Wow a lot to catch up on it seems! I'll try and quickly get to everyone:
I may have found a bug with either faction relations or maybe the fleet ransom?
Spoiler
I was in some system at a trade hub and a trade fleet for the adamantine consortium came by, aggrod onto me and then asked for more money than I had for ransom. For some reason I started the game with them at -50 hostile.
After the ransom prompt I was no longer given any way to flee even though I had remaining story points and they proceeded to destroy my entire fleet while I tried to escape.
It pretty much ended that playthrough which is a bit annoying, but my question is if that's expected to happen?
I'm sorry this ended your playthrough! It is actually intended, however. Refusing tribute is a way to really make a dreadlord/baron angry when dealing the Consortium. If you read the blurb about the faction in the lore section of intel, it states that traders and such actively avoid dreadlord fleets or even areas where one was spotted recently with a superstitious level of anxiety. In game, this mechanic is meant to communicate to the player
why that reputation is well founded. The Consortium is an unlawful and evil faction, and they are hostile to just about everyone. That is why they are hostile at the start even for the player unless you choose their start. You might consider avoiding their systems entirely - especially at the beginning of the game.
In other words, if you see one of their fleets and can't bribe them, your best bet is to
immediately run if you can. I get that it might be a bit annoying when you can't and get caught, but the purpose is to really drive home how dangerous and unpredictable of a faction they are. If you could always avoid them using story points, it wouldn't really feel this way.
I'm playing with both AO and Nexerelin, in case it's important. Two issues I'm having:
1. NPC fleets are regularly get stuck in the black hole in the Archean Order faction's home system, which may just be an issue with SS's AI, rather than AO's code, as it reminds me of NPCs not pathing around suns effectively.
2. Adamantium Consortium patrols aggro (commissioned) PC's fleet for turning off their transponder in their faction's system, but not Pirates.
The first part is vanilla's fleet code not caring about coronas or event horizons. I may eventually look at that but its a low priority thing even if its a little immersion breaking. I'm more concerned at the moment with all the feedback on fighters/missiles/PD and making sure that is in a good place.
The second one is more complicated. Not all of the Adamantine Consortium patrols will care about your transponder. If they spawn from the free market system, they won't harass you. Its impossible to tell if that is the case other than relative proximity however. The free market system is also one of the few places you can trade while hostile to the faction. In design terms, it is a very high-risk/high-reward place to attempt to go. If you get away with it you can get some powerful weapons and ships, but it will take a lot of skill and probably a little luck too. They are allied with pirates under their employ (look at the pirate base's and Xelion's description) and so they sort of have an idea of what their fleets look like. You could also say encrypted signals, etc, for additional handwaving. The real point is that its supposed to be an incredibly dangerous and completely hostile system - whereas a system like the one where you find Galar has some places of relative safety that you can run to if needed.
My advice would be to use a small phase fleet to attempt to sneak in. The new phase tender should help quite a bit there to smuggle stuff out. Also the related skill would be nice.
Adult content
This mod contains adult content. You can turn adult content on in your preference, if you wish
dang. another site to register i guess...
This is because the mod contains some cursing and a few portraits have blood and such, and I wanted to be conscientious of that for children. There isn't really anything "Adult Content" otherwise, and I get that its incredibly mild compared to other things on the internet... I didn't really think about the fact that it forces you to register to the site though.
Sigh, I'll give it some thought. I'm probably being overly conservative and could simply put a self-rating of T for Teen or something. The story might also contain some suggestive and horror content so that would be the most appropriate rating. I think "Adult Content" is probably more for things like nudity and heavy graphical depictions of gore, of which there is nothing like that in the mod.
then...why is there even the need to have the total conversion being turned on/off? if it is the same either way, besides compatability, then why does it exist? if it is about faction mod incompability then the description has it noted, no? and it is probably possbile to make the mod send a message when a game is started/loaded that this mod is best played without faction mods
Albreo and 6chad.noirlee9 are correct, but to add to this:
Another function of the TC flag is to require the user to read the warning about faction mods on the main page. Though this is in part to let the user know about potential balance concerns, but it was also introduced as a way to reduce the number of false bug reports to other modders when combining this mod with scripted faction mods.
I've actually spent a large amount of time reducing instances of this and so it is less relevant than it was, but since I'm not going to take the immense amount of time to scour through all of the other mods' code to find incompatibilities (because that is crazy town), this is the least I can do to have any issues reported here instead of bothering other mod authors.
Hello there Morrokain. Wish u luck with working on this great mod.
Unfortunatly have some conserns about the future espethially in terms of balancing fighters and missiles. In last patch we got (1.4.0.2) PD is literally useless bacuse of exesesive HP of missile (like 1850 HP for salamander) and armor on fighters. Whole point why our small community loved your mod and starsector in the whole was because much more comfortable balance.
So the question - is this permanent or will be fixed?
Thanks for the well wishes!
Your question: It really depends upon what PD you are using and how your build is set up. If I'm remembering the changes I've made from 1.4.0.2 to 1.4.0.3 (release is imminent btw), Beam PD has been improved upon in several areas including range, and I made the Pulse Laser and Void Driver a bit better. Flak's area of effect has been toned down a bit (an Elite Onslaught essentially destroyed all of an Astral or Executor's wings at the first point of contact with 4 dual Flaks) but its damage has remained the same. I think the midline ballistic PD has also been improved a bit, and medium and large machine-gun like PD has a small flak burst effect. A lot of small PD have had their bullet speed increased by a fair amount.
But to address the main point, here, can you give me some specific instances and general build info where PD has seemed that way? I haven't been seeing this myself but maybe that is due to the changes in the dev version. If you are using a bunch of Machine Guns to stop Salamanders or large salvos of torpedoes then that is still not going to be very effective. Machine Guns and low OP things like the Electron Cannon in particular, are designed to quickly finish off armor stripped or otherwise already struck and low-health fighters and missiles. They should be combined with things like Nova Cannons, PD Cannons or Scythe Cannons, etc. Those do the heavy lifting against strike craft and larger healthpool missiles.
Frigates and destroyers, which have less access to PD, have larger modifiers against fighters and missiles than in 1.4.0.2 iirc.
All in all, I am seeing ships of the same class able to generally strip carriers of their wings and close in to defeat them one vs one - which is a design goal. Exceptions are things like the Legion which is meant to be a brawler kind of capital.
Missiles seem generally worse than before when confronted with medium and large PD - which is sort of the goal to make those weapons used more often as a build consideration. So its less that PD is now bad and more that it requires a bit more investment to get PD to the level it needs to be. In that sense, the feedback confuses me a little bit. Again though this might just be a case of me not remembering much about 1.4.0.2 and the relative changes since then.
We will see how it feels in 1.4.0.3. Since I'll be working on a story and clerical work as far as updating descriptions/tactics manual/mod page after that release, there will likely be plenty of time for testing without any changes between the live update and the dev version. I might also begin work on a TC compatible version of Musashi Manufactorum which will mean more test time without any dev changes which messes up my perspective relative to the live release. I hope that explanation makes sense!
Anyway, I will do my very best to take in all points of view at that time and make logged adjustments as needed. And if the points of view are contrary, then a setting is another tactic to satisfying that kind of thing for both parties.
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Topic: [0.95.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - *hotfix* 4/14/22 (Read 768110 times)