Sorry for the delay in changes, I had a tricky thing I wanted to solve first that ended up taking more time than I expected. I have it working (mostly) now though. I might take a break tonight but I might not too. I'm still undecided. I have the changes I want to do in mind and they would be fast but I want to test a bit first so that the testing burden is a little less on the users and a little more on me.
Is it usual for the Archean Order to get crushed so often by the Trade Guilds? Their tech is excellent but I frequently see them getting ground up by Midline fleets. Excited to see what changes are around, enjoying the rebalancing so far.
Welcome to the forums!
Is this during autoresolve battles between npc fleets or in a live combat battle of which you are taking part? Tech doesn't help as much in autoresolve since FP values are closer. The size of the fleet matters more there - as does the number of capitals, generally.
(Also glad you are enjoying the beta!)
I just wanted to say that this is probably the best mod currently available for Starsector.
I've been around since the early versions of this game and I've always found that most Mods fail to address a lot of the core issues with the game.
Focusing heavily on fighters/bombers/gunships is something that was really needed. I've always disliked how these crafts functioned in the base game and this mod addresses exactly that.
In fact, 10 years ago I wrote a thread complaining about Fighters/Bombers and their base function in Starsector: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=418.msg3518#msg3518
My only gripe is that this mod fails to address the complete technological domination of some ships and strike crafts. While it's fine for the early game, later game essentially results in the same meta-builds and the same use of fighters/gunships/bombers over and over again. This essentially makes 90% of the crafts that this mod makes effort to improve essentially.... useless and just junk waiting for the player to obliterate.
This is something that vanilla Starsector suffers from where-as meta-builds become so prominent (very quickly) that a lot of other features, weapons, ships and crafts become useless almost an hour into gameplay. Likewise this mod suffers the same issue of vanilla where large ships can be insta-destroyed quite quickly in mid-late game by single barrages from various ships or strike crafts.
Further-more, in my opinion.... this mod could distinguish itself further by expanding on it's improvements to strike-craft by applying this gameplay directly to larger ships.
Battleships & Carriers should be a main component of EVERY fleet and the main "Command Ship". These ships should all have significant boost in health/hull to withstand barrages and be able to deploy and maintain large (even larger) craft wings. These ships would essentially functions are mobile "bases" on the battlefield and almost function as semi-quasi battle-stations.
I do want to reiterate that this is my -favorite- mod and the only one I really use that adds ships and changes content. I genuinely don't believe I'd play Starsector without this mod as the changes to strike craft are so good and so signifanct to the over-all gameplay. However as I stated before, I believe this formula should be taken further to greatly expand this Mod into a more distinctive area of more HARDY big ships and stronger emphasize of carrier/mobile battleships.
Thanks for your work.
I appreciate the very generous compliment and the time you have taken to provide feedback! I'm not sure that this is the best mod out there (in my mind), but it definitely provides something different and, hopefully, interesting as well. Anyway, I really appreciate it.
To quickly address the main points:
strike craft/roles: Yes this is a core tenant of the mod's overall design goals. I'm glad it seems to work well. Final balance between craft as far as roles go isn't there yet, but I think it's better than it was before. As I design other things I will continue to try and get closer to where it feels "just right" though that will of course be subjective.
Tech meta: I am aware of this (at least to a certain degree) and I agree that more work could be done here. Finding legendary craft/ships/weapons is very fun imo, but the stronger such things are the more likely it will be that a player is going to focus on them to the exclusion of all the other toys in the toolbox. The same goes for the OP - to - effectiveness ratio of higher tech stuff. I want spending more OP on something to have a noticeable impact, but that also runs the risk of obsoleting low OP stuff pretty quickly.
Any detailed thoughts analysis on that topic are welcome - I am certainly open to specific feedback and, perhaps more importantly, why it feels one way or the other and any potential solutions to the perceived problem on an item-to-item basis. In the beta, for instance, I've hopefully already addressed the bombers vs everything else conundrum that carrier building can potentially suffer from. Another goal was to address smaller hullsize carriers and make them feel more worthwhile without making them too strong against warships. On that note, carrier spam effectiveness should have been reduced a bit due to larger AOE radius PD and higher PD hit strength. On the large scale end of the battle size, however, having a lot of interceptors is still going to be necessary.
I also think that when I address item rarity/accessibility in the future this will help a lot too. Though, ideally, I'd like most things to at least have a niche use in certain builds or something along those lines.
Capitals as bases/command ships: This is something that is also a design goal of the mod, but there are two things stopping it from being easy to do right now. The first is that capitals are relatively easy to acquire and fairly prevalent in most fleets in large numbers. So they therefore become the only desirable hullsize to use under those conditions considering the player's ship cap. I want to have destroyers and frigates still provide utility and have a place in the player's fleet rather than simply being an early game throw-away ship if that makes sense. The next Starsector update is looking to tone down npc fleets a bit, and then changes along those lines will be easier to do.
The second and harder to solve issue is battle slowdown and CR. Having capitals as bullet sponges can significantly slow down battles if over-tuned. And, smaller ships can run out of CR before being able to soften them up enough - which goes back to the player ship cap issue. Once again, though, the next update might make these issues easier to work around.
To summarize, I want to do this but I have to be careful about how I go about balancing it from the large-scale design perspective. (I hope that makes sense - it does in my mind anyway
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