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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] Hiver Swarm - V1.1.2 - 03/27/24  (Read 235872 times)

vcuaoiwk

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85 - 02/12/22
« Reply #120 on: March 17, 2022, 06:55:14 PM »

Just a few comments:

Pros: Love the concept and the terrifying-ness of the swarm. Honestly they're currently sweeping through my playthrough and smashing most of the factions. This is great considering I saw the earlier feedback that the hive was not expanding or being active in the sector. They're even responding to Luddic Path threats and sending out strike missions. (I'm running a hodgepodge of mods 3-4 factions, Nex, bunch of QOL mods and such).

Request/Cons: Is there a way to prevent Hiver blueprints from spawning in the sector? I got my hands on some BP's and been able to outfit a few ships with some of the goodies..... and well theyre amazing but jesus they are overtuned to the point where I feel that I can't use them because yes building them is expensive but not prohibitive enough for their outputs.

Possible solutions for overtuned weapons for this specific faction mod (I'm going to throw the following out but not sure how code intensive it would be to create any of the following):
- The easiest would be to make them incompatible with non hive ships - but this wouldnt be very fun
- Creating a prohibitive cost for usage in any of the following scenarios
-- Large combat readiness depreciation if not used on a Hive Ship (similar to plague weapons)
-- i.e. weapons usage is tied into crew depreciation (i.e. similar to fighters but active usage acculates crew deaths). The Ghost Gallon bounty in Nex has a similar feature for hyperspace travel
-- Amping up the weapons cost to something in the 100,000 of thousands of credits (basically prohibiting constructing them until mid/late game)

Anyway those are my thoughts. Love the mod. Love the fear theyre creating when see a Hive swarm. Thrilled to see it working as advertised as well. Thanks!
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memeextremist

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85 - 02/12/22
« Reply #121 on: March 17, 2022, 07:31:03 PM »

ooh I found out something cool with this and nex. I went back to a previous playthrough save that didn't have hiver flagged as a playable faction when I made it, and since I had already done that with the newer character, I can invade a planet and just spawn them by transferring.
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Dazs

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85 - 02/12/22
« Reply #122 on: March 17, 2022, 08:12:05 PM »

Just a few comments:

Pros: Love the concept and the terrifying-ness of the swarm. Honestly they're currently sweeping through my playthrough and smashing most of the factions. This is great considering I saw the earlier feedback that the hive was not expanding or being active in the sector. They're even responding to Luddic Path threats and sending out strike missions. (I'm running a hodgepodge of mods 3-4 factions, Nex, bunch of QOL mods and such).

Request/Cons: Is there a way to prevent Hiver blueprints from spawning in the sector? I got my hands on some BP's and been able to outfit a few ships with some of the goodies..... and well theyre amazing but jesus they are overtuned to the point where I feel that I can't use them because yes building them is expensive but not prohibitive enough for their outputs.

Possible solutions for overtuned weapons for this specific faction mod (I'm going to throw the following out but not sure how code intensive it would be to create any of the following):
- The easiest would be to make them incompatible with non hive ships - but this wouldnt be very fun
- Creating a prohibitive cost for usage in any of the following scenarios
-- Large combat readiness depreciation if not used on a Hive Ship (similar to plague weapons)
-- i.e. weapons usage is tied into crew depreciation (i.e. similar to fighters but active usage acculates crew deaths). The Ghost Gallon bounty in Nex has a similar feature for hyperspace travel
-- Amping up the weapons cost to something in the 100,000 of thousands of credits (basically prohibiting constructing them until mid/late game)

Anyway those are my thoughts. Love the mod. Love the fear theyre creating when see a Hive swarm. Thrilled to see it working as advertised as well. Thanks!

I'm happy to hear you are enjoying it. I did a tuning balance last update to address the earlier concerns players had posted about them not being aggressive enough and boy are they a threat to  any faction that is on the left side of the map. As a side note I play with pretty much all the current faction mods so I can test for compatibility and I like that when they take over a factions' planet all that faction's allies swarm take it back from the Hivers. I'm pretty happy with the current tuning giving a sense of impending doom if you allow them to keep invading.

OK so as to your concerns. As a part of the game I sort of had to give them blueprints. I did break them down into several packs to dilute them, put it as many blacklists as I could to prevent them being for sale and also raised the price of all their assets. Also, I gave them a high chance to break up when defeated but I can increase it a bit more to make their ships more of a rare recovery. Since they are now more of a threat, I'll look over raising the price of their ships and weapons again.

I do not think that I could make their weapons Hiver ship only, if there is a way I'd like to hear from a more experienced mod author.

Thank you for the feedback, you've given me some food for thought.

alaricdragon

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85 - 02/12/22
« Reply #123 on: March 20, 2022, 11:50:00 PM »

this mod looks amazing I cant wait to fight the bugs. not even going to look at the screenshots (i looked at some for like 4 seconds, just to be sure) so im surprised (mostly) wish me luck
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Dazs

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #125 on: April 01, 2022, 11:42:37 AM »

v0.85a released today - Save Compatible from 0.85
   -Raised the break point of all Hiver ships to 60% for the smaller up to 90% for the larger to make them less recoverable
   -Raised the base cost of all Hiver assets by ~25% to make them more of a prize and more expensive to rebuild- TY vcuaoiwk for this and the above idea
   -A code update to fix a compatibility crash when using Linux - TY Phantasia for bringing this to my attention

Been a couple months since the last balance update but other than maybe updating the sprite work I feel good about the current state of the mod. Any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me here on in discord, I check each daily.

DialecticDetective

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #126 on: April 06, 2022, 04:29:52 PM »

Funny story, I was an intern on Sword of the Stars.
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Dazs

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #127 on: April 06, 2022, 04:55:45 PM »

That is awesome I am a huge fan of the game. I named one of the ships in the new mod I am making the Kerberos :)

DialecticDetective

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #128 on: April 20, 2022, 01:11:35 PM »

That is awesome I am a huge fan of the game. I named one of the ships in the new mod I am making the Kerberos :)

Nice!
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vok3

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #129 on: April 24, 2022, 10:48:54 AM »

I was a lurker on the quartertothree forums back around the time of the SotS2 launch. 

I was really impressed with how when the game came out, people started saying "hey wtf", Mecron rushed in "It's okay folks!  We'll patch!"  Patch comes out, fixes very little, breaks more, players are more "hey wtf".  Mecron rushes in: "More patches!  More patches!!!"  Patches fix nothing meaningful.  Mecron: "OH I get it now guys, we released THE WRONG VERSION!  We'll put up the RIGHT version and EVERYTHING will be FINE!  Okay, try it now!"  Players: "hey wtf, ***'s still broke" 

Repeat round and round a few more times until finally Mecron had this great emotive breakdown where he attempted to claim that the stress of releasing all these patches had retroactively borked their systems and broken the functional version of the game and now everybody would just have to wait a month for a real patch.  Players: "dude, version control doesn't work that way, you were just lying this whole time, weren't you?  the game wasn't done, we get it, just stop lying to us" 

But Mecron was not capable of stopping himself from lying.  Just could not admit it.

And for a truly proper ending to the saga, the publisher refunded anybody who wanted one but said "look, we paid that studio for a functional game, they've been paid, if you want a functional game you need to talk to them".  And Mecron: "Oh, we'll GLADLY work some more on this but we don't work for free you know!  The publisher needs to pay us more before we do anything!"

Complete and total lack of responsibility or honesty or fair dealing of any sort.

It is fitting and proper that they have been relegated to dinky little mobile games ever since.  From what I understand there is not a single publisher anywhere that will trust them.  Understandably.

But as far as the mod goes:

When I looked at this a few weeks back, the Hive planets were spamming the market with requests for certain commodities, making it impossible to tell which of the core worlds actually needed those commodities.  (Unless you install Stellar Networks, which is a good mod but has a huge overhead so I don't use it)  Also I kept getting mission givers who wanted me to take stuff to Hiver planets.  Dude, no; they want to eat my liver.  If Hivers could be made into something more like the Remnant - completely disconnected from the human-world economy and society - that would solve my major problem with this mod. 

Also I actually kinda think the ships shouldn't be so explicitly bug-like.  When humans make spaceships, do they look like flying monkeys?  No?  Why not?  Why would bug spacers make flying bug spacecraft?  Bug design, yes; flying space bugs, maybe not so much.

I like the idea though.  (SotS1 wasn't a terrible game, except for the space dolphins - always kill the space dolphins)  The other thing that might work as a source of ideas is the Symbiots from Emperor of the Fading Suns (it's on GOG, but you might be able to find it some abandonware sites as well).  I think it's Matt Caspermeyer who figured out how to hack the executable to make the Symbiots build spaceships, which means they immediately start assaulting the Stigmata garrison, which means the players need to actively cooperate to try to hold them back from invading the rest of the map.  Made for a genuinely interesting alien threat.
« Last Edit: April 24, 2022, 10:51:33 AM by vok3 »
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Dazs

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Re: [0.95.1a] Hiver Swarm - V0.85a - 04/01/22
« Reply #130 on: April 24, 2022, 01:14:35 PM »

You pretty much summed up my love/hate relationship with those game. I have over a thousand hours played on SWOTS with a blend of vanilla and modded gameplay. Swots 2 is the only game I had pre-ordered based on my love of the first game. It sits on my HD awaiting for it to be fixed....

But as far as the mod goes:

When I looked at this a few weeks back, the Hive planets were spamming the market with requests for certain commodities, making it impossible to tell which of the core worlds actually needed those commodities.  (Unless you install Stellar Networks, which is a good mod but has a huge overhead so I don't use it)  Also I kept getting mission givers who wanted me to take stuff to Hiver planets.  Dude, no; they want to eat my liver.  If Hivers could be made into something more like the Remnant - completely disconnected from the human-world economy and society - that would solve my major problem with this mod. 
I have done my best to add as many "black lists" as I could to block various interactions. To make them 100% disconnected from the galaxy I believe I would have to disable the ability for them to colonize and invade. Those are core concepts to the mod but if there is a way to only have them interact with Nex with just those two features, I would if I could. Prv Starworks has a race of aliens, the Agni, which behave more like you describe and they are quite the challenge, you may want to check their mod out.

Also I actually kinda think the ships shouldn't be so explicitly bug-like.  When humans make spaceships, do they look like flying monkeys?  No?  Why not?  Why would bug spacers make flying bug spacecraft?  Bug design, yes; flying space bugs, maybe not so much.
I struggle with that over the months since I released the mod. I would say the number one complaint I see on discord is that players hate the sprite work. If you look at the Hiver ships in SWOTS they are armored bugs and my initial inspiration for Hiver Swarm was when I saw Tecris' and Xenoargh's sprites on Spiral Arms 2. I have added some non-bug but still non-vanilla ships since then to fill out their roster so I am not opposed to the idea of non-bug ships.

I have learned a lot about sprite making and kit bashing since I released JYD and Hiver Swarm. I have updated several blurry mess JYD sprites since then but hesitate to change those initial bug Hiver designs simply because I really like them. Personally I still think their sprite work is freaky awesome (I only re-colored them to have a cohesive theme with both their art) but I also know that art is, by nature, subjective.

I'll take a pass at releasing an alternate addon that replaces those bug sprites for players like yourself that dislike them but it may be awhile. I have another faction mod just released on the Modding forum for testing and I am sure that will take up my foreseeable free time as I tweak and tune that one.

I like the idea though.  (SotS1 wasn't a terrible game, except for the space dolphins - always kill the space dolphins)  The other thing that might work as a source of ideas is the Symbiots from Emperor of the Fading Suns (it's on GOG, but you might be able to find it some abandonware sites as well).  I think it's Matt Caspermeyer who figured out how to hack the executable to make the Symbiots build spaceships, which means they immediately start assaulting the Stigmata garrison, which means the players need to actively cooperate to try to hold them back from invading the rest of the map.  Made for a genuinely interesting alien threat.

I always found the Liir a bit smug and rarely allied with them so I get that. I am an old school gamer but I am unaware of Emperor of the Fading Sun but I will certainly check it out.

Dazs

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v0.9 released today.

It is full of player requested graphical updates (most are optional) and some balance changes that *should* make Hivers more aggressive.
There is a new spoiler linked image on the OP that shows all the optional replacement graphics included in the download as an embedded RAR.

Changelog in the RAR and posted on the forum main page has all the details and instructions to install the optional graphics



Dazs

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Quick oopsie minor update. When I looked over the Beetle replacement sprite on the white background on the forum OP, I noticed that I must have accidently ran the eraser across the bottom when I was designing it. I did a quick fix and replaced the graphic in the embedded RAR and on the forum OP picture. So if you downloaded 0.9 previous to this post and want to use the updated ship graphics just re-download and re-install the "Replacement Ships.rar" for the fixed graphic.

Sorry about that!

Dazs

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v0.95 release today - Save Game compatible with version 0.9

Two new ships, four new optional replacement ship sprites added to the imbedded RAR, a new weapon, some base graphic updates and some error corrections. As always, the Changelog has the details and is posted on the Forum OP as well as included in the RAR.

Doing my best to fix past mistakes and update early graphics. I do hope you enjoy the changes and please contact me on the forum or in discord if you have any comments or suggestions. I want this faction mod to be a challenge without being an eyesore :)

nukularpower

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I dig the new sprites.  Very cool
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