Nice to get some feedback
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and I'll reply to it piecemeal.
In general though, the way I intended the faction to be played is with fragile heavy hitters/glass cannons being supported by a swarm of low dps support ships that focus on distracting and disabling enemy ships. With the Stress fighter being the stock support chaff necessary for most ships to operate successfully. Solo play with most ships in the lineup is supposed to be suboptimal by design, though I'm still not really sure this setup is a viable concept with my limited skills in tweaking the AI etc.
Also, in case you haven't tried it yet, the level 5 skill that enables you to place twice the amount of flux capacitors as normal on ships will make most gimp P9 ships really good.
The Sike is probably the best frigate in the faction (in the game?) to start with due to its incredible mobility, firepower and flux venting. Thanks god it's limited by the very short peak performance otherwise you would be able to take down fleet of cruisers just with it. It's not that great with the AI as i saw it being piloted extremely aggressively just to die stupidly to the first enemy. Also i'm a bit worried of the possibilities to make it a monster missile boat with the 3 universals, i haven't tried but it could ends up very broken.
I can easily prevent it from being a missile laden murderboat by making a missile gimping hull mod, on my to do list then
The Sike-M however is much more AI friendly thanks to the fortress shield. The missiles spam can be bothersome as it can lead to a lot of friendly fire, rockets should self destruct immediately after they run out of fuel. Another thing is that the Sike-M tend to hug very closely enemy targets (i think i heard missile only loadout caused this) and it prevent other allied ships to fire to not damage the Sike.
Also for some reasons sometimes it refuse to raise its shields against fighters, which lead an otherwise tanky frigate to die very fast.
Will think about changing the ship in a way so that it doesn't hug targets as much. Also, the residual missiles from missiles spam was supposed to be removed, but then I just kinda forgot about it since I never really suffered from it myself. Will set them on an appropriate timer though.
I haven't found a use for the Spore MK.I and MK.II, nor for the player or the AI. Way too fragile, way too expensive. As fighters? Yeah, probably. As frigates? Nope.
Well they can in theory act as good chasers for chasing down runners, I could modify the deployment costs to reflect this, but really, I personally just wanted to play around with a tiny ship. The Spore MkII is pretty effective in player hands when you hone your bombing skills though, and more importantly, it's a well armed go-cart!
Not much to say about the Mite hauler, it's indispensable for the cargo space but otherwise useless on the battlefield.
Working as intended!
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For the destroyers, there is no point taking the SL-t2 where you can have the infinitely superior SL-t3. The t2 usually lack the flux to properly use its twin large weapon (vanilla guns work quite well though) and you also must take the expanded shield hull mod as the standard 180° shield arc is usually a death sentence for a P9 ship.
The t3 however is much more balanced, the main gun still rock faces and the two small mounts can be used for a variety of roles. The main gun being built in and the original 360° shield leave quite a lot of OPs to make it quite a beast.
The SL-t2 gives you a choice in which heavy weapons to mount the T3 does not, and is a pretty decent long range support with the HIL setup, also with the previously mentioned capacitor skill and the new Raala blaster it turns into a pretty awesome murder machine towards frigates and destroyers.
The Cyz-C is tricky to use and somewhat unfair to the enemy. The phase emp can wreck any ships quite easily but it's not bug free as it happened to see the game freeze when i used the cloak, no error logs, just the game suddenly freezing and crashing. Also on some occasions the ecm cloak was damaging me, no idea why or how it happened. I'm not sure what the very short ranged P9 Taala laser is supposed to do either.
I'm fully aware that it is *** and I want to completely remake it but I don't know what to do with it really, maybe I should just remove it atm.
Cruiser wise, the Tick gained 2 launch bays, hurray? Not that much because it now become better than the dedicated Cimex carrier. Sure it's completely unarmed but the Cimex ain't' exactly very armed either. Plus more cargo, cheaper etc... It lack the long range support of its militarized variant but still fill extremely well its carrier role.
I made a doodoo, It's the Cimex that is supposed to have the extra flight decks
I'll change that asap, might up the damage on the cimex missile system too or change the tracking to hit engines instead, I just didn't want it to be OP. The Cimex drones are basically a continously refilling Stress figther wing without EMP though.
Couldn't properly use the Korlo-SKT. As the player flagship you can have a long range artillery platform that can cloak. In the hand of the AI however? It's a flying Pinata, incredibly vulnerable to everything, fighters and missiles especially will murder it instantly.
Korlo-SKT especially works much much better with Stress figthers as chaff and more tanky ships nearby. It also benefits greatly from the skill that doubles the amount of flux capacitors you can place.
The Kaala lancer isn't as worthless as the Korlo but is still a very hit or miss cruiser. It's quite incredible against big targets but utterly useless otherwise and while it's not as fragile as other P9 ships, it's still a glass cannon and the close range fight where it can perform will expose it to a lot of incoming fire.
It's sadly useless in computer hands due to AI inability to use the subsystem, but I intended it to be used carefully by the player to take out heavy hitters. I personally thinks it works good enough in the players hands but I might buff the armor or something if more thinks it's too fragile.
The Silverfish doesn't perform incredibly well either. I see the idea of "diving" past the enemy ship and quickly turning around to shell its engines. It share the same problem with a lot of P9 ships, it will fail a lot with the AI. Most of the time, the Silverfish use its "cloaked drive" but will stop just in front of the enemy ship rather than going behind it.
The AI can only use the silverfish semi-effectively if it has long-range weapons, any short-range weapons just makes it a suicide ship. It also gets boosted quite a lot if you have other ships to distract the enemy and absorb some shots, as the armor rep tank is too weak to handle more than a couple of destroyer sized ships at once.
For the capital ships, they are probably the only ships you can entrust to the AI without worrying too much about their fate. They have "very" tanky shields and relatively safe unless they're being flanked. The EBM variant is without a doubt the most balanced one because it will deal reasonably well against any threats. It's still extremely strong (it can wreck nearly anything in 1v1, expect some "trickster" ships) at a pretty cheap cost for a capital ship.
The DSI however seems kinda broken. It's tachyon ray can insta-overload anything it fire at, fortress shield or not. Granted that's the only thing it can do but still!
I thought about adjusting the DSI's laser dps to just be heavily damaging to shields which might make the AI able to handle it better, and not just popping them which happens now (I think I set the DPS to 80000 shield damage or something like that, would just need to scale that down to more reasonable numbers).
I haven't tried the fighters yet.
Do so, the new fighter is great when it have some Stress wings as support to draw fire
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For the weapons, i'm a bit skeptical about some of the "converted vanilla" guns, like the P9 burst laser and HIL which offer nearly identical stats from the originals, is it really needed? For the other guns however i haven't seen too much broken stuff. The audio is very loud for the sks and t3 cannon and the noises overall are a bit underwhelming, you should send a pm to SniZupGun to see if he can help you about it.
The HIL was supposed to have a slightly longer range but I forgot to implement that, woops. The P9 burst laser is not supposed to be accessible to the player as that is a fighter weapon, will see if I can fix this.
Also, I agree, most sounds are lame and *** and needs to be remade, the only sounds I'm satisfied with is the new Raala gun (which I totally ripped from Star Wars...) and the Silverfish cloak. I don't know about the sound volumes though, they sound normal on my system, will check on them though.
That's all i noted for now but there's probably more. The main problem with P9 is that their ship are overly specialized and extremely underwhelming with the AI. As such they aren't very fun to play with or against. It's a shame because i love the sprites but can't get past the gameplay. With more vanilla friendly stats and loadout it would work better maybe?
I want to try a bit more tweaking before I revert to more vanilla like stats, since I cant program the AI I will try to modify weapon loadouts and things like that. But in general, I intended my ships to be pretty terrible alone but have good synergy with other specialized ships.
Right now it remind of the old BISO mod, it have very good ideas but the gameplay is way too far from vanilla to be enjoyable.
Never played this, I should probably look it up and see how it handled everything...
Thanks for the massive feedback!
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