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[Weltall]

WWWWWOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW .... if I am seeing it right, these are humongous. Makes me miss even more Red Oculian Berserkers. I wonder how these compare in size to Ophiuchus.

[Midnight Kitsune]

These ships are game and AI breaking too big. The Cathedral from SWP is as big as you can get WITH A CIRCULAR ship. Giant stickships like this WILL break the AI in many ways

[Stalker]

oooooooooooWOOOOAAAHHH.

Those are bloody huge... how soon will these be added?

I'm working on the Ursa right now, to nail down the "frigate" play a bit, and then I'll start working through the rest of the fighters and bombers this coming week.

I'm actually leaving the big boys for last, although the Shivans already have the Demon destroyer in-game now (it's the same size as the big guys above), and it's fully functional.

Speaking of which, I might as well drop the Shivan fleet in here too (in order, Fighters, Bombers [Frigates], Support and Cruisers [Cruisers], Corvette [Destroyer], and Destroyers [Battleships]:

[Stalker]

These ships are game and AI breaking too big. The Cathedral from SWP is as big as you can get WITH A CIRCULAR ship. Giant stickships like this WILL break the AI in many ways

I've actually been using these size ships for a bit and they don't break the AI - they seem to work without causing wonkiness to the game or AI.

[Weltall]

These ships are game and AI breaking too big. The Cathedral from SWP is as big as you can get WITH A CIRCULAR ship. Giant stickships like this WILL break the AI in many ways

I've actually been using these size ships for a bit and they don't break the AI - they seem to work without causing wonkiness to the game or AI.

Midnight Kitsune might have mean the one I mentioned. It was definitely gamebreaking, making act all weird. Still, gamebreaking or not, I remember it made me smile.. and run away. Then again Oculian Berserkers was a unbalanced and a bit glitchy mod anyway.

[Stalker]

These ships are game and AI breaking too big. The Cathedral from SWP is as big as you can get WITH A CIRCULAR ship. Giant stickships like this WILL break the AI in many ways

I've actually been using these size ships for a bit and they don't break the AI - they seem to work without causing wonkiness to the game or AI.

Midnight Kitsune might have mean the one I mentioned. It was definitely gamebreaking, making act all weird. Still, gamebreaking or not, I remember it made me smile.. and run away. Then again Oculian Berserkers was a unbalanced and a bit glitchy mod anyway.

Gotcha. I took a look at the ship you mentioned... it's easily twice the length of the destroyers above. In fact, I could probably increase the size of the destroyers a bit (from 800px to 1000px).

That being said, this does give me an idea. I wasn't planning on including the Sathanas or Colossus, since they are just such ridiculously huge and overpowered ships, but I'm wondering if I could pull a "Templars" and have a single Sathanas spawn with an "Annihilation Fleet" and have it just go around and cause havoc until it's destroyed. I could probably use the same event to spawn a "Colossus Fleet" - ideally there would be a way to get that fleet to hunt the Annihilation Fleet.

Long time away, if ever, but I think it's generally doable.

[Takion Kasukedo]

These ships are game and AI breaking too big. The Cathedral from SWP is as big as you can get WITH A CIRCULAR ship. Giant stickships like this WILL break the AI in many ways

I've actually been using these size ships for a bit and they don't break the AI - they seem to work without causing wonkiness to the game or AI.

Midnight Kitsune might have mean the one I mentioned. It was definitely gamebreaking, making act all weird. Still, gamebreaking or not, I remember it made me smile.. and run away. Then again Oculian Berserkers was a unbalanced and a bit glitchy mod anyway.

Gotcha. I took a look at the ship you mentioned... it's easily twice the length of the destroyers above. In fact, I could probably increase the size of the destroyers a bit (from 800px to 1000px).

That being said, this does give me an idea. I wasn't planning on including the Sathanas or Colossus, since they are just such ridiculously huge and overpowered ships, but I'm wondering if I could pull a "Templars" and have a single Sathanas spawn with an "Annihilation Fleet" and have it just go around and cause havoc until it's destroyed. I could probably use the same event to spawn a "Colossus Fleet" - ideally there would be a way to get that fleet to hunt the Annihilation Fleet.

Long time away, if ever, but I think it's generally doable.

Do it.

[MesoTroniK]

Seriously, don't use the Red and Blue mod as inspiration or a guide on what to do!

[Weltall]

I never meant you to do it for sure!!! I enjoyed it because it felt broken in an amusing way. The ship was over 2500 pixels in length.. I am not sure what the creator was thinking, but I laughed many times when I would see it in battle or when his ships would rain my fleet with missiles and annihilate me passively. In no way I would consider adding this mod in my load order for a normal play!

I feel people are going to stone me for mentioning it. Lol.

[Phearlock]

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.

[Stalker]

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.