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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: Starsector 0.95.1a (Released) Patch Notes  (Read 249029 times)

Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #240 on: November 11, 2021, 12:30:15 PM »

Thank you all for the suggestions about Impact Mitigation! That got me thinking outside the box a bit, and I've just about settled on "+50% maneuverability for cruisers/capitals, +25% if smaller". It makes sense for the theme of the skill, (after all, turning the ship to avoid/distribute/dare I say mitigate the incoming damage is a thing), and it should be a useful bonus for heavily armored ships that's not just another "damage number is lower".

How much were the substantial HP and armor buffs for Legion and Dominator?

14k is the new value for the Dominator, and 18k for the Legion. The Legion's new armor is 1750; I forget what the original value was.


  • "Defend" assignment can now be placed on friendly ships
    • Right-clicking a powerful group of ships onto a friendly will also create this assignment

I assume this only refers to the default behavior - will the player be able to manually toggle between Escort or Defend regardless of group size of assigned ships?

Correct!

Also, hi and welcome to the forum :)



I'm late to post this reply, but I just wanted to say:

Alex, the sheer number of AI improvements on this changelog are absolutely beautiful.

AI is the one aspect of the game that you can't trumpet as "NEW SHINY CONTENT!!1!ONE" but it is absolutely one of the most important parts of the core gameplay and I am really, really happy to see how much work you've put into it. Not just bugfixing, but flat-out improvements. Bravo sir.

Thank you! <3


Release the update right now.
So we can test it and put real feedback, no some speculations.
ALEX
RELEASE IT NOW
or I will find your KOT  and
Spoiler
pet him and rub his belly.
[close]
I will show no mercy!

Haha! (I trust I don't need to clarify why releasing prior to playtesting would be a bad idea... not that I don't appreciate the enthusiasm; I very much do.)


It might be nice for bounty fleets to have fewer d-mods than average, especially for the flagship and select officers. A bounty captain with field repairs will definitely have higher quality ships than the faction standard. Better quality ships are more dangerous, and are also more juicy picks for the loot screen.

That does actually happen, btw! Not for flagship/ships with officers, but just in general - larger/tougher bounties tend to have less d-mods, too.
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SCC

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #241 on: November 11, 2021, 12:43:55 PM »

This means cruisers and capital ships will be able to get +50% mnvr from Helmsmanship and another +50% from elite IM for a total of double the manoeuvrability? Dominator will certainly like this.

TerranEmpire

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #242 on: November 11, 2021, 12:48:42 PM »

@Alex

So Legion now has the same armor as Onslaught?
It just feels wrong.
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Thaago

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #243 on: November 11, 2021, 01:21:50 PM »

If a pristine 70% CR Onslaught goes down, you are out 233 supplies for CR recovery. That is 7.8% of a 300k bounty payout instead of 1.3%.

(I am not sure how much supply cost the hull/armor repairs add.)

If you are willing to suck the d-mods, which are usually not crippling, I think the cost is acceptable. Bad, but acceptable.

Though the very D mods themselves will lower the repair costs moderately which is nice.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #244 on: November 11, 2021, 01:37:16 PM »

I aim for flawless victories every time in bounty fights, and generally consider any losses to be significant failures, although typically some failure can be tolerated without the bounty becoming unprofitable.

Loses have significant costs on multiple different levels:
- immediate supply and crew cost to restore CR and repair armor/hull
- d-mods: increase chances of ships in the fleet taking damage or dying in the future (costing more supplies) and possibly adding more d-mods that compound the effect
- eventually as ships gain more d-mods, they will no longer be worth using (too weak for their DP cost) and will need to be replaced or restored costing money. Even if you replace via recovering new ships, you still pay the upfront supply and crew cost. Plus recovering ships with d-mods has the hidden cost of more future damage and loses as well.

You definitely can't be taking loses in every fight and expect to make money from bounties efficiently. At least, not without spending skill points to support that and incurring the opportunity cost associated with spending skill points.

I also don't believe in running 'garbage' ships (ships with lots of/bad d-mods, or just generally weaker hulls). I think it's just wasting supplies and fuel lugging them around and recovering them. If a ship dies regularly, I will not use it: why would I use a ship that cost me extra supplies to recover every other fight when I can use a ship that doesn't? I only run d-mods long term if I think they don't adversely affect combat performance significantly. Typically I have some d-mods but I rarely run anything with more than 2 and I would say 1 or 0 is much more typical. In late game when I have massive colony income, I will just restore everything. I would much rather pay more up front for a pristine ship that will not die and will have better combat power per deployment point.

I might consider trying to take the new Hull Restoration skill early to build my fleet though, it sounds like a good way to get ships via recovery without the downside of d-mods, and it can be re-specced late game once I have the ships I want. I will have to see what skills I need to take get there though.
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JUDGE! slowpersun

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #245 on: November 11, 2021, 01:58:19 PM »

I aim for flawless victories every time in bounty fights, and generally consider any losses to be significant failures, although typically some failure can be tolerated without the bounty becoming unprofitable.

Regarding bounty profitability, I kinda have a bone to pick here.  Since this game is to some degree basically just the Golden Age of Piracy in space, a significant amount of monies from bounty hunting (ie, letters of marque/commissions) awards back then was predicated on bringing back prize ships fo' dat cash, but in this game, it's (understandably) different.  Since the fleet limit is vanilla maxed at 30, a player has little to no incentive to recover an enemy ship (ie, one that doesn't keep SP hull mods) unless they want/need the underlying hull.  I understand this is necessary as much for stabilizing gameplay (ie, player can't cheese game design with a free money generator) as it is realism (rehabilitating a vacuum proof ship vs keeping a wooden boat afloat), but when a player decides not to recover ships, is the ship truly broken down into the equivalent value of ALL commodity goods, or is it the goods minus some loss for some (metal...) and normal for others (fuel)?  I guess I can always just crack open the code and look for myself, since initial bounty valuation seems primarily predicated on ship class and quality as much as fleet size for payout size calculations, but the previous statement is necessary for the following chain of thought.

Normally I wouldn't care as much, and it would break the game for basically any regular battle, but for bounties... adding a premium for leaving derelict ships to be "recovered" might be an interesting addition (although game would have to give player an option to choose breaking ships down now or not, and maybe only pays extra later based on valid "recovery," which is to say sometimes there is loss due to poaching by pirates or indys).  I almost feel like perhaps this would be better to post in the Suggestions forum, but since this kinda already came up... I'll drop it here.  Maybe someone will move it.  It also is partially mitigated by the fact that a player has no control over which ships are normally disabled/recoverable (as in, not recovering via SP), but seems like an interesting alternative to just always breaking stuff down.  Food for thought.
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Amoebka

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #246 on: November 11, 2021, 02:12:04 PM »

I might consider trying to take the new Hull Restoration skill early to build my fleet though, it sounds like a good way to get ships via recovery without the downside of d-mods, and it can be re-specced late game once I have the ships I want. I will have to see what skills I need to take get there though.

Does it even work like that though? To me it sounds like the chance to avoid D-mods completely only applies to your own ships, not enemy ships you recover. Those only get a chance at -1 d-mod at most, and even pristine ships get at least 2 when destroyed.
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Megas

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #247 on: November 11, 2021, 03:55:14 PM »

I was about to write about fleets and flawless victories, but intrinsic_parity wrote much of what I wanted to write.

It is not so much about recovery of enemy ships, it is about recovering your ships if they die, especially if they had s-mods.

If my ship that died had no s-mods, no problem, I just rebuild it if I have the blueprint.  If it has s-mods (or I cannot build the ship), I am not scuttling it!  If I have Field Repairs and nothing else to fix, I will recover it and lug it around until the d-mods disappear.  Otherwise, I reload and replay the fight until the result is flawless victory (or I give up and do something else like cheese trade until I earn enough to upgrade my fleet) because it is faster that way.  There are exceptions, like if I lose a small ship or two in an endgame fight, fine, I did not lose that much money and I eat it.

However, Field Repairs makes it tempting to recover anything that does not have more than one d-mod, and it is more convenient than shopping for one at a core world or waiting a month or two for my Orbital Works to spit one out.  And if I am fighting exotic ships I cannot build or buy, I will recover (and mothball) at least some of them.  And if I am running around with Ziggurat, and it blows up, I am not spending nearly two million to fix it.  Either I let Field Repairs fix it, or I reload.

Quote
I will just restore everything. I would much rather pay more up front for a pristine ship that will not die and will have better combat power per deployment point.
If I think casualties is likely, and the only significant reward is money, then it is better to avoid the fight in the first place and run drugs or otherwise cheese trading exploits - much safer!

I dislike d-mods, and I strive to have every ship pristine at all times.  I have a special fondness for Field Repairs.  I plan to take Hull Restoration so I do not need flawless victories for fighting to be profitable.  I will only respec if I need to enable flagship Radiant to be the best it can be with more combat skills, if I go for the Tech 8 path, or if I really need all combat skills to enable soloing fleets efficiently like SCC did with phase ships.

Does it even work like that though? To me it sounds like the chance to avoid D-mods completely only applies to your own ships, not enemy ships you recover. Those only get a chance at -1 d-mod at most, and even pristine ships get at least 2 when destroyed.
With Field Repairs and other Industry skills, I sometimes see formerly pristine enemy ships with a single d-mod.  They are worth recovering.  I obtained most of my capitals by recovering and fixing them with Field Repairs.  By the time I raided for all the blueprints, I already obtained most of my endgame fleet by recovering them from the enemy.  It was also nice recovering spare Radiants with one d-mod and field repairing them for later.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #248 on: November 11, 2021, 04:34:08 PM »

I might consider trying to take the new Hull Restoration skill early to build my fleet though, it sounds like a good way to get ships via recovery without the downside of d-mods, and it can be re-specced late game once I have the ships I want. I will have to see what skills I need to take get there though.

Does it even work like that though? To me it sounds like the chance to avoid D-mods completely only applies to your own ships, not enemy ships you recover. Those only get a chance at -1 d-mod at most, and even pristine ships get at least 2 when destroyed.
I agree that it's unclear whether you will avoid new d-mods on enemy ships, but even if that bit doesn't apply, you also remove 1 d-mod per month from your fleet like the current industry skill. So the skill means that I am now seeing mostly 1-2-3 dmod ships rather than 2-3-4 and I am much more likely to hit reasonable d-mods on ships and I also need to wait less time for them to become usable/better/pristine. I will have to see how well it works but it seems like it could be good enough that I would no longer bother buying ships except maybe very early on to get the ball rolling, or rare ships I don't fight much. The max CR per S-mod is also really good IMO.
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Histidine

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #249 on: November 11, 2021, 06:36:12 PM »

How much were the substantial HP and armor buffs for Legion and Dominator?
14k is the new value for the Dominator, and 18k for the Legion. The Legion's new armor is 1750; I forget what the original value was.
Hmm, gotta say that I'd be wary of the hull/armor creep that low tech seems to have going on these days (previously it was Enforcer that benefited). At some point, ships that don't die when the player shoots them (a lot) are just annoying to deal with.
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Vehemence

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #250 on: November 11, 2021, 07:07:34 PM »

I know this more of a fine tune patch, but I was curious when more permanent terraforming will arrive in the game?
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Alex

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #251 on: November 11, 2021, 07:10:34 PM »

Hmm, gotta say that I'd be wary of the hull/armor creep that low tech seems to have going on these days (previously it was Enforcer that benefited). At some point, ships that don't die when the player shoots them (a lot) are just annoying to deal with.

Fair, generally speaking! But, these buffs are *not* just "need to improve these things somehow, so lets go with durability because it's thematic". Rather, it's improving durability because it felt to me like these ships weren't holding up as well under fire as they, well, ought to, though of course that's a subjective evaluation. (More specifically, it's driven by spending *a lot* of time fighting multi-Radiant Ordos using a low-tech fleet that included both of these ships...)


I know this more of a fine tune patch, but I was curious when more permanent terraforming will arrive in the game?

Hmm, I'm not sure why you'd specifically expect it to be a thing! It's not a direction I'm particularly looking to go in. It's a cool concept, and if it happens to fit in with something else going on (i.e. a main storyline development, for example, or into some other mechanics I'm looking to add), then I could see it, but not the sort of thing I'd want to add just for its own sake, if that makes sense.
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Wyvern

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #252 on: November 11, 2021, 08:08:05 PM »

Thank you all for the suggestions about Impact Mitigation! That got me thinking outside the box a bit, and I've just about settled on "+50% maneuverability for cruisers/capitals, +25% if smaller". It makes sense for the theme of the skill, (after all, turning the ship to avoid/distribute/dare I say mitigate the incoming damage is a thing), and it should be a useful bonus for heavily armored ships that's not just another "damage number is lower".
Hm. +Maneuverability is great for ships like the Onslaught or Dominator. It's very nearly worthless for frigates, though. Hm...

Would it be reasonable to add a second elite effect that, for frigates (and maybe to a lesser degree destroyers) just... increases the resolution of the armor grid? Make it more feasible for small ships to actually get some benefit from turning to take hits on different sides, rather than the armor grid being low enough resolution that hits to one side still damage armor on the other?
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

BaBosa

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #253 on: November 11, 2021, 08:14:37 PM »

Spoiler

I am a bit curious where your ideas for the elite Impact Mitigation effect are going, given the 90% max mitigation being duplicated in Polarized armor.  Where you looking for something that helps at high armor levels and or small weapon hits (which is what the 85%-90% does), but doesn't quite stack so much (1/3 less damage during the maximum mitigation period extends it by a factor of 1.5,.e. 50% more, while 2/3 extends it by by a factor of 3).

...

Would something like a simple 10% more real armor, or +75/150/200/250 (tweak numbers as needed) real extra armor based on size, repaired instantly at the end of every engagement work?  Where "repaired" is just the has an elite Impact Mitigation officer piloting it at deployment time, so it adds say +250 to whatever the armor was there as the ship is deployed into the fight.  At the end, if it's over normal maximum in any cell, just remove excess.

I'm actually pretty open to what the effect might be - ideally it'd be something that's at least semi-interesting gameplay-wise, and also doesn't come with the problem of, for example, making most kinetics near-useless vs hull, like +150 effective armor did.

The issue with +X armor (not effective, just at the start) is that it wouldn't apply once command is transferred. Generally, the goal of the design is to have skill effects transfer over - although a couple do break that rule; most notably Missile Specialization. I kind of wonder - is "giving your intended flagship to an officer with Missile Spec, and probably Reliability Engineering, and then transferring command to it after deployment to benefit from about an extra skill's worth of stuff" at all a thing? I'd guess it's probably not quite worth it, but if we pile on more bonuses that work like this...

That is a fair point.  Stack enough bonuses and some min-maxer some where will take advantage of it.  I will admit if I'm pulling solo Odyssey shenanigans, I'll load it up with a missile expertise officer and switch into it, since my officers have nothing better to do in that scenario.

Interesting gameplay-wise is perhaps a bit tough given it has traditionally I simply take more shots to die kind of skill, which definitely makes the character or officer stronger, but doesn't feel like it changes the ship fundamentally.



Oh, how's this for a thought: damage to armor reduced based on current ship speed. The faster you're going, the more shots 'glance off'!
Balancing could be tricky, and might require scaling differently for different ship classes... but at least the notion of it seems good: a small benefit for slow, high-armor ships, a larger benefit for faster, less-armored ships, and a hopefully-noticeable boost to durability while Burn Drive is active.
[close]
Extra armor durability during Burn drive would be amusing, I admit, and potentially really useful.  It does make it fairly niche though.  There is quite a large range in speeds in each ship class, say from 25 of the Onslaught to the 70 of the Odyssey.  Not to mention plasma burn drive.  It also ties into gameplay.

What are mechanics and behavior we can tie into?  Maneuverability, speed.  Either modifying those numbers, or basing it off what you're doing (i.e. the proportional bonus to speed suggestion).  There's weapons fire state, although that doesn't make much sense.  There's shield state and flux levels.  Polarized armor already has stuff proportional to flux level though.  There's shield state though.  Your armor could become better if you have no shields up (which would indirectly make damping field better).  Reinforcing internal structures in a powered way somehow.

You could make the armor trade for winning the flux war explicit.  You reduce your current flux levels by real armor lost.  I.e. take a hit that make you lose X armor, reduce your built up hard flux by Y.  If no armor was lost (i.e. it was all already destroyed in that cell) then no benefit.  It does mean if an Onslaught eats a Reaper, it suddenly perhaps drops it's flux level by a few thousand.  You're essentially storing waste flux in the armor sections, and if it get's blown off, it takes the flux with it.

Alternatively, increase flux dissipation while shields are down is perhaps simpler to communicate, and incentives actually armor tanking more.

Some crazier ideas:  Ramming bonus when impacting on the ship sprite instead of shields, and reduced or completely negated damage from ship explosions.

Actually, for unshielded ships like Ramparts, or phase ships like the afflictor, being immune to ship/station explosions would be a fairly big quality of life improvement.  You could alternatively simply limit how much damage AoE effects do to armor cells in total, so that things like Reapers still make holes, but they are smaller holes.

I really like some of these ideas.
Removing flux when taking armour damage seems really cool. It would help ships keep pressuring Ships that have more dissipation. Wouldn’t want it on many ships though. It’d probably be a built in hullmod.

Making ramming damage greater when using hull instead of shields sounds like something that should be normal. You’re risking more significant damage to yourself that way so there should be a bigger payout.
Flat immunities are boring in my opinion but making the rugged construction hullmod say half or quarter death explosion damage would be pretty damn cool and it would fit.
Not so much for phase ships as they’re supposed to just phase out.

Reducing the size of the destroyed sections from missiles is a really cool idea. But I’m not sure if it could be implemented in a good way.


I aim for flawless victories every time in bounty fights, and generally consider any losses to be significant failures, although typically some failure can be tolerated without the bounty becoming unprofitable.
Spoiler
Regarding bounty profitability, I kinda have a bone to pick here.  Since this game is to some degree basically just the Golden Age of Piracy in space, a significant amount of monies from bounty hunting (ie, letters of marque/commissions) awards back then was predicated on bringing back prize ships fo' dat cash, but in this game, it's (understandably) different.  Since the fleet limit is vanilla maxed at 30, a player has little to no incentive to recover an enemy ship (ie, one that doesn't keep SP hull mods) unless they want/need the underlying hull.  I understand this is necessary as much for stabilizing gameplay (ie, player can't cheese game design with a free money generator) as it is realism (rehabilitating a vacuum proof ship vs keeping a wooden boat afloat), but when a player decides not to recover ships, is the ship truly broken down into the equivalent value of ALL commodity goods, or is it the goods minus some loss for some (metal...) and normal for others (fuel)?  I guess I can always just crack open the code and look for myself, since initial bounty valuation seems primarily predicated on ship class and quality as much as fleet size for payout size calculations, but the previous statement is necessary for the following chain of thought.
[close]
Normally I wouldn't care as much, and it would break the game for basically any regular battle, but for bounties... adding a premium for leaving derelict ships to be "recovered" might be an interesting addition (although game would have to give player an option to choose breaking ships down now or not, and maybe only pays extra later based on valid "recovery," which is to say sometimes there is loss due to poaching by pirates or indys).  I almost feel like perhaps this would be better to post in the Suggestions forum, but since this kinda already came up... I'll drop it here.  Maybe someone will move it.  It also is partially mitigated by the fact that a player has no control over which ships are normally disabled/recoverable (as in, not recovering via SP), but seems like an interesting alternative to just always breaking stuff down.  Food for thought.

Making leaving ships behind part of the bounty would be really good. It makes it so recovering any of the ships not so free.
But more importantly, if it was made so you could actually make a ship become disabled rather than destroyed and show up on recovery. That would make fights have a varying amount of difficulty depending if you’re just trying to kill them or capture them.
Maybe make it so if you hit a ship with enough emp in a short enough time that they become fried and are disabled. It would have to be harder to do than just damage if their hull so it’s not broken but it would also make it easier to pick what ships you want to recover.
« Last Edit: November 11, 2021, 08:40:10 PM by BaBosa »
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bobucles

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Re: Starsector 0.95.1a (In Development) Patch Notes
« Reply #254 on: November 11, 2021, 08:34:41 PM »

Quote
Alternatively, increase flux dissipation while shields are down is perhaps simpler to communicate, and incentives actually armor tanking more.

This may be easier to achieve by tweaking the shield upkeep values. Make the default flux strength between low and high tech ships a bit more equal. The tradeoff is that high tech ships have very low shield upkeep costs (so they don't feel bad about keeping shields up) while low tech ships have very high shield upkeep. A low tech ship would have much more to gain by dropping shields, making tradeoff more of a choice rather than an armor gamble. It also obviously boosts emergency venting, which further limits armor damage.


The current onslaught has 600 venting and 240 shield upkeep. Maybe the armor trade would feel better with 800 venting and 500 upkeep? It's a nerf with shields up, and a buff with shields down. Something like that. Dunno if it would require further tweaks, as it would make stabilized shield mod far more effective.
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