Hi, so I was testing your Hivers mod and ran into a few problems which I dont know if they where intended or bugs:
Good morning, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. I will address them one at a time but first a second cup of coffee I think
1. Saturation Bombardment turns the DuskSeekers hostile (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=15820.0), all other factions I had installed were fine with it
Secrets of the Frontier is a must have in my gameplay so I am familiar with the Dust Keepers. They are set as a "good" morality faction and care quite a bit about atrocities committed against any faction. Inventor Racoon even put a note in their code ( "caresAboutAtrocities":true, # kind of their whole job )
Saturation Bombardment is considered an atrocity and they as well as any faction with a "good" mortality (not many are) combined with the above true flag with take a dim view on anyone who does it.
2. Hiver mining fleets have Vanilla ships in them
I do have it in the first page description of the faction that they do use captured Corvus sector ships. Now as to the code reason, Nex will assign ships to any faction for a mining fleet and will first pull from a factions list of mining ships. Thing is, I never set them up with mining ships or mining weapons. Now that you point it out though it does seem like a bit of an oversight on my part. I'll give some of their ships mining stats and assign them to be used in mining fleets in the next update to address this, thank you.
3. Hivers are giving me quests for exploration an surveying things, so they come accross as just one more faction instead of an actual thread
I've looked into that in the past but there is not much I can do about that I am afraid. I have to set them up as a "playable" faction in order for them to colonize and invade. I would essentially have to re-write the NEX code to a custom version and well I am no where near as skilled as Histidine. It bothers me as well so if anyone reading this knows of an easier way that I have overlooked, please share.
4. Their loot incluedes their weapons that have an insane damage to flux ratio for energy weapons (0.3 flux/damage, to 1.x flux/damage on usual mod factions), that kinda leads to the player getting very strong once he starts to fight the hivers
Well that is a matter of player choice. I find that some want that OP feeling and others not so much so I have an optional file that a player can enable to have HIVER weapons not drop or be available for sale anywhere. The instructions on how to enable that is on the forum OP and in a README file in the mod's RAR.
5. I can loot their ships by default, which again makes the player powerspike quite hard
See above regarding weapons, I also have an option to make their ships unrecoverable for the same reasons.
I havent tried watching their expansion rate since that would take a lot of time, but the only dangerous ships are their fighters. So when I send in 7 Timeless Motherships Retrofits from Thalan Shipworks they cleaned up all Hiver systems pretty quickly, so I guess they seem balanced for a mod faction that is supposed to be a thread?
I have their power level set to fend off invasions and to eventually take over a vanilla sector. If you have faction mods installed (highly recommended) it will slow down their expansion or even stop it if you use one of the more OP factions like UAF. Now to your second point, Timeless is one of the most powerful ships in a modded starsector playthrough. You are essentially pitting a boss fleet of ships vs a boss faction. For me to tune them to survive against that level of threat would make anyone not using such a fleet near impossible to take them on.
Overall feels like a nice mod.
Thank you for the nice comment I appreciate it.
I do hope I have addressed your points accurately. If I misunderstood a point or you have further insights please let me know. I am pretty much a one man show and having player input is essential to making my mods the best they can be.