and 25 min to do the same to exigency. The glaug carriers die in 3 seconds of firing, and their battleships last half as long as any other. Independent seem to be well balanced, but their cruisers are extremely squishy. I just aim at them and they vaporize.

[xenoargh]

Are you playing on full damage? 

Also, are we talking about a fleet optimized vs. Exigency (i.e., beam-boat Odysseys as your capships with Mega Beams)?

Also, I've been putting serious thought into converting the Glaug into a shield-less faction, but giving them regenerating armor, to reflect their semi-organic ship designs.  It'd also resolve the big problems they have with having long, skinny ships as their main-line battleships.

I think that might be interesting.

[MesoTroniK]

Xeno, if you get the regenerating armor to work well I would also be interested in that script that I would tweak a lot ironically for Exigency.

My thoughts is making Exigencies armor extremely weak to the point of near worthlessness so a single shot of anything even moderately powerful would point vaporize that spot of the plates. But then it would regenerate that same spot very quickly. They would retain the hull regeneration but it would work much more slowly.

This would be my own little experiment that I would do on my own standalone vanilla copy, as it would alter the balance dramatically that was so hard to achieve and equally bad headaches would follow. But I would take my time with it and I love tweaking things

[Annex]

Are you playing on full damage? 

Also, are we talking about a fleet optimized vs. Exigency (i.e., beam-boat Odysseys as your capships with Mega Beams)?

Also, I've been putting serious thought into converting the Glaug into a shield-less faction, but giving them regenerating armor, to reflect their semi-organic ship designs.  It'd also resolve the big problems they have with having long, skinny ships as their main-line battleships.

I think that might be interesting.

Im playing at half damage taken to my ships. And no im not specifically geared to fight exigency ships. Mix of Onslaught and Nautilus designs.

Also finally found a PunkJunkers starbase. Their ships performed well, but their starbases got zero reinforcements, not one ship showed up to defend them after the initial group of defenders fell leaving the starbases all on their own with not one ship or fighter around them.

[xenoargh]

Ah, that's good to know.  With Exigency, gearing right is pretty important, because of their special strengths.  They're really not terribly strong if you have good anti-missile weapons (like a Guardian + a couple of Hephaesteus on an Onslaught, for example, for anti-torp and anti-spam) and have beams-a-plenty; I tried out a maxed-out Odyssey build the other day, and it blew right through Exigency ships.
 
A Nautilus is about the worst-possible ship to fight Exigency with; practically all of its weapons are vulnerable to their Repulsor system.  Same with trying to nuke Exigency from long range, at least with a mixed fleet; I've lost ships due to missiles getting reversed, hehe.

Overall, I'd say that Glaug definitely are a bit weak right now; one of the things I think is a major problem is that their long, skinny ships are pretty strong, in theory, but take huge numbers of hits to the shields, which have to be huge to deal with their shapes.  They tend to get into Flux lockdown too easily, where they cannot fire a lot of their weapons but the AI won't Vent (which I can't really fix until I write custom AIs or write some sort of new type of "shield").  Originally, I wanted them to have small, hard-to-penetrate Shields, but it turned out to be really hard to get the AI to use them well.

The carrier is a big weak spot, as is their lack of any weapons that don't use Flux other than the Shard Gun.  That's pretty easily fixed, and making new weapons is always fun.  Maybe a long-range low-damage version of the Melter and a small, Flux-less weapon that does something interesting, like do damage and slow ships down?  Maybe some new missile that does something wicked, like a big EMP strike, since all of the good missiles are used by the other factions atm?

So, based on what currently ails them, an armor regeneration system that was constantly on in lieu of shields sounds pretty attractive for them; they'd have plenty of Flux freed up, wouldn't take Hard Flux damage, and would not take as many hits from random spam.  It'd also give them an edge vs. Plasma weapons, which are the bane of ships with strong shields but low Armor values.

Also, their beam Cruiser with the Megabeam is just not terrifying enough.  They have really good fighters, but their Frigates are pretty meh, and their Destroyer with Phase Teleport isn't scary enough, same with the Catcher, which has remained the coolest-looking-ship-that-actually-sucks for a while now, sort of like the Striker.

I wish that spawning new ships in combat wasn't borked and buggy atm; I'd love to give them some way to launch massive bunches of fighters over time from their carriers, too.

[xenoargh]

OK, built armor-regeneration code. 

This is going to be very tricky to balance.  Basically, high-level Battleships with Heavy Armor / Neutronium Plating on one end, Frigates with nothing on the other; it has to be just effective enough that it's a credible alternative to Shields, but not quite make the big ships invulnerable.  Going to take a lot of playtesting to get it somewhere near right (oh, darn).  Anyhow, it looks totally feasible to offer a really weak version of this as a general Hull Mod, and a much more potent version of it as the Glaug's special, replacing their reliance on Shields.