v1.1.1a
-Quickload Missile Racks now increases missile regen time as well as refire rate for reloading missiles, such as Pilums.
-Added Cazin (P): An ill-advised pirate modification to an already barely spaceworthy hull.
-Added Loki Superheavy Fighter: Heavily shielded two-man squadron with frigate-level firepower.
-Light Ion Lance buffed somewhat, and is now available as a high-end small energy weapon.
-Pulse Phaser reworked and reintroduced as an IR Pulse sidegrade that's particularly effective against unshielded fighters.
-Lion's Guard versions of Thunder, Gladius, and Broadsword with slightly tweaked stats introduced, moved here from the in-development *Guns & Gear* mod.
-Fourteenth Battlegroup versions of Thunder, Gladius, Broadsword, Khopesh, and Warthog with heavily modified loadouts introduced, moved here from the in-development *Guns & Gear* mod.
-Astral (E): Modified Sprite, reduced Base Value to 75% of the original Astral (was: 100%).
-Sentinel: Modified Sprite
v1.1
Initial (re)release of Fighter Expansion Rebalanced
Credits and Special Thanks
- Hoon: Original author of the mod, without whom I'd have had nothing to modify
- Avanitia: For discovering a few oversights and general balance feedback
- AppleSauce: For discovering that CTD so no one else had to
- BigBeans: For the modified Astral(E) and Sentinel spritework
- A whole bunch of people in modding bootcamp, modmaking foundry and elsewhere for general assistance (sorry for not having you all by name!)
Dear lord the new medium weapons are good. Maybe too good? Both act like 3 small weapons strapped together - same flux efficiency, but they have triple the DPS and have greater range. The IR Autopulse not only has great flux efficiency and DPS, it's also got Skysweeper PD baked in - probably too good for it's OP price. Sure, doesn't have the best armor piercing capabilities, but it does everything else. Maybe reduce the ROF so DPS goes down to 400, and drop the OP cost to 12?The IR Autopulse was 16 OP initially, it was dropped from its ultra-high end price for the official release to compete with mid-high end energies because of criticisms that it felt too weak for that spot. IR Autopulse is a PD_ALSO weapon like the Devastator, rather than having Skysweeper PD baked in (which would maximize its autofire accuracy and inflict extra damage to fighters).
The Heavy Vulcan Cannon also acts as a ridiculously good everything-defense system - missiles, fighters, frigates unfortunate enough to wander into range against a couple of them - worth far more than 8 OP in it's current state. Part of this reason is that there's never any down time to the hail of DU going out the barrel - sure, the DPS effectively halves once you run down the mag, but that doesn't stop it from shredding most things that come into range. It could probably use an OP cost bump to 10, and redesign the mag system so it reloads slower, but in larger increments, so it actually has a vulnerability window for things to break through.The heavy Vulcan is quite solid. The main reason it's priced so low is because of the low range, low accuracy, and the competition is really tough! The same-priced Flak Cannon has an accurate splash effect and good range, and the premium Dual Flak tends to turn the nearby space into missile no-fly zones.
The Mantis is a great interceptor! A few minor things regarding text, as well - it's classed as an Interceptor in-game, but it's named as a fighter, and the description calls it a support fighter, lacking consistency. The description also makes reference to the ancient hangar space mechanic, heh.Yeah, that's an artifact of the many iterations of the Manta. It was initially a bomber, but it'd only launch its missiles at ships and never at fighters, which was not terribly ideal. Then it was a support fighter, which didn't help that issue. Then it was a fighter, which helped but it would still like to prioritize ships when available. Then a few extra guns were added, the Locusts were made reloadable, and the Manta was re-rolled as an interceptor to finally prioritize shooting down fighters.
The high-tech Talon Interceptor doesn't have a different name, or a different icon, so the only way to tell these apart is to hover over their name.The High-tech talon has an alternative color scheme, currently nabbed directly from an unused sprite in the base game (unless you mean the LPC item icons, in which case I think the LPC fighter silhouettes should be different colors because of the design types?). It might be a bit difficult to tell because there's still some red on the high tech talon (at least, until they start shooting or bring up their shields), so perhaps I could do a color pass on the few remaining red bits.
The SFL Aegis System feels underpowered for it's price - most fighters can already deal with missiles without this system, so just dealing more damage to missiles and nothing else is a very niche requirement - the +100su range to PD weapons is probably more valuable than that.Aegis is a more support fighter-oriented hullmod, compared to the interceptor-centric Predator and bomber-centric Hammer SFLs. In addition to increasing anti-missile damage, the hullmod also gives flare ignorance to PD weapons, which is very useful in that role. It's not a perfect IPDAI analogue though as I didn't include the ability to make non-PD smalls PD capable (thought it may be too powerful), but maybe I'll add that in if it doesn't break things.
Quickload Missile Racks feels overpriced for what it does - missile rate of fire is typically not the most important thing, and in some cases firing faster might not be what you want, like in the case of the Annihilator Rocket Pod whose sole purpose is to keep shields up - putting more rockets downrange isn't really required. I haven't tested it, but it doesn't sound like it helps with reloading magazine-based missile systems either, like the Pilum.This one's nearly untouched from the original day, I discovered it a bit late into the revamp. I've not got strong opinions on that and right now I'm more-or-less in the feedback gathering stage for that hullmod. Good to know it's likely not game-breakingly powerful though.
Please don't combine the two, I really don't want the features from Modern Carriers, and all it would do is save you like one download per 4 months or something on average.Sorry for stealing the thread;
Yep!
i cannot for the life of me find a Sentinel supercarrier in any market, who sells them? I even got that Stellar Networks mod to try finding one but nothing ever shows up. Are they just super rare or am I being stupid here. Otherwise really like the fighter wings added in, they're pretty good without being overpowered.Sindrian Diktat is the only selling faction, although the chances are really low and you probably need a commission.
- After looking at the .factions file for them, there might be a bug/issue. Hull frequency is supposed to have an integer for each but the SD have ' .6 ', which is less than 1. I'm not sure that the game can even use a decimal in that field. You might experiment by changing it to a ' 1 '.Hull frequency can work with non-integer values. After all, the Hegemony's XIV_bp tagged ships use a decimal number for Hull Frequency (0.25, specifically), and those turn up fine. The Pirate's Falcon(P) hull frequency is set to 0.5 due to its strength.
Lion's Guard, Mercenaries, and Scavengers will fly with them sometimes. Maybe recover one from a battle.
Okay, I just wanted to know, are the Cazin and Cazin (P) better at different roles or anything? Because the more PD focused guns on the Cazin (P) make them seem better as full interceptors than fighters.Their weapon loadouts make them functionally quite different, yes. Cazins are functionally Broadsword Lite: they perform the same function (tankiness, shield pressure, flare distractions) more cheaply, just not quite as well. Cazin (P) is better against light fighters and missiles due to range and sustained firepower... at first.
Hull frequency can work with non-integer values. After all, the Hegemony's XIV_bp tagged ships use a decimal number for Hull Frequency (0.25, specifically), and those turn up fine.Okay, that's true. Just to be on the safe side, you might add the leading 0, just like the vanilla files do.
i cannot for the life of me find a Sentinel supercarrier in any market, who sells them? I even got that Stellar Networks mod to try finding one but nothing ever shows up. Are they just super rare or am I being stupid here. Otherwise really like the fighter wings added in, they're pretty good without being overpowered.
i... dont think the quickload racks works. I've tested it a lot (bc I wasnt sure which stat the hullmod affects, its description is a bit vague & doesnt use word-for-word either of the missile stats that it might affect) & using a stopwatch a pod of pilums appears to have the same refire rate and reload rate with & without this hullmod. Maybe I'm wrong & the amount this mod changes is just too small for me to notice, could someone else test it?It says by 1/3 so it should be pretty noticeable.
No updates in like, forever :( :(
I'm more than half tempted to install it anyway. Has anyone gone ahead and installed it in the latest (0.95.1 RC6) version? Any bugs or crashes?
Not dead. Just nothing new to report. Holding off on doing stuff with this until the next major Starsector patch
Hey, its a really small issue, but I tried to edit this mod's description.csv file with Rons editor, it crashes with 'JSONObject["id"] not found' message. I can edit other csv files such as wing_data or hull_data, but only description file causes crash. I noticed there's some glitched letters on descriptions, so there's maybe some format compatibility issue with that specific file?Open csv file in https://products.aspose.app/cells/editor/csv then save it. It should help solve the problem.
Otherwise the mod itself works fine, so no worries on that part.