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[Debido]

Just going to quickly comment on the armour regen.

If you're intention is to have a play style where you only need to play with one ship or manage only a small number of powerful ships VS a great number of ships then the current implementation makes sense.

In the long run with most mods I find other ships are cannon fodder unless you spend time on tweaking them. Even then they can be blown up all too easily under AI control, as the allied AI is just no where near the capabilities of a human.

I like having to only focus on only a few uber powerful ships, as I then spend less time micromanaging the AI controlled allies which I don't find anywhere near as fun.

If you think your black eagles or what not are too powerful, let them do a run against a Starbase.

Also the Black Eagle all armoured up with regen and everything can be crushed by some high end ships capital ships if you're unlucky enough to face them.

If the gameplay were even and there was a 1:1 exchange ratio in battles it would become frustrating fleet management in the long run as you'd be continually procuring new ships and configuring them and adapting them to your fleet.

IIRC one of the original design goals of Vacuum was so that it had more of an arcade feel to it, and in general arcade 2D shooters your one ship is overwhelmed by number of enemy ships. Being able to defeat larger numbers of enemies can give the player a good feeling of empowerment, and has the same level of entertainment as FPS shooters where you're overwhelmed by enemy numbers but you eventually whittle them down.

So whether this is a 'good' gameplay element or a 'bad' gameplay element is...up to Xeno.

[Kazzthal]

I did something similar to what Mr. Dmaiski did & god nows it was brutal, the conquest class are just toys at it !

But instead of the 2 frontal heavy plasmas y used slamers :O

Holy... That wasn't a battle, it was a massacre ! the Black Eagle ship can go OP (I destroyed almos an entire station fleet, but ran out of ammo)

All I can add to the debate is this, could you make things harder for the late game? Now I can own anything that anyone can trhow at me

By the way, Great mod man you did it Xeno !

[xenoargh]

Well, hrmm. 

I know there are a few things that can crack that kind of armor; even with a level-zero character, I can kill a single Annihilator with a Conquest, no real problems, and an Annihilator has 6500 Armor.

I agree that part of the issue is how Armor interacts with hits; part of the issue is that Armor damage negation can result in zero damage (unlike Shields, where it's locked down, I think, to some low-but-meaningful minimum).  I found that out when I developed Neutronium Plating; you can create ships that are invulnerable if their "natural" rating is high enough.

But that shouldn't be happening here, so what's going on is Armor regen rates going above the levels required to ever defeat them. 

But that doesn't make sense.  Let's do the math, here:

maxArmorDamageReduction is 0.85, so we're talking 85% damage reduction on a "fresh" armor cell.

Then add in Heavy Armor, 50% reduction.

Then add in the Glaug's version of Armor Regeneration, so that's 35% damage.

So... 1 * 0.15 * 0.5 * 0.35 = 0.02625 of normal damage, or roughly 3%.  Nowhere near zero, but low.

If we fire a Plasma Blaster at that armor, then we're doing (base value, no Hull Mods) 1750 damage to that cell.

If we have 3000 Armor overall, and each cell is 1/15th that value, we have 200 Armor in the cell after that hit.  1750 * 0.02625 = 45.9375, after all the reductions. 

At max, a Cruiser like a Crusher would be repairing 60 Armor / second.  So it can and would defeat a single Plasma Blaster at that point.  Makes sense, and that's more-or-less how it should work; it should defeat a lot of Armor attacks.

But it doesn't work that way, when I test it out; I'm obviously missing something here about how the reduction works. 

Higher armor cell values clearly have a larger benefit than lighter ones do; this is why the Cleaver, when it had Neutronium Plating, was disproportionately harder to kill than any other Destroyers.

So there must be an additional issue here.  If we're taking hits from a HIL, that's 4500(!) damage / second.  Well over the 60 Armor / second regeneration rate, which is a flat rate.  Yet you're showing ships taking zero damage from HILs there.  I presume there's another factor here- probably you have the Combat skill that reduces damage taken.  If yes, then that would explain what's going on; I know that that reduction can be a bit problematic, because it's on top of the rest of the bonus tree and tends to cross that line where certain things that were fine are suddenly not-fine.

But before I get concerned about that, I'll go test a HIL vs. a Glaug ship in the sim with a zero-level character and make sure that yes, it can do damage like it should.  If not, then there's something else wrong here, but if yes, then I just need to drop that final skill-based bonus vs. damage, because it's breaking stuff very badly- it probably also makes Neutronium Plating basically invulnerable, too.

<tests>

Double-hmm.

One HIL (118 Armor damage / second, with the above as our guide) can't ever quite break a Glaug carrier's defense, which is regenerating, at maximum, 65 Armor / second.  It's not doing zero damage; damage figures are piling up, and they're consistent with the theory.  So... erm... there must be more to it than that.  Other cells around it must also be reducing the damage.

Soooo, that must be the formula laid out quite long ago, which we still don't have real numbers for:

It's a little involved. Don't have the code in front of me, but each armor "cell" has roughly 1/8th of the armor rating worth of hitpoints. Damage reduction is based on a contribution from nearby cells - not just adjacent, a bit farther than that, though the farther off cells contibute less. What armor rating means is how much damage to armor you need to do (after reducton), shooting at a single point, before any damage at all gets through to the hull.

The actual formula is:
actual damage = base damage * base damage / (armor value + base damage)

The actual damage is then applied to armor cells contributing to the armor value, so subsequent hits to the same spot do more damage.

So a hit for 200 points of damage vs armor 200 will be reduced by 50%, and apply 100 points of damage to the armor. The next 200 point hit to the same cell will be reduced by 33% - 200 * 200 / (200 + 100).

So the amount of reduction from all of the other cells must reduce the damage below the regen rate. 

This must be why bigger ships, with more cells, are effectively invulnerable with Armor Regeneration on, while with smaller ships, a heavy weapon hit hurts them quite easily. 

How to address that?  Kind of hard, without having something a little more solid to work with; Alex's answer on that is pretty vague.

Probably what I should do is get the number of cells and process the regen based on that, so that ship size doesn't change how effective Armor Regeneration really is per cell relative to incoming damage.  I think that's a large part of this mess; Armor values don't just serve as buffer hitpoints, they also reduce damage according to a formula we don't know.



Oh, and as for the philosophical stuff... the issue here isn't whether it's cool to have Heroic elements where we can buff ships up and be Chuck Norris in a spacecraft.  The issue is making sure that it never ever quite reaches the point where you're complacently devastating whole fleets of the AI without a care.  I don't actually think it's quite like that atm, but it depends on which Faction you're fighting and what ship you're flying. 

It's not really working right, though; what I've found in my practical testing is that there's a world of difference between putting Armor Regeneration on, say, an Enforcer with the 50% Armor bonus from Tech + player buffs vs. putting it on a zero-level Frigate.  For one of these ships, it may provide a way to regenerate if you escape without getting insta-slaughtered... for the other one, it's basically invulnerability vs. anything up to the heaviest weapons in the game.  So clearly I need to debuff it based on the number of armor cells, but I'm not quite sure what formula will arrive at a reasonable value; I know what targets I want to hit, in terms of regen vs. damage taken, but I'm not quite sure how to achieve them without either ending up with regen that's basically worthless, because it's letting too much damage through, vs. something that's comically OP.  I'll look further into this when I have more time.

[dmaiski]

xeno what your missing is this:

a hit to a 0 HP cell does damage to hull and the nearby armor cells

a hit to a 1hp cell does damage only to armor (overflow is transfered to other armor cells nearby untill they are saturated, only then will it do damage to hull)

poorly made example(i dont know the exact numbers used for  this):

Spoiler

ship has 3000 armor(200: 1/15 armor cell)
a 2500 damage shot hits a:

0hp cell:
500 damage is done directly to hull, 2000 damage is transfered to the surounding 8 cells... (see below)

1hp cell:
1 damage is done to armor cell, 2499 is transfered to the surounding 8 cells, armor cells absorb 100 damage each(1599 remain), damage is then transfered to the surounding 8(*8-8=56) armor cells, cells take 28.9 damage (damage totaly negated to armor)

with armor regen, the whole 9x9 block that was damaged by the shell ther regenerates 90hp each (for a total of 7290hp per second)

[close]

So clearly I need to debuff it based on the number of armor cells

this is why my damage regen code did not rebuild destroyed cells instantly
if you tear out the flux managment code itshould do exactly what you want it to do
(ie. huge ships will not become (as) imortal)
(it was originaly made to replace shielding on BISO ships thus flux managment code)

*fiddfling with code a bit to make it scale with the curent cells hp*

1 line change that should* make armor regen also dependant on how much hp a cell has(nearby cells heal damaged ones too)
*edit* bugfix for cells moving too much armor from ajecent cells when damaged and then loosing it

Spoiler

Code: java

package data.scripts.plugins;



import com.fs.starfarer.api.Global;
import com.fs.starfarer.api.combat.*;
import com.fs.starfarer.api.util.IntervalUtil;

import java.awt.*;

/*
to be put on a weapon that will execute script on a ship
multiple weapons will increase the efficiency
 */
public class AbsorptionArmor implements EveryFrameWeaponEffectPlugin
{
    //engine
    private CombatEngineAPI engine= Global.getCombatEngine();

    //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    //timers
    private IntervalUtil fasttimer = new IntervalUtil(.1f, .11f);
    private IntervalUtil slowtimer = new IntervalUtil(.15f, .16f);

    //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////



    //main armor effect
    float lastcycle=0;
    @Override
    public void advance(float v, CombatEngineAPI engineAPI, WeaponAPI weaponAPI)
    {
        //ship
        ShipAPI ship;
        ship=weaponAPI.getShip();

        //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

        //stats of system
        float FluPerAPoint = 10;    //how much 1 armor point is worth in terms of flux
        //float ReBaArmRate = .005f;  //how fast armor rebalanced  max 1 for instant
        float MaxFlux = .8f;        //cap for this system being active
        float RegenRate = .002f;    //rate armor regenerates as a decimal
        float activeRate = .005f;    //how fast active armor balancer works
        float MinHealthActive = .4f;//minimum health for active armor sharing
        float weaponsizemult = 1f;
        //weapon size multiplier
        WeaponAPI.WeaponSize weapsize = weaponAPI.getSize();
        if (weapsize.equals(WeaponAPI.WeaponSize.SMALL)) {weaponsizemult=.5f;}
        if (weapsize.equals(WeaponAPI.WeaponSize.MEDIUM)){weaponsizemult=1f;}
        if (weapsize.equals(WeaponAPI.WeaponSize.LARGE)) {weaponsizemult=2f;}

        //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

        //game is paused dont do anything  //weapon is disabled ""
        if (engine.isPaused() || weaponAPI.isDisabled())
        {
            return;
        }

        //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

        //if(ship.getSystem().isActive()) optional link to ship system
        {
            //advance timers
            slowtimer.advance(v);
            fasttimer.advance(v);

            //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

            //main code
            if (fasttimer.intervalElapsed())
            {
                //stuff that is used alot
                ArmorGridAPI armorgrid = ship.getArmorGrid();
                float armorrating = armorgrid.getArmorRating();
                float MaxCell = armorgrid.getMaxArmorInCell();

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //armor grid stats
                int maxX = armorgrid.getLeftOf()+armorgrid.getRightOf();
                int maxY = armorgrid.getAbove()+armorgrid.getBelow();

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //avarage armor of ship hull
                float armorcells = 0;               //number of cells ship has
                for (int X=0; X<maxX; X++){for (int Y=0; Y<maxY; Y++){armorcells++;}}
                //float ReBalArmor = curarmor/armorcells;

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //adjusted stats
                float adjust = weaponsizemult*Math.min(125 / armorcells, 4); //max increase of rate (prevents 100x rate on small ship)
                FluPerAPoint = 10;    //how much 1 armor point is worth in terms of flux
                //float ReBaArmRate = .005f;  //how fast armor rebalanced  max 1 for instant
                MaxFlux = .8f;        //cap for this system being active
                RegenRate = .002f*adjust;    //rate armor regenerates as a decimal
                activeRate = .005f*adjust;    //how fast active armor balancer works
                MinHealthActive = .4f*adjust;//minimum health for active armor sharing

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //basic armor state of ship
                float curarmor = getTotalArmor(ship);
                //float ArmLost = armorgrid.getArmorRating()-curarmor;  //how much armor was damaged

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //calculate regen rate based on flux (prevents cells from filling up sequentially at low flux)
                float FluxRemaining = (ship.getFluxTracker().getMaxFlux()*MaxFlux) - ship.getFluxTracker().getCurrFlux();
                //float FluxToRepairMax = ArmLost * FluPerAPoint;
                float NormRepPerFrame = (MaxCell * RegenRate)
                        *((MaxFlux-ship.getFluxTracker().getFluxLevel())/MaxFlux);//aditional level of repair decrease
                //float FluxToRepairNorm = NormRepPerFrame * FluPerAPoint * armorcells;
                //float FluxForRep = (FluxToRepairMax < FluxToRepairNorm ? FluxToRepairMax : FluxToRepairNorm);

                //easier, more accurate  (compares the cost to repair in last cycle to amount of flux left)
                if (lastcycle==0) {lastcycle=NormRepPerFrame*armorcells*FluPerAPoint;}
                float FluxForRep = lastcycle;
                float FluxToRepairNorm = lastcycle;
                float RepRate = (FluxForRep<FluxRemaining ? NormRepPerFrame:NormRepPerFrame*(FluxRemaining/FluxToRepairNorm));

                //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


                //armor manager
                float next=0;
                lastcycle=0; //clears lastcycle
                //active cycle (needs to be separate)
                //lets damaged cells take armor from nearby healthy cells
                for (int X=0; X<maxX; X++)       //
                {                                //cycle through all armor cells on ship
                    for (int Y=0; Y<maxY; Y++)   //
                    {
                        float cur = armorgrid.getArmorValue(X, Y); //health of current cell
                        //Active ReBalArmor
                        //mover armor from nearby cells to damaged ones
                        //can be tied to an if statement
                        {
                            //take armor from nearby healthy cells
                            float Forwardsum=0;
                            for (int Xa=(X==0? X:X-1); Xa<maxX && Xa>=0 && Xa<=X+1; Xa++)
                            {
                                for (int Ya=(Y==0? Y:Y-1); Ya<maxY && Ya>=0 && Ya<=Y+1; Ya++)
                                {
                                    float cell = armorgrid.getArmorValue(Xa, Ya);
                                    if (cell>cur && armorgrid.getArmorFraction(Xa, Ya)>MinHealthActive)
                                    {
                                        float diff = (cell - cur)*activeRate;
                                        next = (cell-diff);
                                        armorgrid.setArmorValue(Xa, Ya, next>0? next:0);
                                        cur+=diff;
                                        //ship.getFluxTracker().increaseFlux(diff*FluPerAPoint*.1f, true);
                                        //uses 1/10th of the normal flux to move armor around (too costly in flux)
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                            next = cur;
                            armorgrid.setArmorValue(X, Y, next<MaxCell? next:MaxCell); //add it to cell
                        }
                    }
                }

                /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////


                //passive cycle
                for (int X=0; X<maxX; X++)       //
                {                                //cycle through all armor cells on ship
                    for (int Y=0; Y<maxY; Y++)   //
                    {
                        float cur = armorgrid.getArmorValue(X, Y); //health of current cell

                        //only do repair if cell health is more then 0 prevents immortal ship syndrome
                        if (cur>0)
                        {
                            //regen armor
                            if (cur<MaxCell)
                            {
                                next = cur + (cur/MaxCell)*RepRate;          //how much armor should be regenerated


                                armorgrid.setArmorValue(X, Y, next<MaxCell? next:MaxCell);
                                float fluxuse = (next - cur) * FluPerAPoint;
                                ship.getFluxTracker().increaseFlux(fluxuse, true);
                                lastcycle+=fluxuse;
                            }
                        }

                    }
                }
                

                /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

                //test
                if (slowtimer.intervalElapsed())
                {
                engine.addFloatingText(ship.getLocation(), "armorcells  " + armorcells + " armorrating  " + armorrating + " curentarmor  " + curarmor +" MaxCell  "+ MaxCell +"  waeposizemult  "+weaponsizemult, 20f, Color.RED, ship, 1f, .5f);
                }

            }
        }
    }
    ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

    //gets total armor of a ship
    public static float getTotalArmor(ShipAPI ship)
    {
        ArmorGridAPI armorgrid = ship.getArmorGrid();
        float sum=0;
        int maxX = armorgrid.getLeftOf()+armorgrid.getRightOf();
        int maxY = armorgrid.getAbove()+armorgrid.getBelow();

        for (int X=0; X<maxX; X++)
        {
            for (int Y=0; Y<maxY; Y++)
            {
                sum += armorgrid.getArmorValue(X, Y);
            }
        }
        return sum;
    }

}

[close]

[xenoargh]

@Dmaiski:  Thanks, I'll take a look at this when I get a chance this evening

[xenoargh]

OK, took a good long look at this, and here's what I'm going to do.

1.  Total healing to a given grid area will be constrained by three different factors:

A.  How much the total armor average is.  The higher the average, the faster healing takes place in a grid square.  This makes Plasma weapons more efficient vs. regenerating armor and it makes spamming from all sides (say, by a bunch of fighters) work... eventually... if there are enough of them and they're doing enough damage overall.  It doesn't make ships with Armor Regeneration any more or less efficient against alpha-strikes; it's still less efficient than Neutronium Plating.

However, this isn't enough; it favors ships with more armor-grid locations over smaller ships, amongst other problems.

B.  How much armor remains in the cell.  As the armor level in the cell drops, the cell's ability to heal drops.  This means that once the armor's initial resistance is dropped enough, it's not going to recover quickly enough to nullify large amounts of incoming damage.  This is a nerf, and a pretty important nerf; if you can get through the armor at all, then your lighter weapons can contribute damage most of the time, instead of being defeated by heavy armor.  For example, a ship with three Medium Lasers and Energy Pump used to be able to penetrate a Glaug Mantabee slightly, but the amount of damage that got through past the continual healing was very low.  Now it's able to kill.

C.  A fudge factor that depends on the ship's size class.  Basically, smaller ships get more healing than big ones do, so that this isn't totally worthless for them at their lower armor values.  I think that's going to continue to be really hard to get balanced just right; it feels really good on Cruisers and Capitals, but it is probably too weak for Destroyers / Frigates to use at all, now, unless they're under player control.  Time will tell.


2.  The Neutron weapons are meant to be one of the primary non-nuke counters to this kind of armor at the high end.  They just aren't very efficient right now; compared to a Heavy Plasma Cannon or a MegaBeam with Energy Pump, they're pretty weak, even vs. unshielded opponents like the Glaug.  They have gotten a buff to their damage and a few more ships use them as primary weapons.

3.  These changes make the Glaug's Spore weapons even nastier than they already were; now they're quite nice vs. re-generators because of their effects on total armor.

4.  These changes mean that a hole opened up by a nuke strike or bomber wing is a critical problem for even an Annihilator captain, because the holes close much more slowly now.

Anyhow, that's what's up.  I don't know whether this will be "balanced" or not, yet; I think a lot depends on other factors, like the changes to the kinds of ships players will be meeting in battles now, in particular the changes to fighters. 

A single "Rambo" hero ship with Armor Regeneration is probably in big, big trouble now, if it isn't piloted very carefully; I've taken a max-buff Glaug Catcher (which will get a meaningful buff on its weapons, finally) against an Independent Attack Fleet, and I was able to roll over everybody but the Conquests, who eventually chipped my plates away and traded damage with me until I lost.  I could have won that fight, by refusing to fight without healed armor and making the Conquests run out of ammo for their Storm Needlers, but that was the only way to win it; I couldn't just get into face-hugging range and pound away with short-range weapons.

That said, I don't know if this is balanced yet.  That's probably not quite there; while I want the Catcher to be pretty deadly, the big question is what happens with the Black Eagle and the Conquest, as they're the prime ships for this, other than the Glaug's stuff.

It feels pretty good, though; certainly better than it did.  I'll take a look at the Black Eagle match-up and see how that works; if it's not feeling like I could just pwn whole fleets without breaking a sweat, we'll call this done.

Oh, and I think I came up with an interesting anti-beam defensive weapon idea; sounds like something Exigency could use.  No design yet or anything but I have an idea that doesn't suck.

[Ghostsniper64]

Hey, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I'm not able to see the ship types in other fleets, I only see there exhaust jets. Help?

(see attached)

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Nanao-kun]

Hey, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I'm not able to see the ship types in other fleets, I only see there exhaust jets. Help?

(see attached)

It's a feature.

[Ghostsniper64]

Hey, I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I'm not able to see the ship types in other fleets, I only see there exhaust jets. Help?

(see attached)

It's a feature.

Just making sure, thanks

[ZhAlias]

Nice mod

It's awesome to have some point in the game and the implementation is great.
Differet fractions attitude changes are really good.

Yet there is thing that I didn't like:
- Initial fights are too messy, and not actually always fast-ending.
- I've found fighters as best starter, even with 1 flight deck in fleet they are almost immortal, have no supply consumption, need almost no crew and can be reused later on.
- Paragon always was die-hard due it's vast flux capacity, good damage/flux shield midifier and fortress system, but in this mod it's shield is not as good as always. I would say shields are useless to capital ships here because there is no such good shield hull mods as armor hull mods. So my paragon wear all posslible armor mods, forgot about it's shield and system and use all it's flux to lay waste to those who dare approach it with rarey loosing any hull integrity.
-Fighter-launching large missile weapon. It has no sense because: only one fighter; recharges for ages; fighters are free on supplies and have very few deployment pont anyway. It might be a good idea to make it a fighter deck.

[xenoargh]

- Initial fights are too messy, and not actually always fast-ending.

More details about that would be helpful, as I look at how to re-tune the start of play

- I've found fighters as best starter, even with 1 flight deck in fleet they are almost immortal, have no supply consumption, need almost no crew and can be reused later on.

That's getting changed to some degree in the next build

- Paragon always was die-hard due it's vast flux capacity, good damage/flux shield midifier and fortress system, but in this mod it's shield is not as good as always. I would say shields are useless to capital ships here because there is no such good shield hull mods as armor hull mods. So my paragon wear all posslible armor mods, forgot about it's shield and system and use all it's flux to lay waste to those who dare approach it with rarey loosing any hull integrity.

It's just a different way to use the Paragon; I think it's going to be less attractive in the next build, though, as Armor Regeneration will be nerfed a lot.

That said... a Paragon with maxed Tech buffs to Shields, Capacity and Dissipation + the relevant Hull Mods is an almost-invulnerable shield tank.  Flux Shunt means that you can use Fortress Shield and be immune to practically anything except for multiple Odysseys or Macuahuitl nukes while it's running its damage buff.

For a pure-damage ship, the Paragon is pretty weak, really; the Macuahuitl can put out more DPS than anything else in the game and the Odyssey can kill whole fleets of ships it doesn't even need to see.  I think people rarely try the Macuahuitl out in the mod because the AI version isn't optimized very well, but it's quite nasty if you just want to blow everything up before it can get close to you

-Fighter-launching large missile weapon. It has no sense because: only one fighter; recharges for ages; fighters are free on supplies and have very few deployment pont anyway. It might be a good idea to make it a fighter deck.

Well, that one fighter has two HMGs, which gives it more firepower than practically any fighters, has stronger armor and shields, and doesn't cost any Deployment points at all.  It also gradually reloads.  A Dominator can launch 4 of them and still have fairly heavy weapons, making it a great mid-game harassment ship, as the fighters can knock down most ships' shields.  Late-game, it's not as effective, but during the mid-game, the Prometheus is very effective, because it launches two of them and has a flight deck; with good armor and shields, the Prometheus is quite effective even into the early late-game (taking on Attack Fleets when trying to get Blueprints, for example).

[ZhAlias]

More details about that would be helpful, as I look at how to re-tune the start of play

I think there is 2 main reasons:
-out of the screen range of alot of weapons of small monts. The radar is nice(yet it sometimes show ships that are not seen on tactical map  ), but it is hard to observe surrounding when you even do not see your ship in order to aim properly.
-actually high speed of all initial frigates, I will check once more, but I think toughest frigates wasn't as quick as it is.

It's just a different way to use the Paragon; I think it's going to be less attractive in the next build, though, as Armor Regeneration will be nerfed a lot.

Shield based Paragon can be tank, yet it is definetly is not something that "cannot be outlasted or outgunned". I think it needs some buffs because it is slow, requires alot of supply, crew, deployment points and it usually doesn't worth it.

I haven't played with Macuahuitl yet, Odyssey is nice with Mega Beam or Heavy plasma cannon, but i think it cannot compete with full armor Conquest with 4 Dual Slammer turrets. Those make all other weapons somehow silly, they need no flux and they hit through shields. In my simulation regular Paragon is gone in several seconds. I've took 2 Hegemony stations in row without any casulties.
This Conquest is scary becaue of firepower of 5 large ballistic weapos that can concentrate on one target and its frigate-like mobility(actually rare frigate in original starsector can be as mobile).
I think armor regeneration nerf would not affect it heavily because this thing have enough mobility to avoid surrounding.

[dmaiski]

I have allways thought that if you manage to avoid a fight by ducking in and out of combat thats your strategy working for you, not the OP ness of shields/armor. The main problem with the curent implementation of regen armor was that you simply did not need to do this because you could out-regen any incoming damage short of reaper torps (some ship designs were capable of tanking the concentrated fire of half a station defence fleet at high levels)


on a side note: I have discovered that geting lvl5 combat spec early is hilarious if you want to be a pirate, im curently using a frigate to literaly run through whole fleat disabling and destroying anything up to cruisers that i want captured while a fighter swarm + 2 3deck carriers belch out cap squads and covering fire

i am the bane of the hemogeny trading network, there is nowhere to hide, there is nowhere to run, YOU WILL BE MINE ALL OF YOU![mad ranting and maniacal laughter]


btw what are your thoughts on tech10 super frigate fleets?

Spoiler

16 frigates, 7 fighter wings, 7 carriers...

bane of the hemogeny trade network

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Spoiler

PS: can you implement a way to get out of stuck in hostile system without fule issue?
nevermind figured it out, bu scuttling the equivelent of a hemogeny system defense fleet in captured ships i have ammased 1 spaceday of fule to get out of the system XD (i hope your happy, 10 hemogeny murchant fleets were reduced to scrap for this)

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i have to say this is posibly the most epic mod in starsector at this time, simply because of the way strange quirks leed to "D for Dwarf" levels of awsome

Spoiler

carriers are flying infront of fighter flet to doe a painfull death

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PPS: the carrier AI is getting all my shield maxed dachsund carriers killed, why it do this!!! why!!!!!
(in all seriousness, a datchsund carrier can take 4 reaper torps with shield on and not die, ai needs fixing... ill look at it and see if i can spot what its doing wrong)

PPPS: neither adv optics or targeting system effect BEAM type weapons at all

[dmaiski]

aha found it i think!

in your combat AI you need to run a check to see what is the nearest allied (non fighter/frigate)ship to target

if carrier is nearest ship to target it should retreat away from the ship (conditional on there being allied fighters on field)

[xenoargh]

On the dead-Dachshunds-dillema:  

The issue there is that the AI is lowering its shields when a really big projectile is inbound, rather than taking the hit and Overloading.  The other issue is that I don't think that the AI is getting the damage values for incoming shots correctly; I need to fix that.

With Fighters and Drones, I took that code out entirely; I'm pretty tempted to take it out for Frigates as well, because most of them cannot survive for very long without shields.

PS: can you implement a way to get out of stuck in hostile system without fule issue?

While I totally agree that your fix was awesome, honestly, I think that's a bug.  I want to allow for "rescue" in those situations- a 10% chance / day that a "Good Samaritan" shows up and offers Fuel / Supplies for a steep price.  I think that would be more newbie-friendly.  IDK, I've had that happen exactly once while playtesting... and, like you, I rather enjoyed figuring out how to get out of the trap (didn't have any way to capture stuff, so I did a sacrifice play and moved one System over, found friendlies, the end).  Maybe the best way is to have the "Good Samaritan" cost half your credits, so it's pretty painful at higher levels, especially when saving up for bases.

I totally approve of the Frigates of Dewm approach, btw; I often do 3-4 uber-Frigates, a carrier, and one Destroyer as a midgame fleet.


About the late-game EZ-street issues... patience.  I haven't even tried giving the enemy fleets Admirals yet.  Yet.

PPPS: neither adv optics or targeting system effect BEAM type weapons at all

Targeting system should not, but Advanced Optics worked, last time I checked.  I'll look at that.