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[Debido]

Ok, I may just have found a bug...a good kind of bug. The Hegemony of Man Asteroid Miners - I can board their Valkyrie ships again...and again....and again...and again. After the battle is over they still exist in their fleet, but I have a copy of them in my fleet...hm. Asteroid Miner milking1

[darkova]

i was just wondering when does the storage station make an appearence?

or is it implemented in the mod at all?

[xenoargh]

There isn't one, currently, but I don't see any reason why I can't make that accessible.  I'd like to do it generically, though, so that players can access it from any Station.

[Cruis.In]

Hi everyone, thanks to the authors for the wonderful mods which people enjoy. I am in the market for a mod, as I like the game but it just doesn't have the complete depth of the upcoming finished game in the future.

I only have time to go with one mod at a time, can anyone who has played this and Ironclad point out the differences in each? Pros cons? Thanks!

[drakhades]

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but playing as the indies it's very, very hard.   

also there seems to be about 10% fleets of tiny size, but everything else are huge sized fleets.    so when i try to attack anything, i end up getting nukes blowing up all my ships before engaging any enemies

and there seems to be no ship capture any more?

also, maybe just because I'm stuck with small fleets now, but it's very hard to destroy some ships (like the glaug frigates, taking 5 min of 3 ships focusing on them) but very easy to destroy others like tri-tachion frigates (literally 2 seconds of 1 ship). 

one thing i"m glad about is using a small amount of $$$ it takes to repair your ships now.   it used to be soooo tedious.  so glad that's figured out.

[TimeDiver]

Got a couple of questions (and possible bug reports?) regarding some of the hullmods:

1. 'Armor Analysis' vs. 'Energy Pump': The former gives 2x multipliers to both ballistic/missile/energy weapons and beam-based weaponry (thus 4x multiplier for some weapons?), so unless those three categories don't stack with beams for damage purposes, the latter hullmod (3x boost to beam weaponry only) seems... questionable.

2. The 'Heavy Armor', 'Blast Doors', and 'Reinforced Bulkheads' hullmods: are those intentionally providing increased armor/hull damage reduction, in addition to the increases to their respective numerical stats? Why not a further increase to the armor/hull stat multipliers instead? Something to do with the critical hit system? Or something else?

3. 'Stabilized Shields' is missing the 'ship.getShield() != null' parameter for 'isApplicableToShip(ShipAPI ship)'... which allows it to be equipped on ships without shields, or with a phase cloak.

4. 'Front Shield Emitter' has a seemingly inexplicable flat +0.25f modifier to shield damage taken in addition to its 50% shield DR factor... I'm at a loss as to rationalizing that odd modifier.

Addendum:

1. Both the 'Strike' variant of the Hyperion and the Cleaver (no variant name, assumed 'Standard') have both 'Armor Regeneration' and 'Neutronium Plating'.

I seem to recall the aforementioned hullmod combination being borderline/rather OP, and (mostly) removed as of build 10.

2. Do both variants of the Tempest really need to mount 'Front Shield Emitter', 'Hardened Shields' and 'Stabilized Shields' simultaneously (multiplicative 75% + 50% + 20% shield DR)?

Suggestion (re: what I did on my PC) - make equipping 'Hardened Shields' and 'Front Shield Emitter' on the same ship mutually exclusive.

[drakhades]

i think all these extreme modifiers need to be axed.  As it stands now, only ships who have ALL the multiplicative bonuses stand a chance during combat.  vs the AI ships who have them.   

[Debido]

I finally won the game on Jan 8, 206! All I had to do was wait long enough for everyone to kill my enemies. At least the credits were interesting, never knew Vacuum was the first procedural mod for SS and has been in the works for 2 years.

[xenoargh]

1. 'Armor Analysis' vs. 'Energy Pump': The former gives 2x multipliers to both ballistic/missile/energy weapons and beam-based weaponry (thus 4x multiplier for some weapons?), so unless those three categories don't stack with beams for damage purposes, the latter hullmod (3x boost to beam weaponry only) seems... questionable.

Energy Pump has a real point on ships using High Energy Focus or on ships focusing on short-range beam PD or Frigates armed with relatively short-ranged, high-damage beam weapons (Scythus et al).  I don't think they're redundant, it's just that Energy Pump is much more specialized.

2. The 'Heavy Armor', 'Blast Doors', and 'Reinforced Bulkheads' hullmods: are those intentionally providing increased armor/hull damage reduction, in addition to the increases to their respective numerical stats? Why not a further increase to the armor/hull stat multipliers instead? Something to do with the critical hit system? Or something else?

Basically, these have some reductions in them that make them a bit more attractive; raw numbers (i.e., merely adding on more hitpoints / armor points) are a lot less effective, especially given the changes to Automated Repair Unit.  In the case of Blast Doors, it makes that Hull Mod quite attractive for what it does, which it previously wasn't.

3. 'Stabilized Shields' is missing the 'ship.getShield() != null' parameter for 'isApplicableToShip(ShipAPI ship)'... which allows it to be equipped on ships without shields, or with a phase cloak.

IIRC I did that because it provides a little bit of Hard Flux drain.  Kind of pointless now, I agree.  Fixed.

4. 'Front Shield Emitter' has a seemingly inexplicable flat +0.25f modifier to shield damage taken in addition to its 50% shield DR factor... I'm at a loss as to rationalizing that odd modifier.

Basically, this is a smallish penalty for conversion, instead of getting the full conversion benefits of a fixed-forward shield.  All fixed-forward shields are twice as efficient as Omni shields, and I wanted a little penalty in here for conversion to make it a little less attractive.  The bonus with Hardened Shields is supposed to stack with that.

1. Both the 'Strike' variant of the Hyperion and the Cleaver (no variant name, assumed 'Standard') have both 'Armor Regeneration' and 'Neutronium Plating'.

Thanks for catching that Fixed.

2. Do both variants of the Tempest really need to mount 'Front Shield Emitter', 'Hardened Shields' and 'Stabilized Shields' simultaneously (multiplicative 75% + 50% + 20% shield DR)?

I don't think that the second Variant is actually used anywhere.  What I really ought to do is change the names of all of the Vanilla Hulls, so that they're no longer showing Variants that aren't ever really used...

I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but playing as the indies it's very, very hard.

Some Factions are harder than others, but bear in mind:

1.  You're really supposed to make your early money via mining, not fighting the Factions.  Wait until you've leveled up a bit doing easy runs.
2.  If fighting the Glaug or Exigency,  you need to be prepared to counter their special powers.
3.  Running away is often the best plan, if you're outmatched.  Bring a starter fleet up against something it can't handle?  Retreat.
4.  To capture anything, you need to have Marines on board your fleet, or bring Boarding Shuttles.

I finally won the game on Jan 8, 206! All I had to do was wait long enough for everyone to kill my enemies.

Yeah, you'll have that happen right now.  In the future, that's going to change; Alpha and all that.

I only have time to go with one mod at a time, can anyone who has played this and Ironclad point out the differences in each? Pros cons? Thanks!

They're totally different experiences.  Ironclads is basically a very complete TC in the traditional sense, with a very different universe.  It's low on programmer gameplay stuff, but is really high on content and flair.  It's also Nintendo-hard to start out

This is more of an "experimental" mod; lots of crazy gameplay changes just for the sake of finding new ways to have fun.  It's still Alpha, in the sense that a lot of planned features aren't in the mod yet, but I think that this time I'll get it all working before it gets broken / obsoleted again

[xenoargh]

Ok, I may just have found a bug...a good kind of bug. The Hegemony of Man Asteroid Miners - I can board their Valkyrie ships again...and again....and again...and again. After the battle is over they still exist in their fleet, but I have a copy of them in my fleet...hm. Asteroid Miner milking1

Very weird, but it sounds like they're somehow invulnerable to the boarding effect.  Probably a mismatch in their Variant name or something.  Will take a look at that.

For the next major build, I think I'll look at the issues of boarding a Hulk and getting it working again; I think that will resolve a lot of potential bugs with the Boarding Shuttles in general.

[xenoargh]

It appears that Boarding Shuttles (and boarding weapons, as a general concept) converting Hulks may actually work.  Still getting the kinks worked out, but I am fairly certain it's going to work.  This is pretty exciting; I could get rid of the RNG boarding stuff entirely and do it all in-battle.

Also working on repair and re-arming drones that will seek out friendly ships that need repairs and repair them.

[Sundog]

This boarding shuttle stuff is really impressive. I never would've guessed something like that could be done. 

Also working on repair and re-arming drones that will seek out friendly ships that need repairs and repair them.

You might consider looking at my ICE maintenance drones as they do this too. It's all crammed in their AI script.

[xenoargh]

If I have time, I'll take a look; I think I've got a cool way to do it though, as I've already figured out that yes, you can get weapons to fire on Whatever, so I think that I can get a fairly cool-looking visual working for this as well as an AI that is pretty smart about finding things to heal

Anyhow, I'm really looking forward to doing boarding this way; I think it solves a bunch of issues with boarding in general, and it's a lot more dynamic and interesting.  It also opens up the possibilities of making a boarding weapon that can be used to board ships in the middle of combat, which could get really interesting.

I'm not 100% done with the ship AI for this; amongst other issues, the boarding shuttles probably need to stay out of firefights if they can.

I think that if I'm going to go this way, I need to make it suck up Marines and all that, too, which it currently doesn't bother with. 

[Chaos Farseer]

So, I played Vacuum for the first time (effectively; I'd started it once and wondered why my Omen exploded), and it's a weird experience. I'll definitely play until the end, but it's a weird experience right now.

I'm using build 10 as a Glaug player with mostly Exigency ships, and I'm trying to take on some Data-Mining fleets. In general, it seems nigh impossible to damage certain ships (including my own). Particularly one of the Exigency destroyers; it took a Conquest and 4 cruisers about 5 minutes to beat it to death. At the same time, I was using the Glaug missile frigate (the other option compared to the Death Frog at start) against a "Grey Fox", I think? It regenerated faster than I could do damage. I've been stacking armor and hull buffs, with regen whenever possible, and it seems like many enemy ships do the same. My ships currently aren't optimized for breaking heavy armor except for the Lashers with Phase Beams (most of the frigates are stuck with small ballistics) so battles involving enemy destroyers or larger are insanely tedious.

I find that kind of ironic when compared to your stated goals on the first page:
1.  Enhance the action side of the gameplay wherever practical, rewarding twitch over number stacking.
2.  Strongly differentiate ships, weapons, systems and hullmods in ways that give the player deeper choices and harder decisions.
It seems like anything with number stacking becomes nigh invincible. Twitch gameplay was only relevant in certain situations where the enemy had slow, high-damage projectiles.
I'm just wondering if all the regenerating armor / hull was an intended part of gameplay, I suppose. It's a completely different game, that's for sure, and it's not bad, it's just weird.

[xenoargh]

I'd say that the balance right now for those features, which are all very new, is still pretty flaky; this last update was so big that I just didn't have much time to playtest it out much and I usually nerf / buff after getting feedback  

That said, you're basically playing with the two most OP Factions atm, so I'm not really surprised by your experience

If you want a twitch challenge, the Hegemony or Independents are much more challenging, especially during the early game.  Flying a Scythus and trying to solo a Tech Miner fleet is a real challenge, for example.