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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Anubis-class Cruiser (12/20/24)

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Messages - Gameciel

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1
Mods / Re: [0.97a] Pirate Mini Mod (1.6.1)
« on: October 03, 2024, 01:06:38 AM »

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This hull has undergone significant modifications, it's pirate crew prioritizing showy weapon systems and high-speed engines over frivolous things like ""reliability"", ""Hull Integrity"", and ""Flux Capacity"".

Hull and Armor penalty further increased to %s. Flux Capacity penalty further increased to %s, Flux Dissipation bonus further increased to %s. Increases max speed by %s.

First one should be "its" rather than "it's". First is possessive whereas the second is a contraction of the words "it has/is".

Second highlights should all be lowercase. Personally I think you can also remove or change some of the wording into something like this;


I'll add another one, grammarly this would be a lot better if it's as following:

This hull has undergone significant modifications. Its pirate crew prioritizes / prioritized showy weapon systems and high-speed engines over frivolous things like ""reliability"", ""Hull Integrity"", and ""Flux Capacity"".

I see this file, it is under the folder: mod/PMMM/data/hullmods/hull_mods.csv and being editable.

Also the typo of "Harbinger" over "Herbinger" is under the folder: mod/PMMM/data/hulls/skins/pmm_harbinger_p.skin  In case author's too busy, for anyone reading this you can just open this ".skin" file with text editor(!) and change the word "Herbinger" back to "Harbinger" and it's done, easy.

2
Mods / Re: [0.96a] Realistic Combat 1.35.0
« on: December 03, 2023, 02:48:36 PM »
For balancing reasons I also recommend using fire-delay for lasers from missiles. It'll be awkward if Dragonfire doesn't penetrate anything XD.

Thought twice, maybe more realistic that lasers form missile always penetrate if damage is high enough. Cuz by any means if I somehow managed to shorten missile fire-delay. The effectiveness of warhead SHOULD remain same.

3
Mods / Re: [0.96a] Realistic Combat 1.35.0
« on: December 03, 2023, 02:43:17 PM »
It keeps even such powerful beam weapons as Tachyon Lances from from penetrating citadel armor, which in hindsight seems unrealistic for any laser to do.

Then I recommend scale citadel penetrating with fire-delay, or you might call it "Charging time". Say my armor is 2500: IF - the charging time of a laser that hit's me is longer than 2.5s (just an example), AND IF - it deals enough damage just as RC calculated, THEN - "Penetrate" ELSE - "No Penetrate", even if damage looks like it's enough, it just wiped out armor! As this is basically true when considering beam weapons that's "burst" while it's whole point is to concentrate and intensify charges to penetrate. Longer charging time MEANS that it should penetrate well. Throwing tons of energy without concentration only heats armor up.

For long lasting beam damage it could also be true if programming allows, IF - damage+ AND IF - time+, THEN - Penetrate.

For balancing reasons I also recommend using fire-delay for lasers from missiles. It'll be awkward if Dragonfire doesn't penetrate anything XD.

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Uh-oh, not good.  Is only the Perdition having trouble?  I doubt the weapon aboard the Perdition is the problem because its Hammer Torpedo (single) deals 1,500 damage, enough to citadel all but the hardest targets, which you could do with such heavier-armed fighters as the Cobra, which carries a 4,000 damage Reaper.  Maybe you mean the Piranha bomber, bombs from the Standard Bomb Bay of which deal only 400 damage.  I could increase the damage of weapons with the "BOMB" hint but wonder what the consequences would be for modded content.

Yh pretty much the 1500 single hit stops it from penetrating hardest armor, or at least it takes me dozens of waves to take down Onslaught. Not a problem with Cobra. I say it could be problematic cuz Perdition is the top damage dealer within "Low Tech". If I just wanna play "Low Tech" then I also sort of have weak carriers. Like I said it's fine if you meant it and don't want to change anything here, it's only a recommendation that you could also put whether a CR or BOMB-damage multiplier into commander skill (for "using correct ammunitions").

4
Mods / Re: [0.96a] Realistic Combat 1.35.0
« on: December 02, 2023, 10:11:58 PM »
Thanks, that issue is fixed. However now with the intensityLimits tachyon lance deals only 10s of damage at close range, but if you turn the intensityLimits higher then weapons like paladin goes back to doing thousands of damage per shot. It seems like there's a bug in the damage calculations somewhere?

The damage calculation code works as intended, but the weapon modification code produces wildly different results because it simply multiples and caps damage.  For example:

WeaponDamage (Vanilla)Damage (Realistic Combat)
Tactical Laser75Min(1,200, 6 * 75) = Min(1,200, 450) = 450
Burst PD Laser350Min(1,500, 5 * 350) = Min(1,500, 2,100) = 1,500
Paladin PD System1,000Min(1,500, 5 * 1,000) = Min(1,500, 5,000) = 1,500

To be intense at combat range, big lasers must be very intense at close range because they diffract over distance; therefore, getting close with a big laser will punch through armor.  I lack an easy fix.  I could:
  • Change the weapon spec modification code to cap the initial intensity of only point defense lasers, but anti-ship lasers would remain powerful at close range
  • Prohibit lasers from penetrating citadel armor entirely, but lasers would be much weaker against hull unless I also hiked their damage, which I could make independent of their diffraction
  • Hike laser flux costs, which would reduce laser damage availability but, because beam weapon specs lack flux per second methods, the UI would still read the original, lower CSV flux per second of the weapon.

I have tried all these fixes at once and found ship-based lasers and moreso DEMs to be good against shields but weak against hull, point defense weapons just powerful enough to destroy missiles, and all laser flux costs balanced against their power.

I want to know what you think of these ideas and any you might have, too.

Sounds like a nice fix. Also is it from this mod that changed the vanilla skill effects? Lots of them adds 10% combat readiness when all weapons are covered by certain skills. But since in fact making CR up to 100 is VERY easy and cheap, it simply sounds useless. Does it calculate and stack go above 100? Or perhaps this is going to be changed in future updates?

Also dealing damage with aircrafts like perdition wing to heavy targets might made too difficult. I'm fine with this alone, but it's made not worthwhile to play carriers. It could be balanced with increasing bomber damage (may scale with skills)? Cuz if it doesn't breach, it's simply pure heavy casualties from AA while playing nothing. But real problem is under vanilla realistic combat, we don't have much way to boost single hit strength of small crafts. Or maybe add some hullmods for modifying the bomber ammunition for stronger armor piercing with cost of reduced range etc.?

5
Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.33.0
« on: November 03, 2023, 03:13:14 AM »
Paladin PD system is simply overpowered given it's cost under the new mechanism imo. Now I almost flood my large energy slot with this. Hopefully rebalanced.

6
Mods / Re: [0.96.a] Realistic Combat 1.33.0
« on: October 22, 2023, 07:08:27 AM »
Such amount of progress since I shortly dropped this game. And I'm still picking it up with this mod. Simply fancy. You should get paid for this. Add Patreon if you wish lol.

7
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.22.6
« on: December 24, 2022, 10:07:59 AM »
Hi Liral may I ask if the scatter amplifyer toolstip still being blank? Is it because it's undecided for how to balance or just by mistake?

8
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.22.2
« on: October 12, 2022, 02:05:55 AM »
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For this I was thinking, is it possible to switch multiplyer based on ship class? Hightech ships, they use more composite armor, which SHOULD be a combination between intelligent reactive armor and a thiner plain thickness, which makes'em much stronger against HE types but weak to kinetic. Low tech ships, they SHOULD be a lot thicker plain armor and low intelligent reactive armor, which is very strong against kinetic, but HEs can inject through. Midlines, 50-50. Sounds like a single factor could do, calling it "Reactive Armor Weighting" factor? Remnants are 0.85? Hightech ships are 0.7? Lowtech ships 0.3? Midlines and other mods just 0.5. Or effectively a separate damage table above, for each series of ship.

Distinguishing by tech level feels interesting yet seems arbitrary because many Low Tech ships are said to have good armor, while many High Tech ships are said to have bad armor.

Yh but "good" is always relative for weight/cost efficiency.

Composites are usually thin&light, trading-off for status (better systems, flux etc.). Thin plain armor is not gonna stop much. Kinetic gets through ANYWAY. So, reactive-specialization countering HE is very likely. Tank kinetic with shields, then you can play selectively.

For lowtech, it's thick & less costy. You can ignore many medium intensity firepower whether HE/kinetic and smash'em.

[Modify: As a result, lowtech takes moderate damage whether HE/kinetic (damage taken: 100%/100%). It's all-round protection, except siege HE firepower. While hightech is like (50%/125%). Hightech base value is already smaller, making many mid-kinetic piecing through. So you can't drop guard. But when hit by HE, your armor is twice thick. Although Gauss Cannon kills paragon easily, it does much less damage to Onslaught. Still, on that one shot hellbore, your Paragon might be better than Onslaught :).]

9
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.22.2
« on: October 11, 2022, 10:16:25 PM »
Had a couple of tries. Here's feedback.

UI stuff:

1. "100% Armor penetration.
     100% Hull and Structures Damage. (no hard flux)"
     For energy beam weapon, this sentence pops out of text box which is eh :o. And it didn't mention shield absorbtion.
     So it could be:
    "100% Armor penetration.
     100% Hull and Structures damage.
     100% Shield damage. (no hard flux)"

Where does this appear?

The tooltip hovering on top of weapons.

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Mechanism stuff:

1. AI is subpar. Try assign "Harass" or even "Rally", or any command with cautious or even timid.

I don't understand: would you please elaborate?

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Toolstip says commanders should control ship according to enemy & self weapon range. Seems like AI is still following the vanilla range.

Is this issue the same one as the above?  Regardless, that's not good.  Can you tell me more?

Yh same one as above, assigning Harass or Avoid will still make ships engage very very aggresively. They tend to behave same and keep same distance as vanilla which is suicidal ???.

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Also, phase ship commanders still try to sub & float behind enemy for a "backstab" which fails completely. Phase ship AI prob needs a redo. They should now be real submarines, not phase-ninjas. Their AI should submerge as long as possible (at least in an intermediate range, doesn't matter whether being attacked). For firing, it's getting just about into range, float, fire and quickly submerge. For venting, it's getting out of range asap, float, vent and quickly submerge. I wonder if there could be a cooldown for both submerging and floating which extends the weakness window (and maybe 2x longer), then reduce the flux generation of phasing to balance out AI behavior.

[Modify: Just come up with another idea, if sub & float both have cooldown, then overloading is possible (Subs out of oxygen that needs to float), which is good fun for tactics.]

Redoing the phase AI seems quite difficult.  What if I just dropped the phase cloak cost even more?

Don't know :). But as phase ships keep trying to submerge through and float behind (very close to target), they're keep blowing up :P. I'd say distancing must be a value somewhere. This is critical than generic cost or behavior (cuz enlarging distance by 10x could just stop them from advancing).

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2. 200% For penetration is probably too high for Kinetic, or 50% and 12% being too low for HE and Frag, either way.

You might be onto something: I have now more-closely reviewed what information I can find about the relative effective thickness of modern composite armor against long-rod (Kinetic) and explosive-formed (High Explosive) penetrators and found the latter to be 50-100% greater than the former.  A .5  effective thickness factor against long-rod penetrators is not compatible with a 1.5 effective thickness factor for explosive-formed penetrators.  I will change the factors to be .67 and 1.33 in the next version.

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For example: Take shield in account and use energy (bolt) as a reference 100%/100%/100%, Kinetic is 200%/50%/?%.
  My personal expectation is:
    Kinetic 200%/50% /100%;
    HE       75% /125%/125%;
    Energy 100%/100%/100%;
    Frag     15% /100%/25%;
  Beam, just add (no hard flux), and decay with range, I think it's quite fair.

TypeShieldThicknessDamage
Kinetic20.670.5
High Explosive0.51.331.5
Fragmentation0.2582
Energy111


Shield Thickness Damage? Or you actually meant Thickness Damage Shield? Also 8x seems too high for frags, the nature of frag weapons are just very low flux/damage. So multiplyer larger than 1x is a bit risky.

And yes there are APC APBC APCBC HEAT HEATFS, long rod and depleted uranium long rod penetrators etc. etc., so many types of modern ammo. A scalar is not covering them. Sometimes "kinetic" and sometimes "HE" penetrates more, depends on armor TYPE. The fact is most of'em deals acceptable interior damage.

For this I was thinking, is it possible to switch multiplyer based on ship class? Hightech ships, they use more composite armor, which SHOULD be a combination between intelligent reactive armor and a thiner plain thickness, which makes'em much stronger against HE types but weak to kinetic. Low tech ships, they SHOULD be a lot thicker plain armor and low intelligent reactive armor, which is very strong against kinetic, but HEs can inject through. Midlines, 50-50. Sounds like a single factor could do, calling it "Reactive Armor Weighting" factor? Remnants are 0.85? Hightech ships are 0.7? Lowtech ships 0.3? Midlines and other mods just 0.5. Or effectively a separate damage table above, for each series of ship.

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  The reason HE needs scale up, since Kinetic penetrates too good and it still has some high damage one shot bolt weapon. Like Hypervelocity Drive etc., they can take down heavy targets with mid-slots alone. Then what's Gauss Cannon for? Also, many HEs are fast small bolts that won't penetrate heavy armor at all. Then they can only deal with small crafts. HEs both mid- & small- slots are all for the same role  :-\ ? Why not making mid-slot HE & K deals similar damage to heavy armor?
  Then shield scaling on HE, it's for balancing maximum Kinetic damage. HE is GOTTA be good to penetrate something, or it's dealing ZERO below corresponding kinetic threshold and the only HE left is hellbore. Cuz no HE below that threshold is irreplacable by a Kinetic. But if it presses harder on shields then there are trade-offs.
  Frags are mainly for low flux PDs or some crazy damage low flux cryoblasters, so 12% (id say 15%) sounds fair, not much to say.

You make good points that I have heard before and worried about, and I hope that the above table looks better!  It improves effective thickness against long-rod penetrators and reduces it against explosive-formed ones.

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Still, overall a nice mod :) . Cheers.

Awwwwwwwww, thanks so much!  I'm glad you like it.

Cheers  8).

10
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.22.2
« on: October 11, 2022, 02:46:32 PM »
Had a couple of tries. Here's feedback.

UI stuff:

1. "100% Armor penetration.
     100% Hull and Structures Damage. (no hard flux)"
     For energy beam weapon, this sentence pops out of text box which is eh :o. And it didn't mention shield absorbtion.
     So it could be:
    "100% Armor penetration.
     100% Hull and Structures damage.
     100% Shield damage. (no hard flux)"

2. Hovering on some tooltips like "Armor" on topright of ship modification page, it still says max 85% min 5% stuff that needs a change.

3. Seems you changed Integrated Targeting Unit to realistic targeting, which is nice but I didn't see much difference (though I aim manually quite often).

4. Hullmods like Advanced Targeting Unit on Paragon is still range extension which is wierd.

5. Advanced Optics only increase range of 200, which is like 2% over 10000, nope :(.

6. And Scatter Emitter is not working (blank). Maybe this is ongoing work? I think reducing range is actually fine, as it says, tunes frequency range so it behaves more "particle" rather than "wave" and deals hard flux. So to say this shouldn't decay (at least not too much) over range. But, since it's still instant, cut range in half (5000) is pretty fair.

Mechanism stuff:

1. AI is subpar. Try assign "Harass" or even "Rally", or any command with cautious or even timid. Toolstip says commanders should control ship according to enemy & self weapon range. Seems like AI is still following the vanilla range. Also, phase ship commanders still try to sub & float behind enemy for a "backstab" which fails completely. Phase ship AI prob needs a redo. They should now be real submarines, not phase-ninjas. Their AI should submerge as long as possible (at least in an intermediate range, doesn't matter whether being attacked). For firing, it's getting just about into range, float, fire and quickly submerge. For venting, it's getting out of range asap, float, vent and quickly submerge. I wonder if there could be a cooldown for both submerging and floating which extends the weakness window (and maybe 2x longer), then reduce the flux generation of phasing to balance out AI behavior.

[Modify: Just come up with another idea, if sub & float both have cooldown, then overloading is possible (Subs out of oxygen that needs to float), which is good fun for tactics.]

2. 200% For penetration is probably too high for Kinetic, or 50% and 12% being too low for HE and Frag, either way.
For example: Take shield in account and use energy (bolt) as a reference 100%/100%/100%, Kinetic is 200%/50%/?%.
  My personal expectation is:
    Kinetic 200%/50% /100%;
    HE       75% /125%/125%;
    Energy 100%/100%/100%;
    Frag     15% /100%/25%;
  Beam, just add (no hard flux), and decay with range, I think it's quite fair.
  The reason HE needs scale up, since Kinetic penetrates too good and it still has some high damage one shot bolt weapon. Like Hypervelocity Drive etc., they can take down heavy targets with mid-slots alone. Then what's Gauss Cannon for? Also, many HEs are fast small bolts that won't penetrate heavy armor at all. Then they can only deal with small crafts. HEs both mid- & small- slots are all for the same role  :-\ ? Why not making mid-slot HE & K deals similar damage to heavy armor?
  Then shield scaling on HE, it's for balancing maximum Kinetic damage. HE is GOTTA be good to penetrate something, or it's dealing ZERO below corresponding kinetic threshold and the only HE left is hellbore. Cuz no HE below that threshold is irreplacable by a Kinetic. But if it presses harder on shields then there are trade-offs.
  Frags are mainly for low flux PDs or some crazy damage low flux cryoblasters, so 12% (id say 15%) sounds fair, not much to say.

Still, overall a nice mod :) . Cheers.

11
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.22.2
« on: October 08, 2022, 05:45:28 AM »
Hotfix 1.22.2 is out!  Fixed missile flaming out out too early.
Cheers! Now TORPEDOES!  8)

12
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.18.0
« on: September 01, 2022, 02:45:08 PM »
Alternatively, why not do something like the reverse of the Split Chamber hullmod from More Hullmods? Scale every weapon's RoF, damage, magazine size, and ammo regeneration until it falls inside of some band you're satisfied with, like "all mediums should do at least 150 damage per hit". This changes a weapon's armor penetration without changing its effective DPS, so vanilla balance is still relatively preserved.

Good I think that's a good idea, at least easy to implement.

13
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.15.0
« on: August 29, 2022, 06:37:40 AM »
Currently shield logic follows armor logic - higher damage value will be more efficient. It could be argued that maybe doing the opposite would be more interesting, that's up for debate.

I wouldn't make HE fine against shields because it would make energy weapons the weakest link - either give energy weapons some specialization (like being actually good against shields) or keep it as is. My only gripe is that kinetic damage seems overall as the best, maybe lowering the damage it deals to hulls wouldn't be a bad idea.

Quick fix is to reduce kinetic damage factor. And btw I do believe in flipping damage absorbing efficiency logic. It makes any bolt natually (regardless damage type) either good/bad against shield/armor.

And yep I forgot the energy weapon stuff and just made up my mind. This might sounds impractical cuz the logic jumps far:

Lasers. First thing in mind is wave-partical duality. So frequency matters. In game, it's weapon total range (not hit distance). Longer total range means it has lower frequency Fs, shorter means higher Fs.

So the model is: Given same DPS of two different lasers, one reaches 8000m the other 1000m. Then the 1000m ones shoot many small "bolts" and the 8000m shoot less but larger "bolts". Then you can have a curve of armor/shield absorbsion, then u know how to balance giving them different DPS values.
(Modify: Clarify this is just saying shield & armor absorbsion which shouldn't change the damage decay of the laser weapon itself over range.)

Then for energy bolts, accelerated plasma? They're very chemical active kinetic mass. In fact this thing might just have similar armor model as in vanilla game which obliterates armor plates and make an area of armor less effective with more hits. Balance with soft shield hits seems fine tho. Very unsure how to reflect this thing or if Liral would implement it, cuz it sound very complicated to me having two models at the same time. Or some maths needed to reflect this fact within one model. :(

14
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.15.0
« on: August 25, 2022, 11:07:12 PM »
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Also for balancing, if you still leave that 50% load of high explosives to shield, bad idea! It almost makes it THE WORST option at all in almost any cases. Cuz u can deal prob same damage just with large kinetic bolt right? AND it's 200% good to shield AS WELL! Huh, then blind autocannon! Why not? Fast and through and bashes shields! The only single HE thing I used at all is just hellbore, for the 1050 bolt damage. And I don't even care if it's high explosive. If u give me another kinetic 1050 damage I'm more than happy to chuck hellbore into bin lol.

Read the field manual: high explosive deals more damage if you penetrate the armor.

Really? I did read the manual, but the high explosive hits are actually a LOT softer than I expected. My personal preference was assault chainguns but they were just not as effective as autocannons hitting armor.

15
Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Realistic Combat 1.15.0
« on: August 25, 2022, 03:13:53 AM »
Just an add on, can you or did you start working on tooltips of shield, armor and weapon types? Cuz clearly this mod changes them completely already. It is very misleading to keep seeing things like "200% to armor, 50% to shield, 25% to hull" stuff anymore.

Penetration is what kinetic does, but it gets deflected by angled armor (Or u take it purely as thicker effective armor whatever). High explosive just does the damage in a different way, maybe contact fuze or proximity fuze or else, so it should less likely bounce off (At least given the warhead should be optimized this way, AND for game balancing). Also for balancing, if you still leave that 50% load of high explosives to shield, bad idea! It almost makes it THE WORST option at all in almost any cases. Cuz u can deal prob same damage just with large kinetic bolt right? AND it's 200% good to shield AS WELL! Huh, then blind autocannon! Why not? Fast and through and bashes shields! The only single HE thing I used at all is just hellbore, for the 1050 bolt damage. And I don't even care if it's high explosive. If u give me another kinetic 1050 damage I'm more than happy to chuck hellbore into bin lol.

Definetly lots of balancing to do, but most importantly, I think you're lacking a systematic idea of the roles (or functions) design of each weapon in the first place. Maybe list these out first, like why would anyone use "a weapon" like autocannon or MG? And why would anyone not use that weapon? The specifications.

For example if u ask me why would I use autocannon, to anti shield, then u should make them bounce off armor, way easier. Only very straight hits go through.
MG for anti-air, then it should have less penalty with angle.
Or it could actually be the other way to be more real, u want me to use autocannon for AA and MG for shield? Fine. Then single hard hit on shields should be way softer. MG does 5,5,5,5,5 then its effectively 25 on shield, but a single 25 from ac would only hit as 17 or 18, and so on. But then vulcans fire really fast, so they should be really good to shield? Maybe, maybe not. Really suggest designing this first maybe as a roadmap and stick to it.

But now, AC got some penetration, pretty dead accurate, very good against shields, self sufficient ammo, and with vanilla PD hullmods I just spam this thing on all ships. MG or anthing else actually is completely useless in any aspect.

I really love the idea of introducing the real world scale and armor mechanisms, but don't want to lose it in balancing. The game provided you a good excuse, shields. It does't really exists, so even if a weapon is just in fact a really s**t idea in real life, u can still make it good in your balance system right?

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