Campaign Content Additions and Balance Changes
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--- Campaign Changes:
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- Advanced and rarer vessels are less accessible as a whole in markets, and should no longer be salvageable through post-battle recovery (Enemy-wise) though you can still find them as derelicts from warzones for now (changing that later).
- Starting options contain less starting vessels than before with the exception of harder starts such as Pirate or Adamantine Consortium.
- Increased minimum bounties active at a time.
- Reduced amount of enemy raider bases active.
- Increased payouts for bounties.
- Removed use of autofit in NPC fleets.
- Added many portraits from various portrait packs for the player and re-added new faction portraits as well (with permission).
- Removed several portraits from Archean Order factions (most of the anime style ones) to save for future lore.
--- Faction Changes:
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- Further increased Luddic Church vessels' effectiveness.
- Reduced most factions' use of dedicated carrier vessels (Improves large-scale campaign performance.)
- Hegemony Condor now gains Targeting Feed ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
- Luddic Church Condor now gains Reserve Deployment ship system instead of Burn Drive. (Carrier changes make this necessary.)
- Removed use of Retibution fighters, Thermal Pulsers and Thermal Cannons from Sci-Corps fleets (personal preference. It had too much of a Christmas kind of feel
)
- Added many more portraits from various portrait packs to factions (with permission).
- Restored the CIVILIAN tag to faction freighter conversions so that they won't autodeploy in combat anymore. (Pirates, Adamantine Consortium, Damaged, Trader Guilds)
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Combat Balance Changes
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- Frigates: Added built in hullmod that lets frigates low-flux boost up to 35% max flux and increases damage dealt to fighters by 100% and incoming missiles by 50%.
- Further increased hitpoints of Atropos torpedoes and Shockwave rockets.
- Increased flux cost of Punisher Artillery System to be inefficient like other non-missile Fire Support weapons.
- Slightly reduced hit damage of Devastator Cannon.
- Reduced hit damage of Antimatter Blaster by 20%. (Was too good for being so flux efficient despite the short range.)
- Increased flux per shot of Plasma Cannon. Almost inefficient.
- Increased Peak Performance Time on many rare ships and all phase ships.
- Increased armor penetration and burst damage of the Claw bomber's light tactical laser.
- Reduced Heavy Thunderbolt Launcher's damage per second by 33% (Not its strike damage).
- All dedicated carriers now have a large penalty to their low-flux speed bonus to better prevent kiting. (Carriers now absolutely require escorts to offset their combat range.)
- Reduced Fighters per wing by a range of 33% - 50% in all cases but the highest tiered fighters.
- Increased fighter bay amount in dedicated carriers and most combat carriers past the destroyer-sized hull size.
- Increased supply per deployment gap between hull sizes.
- Increased supply per deployment gap (slightly) between pure assault-class and fighter-carrying hulls.
- Increased fighter replacement times substantially.
- Increased the benefit of the built in carrier hullmod reducing fighter replacement times.
- Changed Barrage Hammer launcher back to alternating fire behavior. (turns out linked fire makes it weaker to flak rather than stronger overall as I had hoped)
- Further increased the range threshold of Safety Overrides. (continuing to improve Luddic Path combat strength)
- Reduced the CR decay per second on dedicated carriers to allow them to more effectively retreat since their speed has been greatly reduced.
- Greatly reduced total flux per shot of the Guillotine Cannon to make it more efficient considering its other drawbacks.
- Increased time between bursts of the Heavy Fissure Cannon to make it more in line with typical ballistic strike weapons. Dps remains the same but overall strike potential reduced.
- Shade (Ad) and Afflictor (Ad) now have Phase Jumper ship systems instead of their original design's ship systems.
--- Faction Hullmod Changes:
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- Simple Core Systems now increase armor by 100 in addition to its usual effects.
- Updated Core Systems now increases max flux by 20% in addition to its usual effects, and the shield damage reduction bonus has increased.
- Luddic Church now has even more increased speed but reduced hull flexibility as far as weapon loadouts (Lower Ordinance Points) and variants have been adjusted accordingly.
- ^(Similar to Luddic Path- but a less patched-together zealous feel because of the removal of both permanent weapon failures and low PPT associated with Pather hulls.)
- ^(With these changes, I'm hoping to provide capitalization on strengths and minimalization of weaknesses from an AI standpoint.)
- ^(To the player, the hulls will seem more balanced as far as player piloting is concerned since previously the hulls mostly provided benefits over drawbacks.)
--- Station Balance Changes:
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--- Ship System Changes:
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--- Ship Changes:
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- Increased Legion max flux and dissipation.
- Added an additional Large Ballistic turret slot to Legion.
- Added additional fighter bays to Legion, Executor, Astral, Megalith, Nightreaver, Epiphany, Odyssey and Pillager hulls.
- Increased Havok armor.
- Increased Shrike armor.
- Aegis now designated a light cruiser. (Better fits its size and power)
- Added an additional two Large Synergy turrets to the Executor in place of its former side-facing medium Synergy turrets.
- ^(Adjusted variants accordingly.)
- Increased Justicar, Revenant and Megalith max flux, and dissipation (reduced their potency a bit too much last update.)
- Increased Revenant weapon count.
- Increased Megalith and Revenant fighter bay count and ordinance points (Not as high as before).
- Re-adjusted cruiser and destroyer speed.
- Increased Malevolent and Astral max flux.
- Reduced Malevolent armor and slightly increased Megalth armor.
- Added additional fighter bay to Eagle to synergize wtih its standard ship system and soften the blow of the number per wing reduction to fighters.
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Bug Fixes
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- Fixed calculation of Simple Core System's shield damage increase in its description to match its actual effects.
- Fixed calculation of Updated Core System's shield damage decrease in its description to match its actual effects.
- Added rarity modifiers to all ship hulls (actually missed the very presence of that column in the ship.csv file, ugh)
- Corrected Adamantine Consortium faction start to use correct ships instead of the Tri-Tachyon variants.
- Removed chance for an error to occur during campaign start due to overrides within the settings portion of the mod.
- Dedicated carriers should now act accordingly among all faction variants and attempt to avoid the front lines and remain behind combat vessels.
- Hopefully fixed issue with some faction starts causing Galatia to not properly reconnect with the Core World's economy.
- Jangala is now finally a Hegemony starfortress instead of a Persean League starfortress.
- Xanathos now actually acts like a black hole instead of a standard star. It is now an extreme hazard.
- Corrected flux per salvo and other statistics. (They are no longer in the description but actually featured on the tooltip)
- Corrected the Adamantine Consortium mistakenly constructing Archean Order stations for raider bases. Now uses Adamantine Consortium stations.
- Fixed post designations for Archean Order to make more sense from perspective on their ranks (hopefully).
- Corrected Citizen rank for Adamantine Consortium to something more appropriate for that faction's setting.
- Added descriptions to ships, weapons, ship systems and fighters that still needed them. (Some are still placeholders for the lore update)
- Fixed faction starts that sometimes wouldn't assign officers to vessels.
- Fixed faction starts that sometimes wouldn't assign officers to the player fleet at all.
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Misc
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- Polished Adamantine Consortium stations look to have better lighting at the edges.
- Polished Condor (Ad) sprite to better match new theme for the Consortium.
- Updated Antimatter Blaster sprite to match modern Starsector.
- Increased battle size defaults (can still be lowered) due to better performance.
- Hopefully increased performance in late campaign during max battles by 25%-40%.
- Changed engine color of conversions that change tech to match the tech that the hull is being converted to.
- Reduced fleet strength variance in Random Battle and Random Fleet Battle missions.
- Changed Retribution sprite to better match a Hegemony-dominated production.
- Increased the radius of orbit for several Archean Order entities to help prevent their patrols from crossing the event horizon of Xanathos.
- Added more important details and statistics to most weapon tooltips.
Author
Topic: [0.95.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - *hotfix* 4/14/22 (Read 768111 times)