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Modding / Re: [0.9.1a] Advanced Hullmods
« on: November 18, 2020, 04:11:13 PM »
Since this seems to somewhat of a contested topic, I thought I'd drop my likely unwanted 2 cents here. I've thought about the balance of these hullmods quite a bit in my own playtime, having spent far longer than I care to admit just fiddling with ship loadouts and I've always wondered if many hullmods are actually a "trap option" in lots of cases. Now just to be clear, I definitely don't mean ALL cases. Theres a certain joy to finding the perfect puzzle piece to make a loadout work, especially if its one of (for me) the admittedly underused hullmods where you, as is the topic, pay with both a downside and OP cost.
I think the actual biggest barrier to entry in arriving to an answer is just how many choices there are in starsector, how many different situations with different priorities, different playstyles to consider, and even how the AI decides to behave on a given day. That being said, I often find the most effective strategy being to use as few hull mods as possible to load up on vents and capacitors. Whether this is a symptom of the above or the hullmods actually being questionable is hard to say, but one thing I'm confident putting my money on is that these hullmods are rarely consistently good. Which is fine, but while I'm tempted to say maybe the point of hullmods is be niche here, there are some that are very clearly good in at least vastly more cases than the "trade off" mods.
The other big issue imo is that many hull mods have to be balanced around extreme cases. A good example is armor, as because it effectively scales exponentially having too much could be insane in specific cases while still underwhelming (for the cost) in others. So in effect, the hullmod has to be more tame for everyone else because of the fringe cases. If every hullmod could have better upsides there would probably not be any need for a mod like this, at least in theory.
To the point, I think everything introduced here is fine except for unstable injector because range and speed are such strong stats. They're such core stats changing them at all is usually a bad idea, because they all but define ships and weapons. As an example to the contrary, the armor mod is fine because 1 the downside is not directly related to the upside, and 2 the 75% effectiveness prevents the aforementioned extreme cases from being a problem. Part of the issue with UI is how range and speed ARE so related and both stats are so powerful changing the ratio places it firmly into the category of stuff like hardened shields where the cost pays for itself and its nearly always good on every ship.
I think the actual biggest barrier to entry in arriving to an answer is just how many choices there are in starsector, how many different situations with different priorities, different playstyles to consider, and even how the AI decides to behave on a given day. That being said, I often find the most effective strategy being to use as few hull mods as possible to load up on vents and capacitors. Whether this is a symptom of the above or the hullmods actually being questionable is hard to say, but one thing I'm confident putting my money on is that these hullmods are rarely consistently good. Which is fine, but while I'm tempted to say maybe the point of hullmods is be niche here, there are some that are very clearly good in at least vastly more cases than the "trade off" mods.
The other big issue imo is that many hull mods have to be balanced around extreme cases. A good example is armor, as because it effectively scales exponentially having too much could be insane in specific cases while still underwhelming (for the cost) in others. So in effect, the hullmod has to be more tame for everyone else because of the fringe cases. If every hullmod could have better upsides there would probably not be any need for a mod like this, at least in theory.
To the point, I think everything introduced here is fine except for unstable injector because range and speed are such strong stats. They're such core stats changing them at all is usually a bad idea, because they all but define ships and weapons. As an example to the contrary, the armor mod is fine because 1 the downside is not directly related to the upside, and 2 the 75% effectiveness prevents the aforementioned extreme cases from being a problem. Part of the issue with UI is how range and speed ARE so related and both stats are so powerful changing the ratio places it firmly into the category of stuff like hardened shields where the cost pays for itself and its nearly always good on every ship.
