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Author Topic: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b  (Read 84927 times)

Neitronus

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #30 on: September 23, 2020, 09:16:48 AM »

Hello there. Any chance you release a hotfix for version file not being reacheble on bitbucket after recent update? It would be neat. Also, what do you think about Industrial Evolution support? I'm talking about Ambassadors being availble on COPS planets and stations. I'm not sure if they should have Ambassadors, since they more like a militarized group rather than a political faction, but still.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2020, 08:56:26 AM by Neitronus »
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #31 on: October 05, 2020, 05:34:03 PM »

I am installing this mod for my next campaign.

The idea is nice, the ship design could be described as cool and the ship mechanics may possibly be referred to as unique.

But the ship summaries? That's the thing you sold me with.

See you soon, after I assert my dominance in my current campaign where my capital has no shield, it's longest range weapon has 900u before ITU, is held togheder by 36.000 hull points and has better fuel than crewmember per light year economy.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2020, 05:36:13 PM by Arcagnello »
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Neitronus

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #32 on: October 06, 2020, 12:14:14 AM »

For some reason I get a crash every time I open a refit screen for that ship with customizable drone. Log said that it has something to do with the hullmod "flux distributor" or something like that. I'll update this comment with a log if this ever happens again (lost HDD with a save which had this ship availble for me).
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Raine

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #33 on: October 07, 2020, 05:30:17 PM »

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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #34 on: November 06, 2020, 07:22:18 PM »

I can now safely admit that I'm probably never taking this mod off Starsector and only switching it off for the first playthrough of every major vanilla update. Bravo to you and the other modding fellows that supported this endeavour!

Now, I am playing a hardcore, no officer, no extra CR, no extra OP campaign as a semi-pirate with Hazard Mining Incorporated so I have not played with/refitted these ships, but boy am I having hard battles against them. They truly do feel like a faction designed to combat low mobility, low range, poor shield enemies and I have not encountered blatantly imbalanced units on either side of the spectrum as far as I'm aware.

I've got some quick ship feedback before going to bed about the ships I have some opinions on:

Atome is lethal. I already saw you heavily nerfed it once and I feel it's in the right place as it stands now, damned combat Battlecarriers from high tech hell  >:(

Mesonax on the other hand feels lacking in some way. Sure it deletes-everything-it-looks-at-wrong if it's destroyer size of below but it really feels way too enthusiastic around bigger ships and seems to get way too close to an enemy it could feasibly engage from afar.

Asimov is the bane of my shieldless bricks made of medium range, high flux efficiency guns. It's a Paragon that does not hard flux itself into a choke with its fortress shield ability and still retains enough mobility to properly kite and exploit its overwhelming range advantage. I may or may not fed a lone Asimov some of my Locomotives for them to get extra D-mods.

Anthyma Mk.2 disappoints me. I retrofitted it for half an hour only for it to get two salamanders up the engines and get deleted by two wings of piranhas from a Colossus Mk.2. The mobility is orgasmic, I know, but it simply can't cover for the absolutely lackluster amount of Ordinance points and rage-inducing weapon arcs.
My idea of making it more worthwhile and diverse from the original ship it came from is the following: give it more OP, make it a tad slower, further widenin the two engine blocks at the back and slap a good old pair of fighter bays in that gap, possibly also borrowing that built-in fighter bay debuff from the Colossus Mk.2?

Alternatively, just give it a tad more OP, better weapon arcs and for the love of Ludd give it a back facing mount. I am fine if it gets more expensive as long as it is more viable than its current state.

« Last Edit: November 08, 2020, 01:03:54 PM by Arcagnello »
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #35 on: November 08, 2020, 03:08:18 PM »

Hello again!

I've actually followed a Storyteller quest and managed to recover a (surprisingly) pristine, Spec Ops Atome Battlecarrier so I brought it back to my homeworld for "Research Purposes".

First off, I am playing a semi-hardcore campaign with no commander skills improving in-combat fleet capability. The only two I permitted myself using are level 1 coordinated manouvers (was actually a mistake) and level 1 electronic warfare since I've got mod faction bringing in something ridiculous like 50% ECM rating and I'd rather have my fleet at least combat it a little.
Furthermore, I limited myself to only level 2 of Loadout Design, so none of that juicy extra OP for me.
I'm also not using any Lieutenants and the enemy is limited to 1 level 0 officer so the combat performance should almost as level as it can get.

Back to the BO Atome. I've looked over the stat board and noticed the BO variant seems to just be adding extra Hull Integrity, wich I can only assume it's a placeholder for what you come up with in the future.
Spoiler
I can give some ideas however. More armor/better flux capacity has been done before, so I would go with a different route: Improved Accelleration, top speed, a tiny bit more ECM rating and reduced sensor signature on the overworld would fit an elite hit group just fine methinks  :)
[close]

Onto the retrofitting. I immediately noticed it's rather tight on Ordinance points for a 45FP Battlecarrier. A XIV Legion gets 270 while this chonker barely squeaks above that at 290 and that's more than fine. This ship already comes with an amazing 0.7 flux to damage shield and has a  much, much more useful special ability than anything in that FP range.

Considering the rather tight OP, I decided to forgo installing Hardened Shields (did not really need it anyway, but It would've been nice) and limited myself to just installing Shield Conversion:Front since 600 flux sec for the shield simply had to go, added to the fact that shield arc was way too narrow for my liking.

Also installing stabilized shields is a pitfall many high tech players use but in this case stabilized shields does not do anything since it costs 15 OP and reduces shield upkeep by 150 OP, meaning you get the same results in spending those 15 OP in Vents, with the difference the ship will vent faster while the shield is not up or is venting.

Now, weapon loadouts. I'm not a fan of giving a Battlecarrier weapons revolving around medium to close ranged combat since there's still half a carrier behind those weapon mounts, so I went on the opposite route instead. I did some experimentation and quickly found out the ship really can't support crazy large energy weapons like High Intensity Lasers or Tach Lances, so I installed a pair of Scorpius LRM systems.

I quickly went around the rest of the ship and noticed that while there are two hybrid slots at the front everything else is energy mounts plus one medium missile slot to the right side, so I just went the laser way. I installed 5 Medium Combat Lasers and 10 Tactical Lasers plus Integrated Targeting Unit, Integrated Point Defence AI and Advanced Turret Gyros to not only give the Battlecarrier amazing, long range PD capabilities but also a very punishing, constant damage array of lasers working off the Hard Flux those two Scorpius LRM systems generate. You could argue Graviton beams would be a better candidate but they're not nreakt as good PD weapons and I wanted this carrier to both be an amazing anti fighter tool and very dangerous to ships with their shields disabled.

The only thing remaining is the Fighter complement and with any respectable carrier also comes Expanded Deck Crew so I plopped that in. I personally find various degrees of combat carriers ranging from the Legion to the Odissey to work a lot better with air superiority fighters rather than bombers or support fighters as the increased staying power will hold enemies off the main ship a lot better, wich is vital for a unit that usually sits at the frontline and is vulnerable to flanking by smaller, faster ships. My fighter of choice ended up being the Broadsword (so much for creativity) as it also has the bonus effect of dealing kinetic damage, making the Atome's laser array that much more lethal!

I could've installed some rather questionable Hullmods like unstable injector or ECM but decided to go simple for once in my life and invested all the 39 remaining Ordinance Point into vents. I also committed sin and left that side missile mount completely empty since anything I could put there felt like a waste. A medium version of the Scorpius LRM would've been swell but I don't think there is one yet wink wink.

I wanted the ship to also use its medium combat lasers as PD so I grouped all sorts of lasers togheder, with the only other weapon group occupied by the (obviously linked) LRMs.

The end result is an extremely resilient and PD heavy ship that will out-kite mostly anything in the sector, especially effective against small ships but also more than capable of overwhelming big targets overtime. I can only imagi e this being even more of a nightmare in the center of an AI fleet and with a heavy ECM rating supporting it.

The end result beats the Simulation versions of
1)Atome
2)Electras/Anthyma/Lepton all coming at it togheder, takes a while especially due to the Suuuucc
3)Gauss/Hellbore, Piranha Legion
4)Gauss, Annihilator rocket Onslaught
5)Astral
6)Vendetta (missile based, 42FP Hegemony mod capital)
7)Victory (!) (55 FP midline mod capital) but it takes a loong time
8)Double Aurora, both with sabot MRMs
9)Double gauss Conquest. Conquest can't push in cause fighters and Atome can't pressure it all too well due to the Broadside Wonder being too mobile. Conquest will eventually get eaten alive by fighters after a long while. The Atome actually snipes the Hurricane MIRVs even before they split into their submunitions. Feelsgoodman.
10)All COP frigades (minus Quantum) plus Proteus (51FP total). Really shows how brutal it is against smaller ships
11)4 Tach Lance Paragon. I don't have anything smart to say about this one, just that most simulator variants of ships seem to suck a.lot of ass, no offense to anyone involved.

It works best with an aggressive officer as it will keep the pressure on and the ship is mobile enough to effectively disengage whenever it's in danger. You could probably switch the Broadswords for Longbows but as I said before the increased presence of actual fighter craft helps it a lot more. Don't know if high tech actually has fighters dealing kinetic damage but I'd go for those if there were wink wink. You could add this to the faction variants no problem, I guess slapping a Salamander on that naked medium missile slot would at least slightly nerf it's pressure capabilities.

What else can I add... hmmm... I don't think it's all that overperforming despite the obviously overwhelmingly positive results it has. It can kill a lot of stuff by itself but it's going to take a long, long time to do it, especially if its of comparable size. I have not experimented all that much with shorter range variants but I don't think they come anywhere close to the same level of performance reliability this laser version achieves across most types of targets. It probably really struggles against [Redacted] since they're both hypermobile and have amazing flux stats and shield damage ratios.

The only small nitpick I have are the side/back small energy weapon arcs. All those 180 degree weapon arcs feel rely out of place on such a sinuous hull. I hope you did not get a brain aneurism at the end of this text wall of a reply, I'm sorry if you did. Mod onwards my friend!

Edit: I wrote this on the phone so I could not include any screenshots. I am home now however so here's my Atome loadout:
Spoiler
[close]
« Last Edit: November 08, 2020, 03:27:59 PM by Arcagnello »
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #36 on: November 11, 2020, 07:53:44 AM »

Last piece of feedback I'm giving to this lovely faction of yours during my current campaign:

I managed to eradicate the space donut eater threat once but they actually attempted one last ditch attempt at regaining a hold on the sector by attempting a respawn with 5 large invasion fleets on one of my colonies wich I successfully repelled after around 80 minutes of fighting.

Combat results of the last siege battle
Spoiler
[close]

Mesonax is just brutal vs Battlestations
The battle with the two leftover invasion fleets was already underway when my own fleet got involved, but I was appaled by the level of absolute SAVAGERY a triplet of Mesonax arsenal ships can do even to an Alpha Cored Star Fortress. I spawned all the avaiable overridden cocained-up ships in my fleet to get there as fast as possible and push them off the battlestation with Kill Orders but to no avail. They just tore it apart in less than two minutes and there were so many little skimish destroyers/frigades in the way I could not get a hold of the enemy capitals until they did the star Fortress Dirty. The only nitpick I have with the Mesonax is that they just spam Harpoons on those medium missile slots while I am rather confident they would work a ton better against a larger variety of targets if they used a combination of sabots MRMs and Salamanders MRMs instead, or at least shove some of those into the mix. The mesonax also seems to suffer from the "Can't fire all my weapon groups" syndrome most AI ships suffer from, so I'd suggest reducing the max amount of weapon groups to something like 3 when starsector 0.95a hits, unless the changes to AI control of weapon groups actually solve it instead, that'd be swell.

Frigade swarms are naaaasty!
COPS have some of the best and most inventive frigades in the game, and when an invasion fleet that already managed to delete the battlestation still has around 50 of them they can really put the hurt down your fleet, especially considering ECM rating is a thing, meaning they'll just butcher your effective weapon range down to a level when it's going to be really hard to properly catch and deal with them, unless you've got a honestly disgusting combination of overridden cruisers and salamander vomiting carriers to tear them apart one ship at a time. The only nitpick I have is more connected to the enemy AI not  properly retreating them when their CR start degrading, causing large scale battles like the one above to eventually end up with an enemy force with either very low and even 0CR frigades that are just there, preventing COPS from spawning fresh units to replace them.
Spoiler
This is honestly a huge gripe I have with vanilla and that would make a lot of factions perform a lot better if it changed, and I don't know how you could solve it without Alex and his team dealing with it first. An idea you could consider is giving Blothorn a call and asking if you can try integrating his Automatic orders mod (https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=15128.0) into your faction, therefore having your own faction's ships properly retreat (when their HP is low, they run out of PPT or even when they run out of limited ammo missiles). And not becoming a joke on a prolonged engagement.
[close]

Asimov: a tale of extremely questionable loadouts
I am under the strong opinion you should not allow the Asimov to get any autogenerated weapon loadouts in the campaign. 4x Autopulse, 4x Tach lance and the 4 HIL versions (all with 4x paladin on the other side) are the only ones worth their salt, I've actually encountered ones either using large PD energy weapons on BOTH Sides and they're just a complete waste of their own fleet's deployment points.

Rhodan's customizable built in drone like to play bumper cars
This is a very minor thing I noticed. WHile very cool and also effective the drone the Rhodan deplys rams into allied ships once every 10 seconds in a crowded envirorment, wich can be fatal to both the unfortunate frigades it punts into my fleet and itself. Is it even possible for it to not have a hitbox like all other fighter craft unless it overloads/gets its engines killed? I doubt this change would make it overwhelmingly more performing than it currently is now and would prevent it from hurting its own allies more than the enemy.

Cheers man and mod on! I enjoyed every single battle with the COPS and (as I said a few posts above) I'll probably never take this mod off in my modded runs; you've earned yourself a devout customer :)
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #37 on: April 28, 2021, 02:55:57 AM »

Is everything alright J0hn Shm0? How have you been doing?

I absolutely adore this mod, I think it really does add quite the fun and vanilla compatible experience, not to mention working amazing in combination with Underworld (which you also mention in the OP) with opposing ships (and weapons) to the Pirate menace!. I'd hate for this amazing content to remain incompatible with the game and be forgotten.

Post Scriptum: I'm hoping this is not considered a Necro in any shape or form, making an additional thread for this mod sounds really silly to me.
« Last Edit: April 28, 2021, 05:59:04 AM by Arcagnello »
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scmp

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #38 on: April 28, 2021, 06:58:09 AM »

I would absolutely love an update to this mod. I hope the mod author is doing well!
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #39 on: June 04, 2021, 12:56:06 PM »

The Sector is in disarray Officers, the civilians need immediate assistance!

Come back my man, I love this mod so much  :'(
« Last Edit: June 04, 2021, 01:03:50 PM by Arcagnello »
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pearagon

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #40 on: June 07, 2021, 10:01:27 PM »

The Sector is in disarray Officers, the civilians need immediate assistance!

Come back my man, I love this mod so much  :'(

Bump, I was excited to try this faction out in 0.95a before I realized its not updated :(
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Master Troano

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #41 on: June 08, 2021, 01:12:34 PM »

Hey, this mod looks awesome. I'd love to try it!
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Bruogo

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #42 on: June 15, 2021, 04:16:17 PM »

Oh man, I really, really love this mod.

Did the creator say anything about an update on the discord? Or is there an unofficial release?

EDIT: Found him on the discord, everything's fine and he's just taking a hiatus. The mod is not dead, thank god <3.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2021, 04:32:30 PM by Bruogo »
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GoingBatty

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #43 on: November 04, 2021, 08:32:37 AM »

Update please?
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Dazs

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Re: [0.9.1a] Concordance of Protection Syndicate (COPS) v.2.0b
« Reply #44 on: March 02, 2023, 03:44:26 AM »

FYI to all who miss this great mod - SteelSirokos obtained permission from J0hn Shm0 to make an unofficial update - it is posted on the Starsector discord which I have linked to below. Ty you so much SteelSirokos for doing this, I am not a fan of high tech ships but this was my go to mod for them and personally I appreciate you making it once again available.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/825068217361760306/1080833140655915139/Concordance_of_Protection_Syndicate_v2.1.zip
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