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Mods / Re: [0.7.2a] Freespace v0.2 (updated 2/11/17)
« on: February 17, 2017, 10:36:15 AM »If you ever feel like it, the UEF ships from Freespace 2: Blue Planet 2 would also be very welcome. And if you haven't played that freespace 2 mod, I'd higly recommend it. Fantastic set of missions.
Yeah, I really like that mod - the UEF have a cool aesthetic for sure. I also really like the GTD Raynor. Something I definitely want to explore after the core FS2 stuff is in play.
Speaking of which, here's where I'm at:
- Noted on the Red and Blue mod inspiration point (on what to avoid) - it is nice to know what the extreme upper limits on size are, though.
- Ursa Bomber is in-game. Once I got it in, I realized how out-of-balance the ship/weapon stats were (way weaker than they should be), versus vanilla equivalents. Rather than put more ships in, I spent a bunch of time establishing a framework for balancing FS ships and weapons.
- All FS weapons are now balanced against vanilla equivalents. This required me to build out the stats for all remaining weapons, and forced me to reconfigure/add weapons where gaps existed. This is balance pass 1 (on paper), and I'll need to do a further balance pass once everything else is actually in-game. That pass should just be tweaking and addressing any outliers.
The result of this is a set of weapons that retain the character of what's in FS2, while still being competitive with what's already out there. - All FS ships are balanced against two exemplars, which themselves are balanced against vanilla ships. In this case the exemplars are the Hercules II Heavy Fighter for shielded fighters/bombers, and the Deimos Corvette for everything else. Everything else is balanced against these via the ratio of difference in the original FS2 stats.
This, at least, provides a baseline to work off of, and makes it really easy to get all the rest of the ships in the game, once I have time to build their *.ship and *.variant files. - Finding a way for max flux and flux dissipation to be a proxy for the weapon/shield/engine system (ETS) in FS2 was a challenge, but I believe I have it cracked. Fighters/Bombers will need their flux to balance shield charge, weapon firing, and afterburner (or other ship system) power. It should be interesting to see how Bombers perform when player skills increase their OP and allow for higher max flux and flux vents to be installed.
- I'm still balancing flux settings for the larger ships. It's even more critical than for smaller, shielded ones, as larger ships will only use flux for weapons and systems. What systems? Well, Shivans will probably be focused on short Subspace Jumps (since they are the masters of subspace), with the goal of keeping their capital ships facing the enemy (almost no rear defenses). Terrans will probably get a mix of ramming speed (similar to the Onslaught), and "weapon/reactor overload" powers across their ships (still one power per ship). Vasudans... some sort of active armor on their "newer" ship designs and something else for their "older" ones? TBD.
The idea behind system usage is that it will take up 80 - 90% of the ships flux capacity to use them, meaning you're trading the value the system gets you for the ability to fire beam cannons, at least until your flux dissipates sufficiently. Ship reactors are tuned to only provide so much power, after all, and beam cannons take a ton of it. - My current short-term goal for v0.3 is to get all the remaining weapons in-game, and the heaviest bomber per side. I might throw in some additional variants of the ships already in-game, so there's a bit more to go on there.
