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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: [0.96a-RC10] The P9 Colony Group - Faction mod (v0.54), Nexerelin Compatible  (Read 256482 times)

Zudgemud

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Great feedback, thanks a lot! I'll go through it piecemeal.

Here's my feedback after a short time with the campaign and some cheating to play around with some of the more expensive ships. I haven't had really very much playtime on the whole so take with a grain of salt.

The p9 design/fleet 'doctrine' that I am trying to inferentially work out while playing is potentially very interesting. Small number of turrets, good shields, low armor/hull, very high flux dissipation, but very bad venting. Minimal PD. Frigates are fast; but destroyers, cruisers, battleships are comparatively slow and unmaneuverable.

Frigates, low armor combat destroyers and low armor combat cruisers were supposed to be fast for their class. PD platforms are supposed to be somewhat lower speed as they are mostly there to escort larger slower ships, but the problem there is that they are too slow to support the fast killers that also lack PD. I'll see if I can maybe boost the speed on some stuff.

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Most interesting is the implicit synergy between a lot of the PD-less ships that effectively exist and specialized PD platforms like the SNZ-PD and AGG-R.

But also some general design issues:

Frigates are pretty divergent. The Sike outclasses everything. Super fast, three medium turrets, enormous flux dissipation. Its only weakness is very fragile armor/hull. Some other frigates like the RS-class seem more in-line with vanilla balance. Still other frigates like the tartiff 'gell' frigate have no shields and instead regenerating armor; which isn't very thematic in my opinion. The Sike seems like the obvious winner in 80% of situations; it isn't an elite ship; it is plentiful in the campaign; it doesn't have very high price or supply cost.

Broader divergences between frigate and destroyers. Frigates are fast and manouverable. Destroyers, cruisers, battleships, meanwhile, are comparatively slow for their class. Low amount of turrets means a tendency for ships to be 'upgunned.' Medium turrets on frigates. Large turrets on destroyers and above. This makes frigates OP and destroyers and above actually kind of underpowered. The Sike (as mentioned before) is OP. It is capable of outranging and outmanouvering almost any standard frigate you can expect to encounter in the early campaign. I can easily take on 5 pirate frigates with 1 Sike. But SL-T2 destroyers meanwhile have pretty bad speed and maneuverability and only two large turrets with narrow angle of fire. This is a ship that has difficulty exploiting opportunities (no missiles) and is easy to outflank and destroy. SL-T3 destroyer seems somewhat better balanced (1 large, 2 small; higher top speed?) but still has issues with the low number of turrets.

The Sike and partially RS was supposed to have terrible combat stamina to compensate, but it turns out that I somehow have set the peak performance time quite high compared to 0.95 vanilla. So that will indeed eat a nerf, I'll probably up the cost/support profile of the Sike too. In general all support profiles ad cost profiles have not been reviewed since this mod went into hibernation several years ago. The gel frigate was supposed to be the prototype of a line of gel ships or a subfaction for the mod, but I never finishied any other gel ships or the subfaction so it is just that one for now. I mostly just kept it in faction because Tartiflette made it work so nicely and I myself think it is pretty fun to use the ship system to bounce enemy ships into my own lines

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I think the general design philosophy that is holding this all together is that low turret mounts encourages high flux energy weapons; which then requires (potentially imbalanced) high flux dissipation; which is then hopefully compensated for by lower weapon variability (few missiles; few kinetic/explosive; narrow angles). But this is a very tricky balance that doesn't really work as presently constituted. Overall: early frigate/destroyer gameplay has a pretty off-kilter balance. It doesn't feel that the main fleet elements are generally complementing or synergizing with each other. Sikes dominate while SL-T2s and T3s are sort of left behind. In a softer way, it doesn't really feel like the coherent design/fleet 'doctrine' of a relatively small colony. If the Sike is nerfed everything might feel different.

The bolded part is generally what I intended yes. In my brief experience this patch the destroyers still seem to work pretty OK in the players hands especially if you fit some vanilla weapons there too (like large missiles on the SL-t2). But I agree that they do feel a bit lacklustre atm.


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Some more specific issues:

- Lancer Destroyer: Almost a suicide ship. Extremely dangerous special ability that shoots this ship forward and discharges its forward beam for 5-10 seconds. The extremely narrow profile, the general destroyer sluggishness, and the extremely narrow turret angles creates incredible vulnerabilities.

Yes it is terrible in the current iteration, both for AI use and player use, I have plans to make the current one into some novelty ship obtainable via bounties while remaking the old one to a more standard ship of the line with 3 medium turrets in the middle space. Though I must say reinforced bulkheads and the skill which reduced damage per D-mod had pretty good synergy with this ship in my very brief Nex trial...

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- There is a destroyer/cruiser phase ship (I forget the name) that is probably too slow to be of much use.

The Korlo cruiser? Yes, it probably needs a speed boost, it's current speed was more appropriate when you could stack two or three speed mods on ships ~3 patches ago.

The Cyz destroyer? It seems to work pretty well but could maybe use a slight speed boost?

The Eyfel battleship? Yes, its a slow huge blob. The current placeholder ship system makes it a bit more mobile though.

The Cimex carrier and the Tick hauler are indeed slow though, but they are not supposed to be frontline ships anyway so it's mostly ok.


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- Samaa-DSI Battleship: many of the issues with the SL-T2/T3 destroyers are recurrent here. Again very few slots for its class; thematic; but weak for a battleship; low/no missiles means difficulty pressuring and exploiting. There is a large turret mount with narrow angle facing completely backwards that is close to useless. These problems are all somewhat compensated for with a built-in 'Tachyon Ray'--same visual effect as small salaa laser--which will typically overload the shields on any class of ship. Almost certainly OP. But the battleship, on its own terms, is peculiarly both OP and underpowered. Because it has so few slots it has difficulty exploiting the shields it downs.

It is essentially a gimmick support ship not meant to solo stuff. If you fly it yourself you still need a fleet to actually kill the stuff you disable. I agree that it is somewhat OP but, only in the players hands with the right fleet to support it, as the AI is pretty bad at both picking good targets for overloading and to exploit the overloads. Not sure how to fix it without actually destroying the gimmick. The large slot in the back is basically to have some big sized PD that can mess up smaller frigates that outflank the shield coverage, simply so that you do not get humiliated by hounds too often.

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- p9 weapons mostly have good custom descriptions; but they don't have their own p9 design type designation; missing description on some special weapons like the tachyon ray; improper usage of it's and its in most descriptions (a pet peeve; w/e).

I'll go through the descriptions. Though I'm not a native speaker and I suck at grammar so I'll probably miss something again.

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- I don't like the visual effect of the Salaa laser; dull from long camera distance; should ideally be more vibrant. It's an effect that is repeated on a number of other p9 weapons.

- The visual effect on the SKV cannon is dark to the point that it is somewhat hard to see. Low amount of turrets encourages energy weapons; so many ships using P9 weapons will use the SKV.

I'll note that down and see if it can be improved.

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- P9 talaa laser is a beam with only 50 range; it seems impossible for this to have a use other than to be placed on the lancer suicide ship. I don't really like any of it.

I'll set it to something more usable like 400 or so.
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Zudgemud

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Here's a temporary .jar that fixes the crash until the author officially patches it: https://garfu.dev/PN.jar

Place in \pn\jars\

(will remove this post after an official update)

Just wanted to say that i posted this temporary hotfix by garfu in the OP too. I will probably release a real update this weekend that fixes both this Nexus bug and other issues. But this fix works and is savegame compatible.
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Zudgemud

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So I updated the mod a bit.

The Nexus bug is fixed! I deleted the nexus, it filled no purpose except crashing the game and it's removal should not impact the game at all.

I remade the Kaala cruiser into a more standard brawler cruiser, it now looks like the image below and recived two medium hybrids and one large energy, all with very good coverage. While the AI still cant really handle the ship system properly it now sometimes does a fabulous retreat that murders things in front of it, and in my playtesting this annihilated an enemy Falcon P once so at least it is useful sometimes.


Some guns and missiles that behaved badly in the AIs hands have now been fixed so that the AI uses them properly (thanks Mesotronik!).

Ships, guns, fits and fleet compositions have been rebalanced again. Generally support ships were given more speed, ships were given enough flux vent to handle their standard loadouts and the Korlo was made a bit faster to compensate for hullmods lost from previous versions. The Sike ate big nerfs in deployment time and cost, and lesser nerfs in support profile and rarity.

The Tolp system has been remade again and if you start a new game Tolp III has become a much juicier target.

The update can be downloaded by the link below.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j08kk2glycvq81t/pn52.zip/file
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Jet Black

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This is going in my next playthrough for sure, amazing!
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Flacman3000

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So I updated the mod a bit.

The Nexus bug is fixed! I deleted the nexus, it filled no purpose except crashing the game and it's removal should not impact the game at all.

I remade the Kaala cruiser into a more standard brawler cruiser, it now looks like the image below and recived two medium hybrids and one large energy, all with very good coverage. While the AI still cant really handle the ship system properly it now sometimes does a fabulous retreat that murders things in front of it, and in my playtesting this annihilated an enemy Falcon P once so at least it is useful sometimes.


Some guns and missiles that behaved badly in the AIs hands have now been fixed so that the AI uses them properly (thanks Mesotronik!).

Ships, guns, fits and fleet compositions have been rebalanced again. Generally support ships were given more speed, ships were given enough flux vent to handle their standard loadouts and the Korlo was made a bit faster to compensate for hullmods lost from previous versions. The Sike ate big nerfs in deployment time and cost, and lesser nerfs in support profile and rarity.

The Tolp system has been remade again and if you start a new game Tolp III has become a much juicier target.

The update can be downloaded by the link below.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j08kk2glycvq81t/pn52.zip/file

Can I make this version compatible with 0.91a?
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Ryzen 7 2700x, 1080ti, 16GB DDR4 RAM and playing SS on a SSD - Always stay ahead because when you're ahead you're rear anatomy is open to interpretation.

Hellya

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So I updated the mod a bit.

The Nexus bug is fixed! I deleted the nexus, it filled no purpose except crashing the game and it's removal should not impact the game at all.

I remade the Kaala cruiser into a more standard brawler cruiser, it now looks like the image below and recived two medium hybrids and one large energy, all with very good coverage. While the AI still cant really handle the ship system properly it now sometimes does a fabulous retreat that murders things in front of it, and in my playtesting this annihilated an enemy Falcon P once so at least it is useful sometimes.


Some guns and missiles that behaved badly in the AIs hands have now been fixed so that the AI uses them properly (thanks Mesotronik!).

Ships, guns, fits and fleet compositions have been rebalanced again. Generally support ships were given more speed, ships were given enough flux vent to handle their standard loadouts and the Korlo was made a bit faster to compensate for hullmods lost from previous versions. The Sike ate big nerfs in deployment time and cost, and lesser nerfs in support profile and rarity.

The Tolp system has been remade again and if you start a new game Tolp III has become a much juicier target.

The update can be downloaded by the link below.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j08kk2glycvq81t/pn52.zip/file

You son of a *****, you had me at "missiles behaving badly". At least that is how I read it.
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Hellya

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Sl-t3 has a max burn of 5, is that right?
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Zudgemud

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Sl-t3 has a max burn of 5, is that right?

It is not supposed to have that, I assume I have fat fingered that. Thanks for notifying me, all burn speeds are now set to vanilla.

Updated version can be found in the following link.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/9fkjtql3gu9iyhy/pn52a.zip/file
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Hellya

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Sl-t3 has a max burn of 5, is that right?

It is not supposed to have that, I assume I have fat fingered that. Thanks for notifying me, all burn speeds are now set to vanilla.

Updated version can be found in the following link.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/9fkjtql3gu9iyhy/pn52a.zip/file

NP and thanks for the update. I noticed none of the bp's are dropping from the usual places for bp's. It could be a nex thing, maybe not though.
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Zudgemud

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So I updated the mod a bit.

The Nexus bug is fixed! I deleted the nexus, it filled no purpose except crashing the game and it's removal should not impact the game at all.

I remade the Kaala cruiser into a more standard brawler cruiser, it now looks like the image below and recived two medium hybrids and one large energy, all with very good coverage. While the AI still cant really handle the ship system properly it now sometimes does a fabulous retreat that murders things in front of it, and in my playtesting this annihilated an enemy Falcon P once so at least it is useful sometimes.


Some guns and missiles that behaved badly in the AIs hands have now been fixed so that the AI uses them properly (thanks Mesotronik!).

Ships, guns, fits and fleet compositions have been rebalanced again. Generally support ships were given more speed, ships were given enough flux vent to handle their standard loadouts and the Korlo was made a bit faster to compensate for hullmods lost from previous versions. The Sike ate big nerfs in deployment time and cost, and lesser nerfs in support profile and rarity.

The Tolp system has been remade again and if you start a new game Tolp III has become a much juicier target.

The update can be downloaded by the link below.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j08kk2glycvq81t/pn52.zip/file

Can I make this version compatible with 0.91a?

To make it compatible with 0.91 you simply edit the mod_info file with notepad or something. The specific thing to edit is "gameVersion":"0.95a-RC12",
to
 "gameVersion":"0.91a",


NP and thanks for the update. I noticed none of the bp's are dropping from the usual places for bp's. It could be a nex thing, maybe not though.

Will check up on that, I just know that you get the blueprints if you start as the P9 faction in Nexerelin but I have not extensively playtested it in Nexerelin so there might be some spawning issues.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2021, 01:49:44 AM by Zudgemud »
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Flacman3000

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Awesome man thanks for everything! I just have one question is there a specific reason your mod is easily back portable from a 0.95a version? Because most other faction mods I see explain that making the new updates reverse compatible is complicated. Is there very little you touch at the core level of SS that makes your mod easily backported or is this just a dirty fix and I can experience further issues on a serious run in the long run?
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Ryzen 7 2700x, 1080ti, 16GB DDR4 RAM and playing SS on a SSD - Always stay ahead because when you're ahead you're rear anatomy is open to interpretation.

Zudgemud

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Awesome man thanks for everything! I just have one question is there a specific reason your mod is easily back portable from a 0.95a version? Because most other faction mods I see explain that making the new updates reverse compatible is complicated. Is there very little you touch at the core level of SS that makes your mod easily backported or is this just a dirty fix and I can experience further issues on a serious run in the long run?

You know that nice campaign integration with custom wares, colony structures, campaign layer features, weapon specific AI and ship systems that produce a glittery sphere of death etc? I don't have that because I can't code.
All my scripting is basically vanilla code copy and pasted into new script, and my whole mod structure is ripped straight from mendoncas lovely Junk Pirates mod, which is basically only vanilla things. Thus I guess my mod is moderately resilient towards patch changes that does not interfere with base game features such as sector generation or vanilla ship systems.

All I did to make it work in 0.95a from 0.91a was to change that parameter, and then delete the tachyon ray effect from the Samaa DSI laser because it crashed the game for some reason.
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Flacman3000

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Awesome man thanks for everything! I just have one question is there a specific reason your mod is easily back portable from a 0.95a version? Because most other faction mods I see explain that making the new updates reverse compatible is complicated. Is there very little you touch at the core level of SS that makes your mod easily backported or is this just a dirty fix and I can experience further issues on a serious run in the long run?

You know that nice campaign integration with custom wares, colony structures, campaign layer features, weapon specific AI and ship systems that produce a glittery sphere of death etc? I don't have that because I can't code.
All my scripting is basically vanilla code copy and pasted into new script, and my whole mod structure is ripped straight from mendoncas lovely Junk Pirates mod, which is basically only vanilla things. Thus I guess my mod is moderately resilient towards patch changes that does not interfere with base game features such as sector generation or vanilla ship systems.

All I did to make it work in 0.95a from 0.91a was to change that parameter, and then delete the tachyon ray effect from the Samaa DSI laser because it crashed the game for some reason.

Well, all things considered your mod isn't less sophisticated in my eyes.

BTW Hail Satan My Friend! I've taken that ship and integrated it lol as a rare ship bp for now just for fun. It's not broken either as into OP I'm happy with it! And I just realized your SHIP blueprint packages have a *** low price, it's comparable to buying a fighter LPC. Perhaps you can tune up those BP's a lot considering the tech may be above TT prices. And the ships themselves are relatively inexpensive. Perhaps you can add-flux capacity across the board to increase their reliability and increase their price? Better yet pump up the shield flux damage below the average high tech ship showing how efficient the shields are yet they have no major capacity (this will increase reliability without increasing an outrageous onslaught of support fire) most of your ships are 0.8 maybe putting them more in the 0.4 to 0.7 range would be better for such a display of tech?

Also, this is purely opinion have you considered making a new flag for the faction the orb does speak to the distinctive ships but not much else.
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Ryzen 7 2700x, 1080ti, 16GB DDR4 RAM and playing SS on a SSD - Always stay ahead because when you're ahead you're rear anatomy is open to interpretation.

Zudgemud

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Well, all things considered your mod isn't less sophisticated in my eyes.

Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you enjoy it.

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BTW Hail Satan My Friend! I've taken that ship and integrated it lol as a rare ship bp for now just for fun. It's not broken either as into OP I'm happy with it!

I made that as a special bounty, but it is wholly made from cycerins Templar mod and goes with that theme, so it felt wrong to include it in this mod.


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And I just realized your SHIP blueprint packages have a *** low price, it's comparable to buying a fighter LPC. Perhaps you can tune up those BP's a lot considering the tech may be above TT prices.

I'll look into it, such bargains was not intended.


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And the ships themselves are relatively inexpensive. Perhaps you can add-flux capacity across the board to increase their reliability and increase their price? Better yet pump up the shield flux damage below the average high tech ship showing how efficient the shields are yet they have no major capacity (this will increase reliability without increasing an outrageous onslaught of support fire) most of your ships are 0.8 maybe putting them more in the 0.4 to 0.7 range would be better for such a display of tech?

I have considered to increase shield efficiency before as an alternative to flux capacity but then I found it hard to not make them either horribly OP against vanilla or make it hard to fire vanilla or other mod weapons due to the compensatory low flux caps. I'm decently satisfied with their fragility atm, keeps them somewhat balanced against vanilla despite having ridiculous vent rates.


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Also, this is purely opinion have you considered making a new flag for the faction the orb does speak to the distinctive ships but not much else.

Yes I totally agree, it have been on my P9 to-do list for years, something cleaner and more flag like. Maybe I should bump that up a bit on the to do list...
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Hellya

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So I updated the mod a bit.

The Nexus bug is fixed! I deleted the nexus, it filled no purpose except crashing the game and it's removal should not impact the game at all.

I remade the Kaala cruiser into a more standard brawler cruiser, it now looks like the image below and recived two medium hybrids and one large energy, all with very good coverage. While the AI still cant really handle the ship system properly it now sometimes does a fabulous retreat that murders things in front of it, and in my playtesting this annihilated an enemy Falcon P once so at least it is useful sometimes.


You do get some bp's. They are I believe a few from each hull size except capitals and some weapons. Still looking for capitals, various other ships, and weapons.

Some guns and missiles that behaved badly in the AIs hands have now been fixed so that the AI uses them properly (thanks Mesotronik!).

Ships, guns, fits and fleet compositions have been rebalanced again. Generally support ships were given more speed, ships were given enough flux vent to handle their standard loadouts and the Korlo was made a bit faster to compensate for hullmods lost from previous versions. The Sike ate big nerfs in deployment time and cost, and lesser nerfs in support profile and rarity.

The Tolp system has been remade again and if you start a new game Tolp III has become a much juicier target.

The update can be downloaded by the link below.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/j08kk2glycvq81t/pn52.zip/file

Can I make this version compatible with 0.91a?

To make it compatible with 0.91 you simply edit the mod_info file with notepad or something. The specific thing to edit is "gameVersion":"0.95a-RC12",
to
 "gameVersion":"0.91a",


NP and thanks for the update. I noticed none of the bp's are dropping from the usual places for bp's. It could be a nex thing, maybe not though.

Will check up on that, I just know that you get the blueprints if you start as the P9 faction in Nexerelin but I have not extensively playtested it in Nexerelin so there might be some spawning issues.
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