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[Wyvern]

Hey MShadowy, first off I love your mod, definitely one of my favorite faction packs.

I made an account to ask about Tartarus' Siege Mode AI. I know from using search that it's been a bit of a problem child, so apologies for harping on it. From looking at the AI script, the only factor in activating it seems to be whether the shield extension would be beneficial at the time. This seems odd to me, as it's focusing on the least useful aspect of the system. It's a fairly slow line ship, an oft-referenced anvil, and as such should rarely be alone or in a position to be easily flanked; even then, it already has a large shield arc and good pd-coverage aft. The benefits of the mode seem to me to primarily be in the flux efficiencies and range boosts, and with that in mind it seems to me that the system should be active basically whenever non-pd weapons are active or it's taking more than chip-damage (taking more than 5% flux capacity in damage per second or something). Worrying about the speed loss shouldn't really factor into it much, it's not a ship that's designed to chase down or finish off enemies anyway, and would get toggled off when the weapons are no longer firing and it's safe to do so, anyway.

Unfortunately I don't know how to change this myself, because I'd love to figure out something that worked better.

So, as the person who wrote the siege mode AI (and the ship system): You're almost entirely right.

I suspect that you're underestimating the value of mobility... but it shouldn't be that hard to throw together a system AI that takes the opposite approach and just tries to turn on whenever it's fighting things and see how stupid that is in practice.

Since it's not otherwise clear from context, this is as-in "The AI will always do stupid things, but does it do stupid things that get it killed, or just stupid things that result in it not killing things?" Explicitly, this is not as in "this idea is stupid", because it isn't, and would absolutely be worth testing if the Siege Mode system is going to be sticking around.

...Which it might not: a number of Siege Mode's modifiers were intended to function in the context of the Tartarus having a number of universal slots, and needing to make energy weapons competitive with ballistic options. The current Tartarus instead has synergy slots, so there's no actual need for it to have a comprehensive set of energy-weapon-specific boosts from its ship system.

What would be a good system to give the ship instead, is still an open question (and one that - alongside the question of if Siege Mode should be replaced at all - is entirely up to MShadowy, of course.)

[Cas]

I certainly value mobility, at least from a tactical standpoint, I just put more weight on the Charybdis and Clades having a stable line to dance around; a line that Tartarus cruisers need to provide and that their Siege Mode system seems designed to do. I perhaps don't value mobility as much as I should from the idiot AI doing "stupid things that get it killed" standpoint that you referenced. Since you made the current iteration of it, I imagine you have more experience in how the AI actually handles changes to the decision loop and the unintended consequences that can arise. If the current iteration is the best that can reasonably be done without it becoming a bloated mess, that's fine. Obviously there's not much point devoting a lot of time to it if the system may change, anyway.

That being said, using aggressive captains on Tartarus ships, along with omni shield conversion (lowers arc to trigger Siege Mode much more reliably), Hardened Shields, Shield Modulation, and as much flux capacity as you can stuff in does the job. They'll stay on the front line due to aggressive, and the shield stacking gives them the staying power to hold it while the faster ships move in and out as needed.

I imagine you knew all that, I'm just posting it as a tip for the next person that comes in and searches for Siege Mode.

[Wyvern]

That's interesting, and I actually haven't played much with this stuff in quite some time - when I put together the system AI, I did attempt to make it a bit cleverer, but it didn't work out well... but I also don't recall the details of what all I tried. So the current implementation is heavily weighted on the side of 'don't use the system unless it's clearly the right call'.

If I were to iterate on Siege Mode for a 'modern' Tartarus, I'd probably make it work more like High Energy Focus: no downsides to activation, but limited charges/duration. At which point you could substitute in a much more aggressive system AI, since the penalty of making the 'wrong' call would just be not having that charge available later.

Maybe toss in a reduced base ship speed, and a hullmod that increases the zero flux speed boost (when actually at zero flux, does not apply to elite helmsmanship), to get a similar feel of something that's a bit slow in battle, but relatively quick to move between battles? That would probably be better, overall.

[MShadowy]

At the very least I'd say it's worth thinking over; aside from some updates to the ships graphics (which have not made it yet into the general release build) the Tartarus is one of the only ships of it's age that has seen few significant changes. Even with the changes to it's mount types it's functionally pretty much the same ship that it was when it was originally created, and a lot of that comes down to the ship system, which is admittedly a pretty defining feature of the ship. The only vessel that I think has seen fewer changes is the Seski, and that's largely because I haven't figured out how to make the ship system I wanted for it.

While I probably will not be reconsidering the Tartarus' overall function for the next release, I'll likely look at it after that, though at this point I'm absolutely unsure what I should do about it, if anything.

[Shogouki]

Are there any issues with activating this mod on a game that was already started without it?

[bishbashbosh]

Are there any issues with activating this mod on a game that was already started without it?

You can activate almost all faction mods mid game, but the faction won't spawn unless you manually "revive" the faction by giving them a market. The ships and weapons will be added to the game but there's won't be any market you can reliably buy them. (unless you play with nex, there is one market that'll have ships from all factions.)

[Supereor]

Hey!  Just wanted to let you know that the Upelluri, or the station defense drones employed by the Shadowyards star fortresses, can be ordered from black market manufacturers and deployed like regular ships.  Considering they have infinite deployment time, no deployment or maintenance costs, an average movement speed of 200+ units, absurd weapon range, and are extremely cheap to order and restore, I'm going to assume this wasn't intended

[MShadowy]

You're correct, it's not; giving it a look, it's probably a result of some missing tags (particularly "no_dealer"), which I have just fixed.

[Buggie]

You should know that the sra export ships/weapons for the persean league aren't spawning in their fleets, the persean league's faction file is using a wrong id for the export bps called ms_export_bp(i assume an old name?) when the actual name is sra_export_bp. There should also be a "knownWeapons" for the export bp so that the lockdowns start spawning.

Apologies if you were already aware of this.

[iambob]

Hello, I was wondering if you would know a solution to the crash I am having with Shadowyards?
It crashes upon making a new save with the mod enabled.


165058 [Thread-4] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.loading.LoadingUtils  - Loading CSV data from [DIRECTORY: /Applications/Starsector.app/Contents/Resources/Java/../../../mods/Nexerelin]
java.lang.RuntimeException: [ms_ninurta_Standard] is not a valid ship variant id
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.fleet.FleetMember.updateVariantIfNeeded(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.fleet.FleetMember.init(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.fleet.FleetMember.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.fleet.FleetMember.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignEngine.createFleetMember(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.DerelictShipEntityPlugin.readResolve(DerelictShipEntityPlugin.java:348)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.DerelictShipEntityPlugin.init(DerelictShipEntityPlugin.java:245)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CustomCampaignEntity.<init>(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.BaseLocation.addCustomEntity(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.procgen.themes.BaseThemeGenerator.addSalvage Entity(BaseThemeGenerator.java:1487)
   at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.procgen.themes.BaseThemeGenerator.addSalvage Entity(BaseThemeGenerator.java:1481)
   at data.scripts.util.MS_Utils.addDerelict(MS_Utils.java:229)
   at data.scripts.world.gigas.Gigas.generate(Gigas.java:152)
   at data.scripts.world.SHIGen.generate(SHIGen.java:22)
   at data.scripts.ShadowyardsModPlugin.initShadowyards(ShadowyardsModPlugin.java:157)
   at data.scripts.ShadowyardsModPlugin.onNewGame(ShadowyardsModPlugin.java:103)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager.o00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.title.TitleScreenState.dialogDismissed(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.N.dismiss(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.impl.o0oO.dismiss(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.if.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.k.buttonPressed(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.Ò00000(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.k.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.coreui.interfacesuper.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.o0OO.I.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.N.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.if.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.ui.interface.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.title.TitleScreenState.processInput(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.BaseGameState.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.super(Unknown Source)
   at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)


I have tried updating to the lastest version of sw, and tried renaming the variant file from 'ms_ninurta_standard' to 'ms_ninurta_Standard', but neither fixed the crash.
Forgive me if those are stupid ways to fix it, since I don't know much at all about Starsector modding, and was not able to figure out where the mod files referenced ms_ninurta_standard.

[jalthegar]

Its (argh) a great mod, its (aaaargh!) just a shame there's so much confusion between its and it's. So I went through the "descriptions" file and fixed it (and ONLY that, nothing else was changed). If that particular mistake is also a pet peeve of yours, feel free to place the corrected file in   wherever-you-installed-starsector\mods\Shadowyards\data\strings
Ah, and it seems I can't just attach a .csv file, so I've had to put it in an archive.

[Warnoise]

i dont know why but either th ai doesnt know how to use these ships properly or their ship loadout is bad. because every time i see them fight they always end up gettnig demolished by anything above a trash pirate fleet.

[MShadowy]

Hello, I was wondering if you would know a solution to the crash I am having with Shadowyards?
It crashes upon making a new save with the mod enabled.

I have tried updating to the lastest version of sw, and tried renaming the variant file from 'ms_ninurta_standard' to 'ms_ninurta_Standard', but neither fixed the crash.
Forgive me if those are stupid ways to fix it, since I don't know much at all about Starsector modding, and was not able to figure out where the mod files referenced ms_ninurta_standard.

It's a problem with one of the system gen files (specifically, Gigas;) it's been fixed in dev, but I've been held up on release because of new content I haven't had time to complete.

Its (argh) a great mod, its (aaaargh!) just a shame there's so much confusion between its and it's. So I went through the "descriptions" file and fixed it (and ONLY that, nothing else was changed). If that particular mistake is also a pet peeve of yours, feel free to place the corrected file in   wherever-you-installed-starsector\mods\Shadowyards\data\strings
Ah, and it seems I can't just attach a .csv file, so I've had to put it in an archive.

Thanks; I'll have to see how I can merge this into the existing csv (again, due to added content.) I'm normally pretty good at catching the difference between its and it's, but spreadsheets actually make it a little harder for me to catch most of the time.

i dont know why but either th ai doesnt know how to use these ships properly or their ship loadout is bad. because every time i see them fight they always end up gettnig demolished by anything above a trash pirate fleet.

I mean, I can give the ship fits a look, I guess? They usually seem to do alright, but they are pretty squishy under their shields, so it's easy for things going wrong to go really wrong for them.

[Argonaut]

Obligatory "looking forward to the 0.96 release" post. But really, i am!

[A_Random_Dude]

That mod wasn't even updated for 95.1. Chances are you'll have to wait a bit more.