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[xenoargh]

So many builds in just a couple of days.

Well, but trivial builds; the only important one this week was 13.  This is just balance-pass stuff, or "oops I forgot to test X".  I tend to do that a lot, and I like fixing it before I forget about it; it beats setting down long bug lists that I never actually fix.

There is a big difficulty limit between the hedgmon tech miners to the assault fleet...I might as well play it. Maybe some more intermediary fleet sizes?

Assault fleets are, short of the Station fleets, the biggest in the mod right now.  Attack, Defense and Privateer fleets are considerably more bite-sized, but are a big step up from Mining / Tech fleets.

On the battle map size... yeah, that's one of the things I'd really like- I have no idea how arbitrary that limit is or how big of a deal it'd be to change it, and 60K is plenty huge for Vanilla, so I've never bothered asking

Anyhow, time for me to do the whole pumpkin thing, hope to see you up against a Station fleet soon

[Debido]

Can't say I've seen any privateer, attack, defence fleets yet. Did see them in previous builds. They're probably around somewhere.

What I really want to do is grab some eagles and give them some megabeams. They're very low FPS/CPU intensity.

I'm not sure if you intended to give the eagles medium mounts, cause with the large mounts they're awesome for their price.

[xenoargh]

I definitely intended that.  The Black Eagles are meant to be pretty close to the top of the heap, cruiser-wise.  I think the BE/Eagle/Falcon line makes reasonable sense, in terms of power; all three together are pretty synergistic.

BTW, Black Eagles usually do quite well with Dual Slammers; no Flux cost, if you go with a heavy shield build to tank, they're better than either Megabeams or Heavy Plasma Cannons, in terms of DPS-before-shield-failure, and have great range.  Just make sure they have good PD, and remember that they're still just Cruisers, not true Battleships; a Macuahuitl will pwn one pretty fast when it does the Nuclear Death Blossom dance if you aren't careful, even with late-game buffs.

OK... definitely bedtime lol.

[Demonocolips]

alright i love the expansion of the games systems with this mod but i have some issues.

i do not get experince unless i absolutely win an engagment.
even if i kill 99.9999% of a fleet if even a single ship gets away i dont get salvage cash or experience most of the time i lose money in these cases.

actually thats the big one. other than that i dont have any major complaints (other then i am terrible at this game).

oh another thing just a small bug my hermes class ships when on autopilot cycles the drones continuously

[xenoargh]

Are you playing with Alpha 16?  I think most of that got fixed last night while I watched Debido's stream

[Demonocolips]

well that makes sense  i just downloaded it a couple days ago set everything up to work and left it to the weekend to play around with buts it's in a newer version

k downloading newest version 

[Taishar]

First of all I would like to say awesome mod...Im hooked and Im just scratching the surface of what can be an infinite bit of re-playability.  Im having just one issue and this may just be a configuration issue on my end.  I am unable to see the makeup of any fleet but my own while flying around space.  I can see their engine burn and the slots available but no ship models.  Anyone encountered this?  Right now im taking on fleets based on size and hoping I get lucky   There has been some rude awakenings in the process

[Nanao-kun]

First of all I would like to say awesome mod...Im hooked and Im just scratching the surface of what can be an infinite bit of re-playability.  Im having just one issue and this may just be a configuration issue on my end.  I am unable to see the makeup of any fleet but my own while flying around space.  I can see their engine burn and the slots available but no ship models.  Anyone encountered this?  Right now im taking on fleets based on size and hoping I get lucky   There has been some rude awakenings in the process

That's intentional.

[Taishar]

Great now I can stop obsessing about it.  Thanks!

[xenoargh]

I'll probably put out another build sometime over the next few days;  couple of things I want to get done first:

1.  Get the "transporter beam" concept working.  Boarding devices for all, and all that jazz.
2.  I'd like to try out the healing weapon concept.

3.  Do some stuff in regards to fighter balance.  

I.E., deal with the Glaug's fighters being really OP (still) and take a look at the whole situation there.  

I feel like the factions are very unbalanced in terms of massed fighters; probably the player's best bet is to mass up a bunch of Gnawlers and Daggers and Flyters and enough flight decks to keep them in motion; I think that is the ultimate unbreakable combo atm, even moreso than OP flagships + OP rest-of-fleet, especially if you have a couple of wings of Boarding Shuttles in that mix.  

Why Flyters, I hear you ask?  Don't they suck?  Yes, they suck, until you get them in large enough numbers... and then they suddenly don't suck, because their missile spam covers the battlefield like a moving, intelligent minefield, utterly wrecking any fighters dumb enough to try and engage, let alone move through, and it nullifies most missile / rocket / torpedo / bombs.  The only faction that can sorta-kinda counter it is the Hegemony, which (ironically) is unable to do so for a meaningful amount of time because the Falcatas, unlike the Condors or Launchers or whatnot, only have one deck, due to an oversight by Yours Truly that I fixed this evening.  

Thoughts on solving this include further nerfs for the Glaug's armor regen, specifically for fighters and drones, so that it's just barely there and can be whittled down, and the other biggie, introducing a weapon that I've often wanted:  a Small-mount, single-launch Pilum- something small ships can carry that gives them AOE vs. missiles and fighters, with low ammo but each shot is pretty useful and the range would mean first shot in (kind of like Phoenix missiles on F-14s).

That, and I think one faction or more might get a slow-moving turret-with-engine concept fighter, mounting something nasty and AOE- a Flak Gun or Light Mortar or two.  Nothing heavy like a Millennium or a Hephaestus, of course, although a dedicated beam-bolt fighter for Tritachyon might be interesting (a beam-bolt PD in general is interesting, imo, as a LMG replacement that doesn't run out of ammo but costs some flux and does Energy damage).

In general, I'm thinking that fighters designed to kill other fighters and rocket spam in non-interceptor roles might be nice.  The Faction balance in regards to this also needs further looking-at; Hegemony's probably fixed, with the Falcata actually having the two decks it was supposed to + the Cruiser with a deck that's on-tap making it complete.  The Independents might actually have to give up the Launcher and give it to somebody else, if the Heron ever makes it into the mod; the Pirates feel like they need something to give their fighters some decent killing power vs. other fighters, but have reasonable deck support with Condors and Dachshunds, Exigency feels pretty good in that respect and I think the Punk Junkers are about right atm; their Squires are murderous evil but they can't quite do giant waves of doom because they don't have enough decks to keep it going; in player hands, though...  

Anyhow, as usual, balance comments will be taken into account, so feel free to tell me what you'd really like buffed / nerfed on fighters.

[Draginea]

Do you think you will ever make a tank based faction sometime in the distant future? If there is one i can see massive potential for fun.

[xenoargh]

I could see doing a faction like that, where all the ships are essentially built around a huge turret with small support weapons and have tank-like designs, but I don't have the art for it

[xenoargh]

I think that Hegemony vs. Glaug fighter balance is now something like rational, but could be better.

The Broadsword, which was like a crappy-but-fast light-interceptor version of the Gladius, has been re-purposed, but that's still evolving.  I think what's going to happen with it is that it's going to have a pair of missiles that are direct counters to stuff like Flyters, being fast and really decently guided and reasonably powered (two-hit light-fighter kill) but low-RoF and ammo, so they're really useful in the interceptor role but lack stamina.  I tried arming them with a pair of Light Mortars, but that really didn't cut it, at least on forward mounts; a pair of Flak Cannons actually worked OK-ish, but I'm not entirely happy with them in that role, it just feels too weird.

The Warthog, which apparently went missing from the mod entirely at some point, is returning, although differentiating it from the Gladius has proven to be pretty tricky; basically the Warthog's tougher and slower and packs HE, the Gladius packs Kinetic, they're like peanut butter and chocolate, in theory, but I think they need to be differentiated further.  I'm thinking the Warthog gets a Light Mortar on the turret so that it can clear limited amounts of missile spam; that might make it a bit special, vs. the Gladius, which is entirely focused forwards.

Anyhow, still working on all of that; I've also updated their paintjobs to be a little more uniform with the Hegemony general brownish tones and themes (yes, I know Hegemony in general is pretty inconsistent, given their militaristic theme, but meh, given the way the art for all of the early stuff in the mod came together, it's a wonder it's not even more incoherent than it is, really).

Anyhow, here are the edited Hegemony fighter sprites; I think they look much more uniform in colors and tones without having lost their uniqueness in terms of form and functional bits.

[xenoargh]

A few things, development-wise:

1.  I will be finally making UniversalSpawnPoint.java a little less like trying to read a technical manual written in a foreign language for the sake of other people who are interested in how development of a simple campaign meta-game works and all that.  I remember struggling to get through Zaphide's code in Exerelin, which is nicely-commented for the most part, so I can't even imagine the horrors UniversalSpawnPoint creates for people trying to read it. 

It's not as sexy as the AIs apparently are, based on the amount of PMs and bugs caught and all that (btw, thanks again everybody, you're all awesome for pointing out the bugs and cruft in my logic), but if anybody asked me which part was actually harder to write, I'd honestly say that UniversalSpawnPoint was, and I think it's stable enough that it can be cleaned up. 

It and SectorGen.java are pretty much the whole meta-game, other than the DialogPlugins (which are quite nicely commented, because I wasn't quite so darn busy at that point) that facilitate player interaction and I realize it's pretty hard to read right now if you aren't me, so I'll be commenting it properly and cleaning up the Advance() logic so that it's not quite so hard to poke at it, for those who are inclined to learn more about how to build meta-game structure and all that.

2.  I think it's high time to organize the data a little more rationally and do some cleanup on the assets.  For example, certain ships have been assigned to <insert faction> for ages, but they don't even vaguely match up, color-wise, or feel like they're part of a theme... but, more importantly (to me at least, as the coder-person) the Vanilla data's still mixed up with non-Vanilla data in spots and the whole thing is really horribly organized. 

This has been a growing problem, as I add more Stuff... and I think it's about time to actually organize this mess, especially now that we can have comment lines in CSVs so that I can label stuff clearly (i.e., #HEGEMONY FIGHTERS, #GLAUG CRUISERS, etc., etc.).

All of this may sound ridiculously pedantic, but it's not; I've found in the past that when projects get to a certain point, size-wise, clean organization gets more and more important.  I keep not finishing certain things because I'm like, "ugh, I'll have to wade into that mess again", lol.

-------------
Anyhow, none of this effects the immediate timeline for the release I'd like to get done this week, which will basically just cover a few more AI speedups (order-of-operations stuff and a few other minor things) and putting in the "boarding transporter" and "healing ray" stuff, both of which are pretty light-n-fluffy fun projects. 

The process of getting the Factions looking a little less hodge-podge (well, except where they should look hodge-podge- the Pirate and Independents will likely remain in their current state, because it fits their lore; we're mainly talking Hegemony and Tritachyon here) can be done in small doses, same with commenting the code better in the core stuff.  So no giant delays or whatever, I don't currently see any show-stopper bugs.  I'll probably hold off on major new initiatives while I get through this part, though.

[xenoargh]