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Mods / Re: [0.95.1a] Holy Covenant of Kemet 0.0.2h (Fiddling, Fire and Phase Ed.)
« on: January 25, 2023, 07:36:01 PM »One thing that makes it hard to balance Kemet against vanilla is energy weapon ranges: the Kemet weapons tend to have longer ranges, and their hulls are balanced around that... but that makes those same guns somewhat exceptional when mounted on vanilla ships.
I'd suggest riffing off the Ballistic Rangefinder hullmod, and moving some of the Kemet weaponry range from being inherent to the weapons, and instead being a hullmod on Kemet ships that boosts the range of explicitly just Kemet weaponry.* (I'd be happy to contribute the code you'd need for this, too - I look at this and think it's relatively simple to implement, but, uh, I do programming as my job, so my definition of 'simple' may not match anyone else's.)
For example, the Jar Lightning Cannon is a large energy weapon with a range of 900. For it to be balanced against its competing vanilla options, it'd need to have that range reduced to at least 700... or maybe even less, given its specialized nature gives it some advantages over energy-damage-typed weaponry.
Even standard Kemet small weaponry tend to have ranges of 600 to 700, compared to vanilla weaponry that's generally 500.
As such, I'd suggest an all-around reduction of Kemet weapon ranges by 300 for all sizes of energy weaponry, to be balanced out by a hullmod that grants Kemet weaponry +300 base range when installed on Kemet hulls.
(Edit: Or maybe less than 300 for some of the more mobile, high-tech-styled Kemet hulls? The yellow fast-strike style hulls might be easier to balance without the full range boost...)
(If you're feeling particularly clever, you could even consider making that a modular hullmod with a high OP cost and, say, a 25% reduction in ship speed, allowing a player to essentially convert a high-tech ship into something that plays more low-tech style... Though, hm. That might just introduce its own balance issues. Eh, it's an idea. Edit2: ...Yeah, the Paragon exists, this probably isn't a good idea.)
*Edit3: Why just Kemet weaponry? Because the Heavy Blaster exists and distorts all mount options around itself. In general, a specialized option for a weapon slot (i.e., a Kemet weapon dealing kinetic or HE damage) is going to be a better choice than a generalist option (vanilla weapon dealing energy damage)... And then you get to the Heavy Blaster, that beats out specialist options by just putting out that much more DPS. If it also got a Kemet range boost on top of the existing Kemet flux-efficiency boost, it'd be a no-brainer choice to install at least one on every ship, likely in place of Kemet's specialized HE weaponry because you don't need that much armor-cracking. So it needs to not get the range boost.
One thing you might've missed, is that Kemet weapons (specifically Ma'at and Ka ranges) already get a range bonus to range on Kemet hulls (specifically with hulls that have Seshat Systems, it's the first yellow line in the Seshat Systems hullmod). A lot of the Kemet weapons are balanced around being 600 units on a vanilla ship, and 700 units on a kemet ship. This is because right up until I checked five seconds ago, I was under the impression that all energy weapons were 600 units in range. I'm honestly not quite sure when the range change actually occured, I distinctly remember pulse lasers and IR pulse lasers being 600 units in 0.8.1a, but that might be me misremembering things.
I'll give a lot of weapons a range nerf, and make up for it with a bonus to range in the hullmod. Thanks for the catch!
I'm guessing the smaller ships will stick around?