Thanks! Yeah, I spent a lot of time working on valk specifically trying to make it interesting , so im glad you like it!
OFC! I appreciate hard work that goes into helping me enjoy things.
I remember increasing CR cost to 40% but not as to why, and tbh dropping it to 30% is definitely doable.
Well
, even I'm dithering on it a little bit. The "problem" is that while 30% would allow the Valk to operate twice without malfunction risk at 70%, at 100% you're talking about a fighter-frigate
that strong that can operate for three full fights, with the possibility of being repaired mid-fight, and I can definitely see that being a bit crazy, especially in a situation like a base defense. (Hell, I've already done a few base defenses where I could basically stay on the field
forever.)
I think what I might actually suggest is bumping up the CR recovered per day a bit - right now, it takes 4 days to recover from
one engagement, and that feels a little crazy, even for a high end prototype. It may be that, but it's also a
fightercraft, essentially, so access for maintenance isn't going to be like having to run around fixing things on a frigate, even. By way of comparison, the hangar queen that is the Hyperion currently loses 40% per deployment and has a recovery rate of
8%, but somewhat more practical high-performance machines are a bit different, with the Tempest at 20%/10% and the Afflictor at a whopping 50% but then 25% per day. The impression I get is that while the Valk is a high-end machine with some crazy design behind it, it's meant to be at least somewhat more practical than a Hyperion.
Or, another little suggestion for feature creep
: another bonus that you get for having a dedicated carrier in the fleet is that CR recovery is increased by 50% or so for strikecraft, due to having proper dedicated facilities to do it, rather than having poor shmoes out there in EVA suits while your Valk or Ein is strapped to a Hermes or whatever. I think that might feel a bit better, ultimately; you burn a lot of CR each deployment at minimum because of component stress, but it's relatively quick to recover, especially if you have ships dedicated to it.
There's no way to manually make AI controlled ones rearm outside of taking damage / running out of ammo that doesn't screw with other things (at least that I can think of at the moment, anyway) but most of my attempts was with issuing orders, like defend as some kind of prerequisite when I was trying to make it work.
Yeah, I was kind of afraid of that, or that it would require entering the
truly dark magic realm of introducing new command types and command keybinds to handle the case. If we're wishing for horses, I would definitely say my new big wish is for a dedicated command/keybind to order folks to re-arm, but I fully understand that's probably a full order of magnitude more complicated than anything else that's gone into the mod so far. Still, if you figure out a way to do it that isn't quite so hideous on your workload, it's definitely the one thing that feels "missing" right now.
Anyway, thank you again, and if you want feedback on specific things, please feel free to ask!
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Also, to finish off with another question: for the current system of protecting strikecraft from hyperstorms etc., is it checking for ships with the CARRIER tag specifically, or is just having bays enough? I noticed I didn't take CR damage when I had a Condor (tho ofc the hull protection doesn't seem to be working, as I reported), but when I tried to use just a Fidem from Alfonso's Luddic Enhancement mod (which doesn't have the tag), my strikecraft still took damage. If so, that informs fleet comps and also means it could be ideal for the user to mess with a few weird edge-cases in mods specifically (such as the Diable capitals not having CARRIER tags despite blatantly having the necessary equipment in-lore to dock and service strikecraft of Arma's sort).