Fractal Softworks Forum
Starsector => Suggestions => Topic started by: MrPipperz on March 16, 2023, 07:50:29 AM
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Here's an idea: a hullmod to add an extra weapon mount to a ship.
I know, I know; How will it be rendered? What would its arc be? How do you determine mount type? Size? How can you possibly balance that?
Easy: Don't render it. Give it a full arc, but verrry slow turn rate penalties. Only ballistic or energy- for this hullmod. Dependent on hull.
Let me explain.
In-lore, the hullmod would take up mounting, deployment panels, hardware and automation, energy, and fuel supply lines of landing gear and thrusters which requires a lot of specialized apparatus to accomplish reliably and be spaceworthy.
In-game, this would give penalties: reduced maneuverability, heightened deployment point costs for weapons mounted there, diminished armor profiles, greatly lengthened in-combat weapon repair times.
But mah missiles!- Sure. But a different hullmod, so it can be balanced differently- missiles are high-impact, limited use weapons, that can tactically alter whole battles. So... Similar somewhat dramatic drawbacks. Missiles mounted in these bottom mounts are poorly integrated with their host ship, and are far more dangerous to operate- they carry some of the drawbacks above, but also halved ammunition as well as: if damaged or offlined in combat, the ordinance can explode, dealing 100x its OP in direct hull damage not negated by armor.
Would make EMP a real threat, give it a spicy flavor, and a real balancing act to negotiate for the player.
Thoughts?
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I mean adding an extra underside universal small/medium/medium/large turret mount for 8/15/20/40 that can't be bullt in would probably be a balanced and interesting hullmod as it would open some alternative builds. Ships are not exactly starved for mounts, in fact you can tell a capital ship is not optimized and is probably built by a newer player if all mounts are full. I don't think such a hullmod would be overpowered even without any penalties so long as it can't be built in.
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Hmm, not being built-in compatible would probably be a good idea, but having no penalties doesn't seem great- while true that most good builds don't fully utilize their mountings, having an extra large mount on a capital or cruiser with the flux stats to support it might unbalance a hull. Though, the opportunity cost of the mod itself would have an effect for sure. It'd need some testing and thought!
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The biggest problem for me is readability. I like being able to look at a glance how each ship is equipped and what I should look out for.
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(Neat idea, btw, in general! I could perhaps see it working as like... a custom drone-platform-type-thing added to the ship. I think that'd require fairly extensive backend work, though...)
Balance-wise, the other thing to consider is that the ability to add a ballistic-capable slot to a high-tech ship is going to be trouble, a lot of the time. All of a sudden the ship gets capabilities in terms of range and damage types that it's very much not balanced for. I think it'd have to be something where the hullmod looked at the types of slots the ship had, and limited it to something where it would not let the ship install a weapon it couldn't already, hmm. Fun to think about, regardless!
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I’m trying to think of an example ship where I think “I wish this had one more mount” and the only one that immediately comes to mind is the Heron. Another Medium something could be useful. For most everything else, I don’t fret it. If anything, I leave mounts empty.
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Yeah, I guess that's the flipside - if you can't get an overpowered-on-this-ship ballistic mount, then the extra mount doesn't mean much, does it.
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(Neat idea, btw, in general! I could perhaps see it working as like... a custom drone-platform-type-thing added to the ship. I think that'd require fairly extensive backend work, though...)
(There's a mod that already does that, actually! Though it's like 95% heresy. I think it adds slots by generating new ship hulls while the game runs.)
Balance-wise, the other thing to consider is that the ability to add a ballistic-capable slot to a high-tech ship is going to be trouble, a lot of the time. All of a sudden the ship gets capabilities in terms of range and damage types that it's very much not balanced for. I think it'd have to be something where the hullmod looked at the types of slots the ship had, and limited it to something where it would not let the ship install a weapon it couldn't already, hmm. Fun to think about, regardless!
It's a fun consideration. Maybe the ship has a default slot type that can be attached to it? Ballistic ships adding energy weapons isn't a real concern, since, well, you know how a lot of people think about Mjolnir. A ballistic on an energy ship is almost like a flux-using missile slot, though.
I would also think about the possibility of putting bigger slots where they really don't belong. Almost makes me want to give the slots debuffs, to mobility, maybe, that scale backwards with ship size, but without scaling OP costs, so that a capital putting on a Large slot loses less stats than a Kite. Assuming the Kite even finds OP for the slot and any Large weapon.
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Yeah, I guess that's the flipside - if you can't get an overpowered-on-this-ship ballistic mount, then the extra mount doesn't mean much, does it.
Even if it wasn’t “ballistic-on-High Tech to break things”, what would one more Medium Energy add to say, an Aurora or Champion? Maybe the Fury would gain something? You’re usually pushing up against flux limits more than lack of mounts. Likewise, an additional Ballistic on an Enforcer adds what exactly? It’s already starved. Maybe a Hammerhead or Manticore? Then you get into Mid-line that has mixed mounts and I wonder how it would work.
I suppose there are a few ships that could benefit from such a thing, probably no more or less than the Missile Autoloader, so the precedent might be there.
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I think the OP cost of an extra (non-missile) weapon, vents to support the extra weapon, and the hullmod would be too much 99% of the time for it to be useful. IMO, most ships are either flux limited or OP limited. Very few are mount limited.
Edit: Rewording some stuff because I missed a bit of the discussion skimming: I think if you eliminate the obvious strong things like extra missiles, or mount types you can't normally get, then it would not be very good.
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I mean if alex version of it involves a drone thing like kinda like those that are on stations why not make it be able to be shot down? All that OP you invested on the gun? It's gone now and you are crippled. Or give it limited ammo? Granted giving limited ammo to something like adding a graviton beam would be silly.
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intrinsic_parity is exactly right. If it were costed like heavy armor but not able to be built in it would be a ridiculously bad hullmod if it comes with a malus or limitations on weapons. Say, spending 60 OP to put a Squall on a Paragon or Odyssey is already highly questionable and probably bad but would at least be interesting. Spending 70 OP to put in an extra Plasma Cannon would be lunatic, the ship needs the OP for other things and does not need an extra Plasma. There are few ships limited by mounts of their usual weaponry, mostly frigates and the Heron already mentioned come to mind. Even the Onslaught which has so much OP you can waste it on anything doesn't really benefit from 1 more large ballistic I don't think due to flux constraints.
Even if it were cheaper and able to be built in it would usually not be good if it only granted 1 extra energy to high tech ships or 1 extra ballistic to midline/low tech ships. Though as a built in I could maybe see myself trying it out, but for example on a Conquest that would probably mean building in this hullmod, putting in an extra Mjolnir and leaving medium ballistics empty and I am not sure it would even be better since you are not building in something else. The ship doesn't have flux stats to fill all of its mounts as is despite having top tier flux stats out of all Starsector ships. Spending something like 56 OP to install an extra Mjolnir would again be ridiculously bad so this would only be marginal use as an S-mod.
Thinking about it hullmods like this would be very interesting, let you rework a ship slightly outside its intended role at a cost, so let me say what was missing from my previous post that it is a cool idea.
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I will say that I was trying to think of use cases, and realized that apogee could really like this hullmod, although OP would still probably be a big concern.
But it would be insanely niche in the best case, assuming it is not allowing missiles and not allowing mount types that don't already exist on the ship.
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360 degree Ion Beam or Dual Flak on everything.... 8)
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How about just a fighter that can have a weapon added to it? I've seen a janky version in the Arma Armatura mod. It works pretty well, though.
There's a spare slot on the ship, and at the start of combat, the slot is disabled and the fighter uses the weapon.
As a drone fighter, the new weapon mount becomes a standoff weapon that can be disabled for extended periods in heavy combat.
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I've considered this before, basically "what would it cost to buy an extra weapon mount". The closest analogy we have in the game is of course Converted Hangar, through which we can buy an omnidirectional mount that can provide a variety of weapon functions, such as hard flux (Broadswords, etc.), EMP damage (Claw, Xyphos), burst damage (Dagger, etc.), PD (Sparks, Xyphos, etc.), and so forth.
Realistically, I think a balancing lever for such a mount, if it existed, would likely have to be increasing the ship's DP, similar to the new Converted Hangar. A new mount is simply too strong. Off the top of my head:
* Adding a large missile enables Squall spam, which makes it a lot easier to deal with tougher fleets, especially Ordos fleets.
* As already mentioned, adding ballistics to High Tech ships shores up one of their biggest weaknesses, the inability to deal hard flux at long range.
* A bit more subtle is that adding an energy mount or two could help with some Low Tech ships or otherwise non-energy ships, for example a medium energy mount could allow them to mount an Ion Beam, especially since they can apply hard flux at long range.
* Something like the Falcon (P) being able to mount a Cryoblaster would be crazy fun...and scary.
* Many ships that use Safety Overrides could use more mounts, depending on their OP. Since the Hyperion is the poster child for SO I'll throw that here as well.
I can think of plenty of examples of ships that would benefit greatly from another weapon mount, even if it's limited to a weapon mount that they already have. Some examples off the top of my head:
* Any ship that already has a large missile would of course benefit a lot from another large missile mount.
* Many ships that rely on burst (especially phase ships) could benefit from another mount.
* Gryphon could of course benefit from another missile mount. But more than that, a second medium ballistic would mean it could put another HVD, helping to keep other ships at bay.
* Fury could benefit from a second energy mount, to mount dual Cryoblasters. One of the main reasons why I'll usually use Medusa as flagship if I'm going High Tech is that it's one of the cheaper ships that can mount dual Cryoblasters.
* Similarly, Aurora could benefit from more Cryoblasters or more Minipulsers -- in this case, I feel like some of its synergy instead of energy mounts actually weaken it somewhat by preventing it from using more Omega weapons. Though synergy could mean more missiles which would be useful too.
* Champion could use another medium hybrid mount, so that it could use 3 HVD along with its Squall and HIL. That third HVD helps out its offensive power and hard flux a lot, to enable it to use its HIL goodness.
* Apogee could benefit from another mount that pointed forward (in addition to the craziness if it had 2 large energy or 2 large missile mounts).
* Eradicator with another medium ballistic mount would mean that it could potentially just ditch its small ballistics, or at least not use them much. After all, a new weapon mount could replace the use of an existing mount, rather than supplementing them. An HVD will contribute about as much overall battle DPS as 3 Railguns with BRF, or 4 Railguns without BRF, but only cost around 2/3 of the overall OP (including flux usage), making it a better choice.
* I highly suspect that Conquest with 3 Mjolnirs would actually do more overall battle DPS than Conquest with 2 Mjolnirs and 2 HVD's, and it has the flux to support that. For Conquest with dual Squall / dual Mjolnir / dual HVD / dual Harpoon, the HVD's did around 40% of the damage of the Mjolnirs, so the two HVD's did about 80% of one Mjolnir, and mounting 1 Mjolnir instead of 2 HVD means it gains 12 OP due to HBI.
I'm sure I could come up with a lot more examples, these are just off the top of my head from playing around with (mostly) cruisers recently. In all these cases, the ships could have enough OP to pay for the extra mount, if that OP cost isn't too high. So it really depends on the cost/penalty.
A potential way to limit the power of this is to make it so that you can only install a mount that's one size smaller than one that's already on the ship. That might make it too weak though, if you can only add mediums/smalls on ships that have the corresponding larges/mediums. Maybe just make it so that larges can't be installed in this way but only mediums and smalls. After all, large mounts presumably take up too much space to retrofit afterward (like a battleship's turrets, which extends down most of the height of the ship).
Another way to keep it in check may be to reduce the fire rate (increase the refire delay). Having an extra Mjolnir may not be as overpowered if that extra Mjolnir fires only half as often, for example. Similarly, beams may have their DPS cut in half (or some other fraction). If this is the case, then making it built-in could reduce that penalty somewhat, i.e. say to firing at 2/3 the rate instead for example.
Mentally I think of this as a ventral weapons pod, like what's on the underside of the Arilou Skiff (can be seen here (http://pscd.ru/uploads/posts/2012-04/1333702064_star-control-logo.png)). In which case it makes sense lore-wise that it gets whatever penalties it has. Easier to disable because it's on the outside of the ship's armor as something installed after original manufacture, etc. Same thing with a ventral missile bay/pod.