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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: [0.97a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.4d  (Read 162662 times)

liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2a
« Reply #30 on: March 31, 2021, 06:45:08 PM »

Mini update, mod should work on every version of 0.95a instead of just RC-9(if it didn't already).

https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Astroid%20ship%20pack%201.2a.rar?raw=true
« Last Edit: March 31, 2021, 06:50:45 PM by liam556 »
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Flunky

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2a
« Reply #31 on: April 01, 2021, 09:18:16 AM »

Asteroid ships are incredibly maneuverable, which for the bigger ships is a little zany. Are they intended to be able to turn on a dime and go from full speed to full reverse quite so rapidly? The maneuverability, combined with the big hull values, make them quite the nuisance.

(And wait, Rule the Waves 2 has a modding community? I had no idea, and need to give that a look.)
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2a
« Reply #32 on: April 01, 2021, 03:57:07 PM »

Yes, the asteroid ships are supposed to be very fast and maneuverable. If you have a issue with a particular ship going to fast let me know and i'll take a quick look at it.

Also yes, rule the waves 2 does have a suprisingly large amount of mods on their forum.
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Flunky

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2a
« Reply #33 on: April 03, 2021, 11:43:57 PM »

I guess it's most pronounced with the Clanker given the pretty high speed for a cruiser and having maneuvering jets on top of the already-high maneuver. Cerus is more just annoying in its ability to pivot incredibly rapidly to bring its full frontload to bear on whatever tries to flank it - feels like the AI isn't always able to appreciate just how quickly an opposing Cerus can do so.
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2b
« Reply #34 on: April 04, 2021, 01:42:58 AM »

Update 1.2b
Clankers Deacceleration and turn rate have been lowered.
https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Astroid%20ship%20pack%201.2b.rar?raw=true

This mod is also still compatible with Industrial Evolution
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=18011.0
« Last Edit: April 04, 2021, 02:07:14 AM by liam556 »
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2b
« Reply #35 on: April 05, 2021, 02:03:03 AM »

Update 1.2c

Cerus's turn rate and acceleration has been reduced and Clanker's turn rate has been lowered again.
https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Astroid%20ship%20pack%201.2c.rar?raw=true
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DifficultyTweak

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2b
« Reply #36 on: April 16, 2021, 10:01:33 PM »

Update 1.2c

Cerus's turn rate and acceleration has been reduced and Clanker's turn rate has been lowered again.
https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Astroid%20ship%20pack%201.2c.rar?raw=true

Clanker still turns too hard, AI likes to swing it around constantly when its being swarmed by frigates/destroyers.

Might want to take a look at HMI's junkship stats and see what you can do about the maneuverability for the asteroids, since the junkships turn like crap and I imagine would have theoretically identical performance to the asteroids.

Also, Fortress Shield on the Pebble is simply too powerful - Damper Field would probably make more sense both from a lore perspective and a balance one.
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Helldiver

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2b
« Reply #37 on: April 17, 2021, 03:25:25 AM »

Might want to take a look at HMI's junkship stats and see what you can do about the maneuverability for the asteroids, since the junkships turn like crap and I imagine would have theoretically identical performance to the asteroids.

IIRC the modder's intention is for asteroid ships to move more lightly to go with being mainly made of rock, which is less heavy than an equivalent volume of metal (in exchange for being more fragile).


One piece of feedback on the mod, while the asteroid ships aren't that expensive overall, some are surprisingly as expensive or more as production ships of similar size, which seems a little backwards.
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2c
« Reply #38 on: April 18, 2021, 03:41:09 AM »

Update 1.2d

All Destroyer sized ships and above have had their market price dropped.
https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Astroid%20ship%20pack%201.2d.rar?raw=true
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2d
« Reply #39 on: April 23, 2021, 06:59:10 PM »

Hello there! I think this is about time for me to start giving some semi-early feedback and suggestions about these wonderful asteroid ships you've given me the chance of playing with! I don't feel any of the opinions listed below to have any particular order to them so I'll just number them for ease of writing.

1)I've been wondering if writing the "Astroid" written at least once on every ship description is a new term referring to the ships or a typo, by which you meant to write Asteroid.

2) I like the theme of these ships: low tech with a focus on having a plethora of small weapon fire to quickly saturate over the enemy if they get too close combined with agility and a lot of hull hit points to take punishment, but you could improve it even further with the following:

Considering the fact these spaceships are mostly made of a less dense, porous, even more insulating material than metal, how about having all asteroid ships come with Insulated engine assembly? it would personally only make sense for them to have quite the low signature compared to a normal, mostly metal.alloy built ship. Either do that or just manually tweak their signature profile to be lower.

3) You could even go a step further, which would make these ships quite funny: how about making all these asteroid based ships basically work like phase ships when inside asteroid fields? What I mean by this is that they would virtually work he same way as phase ships (0 signature, reducing fleetwide signature with diminishing returns)  but only when the fleet is inside an asteroid field/belt and the like. Could this even be done?

4)I've been playing with another mod called Vayra's ship pack and in that collection of awesome ships there is a particular one called the Oppressor. This one ship is very peculiar (and relevant in this reply) because it is the only ship in the game and the known modiverse to even have an integrated hullmod on it called Small Ballistic Integration, which reduces the Ordinance point cost of all small weapons installed on the ship by two Ordinance points. I could really see these ships making great use of this very underdog, novel Hullmod given the ships that would get it also get a minor rebalance in some aspects.

5) Speaking of minor rebalances, shields! I have read all the replies up to this point to make sure I did not obliviously repeat the exact feedback points without adding anything of my own and I also agree something has to be done with the shields on these ships.

I do not think the shield to damage ratio should be made worse.  I think it conceptually make sense a lot of senses that having a ship made out of rock would allow for better flux management and shield efficiency than the cruel embrace of a hull made of steel, which is much harder to expand were it to be crudely converted by pirates into a combat variant.

I would do another thing to the shields instead. Make them all low degree omni variants with barely enough speed to accommodate for the asteroid ships' very good handling. The reason behind this suggestion of mine is two fold:
-Low tech should not get 300ish degree, 1:1 damage ratio shields this easily
-All these asteroid ships are more or less spherical, it would make sense for a faction like pirates to try and be efficent in their novel ship design and manage to obtain surprisingly durable shields that rotate in the direction they are needed instead of covering an excessive amount of the ship.


Post Scriptum: I've got around 4 different asteroid ships in my fleet, two types of them with three integrated hullmods. I am in bed right now so the section of my feedback regarding individual ships in this mod will have to wait for tomorrow. Cheers!
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2d
« Reply #40 on: April 24, 2021, 05:09:46 AM »

Thanks for the feedback.

So
1) I thought I fixed that like a year ago. Well It is fixed now.
2) Personally I don't see much point in doing that, but I'll think about it.
3) I don't think that's possible
4) I'd rather not as that would require me to ether make my own version of that or force my mod to require someone else's mod which I'd rather not do.
5) I think I will most definably do this sometime in the near future.
Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be anyway to tweak signature profile or shield speeds so I can't do anything about that.
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2d
« Reply #41 on: April 24, 2021, 11:14:18 AM »

1)
Ah, I had a feeling Astroid wasn't a newly coined term you used  ;D
Don't feel bad about it at all by the way, I'm disgraphic and also have High Potential Autism, which you may have gotten a hint of if you read any of my threads/replies  ::)

2-3)
I Personally see it this way: these ships are going to be considered during early game by most people having this mod installed since they've got quite the appealing combination of short range firepower (very good versus Explorarium ships), bearable logistics, very low CR lossper engagement and remarkable survivability.

The issue with these ships preventing them to be appealing and find any use  after that initial phase of the campaign when you're willing to take just about anything in your fleet to meat it up is a combination of Low burn speed, generally short engagement range and very limited Ordinance Points.

Low burn speed is a big hit on early game exploration that more or less requires a very expensive hullmod to be installed for even just the Rock to not slow the whole fleet down. I am playing this mod alongside Underworld which made me find an Infernus (which I later adopted as my Flagship) in the fringes of the Sector that even without any D-mods still has an excruciating 6 burn speed, so I did not mind filling my fleet up with Asteroid Ships since they're all above than number (for now, have not seen the capital yet) but I can see how that can be a massive turning point (especially in Pirate Roleplay Campaigns) to a small fleet that would really like to be sneaky and/or go fast. The suggestion of giving all these ships Insulated Engine Assembly has the aim to provide players with an alternate way of playing the Pirate, with a much bigger emphasis on staying stealthy with a bigger, meaner fleet than a normal pirate would but that is pretty much unable to run away if detected. Then there's also to mention the fact this mod makes small to medium sized pirate fleets a lot easier to evade thanks to the very low burn speeds of even the smaller Asteroid Ships. Insulated Engine assembly would at least give them an easier time when trying to get the jump on you!


4)
None of these ships have any integrated range weapon debuffs like Unstable Injector or Safety Overrides (thank Ludd for that. I could see them being a bit too effective if that were the case if they were deployed en-masse), but they all nonetheless suffer from a very low average engagement range even when compared to other pirate vessels, and it mostly revolves around the size and quantity of weapon mounts. These ships are, by design, filled to the brim with small ballistic turrets and a very sparce presence of medium/large sized ones. This means all these otherwise very competitive low tech ships suffer from massive, massive range issues and flux management since all the best small ballistic weapons only get up to 700 range and you can barely have any due to them being very flux intensive.

Even the best duo of small energy weapons with decent range (railguns/light needlers+light assault guns/heavy mortars) really begins to suffer extremely hard from the lack of any high damage option to tear thru any heavy armor or strong shields, Railguns/needlers may have very good flux stats for the damage they do but their Ordinance Point cost is just thru the roof, meaning it just applies further strain to to already very sparce amount of Ordiance Points most of these ships have at their disposal.
The best setup I got working on most ships is Hypervelocity Drivers on most medium ballistic slots for as much long range kinetic as I could, to then dedicate the plethora of small ballistic weapons to be as Ordiance Point Efficient as possible, therefore simply slamming vulcans and Light Mortars.

Light Ballistic Integration would adress this issue in a much more nuanced manner, but the bottom line of me suggesting it is that most of these ships need more Ordiance points across the board if their main pirate-flavoured shtick is using a lot of small ballistic weapons. As most of them would realistically go with half if not more of those staying empty in order to fit important hullmods/vents unless a significant amount of hullmods is integrated into them.


5)
I can't wait to see what you do with the shields and how these ships are going to feel like once you put more love into them!


Post Scriptum: Have you went over the handling of the Rock Cruiser by the way? I legit had to install advanced turret gyros for even the fastest turning small kinetics to stay on target. I'm also under the opinion the ship as a whole would greatly benefit from being downgraded to a Destroyer, as its minuscule 110 Ordinance Point pool can't realistically handle the Cruiser-price of hullmods, unless they are integrated.



« Last Edit: April 24, 2021, 11:17:02 AM by Arcagnello »
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liam556

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2d
« Reply #42 on: April 26, 2021, 03:17:46 AM »

Update 1.3

All ships(except Pebble, Stoner and Boulder) now have OMNI shields instead of FRONTs
Havel, Galileo, Rock, Cerus and Clanker have had their OP points increased.

This update should be save game compatible
https://github.com/Liam5563/astroidships-pack/blob/master/Asteroid%20ship%20pack%201.3.rar?raw=true
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.2d
« Reply #43 on: April 26, 2021, 06:01:50 AM »

Nice!
Quote
All ships(except Pebble, Stoner and Boulder) now have OMNI shields instead of FRONTs

Going to test around the two Cerus, Rock and Galileo I've currently got in my fleet to see what the omni shields behave!

Quote
Havel, Galileo, Rock, Cerus and Clanker have had their OP points increased
I'll give the asteroid ships a go to see how they feel right now, I guess I'll see how much Ordinance Points you added whenever I load the game!

Side Note: I gave my one Galileo (as an italian, you make me proud) a full Salamander loadout with ECCM with all other weapons being point defence, but it has the same issue as the vanilla Gryphon, where since it is not a carrier it will behave like a fontline combat vessel and try and get in range of the enemy to be able to shoot it with point defence weapons instead of staying at range and pelt it with long range, guided missiles instead.

Would it be possible to swap the AI of the Galileo from a standard combat ship to the one of a carrier? Meaning it will actually hang back and not get close to the enemy if it has nothing but point defence and missiles and does not have an aggressive/reckless officer overriding it? It should still behave like a direct fire combat ship if given offensive kinetic weapons/unguided rockets.


« Last Edit: April 26, 2021, 07:15:25 AM by Arcagnello »
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Arcagnello

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Re: [0.95a] The Asteroid ship pack 1.3
« Reply #44 on: April 26, 2021, 10:10:04 AM »

I'm back from 30 minutes of fiddling with my three asteroid ship classes in my fleet. The update seems to work just fine when stapled onto an ongoing campaign by the way, so no worries there  :)

Cerus Heavy Cruiser

Changes: Ordinance Point value increased from 170 to 190,  280(ish?)° front shield changed to 130°degree omni shield

How I feel about it:
It now definetly, definetly has enough ordinance points to not only comfortably fill all the weapon slots but also some very important hullmods like Heavy armor (which doubles the armor value) and ITU.

Now, 190 feels like a lot of Ordinance Points for a 20FP cruiser, but both the fact this ship has cruiser prices for the hullmods and the fact that mediums and especially small weapons are incredibly OP inefficient proves it's just enough to equip all the things.
I would honestly cut the omni shield coverage further down to 125, 120 degrees as that is barely enough to cover it from whatever it's pointing it at, not to mention preventing people picking this up and basically getting the same, nearly 300° front shield it had before.

The last thing that I'm not too sure about the Cerus is the ship ability: Burn Drive. I'd wager something like Advanced Ammo Feeder as a ship skill would work a lot better for two reasons.
1) Giving what basically amounts to a Pirate Dominator with an Asteroid as hull 50 top speed and burn drive more or less makes it able to chase and butcher anything faster than itself also thanks to the agility and the very generous front weapon angles, with the only weapons  not really being able to keep firing at, say, a Frigade evading the Burn Drive being the one Medium Ballistic and the 4 Composite bolted at the front. It's a bit too good at competing in mobility not only with Cruisers but also destroyers and even some of the slowest frigades.
2) I feel Accellerated Ammo Feeder would make a lot more sense on the Cerus since it's the ship with the most concentrated firepower per Deployment Point in the whole mod and, if I were to assemble a fleet completely made of Asteroid Ships, I'd have one or two of these escorting the Pebbles and use them as mobile gunboats to both combat the approaching enemies but also provide impressive point defence coverage with the ammo feeder. The lack of a mobility skill further adding to the ship's already impressive mobility would also prevent it from absolutely deleting anything too small to contest it at short range and unable to get away from it.

I could see it being bumped up to something like 22 Deployment Points (Having it compete with the Eagle and only being 3FP cheaper than the Dominator) if it did get Ammo Feeder tough, since that would make it a lot scarier to anything going slower than 50 speed while in combat.

This is the setup I feel happy about using. It's got one set of long range weapons (the three mediums) and another for shor range (two Dual Autocannons, two light assault guns) and vulcans everywhere else.
Spoiler
[close]


Rock Light Cruiser

Changes: OP from 110 to 120, 300(ish)° Front Shield converted into a 140 degree omni shield

How I feel about it:
The Rock still really struggles OP wise considering the amount of weapon mounts and the fact it gets the same OP cost for hullmods as the Cerus, but I'm pretty sure that is by design. This is quite the twitchy cruiser that can reliably go around and hunt frigades by itself, while it generally really struggles against destroyers due to the weapon composition being very short ranged. 10 more ordinance points really go a long way to at least make it fit Dedicated Targeting Core/Integrated Targeting unit.

I think it still needs the shield further trimmed down in coverage, 130-125 degrees should be enough to barely cover it from what it is fighting and that's more than enough for how good of a shield it really is for an original Pirate Vessel.

One more thing I'd personally love to happen if for this ship to actually become a Destroyer, not a Cruiser. Frankly speaking, it's too small and having it pay cruiser OP amounts for hullmods absolutely butchers it. In addition to that, being a cruiser makes it compete with the Clanker, which has the same role and even ship system but brings more ordinance points and more weapon mounts for just 5 more Deployment Points to the table.

As for changes during the transformation into a destroyer, I'd compensate for the fact Targeting Core/ITU provide an inferior bonus by giving the Rock a slight top speed increase, making it even better at hunting frigades and small destroyers now that it's significantly outclassed by cruisers and above.

This is my current build for the one Rock I have in the fleet. Don't look at the integrated hullmods. I was litterally drunk the moment I spent three story points on it.
Spoiler
The name of this particular Rock is a nod to the animated parody "TRANSformers" by Flashgitz on Youtube. It's great, just don't watch it while someone is around  ::)
[close]

Galileo Support Destroyer

Changes: OP from 80 to 90

How I feel about it:
I love this thing. It's so damn good when set to escort the other Asteroid Ships and providing missile fire support, sspecially now that it can fit 7 Salamander missiles plus ECCM, decent defence, reinforced bulkheads and have points to spare for something else too!

The only problem I have with this adorable missile vomiter is as stated in the previous reply connected to the Destroyer AI, pushing it into range to shoot at the enemy with its weapons even if it has nothing but point defence and long range support missiles. I don't think it's either lacking or too good at its job. It does what it's built for well and gets butchered when attempting anything else, the end.

This is the setup I'm using, it could honestly work with Harpoons aswell, even pilums if we're ever going to get a vanilla pilum for small missile mounts.
Spoiler
[close]







« Last Edit: April 26, 2021, 02:29:15 PM by Arcagnello »
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