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[Albreo]

Sorry for the delay in changes, I had a tricky thing I wanted to solve first that ended up taking more time than I expected. I have it working (mostly) now though. I might take a break tonight but I might not too. I'm still undecided. I have the changes I want to do in mind and they would be fast but I want to test a bit first so that the testing burden is a little less on the users and a little more on me.

No hurry. I myself almost got burnout as well. I'm only focusing on the specific issue of craft balance and some nerf require to not let any weapon become a no brainer choice. I rarely play now a day, going to wait for a new major update to hit.

My only gripe is that this mod fails to address the complete technological domination of some ships and strike crafts. While it's fine for the early game, later game essentially results in the same meta-builds and the same use of fighters/gunships/bombers over and over again. This essentially makes 90% of the crafts that this mod makes effort to improve essentially.... useless and just junk waiting for the player to obliterate.

You should try the beta. There's a lot of major overhauls for the craft which make most of Low, Mid, and High tiers viable in many situations. High tech tier crafts will be weak against low tier ship due to heavily shield investment while still strong against high tech ships. Midline has very good fighters and well rounded bombers with the addition of new Legendaries. Whereas Low tech crafts got armor boost and usable end game.

[Morrokain]

---New Beta Update---

Changes:

-- Balance pass on ship speed. In general, increased speed of destroyers and some cruisers. Reduced Paragon speed. Increased Conquest and Revenant speed and increased Conquest maneuverability.

-- Decided to keep Executor OP where it is but reduced max flux by 5000 to compensate.

-- Reduced orb count of the Phantom bomber to 3 - down from 8. Damage remains the same. Reduced Dagger Atropos torpedo damage to 1500 - down from 1800.

-- Increased Dagger and Cobra torpedo hp substantially. Increased Cobra turn rate and increased shield strength to 1800 from 1200.

-- Reduced Apocrypha Antimatter Blaster charge count to 2. Reduced damage down to 2000 from 2500.

-- Doubled missile weapons of all Vanguard variants.

-- Stinger and Vespid missiles now deal High Explosive damage. Reduced damage to 200 from 250. Buffed Swarmer damage to 400 from200 but halved recharge rate to keep it competitive in comparison.

-- Increased low tech capital dissipation rate by a small amount.

-- Reduced Heron and Mora speed slightly and reduced Targeting Feed (AO) ship system's benefit to strike craft damage to 25% - down from 50%. (Mora should be more competitive now.)

No hurry. I myself almost got burnout as well. I'm only focusing on the specific issue of craft balance and some nerf require to not let any weapon become a no brainer choice. I rarely play now a day, going to wait for a new major update to hit.

I definitely understand. Thank you for all the feedback you have given as you test the beta. I really appreciate it. 

I will probably prioritize fixing variants for a bit. I think most balance outliers have been addressed (hopefully) but I'll still check here daily for any continued feedback.

After I get a lot of the variants out of the way, I might build a mission (outside the campaign) to test interceptor carrier builds more thoroughly.

[megabot]

so I don't know if I've got smooth brain or need glasses but i seem to remember there having been a massive FAQ part before...but i cannot find it, so I am gonna try to comment in hopes of there not having been one: is this mod balanced with Industrial Evolution? if not, is there a plan to maybe make it?

also i hope i see replies if there will be some because i still don't know how to propperly use this site, i think

[megabot]

also another thing, if disabling the total overhaul to make it compatible with nexerelin, what exactly gets disabled if I might ask? I don't really want to miss out on the features of this mod

[Morrokain]

so I don't know if I've got smooth brain or need glasses but i seem to remember there having been a massive FAQ part before...but i cannot find it, so I am gonna try to comment in hopes of there not having been one: is this mod balanced with Industrial Evolution? if not, is there a plan to maybe make it?

also i hope i see replies if there will be some because i still don't know how to propperly use this site, i think

Hi! There is a manual on the main page that is download-able but its pretty out of date by now. I need to update it when this update is finalized.

I haven't had a FAQ though you are correct. Currently, you can use Industrial Evolution as far as I know but I'm not really sure if it is balanced around it or not. I know some mods implement content alongside that mod (though I don't know exactly what) and I would love to do so in the future too. I have a lot of stuff to do yet in the beta, so I can see about stuff like that when the bulk of the work is done.

(Also I should probably make a FAQ.)

also another thing, if disabling the total overhaul to make it compatible with nexerelin, what exactly gets disabled if I might ask? I don't really want to miss out on the features of this mod

Disabling the TC settings to make it selectable alongside Nex doesn't impact the TC experience except that for what Nex adds so no worries there.

Furthermore, in the beta (not on the main page but linked in the thread) there are customization options in the settings file (data/config/settings.json) that allow you to fine-tune your TC experience. Hope that helps!

[Darrow]

Sorry for the delay in changes, I had a tricky thing I wanted to solve first that ended up taking more time than I expected. I have it working (mostly) now though. I might take a break tonight but I might not too. I'm still undecided. I have the changes I want to do in mind and they would be fast but I want to test a bit first so that the testing burden is a little less on the users and a little more on me.

Is it usual for the Archean Order to get crushed so often by the Trade Guilds? Their tech is excellent but I frequently see them getting ground up by Midline fleets. Excited to see what changes are around, enjoying the rebalancing so far.

Welcome to the forums!

Is this during autoresolve battles between npc fleets or in a live combat battle of which you are taking part? Tech doesn't help as much in autoresolve since FP values are closer. The size of the fleet matters more there - as does the number of capitals, generally.

(Also glad you are enjoying the beta!)

I just wanted to say that this is probably the best mod currently available for Starsector.
I've been around since the early versions of this game and I've always found that most Mods fail to address a lot of the core issues with the game.

Focusing heavily on fighters/bombers/gunships is something that was really needed. I've always disliked how these crafts functioned in the base game and this mod addresses exactly that.
In fact, 10 years ago I wrote a thread complaining about Fighters/Bombers and their base function in Starsector: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=418.msg3518#msg3518

My only gripe is that this mod fails to address the complete technological domination of some ships and strike crafts. While it's fine for the early game, later game essentially results in the same meta-builds and the same use of fighters/gunships/bombers over and over again. This essentially makes 90% of the crafts that this mod makes effort to improve essentially.... useless and just junk waiting for the player to obliterate.

This is something that vanilla Starsector suffers from where-as meta-builds become so prominent (very quickly) that a lot of other features, weapons, ships and crafts become useless almost an hour into gameplay. Likewise this mod suffers the same issue of vanilla where large ships can be insta-destroyed quite quickly in mid-late game by single barrages from various ships or strike crafts.

Further-more, in my opinion.... this mod could distinguish itself further by expanding on it's improvements to strike-craft by applying this gameplay directly to larger ships.
Battleships & Carriers should be a main component of EVERY fleet and the main "Command Ship". These ships should all have significant boost in health/hull to withstand barrages and be able to deploy and maintain large  (even larger) craft wings. These ships would essentially functions are mobile "bases" on the battlefield and almost function as semi-quasi battle-stations.


I do want to reiterate that this is my -favorite- mod and the only one I really use that adds ships and changes content. I genuinely don't believe I'd play Starsector without this mod as the changes to strike craft are so good and so signifanct to the over-all gameplay. However as I stated before, I believe this formula should be taken further to greatly expand this Mod into a more distinctive area of more HARDY big ships and stronger emphasize of carrier/mobile battleships.

Thanks for your work.

I appreciate the very generous compliment and the time you have taken to provide feedback! I'm not sure that this is the best mod out there (in my mind), but it definitely provides something different and, hopefully, interesting as well. Anyway, I really appreciate it.

To quickly address the main points:

strike craft/roles: Yes this is a core tenant of the mod's overall design goals. I'm glad it seems to work well. Final balance between craft as far as roles go isn't there yet, but I think it's better than it was before. As I design other things I will continue to try and get closer to where it feels "just right" though that will of course be subjective.

Tech meta: I am aware of this (at least to a certain degree) and I agree that more work could be done here. Finding legendary craft/ships/weapons is very fun imo, but the stronger such things are the more likely it will be that a player is going to focus on them to the exclusion of all the other toys in the toolbox. The same goes for the OP - to - effectiveness ratio of higher tech stuff. I want spending more OP on something to have a noticeable impact, but that also runs the risk of obsoleting low OP stuff pretty quickly.

Any detailed thoughts analysis on that topic are welcome - I am certainly open to specific feedback and, perhaps more importantly, why it feels one way or the other and any potential solutions to the perceived problem on an item-to-item basis. In the beta, for instance, I've hopefully already addressed the bombers vs everything else conundrum that carrier building can potentially suffer from. Another goal was to address smaller hullsize carriers and make them feel more worthwhile without making them too strong against warships. On that note, carrier spam effectiveness should have been reduced a bit due to larger AOE radius PD and higher PD hit strength. On the large scale end of the battle size, however, having a lot of interceptors is still going to be necessary.

I also think that when I address item rarity/accessibility in the future this will help a lot too. Though, ideally, I'd like most things to at least have a niche use in certain builds or something along those lines.

Capitals as bases/command ships: This is something that is also a design goal of the mod, but there are two things stopping it from being easy to do right now. The first is that capitals are relatively easy to acquire and fairly prevalent in most fleets in large numbers. So they therefore become the only desirable hullsize to use under those conditions considering the player's ship cap. I want to have destroyers and frigates still provide utility and have a place in the player's fleet rather than simply being an early game throw-away ship if that makes sense. The next Starsector update is looking to tone down npc fleets a bit, and then changes along those lines will be easier to do.

The second and harder to solve issue is battle slowdown and CR. Having capitals as bullet sponges can significantly slow down battles if over-tuned. And, smaller ships can run out of CR before being able to soften them up enough - which goes back to the player ship cap issue. Once again, though, the next update might make these issues easier to work around.

To summarize, I want to do this but I have to be careful about how I go about balancing it from the large-scale design perspective. (I hope that makes sense - it does in my mind anyway )

In my opinion the focus on Strike Craft would go better with larger ships being straight up mobile battle stations and able to absorb much more damage with destroyers etc being far more expendable and plentiful. I agree that battleships/large carriers are quite easy to obtain currently and often advantageous to have numerous. I'd love to see everyone fleet limited to one "Battleship" which would enable you to significantly BUFF them making them the focus on the battles.

This would obviously require the game to shift heavily from vanilla Starsector, making battles longers and severely decreasing CR to allow for this.

[megabot]

Hope that helps!

it does, thank you!
industrial revolution mainly might interact with this mod trough letting you set up a shop that sells/stockpiles (rare) weapons for sale, a way to strenghten fleet defences of weaker planets in a system if there are stronger ones present(anywhere) and a way to make the colony raid other colonies (of your enemies) automatically to aquire resources and blueprints. I'm mainly asking due to the total conversion aspect and the fact that there even is a specific selection of mods to be "balanced"(as balanced as they are on their own) or compatible with

[Morrokain]

In my opinion the focus on Strike Craft would go better with larger ships being straight up mobile battle stations and able to absorb much more damage with destroyers etc being far more expendable and plentiful. I agree that battleships/large carriers are quite easy to obtain currently and often advantageous to have numerous. I'd love to see everyone fleet limited to one "Battleship" which would enable you to significantly BUFF them making them the focus on the battles.

This would obviously require the game to shift heavily from vanilla Starsector, making battles longers and severely decreasing CR to allow for this.

That would definitely be interesting and at some point I might try it out. It probably would have to be after 1.0 since I'd likely have to provide my own fleet generators and completely rework the battle creation context to do something like that. And that's assuming I could somehow communicate that through the UI in the deployment screen - which might not be accessible.

Basically, it would be an extremely ambitious undertaking and probably take a long time to balance out assuming it's even possible. I like the idea and it's definitely not a "never going to happen" kind of situation but the work involved makes it more unlikely than likely to happen, unfortunately.

That being said, I'll see how the next update looks with the changes to fleet generation. That might make something along these lines easier to do.

it does, thank you!
industrial revolution mainly might interact with this mod trough letting you set up a shop that sells/stockpiles (rare) weapons for sale, a way to strenghten fleet defences of weaker planets in a system if there are stronger ones present(anywhere) and a way to make the colony raid other colonies (of your enemies) automatically to aquire resources and blueprints. I'm mainly asking due to the total conversion aspect and the fact that there even is a specific selection of mods to be "balanced"(as balanced as they are on their own) or compatible with

Thank you for explaining! That definitely sounds interesting and I'll have to check out what opt-in options are available. I think the mod will probably work like Nex and add its features without affecting the TC balance. While I add new locations/markets, etc, I don't really do much to the campaign other than the fleet dialogue and a couple of unique things at certain markets. So mods implementing colony or economy features probably won't cause anything to break.

The list on the main page isn't exhaustive by any means. Iirc I added that as people playing the mod confirmed there weren't any conflicts while using them. The only feature mod that causes a crash I believe is Better Colonies because I add custom orbital stations that are unable to have the Better Colonies station script applied to them. But I think that's it as far as I know.

[Albreo]

The Cobra hit rate has increased to around 20-30%, slightly better. For now, I would leave it like that until someone complains more about it.

The new Obliterator doesn't feel right. The DPS output is in line but its reload speed is a lot worse. The gap between each salvo is huge and I like the old one more. I think faster firing and less damage per bullet will be better.

Tyrant's boost ability is often wasted by AI and doesn't look that significant. If its duration is longer and a bit more potent would be nice.

Can you make REDACTED fleets larger for all security rating? It's too easy at the moment after the teleporter removed. I still like the old teleporter on Radiant. It makes the ship survive long but it has to be fine tuned first to not suicide.

[Morrokain]

The Cobra hit rate has increased to around 20-30%, slightly better. For now, I would leave it like that until someone complains more about it.

Ah good. I think I buffed the torp hp a tiny bit more but I think the changes are not in the DL yet. I did another strike craft pass and I really like where they are at in general. the only thing I still need to do is test full interceptor carriers but with the fighter changes I'm pretty confident they should be an attractive option alongside bomber/gunship carriers.

The new Obliterator doesn't feel right. The DPS output is in line but its reload speed is a lot worse. The gap between each salvo is huge and I like the old one more. I think faster firing and less damage per bullet will be better.

Yeah I agree. Unfortunately reducing the cd creates an AI issue. The AI manually fires strike weapons (which the Obliterator is because it would waste too many shots on strike craft otherwise) and low cooldowns mean the AI is very inefficient. What about a burst? Like 2 or three pulses per fire or something? That would make it more similar to the Heavy Obliterator Cannon.

Tyrant's boost ability is often wasted by AI and doesn't look that significant. If its duration is longer and a bit more potent would be nice.

Plasma Jets does seem a little underwhelming compared to Burn Drive despite that system removing shields. I'm not sure I can do much about the AI wasting it, but I think a buff to the ship system might be ok.

Can you make REDACTED fleets larger for all security rating? It's too easy at the moment after the teleporter removed. I still like the old teleporter on Radiant. It makes the ship survive long but it has to be fine tuned first to not suicide.

I'm honestly not sure if I can or not. Does increasing: "numShips":1, to something like "numShips":4, - in the faction file do anything?

Re: Teleporter.
I think it has Plasma Jets so maybe the buff will help? Is it still too fragile due to surrounds without the Teleport?

[Albreo]

Yeah I agree. Unfortunately reducing the cd creates an AI issue. The AI manually fires strike weapons (which the Obliterator is because it would waste too many shots on strike craft otherwise) and low cooldowns mean the AI is very inefficient. What about a burst? Like 2 or three pulses per fire or something? That would make it more similar to the Heavy Obliterator Cannon.

A bigger burst size might be better. From what I saw, it couldn't empty the clip no matter what for both Medium and Heavy Obliterator. The damage is still insane though albeit slower, can overload Executor in one salvo from my full Obliterator Paragon. Because it's cheap to fire I would cut the damage out some more. I say the heavy Obliterator goes down to 1000-1200 per bullet and maybe increases the burst size to 6 with a slightly longer delay (not sure how it's going to look lol). Medium Obliterator's damage down to 500-600 and burst size increases to 4 and fire in an alternative pattern like Heavy.

Re: Teleporter.
I think it has Plasma Jets so maybe the buff will help? Is it still too fragile due to surrounds without the Teleport?

It's not that fragile but once it succumbs to mistake it has zero chance of recovery. Players will surely take the opportunity to gang it if it coming straight with no support.



Now, that you buff strike crafts maybe a bit too much. Tyrant speed nerf might be unjustified. Really can't escape from the fighter swarm.

[Darrow]

Just a personal observation, but flash bombers and bombers in general that require a momentum release seem severely weak.
It's much more beneficial to use heavy fighters that use a combo of EMP/Sustained damage than it is for the brief heavy damage infliction.

I'm late game now and I've essentially eliminated all my bomber wings as they under-performed compared to my heavy fighters.
In my opinion, the weapon mount disabling is far more vital than having bombers.

[Albreo]

Just a personal observation, but flash bombers and bombers in general that require a momentum release seem severely weak.
It's much more beneficial to use heavy fighters that use a combo of EMP/Sustained damage than it is for the brief heavy damage infliction.

I'm late game now and I've essentially eliminated all my bomber wings as they under-performed compared to my heavy fighters.
In my opinion, the weapon mount disabling is far more vital than having bombers.

Flash Bomber in this mod actually has guns and not bombs like in vanilla. Its DPS is also one of the highest of all crafts as well but it's fragile... for now. As for bombers in general, you should never use them alone or against a shield. Try to deploy it in combination with the main ballistic front-line ships and it did wonders for me against any enemy capital ships. For example, I put low-tech bombers on my Executer with main ballistic and energy.

[Darrow]

Just a personal observation, but flash bombers and bombers in general that require a momentum release seem severely weak.
It's much more beneficial to use heavy fighters that use a combo of EMP/Sustained damage than it is for the brief heavy damage infliction.

I'm late game now and I've essentially eliminated all my bomber wings as they under-performed compared to my heavy fighters.
In my opinion, the weapon mount disabling is far more vital than having bombers.

Flash Bomber in this mod actually has guns and not bombs like in vanilla. Its DPS is also one of the highest of all crafts as well but it's fragile... for now. As for bombers in general, you should never use them alone or against a shield. Try to deploy it in combination with the main ballistic front-line ships and it did wonders for me against any enemy capital ships. For example, I put low-tech bombers on my Executer with main ballistic and energy.

Wait, Flash bombers aren't the ones dropping the little purple bombs off?

[Sidestrafe2462]

Do no ships have Ground Support Packages anymore? Just picked up a couple of Valkyries, they serve as little more than expensive crew transports right now.