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[Wyvern]

Well, I've tossed up a bug report thread for this. Hopefully someone can figure out why it's breaking, but I'm currently not seeing any obvious cause.

[Wyvern]

Ah-hah! I figured it out (after much trial and error): The reason it works for you but not for me is that the OSes have different file list orders. There's a "hcok_ka_bruterifle_shot_old.proj" in the mod, with the same id specified in the file as is used by all of the net-type guns.*

If the load order comes up with the old version being used, Starsector crashes. If it comes up with the new version being used, then everything works fine.

The solution, then, is to delete that old file - then poof, no more crashes.

* Interestingly, there also exists a "hcok_ka_bruterifle_shot_lrg.proj", but it's unused: the large net gun still uses the same projectile spec as the medium and the small.

[Wyvern]

So, going to go with bits of feedback based on where I'm at in the run - this is not a comprehensive analysis, just commentary on things I've used or fought.

• Ranges are much better now! However, I'd suggest considering making the Seshat Systems range bonus not apply to PD weaponry or Safflower-type hulls.
• The Skin of Heka hullmod does not, in fact, occupy a logistical slot as its description claims. (Edit: And, given the example of the new Lion's Guard hulls, I'm not sure it needs to.) It does block Solar Shielding, though, so it might be worth adding a possible s-mod bonus to increase the protection from hyperstorms, coronae, etc. to 100%.
• The Standard, Elite, and Attack variants of the Ammit are all missing DTC/ITU, making them significantly weaker than a player-outfitted Ammit. I'd also suggest including Stabilized Shields on at least most variants.

Edit:

• For some reason my Ammit is acting like it has S-Modded Integrated Point Defense AI, with all small energy weaponry firing on missiles. (Spoilers: It does not have that s-modded.) This is a trait I can work with now that I know that it's there, but it is kinda weird and not actually described in either of its built-ins. (Double-checked, and this is not a bug from another mod; the Ammit just does this out of the box.)
• Several weapons would benefit from using the new 'USE_LESS_VS_SHIELDS' tag from the vanilla Mining Blaster. Offhand I'd suggest putting it on the Amphora and Furnace series weapons.

[King Alfonzo]

Many thanks for the feedback and criticism Wyvern and Pesci! I'll get to work on that this weekend, fix those bugs, have a stab at rebalancing.

Current thoughts are:
Furnaces: Make the original shot Fragmentation, and the explosion HE, and see if there's a 'dangerous' tag I can work with.
Heavy Urns: Have a solid look as to what the projectiles are doing, make them less flux efficient and have a longer cooldown

Weapons in general
Ma'at to remain unchanged (I really wanted those to be a lot better with expanded mags), Ka'at range get a nerf to magazine size and a stronger restriction on burst size. Also have a look at the fancy new tags that exist, see if I can use those.

Ammit system
Fixthe system so that it only makes smalls back into pd if you have LPDAI s-modded in (right now it only checks if you have the hullmod installed, a la the previous version of the game)

Skin of Heka: S-mod that boosts the terrain bonus to 100%, remove the blurb about the logistical slot.

(Also Nerf Remnant Attack lasers amongst other things, but the HMI update is a little ways off. I need to make a certain thing in it spookier. As well as fix the mystery issue of multiple ships spawning for no reason.

[Wyvern]

I'm just going to drop a quick counterpoint here RE: Hungering Furnace Cannon & Furnace Penetrator:

Hungering Furnace Cannon: as a large energy dedicated anti-armor weapon, it's in direct competition with the vanilla Tachyon Lance... a competition which, in my opinion, it loses, even on Kemet hulls with their reduced beam ranges. (Except maybe in context of weapon turrets left under AI control, where the Tachyon Lance can have issues with keeping a burst on-target.)

Furnace Penetrator: I've got one ship that's getting good use out of one of these; a Hapi-class frigate. However, that is with me editing the mod to add the USE_LESS_VS_SHIELDS tag to the weapon, without which the variant basically just does not work under AI control. On larger Kemet ships, however, the Furnace Penetrator is quite quickly outclassed by the vanilla Heavy Blaster.

That said, if Pesci is correct about there being some sort of damage-multiplication effect going on with multiple darts detonating at once, that should probably be toned down or even removed entirely; my analysis is specifically for the case of including one or two of these things as specialized anti-armor weaponry, while Pesci seems to be going all-in on stacking large numbers of furnace guns.

[Wyvern]

Ammit system
Fixthe system so that it only makes smalls back into pd if you have LPDAI s-modded in (right now it only checks if you have the hullmod installed, a la the previous version of the game)

Ah, the system's supposed to turn off PD use of weapons while active, and then turn it back on? Then the test should probably start with "if (hasipdai" instead of "if ((hasipdai = true)" - the latter code will just set hasipdai to true all the time, rather than actually testing the variable.

You're correct that this also needs to be checking for ipdai being s-modded. But as currently implemented, the end result is that, with the system not active, all small energy weapons will act as PD, even if ipdai is not installed.

And even if you fix that, you'd get the weird state of, say, PD Lasers getting to stay PD-tagged... unless the player s-mods IPDAI, in which case the script would strip the PD tag while the system was active. (Since the current implementation allows non-charge-based PD weaponry to remain PD-tagged.)

Additionally, this behavior is not mentioned in the ship system or ship description, and it really should be; disabling PD usage of weaponry while the system is active is a significant and noteworthy drawback (and may be a contributing factor to the trouble I had with using an Ammit against the Ziggurat, where the Ammit would just stop firing at incoming motes after a bit.)

[King Alfonzo]

That said, if Pesci is correct about there being some sort of damage-multiplication effect going on with multiple darts detonating at once, that should probably be toned down or even removed entirely; my analysis is specifically for the case of including one or two of these things as specialized anti-armor weaponry, while Pesci seems to be going all-in on stacking large numbers of furnace guns.

Thanks for the feedback on that, but I'm still going to give them a nerf to magazine size. Amusingly enough there isn't a multiplicative damage from having multiple needles, the problem is that the intial HE explosion strips armour, and then the follow-up fragmentation burst has a significantly powerful knock to it.

If you're looking to create some spooky stuff in the deep reaches, the Covenant already have things nearly as frightening as Seele in their elite fleets, a couple of those recolored leading a fleet of one of your Derelict factions would make a nasty surprise (especially if they split like the Mess).  You're probably not trying to combine all your mods but I was thinking, what if a few of those Pharaoh ships got infected by the Mess nanovirus?  I'm surprised there's not a special bounty in Covenant bars about "The Flood" or suchlike.

This sounds amazing. It probably won't be a one to one Mess, but a Flood Fleet as a one-off bounty would be hilarious.

I was thinking with the Furnace needles, you said in a previous post it was unfeasible to make the original shot Fragmentation because the AI wouldn't know to shield against it.  If there's not a tag to make them behave right, maybe make the original shot Energy and the explosion HE?

I fear that would make the weapon far too generalist, as you could have decent utility against both shielded and and unshielded enemies.

I feel like the primary imbalance with the Heavy Urns is that they shoot so FAR.  It would be fine if a heavy battlecruiser with six kinetic energy mounts could win the flux war inside its actual firing range, but the Heavy Urns can hit things that I can't even see on my screen.  If the projectile faded out after its listed range it would be far more reasonable.

Fair cop on that, their range has been suitably nerfed.

A few more little tweaks I forgot to mention last night:

I'll drop the sounds a touch, and give the Net a bit of a buff to range. The way it currently works it won't properly explode at different ranges, but it should crack close to fighters to begin with.

Regarding the Ma'at weapon series...

Good to hear about that, I really did want them to synergise well with Expanded Mags.

...With Mining Blasters or Tachyon Lances, there will be moments when you aren't firing your weapons.  With Hungering Furnaces, your magazines will refill in the time it takes your ship to vent...A big enough Hungering Furnace explosion penetrates all walls and indestructible structural segments of stations...

I think the nerf to magazine size and reload speed should clamp down a touch on a lot of these issues. One thing I realized is exactly how big the explosion from embedded needles actually is, so I'm dropping them down to something reasonable.

[King Alfonzo]

The Wyvern/Network Pesci Inspired Update
Many thanks guys!

Version 0.04b
Changes:

Weapons:
-Furnace line now have a lower magazine size, a longer recharge rate, are less flux efficient, and explosion size has been reduced, now also has fancy AI tags
-Heavy Urn Pulsers are now the right range, and are less flux efficient
-Net Launchers have a longer range, and the Crash projectile has been removed
-Kiln and Pot sounds reduced slightly

Hullmods:
Skin of Heka no longer falsely claims to occupy a logistics slot, and can now be s-modded to completely erase damage taken from terrain. Different ship ranges will also gain different, subtle bonuses.

Misc
Fixed a couple of Variant issues
Fixed the Lapis ship systems to be clear on what they do, and how they interact with IPDAI.
DOWNLOAD HERE

Again, give me a yell if anything explodes, and once again many thanks to Wyvern and Network Pesci for the criticism and feedback!

[Wyvern]

Ooh, neat! It was just about time for me to be starting a new game, too.

RE: Furnace explosion damage: I wonder if the escalating damage Pesci was reporting is just the vanilla armor damage calculations? Even (or perhaps especially?) against fully-stripped armor, ten 140 damage hits is going to be significantly less effective than a single 1400 damage hit... Depends on exactly how it works, of course, and I haven't dug far enough into the code to figure that out. (Clarification: This isn't me suggesting anything, exactly, just musing on how things might work to produce observed effects.)

Edit: Welp, found my first bug: some built-in hullmods now drop as learnable from exploration content. So far I've acquired Skin of Heka, Skin of Netjer, and Streamlined Fighter Coordinator.

[King Alfonzo]

Whoops! Thanks for the catch on that.

Version 0.04b
-HOTFIX; Fixed built-in hullmods being discoverable

DOWNLOAD HERE

[Wyvern]

Another maybe-bug: The s-mod bonus for the Ushabti's Skin of Heka hullmod includes "projectiles move 2000% faster". I'm going to guess that was maybe meant to be 200%? At 2000%, it results in display glitches when it fires things...
Edit: On further investigation, this isn't just a display glitch; weapons with that much speed boost will sometimes shoot straight through a target without hitting it.

Edit: and a balance commentary: the sustained DPS on the small and medium net-class weapons is painfully low, to the point that I've not been able to find a use for the things beyond an occasional "Well I need something else on this Kemet hull to help boost its energy flux reduction, and this thing has a basically-negligible flux cost so it won't take away from the weapons I actually want to have firing..."

[King Alfonzo]

Another maybe-bug: The s-mod bonus for the Ushabti's Skin of Heka hullmod includes "projectiles move 2000% faster". I'm going to guess that was maybe meant to be 200%? At 2000%, it results in display glitches when it fires things...

Well I'm an idiot.

UPDATE 0.04d

-Fixed S-mod bonus for Kermes range; projectile speed is improved by 20%, not 2000%.
-Upped the rate of fire and ammo recharge of Net weaponry, to be more useful but still bursty.

DOWNLOAD HERE.

[Egren]

I would strongly suggest you keep a complete changelog (inside spoiler tags! think of the poor mousewheels!) in the in the first post instead of piecemeal throughout the thread like you've done so far.

The art is absolutely gorgeous btw. I love it.

[Uther Phobos]

So after some initial reservations over their rather unique weapon mechanics and their... exceptional fashion sense, the Covenant has grown quite a bit on me. But i encountered two (sort of) issues.

One, for some reason Net weapons don't seem to be able to fire beyond their base range for me, the projectiles detonating once they reach that point. Which is a problem as the AI won't understand this and keeps trying to hit things that aren't actually in range.

Two, when playing with Progressive S-Mods, the 0 cost on the Skin of Heka means upgrading it costs nothing whatsoever. Also, it shows up in the ship editor for Missions, giving a free -30% energy damage. I'm not exactly complaining about this, but balance wise it probably shouldn't work that way.

[Maelstrom]

26415748 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at data.scripts.weapons.HCOK_spikeEffect.onHit(HCOK_spikeEffect.java:22)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.entities.BallisticProjectile.setDidDamage(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.entities.BallisticProjectile.notifyDealtDamage(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.E.super.O0OO.o00000(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.E.oOOO.super(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.E.oOOO.super(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advanceInner(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatEngine.advance(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatState.traverse(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
        at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)

got this crash using the meme gun from fuzzy pack that shoots all the random ordinance, think its called the garbage chute. Hope this helps

using the latest version of HCOK