One thing that I find puzzling is the use of flux. With no shields flux has basically irrelevant for your mod, weapon balance can be achieved by rate of fire, reload times and magazine size. The benefit of this is that the player will not be confused by flux information of ships as these, to me, seem irrelevant and therefor misleading. The only use flux may have is in limiting ships who can field many more weapons then others by limiting their maximum potential damage, though I haven't seen any great discrepancy in weapon slots between ships.
You're absolutely correct here. Flux really isn't a major mechanic anymore, but with the lack of shields, it's unfortunately going to stay that way for a while.
Ideally, there would have been a hullmod that allowed you to install shields onto any ship, but that turned out to not work so well (as in, not at all).This unfortunate limitation certainly punched the mod in the face the way I see it, as I really wanted the player to be able to install shields on their ships if they so pleased.
Another thing is the EMP damage found on all weapons, I don't understand the overuse of this, it seems to me that this is a loss of a valid tactic, namely the option of EMP weapons in a world where there are no shields. You could use strong EMP weapons as a great boon and of tactical importance, yet EMP is everywhere in little bits making it tactically irrelevant (or at least misleading). I don't understand this choice. The option of having a weapon that deals enough EMP damage to instantly (or rather swiftly) disable other weapons systems but takes a long time to use again (or find another way to make the weapon difficult to use) would make an interesting option, as would having weapons that do use EMP but deal less damage vs weapons that don't use EMP and deal more damage.
A valid concern. This fits somewhat in with the shield dilemma--without much of a use for flux, the only thing that weapon impacts did to your ship was damage its hull/armor. I felt it would be an interesting concept if all weapons had the ability to knock your ship's systems offline, simulating some meaningful wear-and-tear on your ship instead of just a blasted up hull. I admit, EMP could probably be handled in a better way than it is now. I'll consider your points, and I might do a bit of fiddling with the weapons in that respect, as I certainly see some potential in your approach as well. I think a mix between the two concepts could end up fitting the mod nicely.
I also find the use of kinetic weapons puzzling (6 weapons vs 2 ships with shields), its a damage type that only works against shields so why is it used at all?
This is mainly a cosmetic thing and a desire to keep it true to the original Homeworld 2 mod. Kinetic weapons, though they do suck against armor, generally have higher DPS and lower OPs than energy weapons. For example, the standard Thiian Magnetic Coil Gun does 90 per shot, and fires a burst of two. The Coalition Light Pulse Cannon does 80 per shot, and fires only once with a fairly similar rate of fire to the former.
The following is just bad memory. I've played a little of homeworld 2 (and none of the mod this is based on), perhaps you can help me on this but did it use the 'fog of war' effect? I don't recall it having this but it's bin a very long time. I doubt it would be a good idea to implement the same thing here though.
Not really a 'fog' so to speak, but more of a "enemy ships aren't shown if they're out of sensor range." Why do you say that fog of war is a bad idea?
There are variant files that have rather strange names. You have a brawler, hound, shuttle and wolf variants even though these have nothing in common with the original vanilla ships and indeed only use your own ships/weapons. This is rather confusing, although not important.
There is also still a phase beam in the weapon data.
Mainly just files I forgot to clean out. The variants replaced the starting ships, and were necessary pre .52a because .json files with the same name merged and couldn't be replaced. Thus, I made all the starting variants the Kio. The Phase Beam was from the original example mod that I used as a template ages ago when I started building the mod.
Is there are goal behind not having shields (other then lore), do you have a principle or grand strategy to compensate for the lack of shields and what it means/does to gameplay?
Gameplay-wise, this is mainly my personal preference here. I like difficult, brutal combat. Starfarer is an awesome game, but I felt that being able to just flip on your shields and absorb all incoming fire proved to be kind of cheap at certain times. Ascendency's shields are trickier to use due to their relative weakness compared to vanilla shields, but if used properly, they can keep your ship alive for quite a while. Thus, that's why the Kio is the starting frigate. And again, the initial idea was to have a hullmod that added shields, but I already mentioned that above.
Psiyon, I'm not trying to antagonistic here, I'm just trying to understand the mechanics of this mod.
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I'll say again, I've seen very little of this mod in action (I have bin looking throe the mods files) and I'm not judging it, I'm just trying to understand.
Vandala, I'm one of the few people on the internet who actually accept criticism and use it to improve myself and my work. I know that you're only trying to help, and I truly appreciate it.
