/stsg/ - Starsector General

those tiddies are ballistic

Is the Intelligence Data Chip you can buy from Prism Freeport useful for anything, or is it just another commodity?

Question for Monobloc Construction ships:
What if the x1.3 bonus to venting came at the cost of active venting being unavailable? Wouldn't it become a slightly more defensive SO?

Alternatively, the bonus applies to active venting but the ship produces hard flux at all times?

30% of SO, plus other bonuses, and no PPT reduction? sounds pretty damn strong to me.

>lesser SO with no range or CR penalty
the OP cost better be comparable to SO

*vent rate is ridiculously strong and must be paired with huge downsides - or better yet, not offered at all.

for DME it doesn't even make flavor sense, *vent rate is for dedicated and reckless combat ships

Commodity, they are at times asked for missions. For crazy prizes (no idea what they cost btw). If they are very cheap, you could stock up on them. Usually you can only get them from black markets.

Don't SCY and other already have bonus to active venting?
I don't like this hullmod conceptually, because it's "muh speshul faction is better than others", but I think it can be salvaged - don't ask me how, though, because only idea I had (no bonus but double vents from OPs) is pretty bad too.

I outfitted an II Dictator cruiser with DME weapons that I salvaged and it's fucking retarded.

2 x Howlers in the medium mounts.
A mix of linear autoguns, linear auto cannons, and light rail accelerators, and lux autocannons (the only II weapons mounted) in the small mounts.

I can just send it head first into a huge clusterfuck of enemies and it will rape them all to smithereens every time. It's honestly absurd. The range is huge, and projectile speed is fast enough on all of them that it will just melt a group of frigates or destroyers before they even have a chance to really respond. Even cruisers get flux loaded and their armor peeled off like cheese way quicker than should be possible.

Balance. BALANCE.

Chill buddy. user DM'ed creator with criticism from previous thread.

soren posted a reply. some of it got through, some of it triggered butthurt, some was ignored

he doesn't seem to realize that the heavy MG is an extremely good weapon

the dude after is retarded, incidentally

So much fucking balance. I considered turning them off, but when you get super powerful it's fun looking at their pretty ships explode.

out of the ashes of the fallen other mods will rise.
fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12004.0

>he doesn't seem to realize that the heavy MG is an extremely good weapon
Well, that just about invalidates every single one of his opinions on weapon balance.

To be fair, I really don't care that much about everything being balanced against vanilla, I just don't want to see too much power creep in the mod community. I really like DME as a mod, but they're too strong to be justified by the lore.

They are fun to fight once you have a good fleet set up though. Nothing I enjoy more than watching a disgusting swarm of overpowered fighters run face first into my PD wall and pop like balloons.

Just wait until I find the perfect ship to boat SCY miniguns with IPDAI as escorts.

Heavy MG the vanilla one? well in his defence, if you are only testing the weapons with AI pilots most of the time the AI won't get in range to fire it

>To be fair, I really don't care that much about everything being balanced against vanilla, I just don't want to see too much power creep in the mod community.

avoiding power creep is the ends

balancing against vanilla is the means. it's a good, solid and dependable anchor point.

>Post after.
>Zelenograd can't be that OP lol he must be using other stuff.
Ok I'm slightly miffed, time to make an account.

And no always-on 0 flux boost

If you give the AI ship nothing but ~500 range weapons, they *will* bring the HMG to bear even without aggressive officers.
OTOH this means you'll have to sacrifice missile slots to do it, but increasing time-on-target for HMGs is a worthwhile tradeoff by a long shot.

>fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=12004.0

as long as the missiles are STRIKE they should work fine

unless i'm misunderstanding your point

I REALLY don't like the idea that all "critiques" must be posted in a mods thread for public scrutiny. Not only do people not want to be "that guy" I don't know if it's more of a recent phenomena, but people have gotten really bad at both giving and receiving criticism. It's a skill like any other that can be learned, but the environment of debate is severely biased towards praise. People who don't like the mod/think it's unbalanced won't peruse the thread or waste energy commenting, and people that do are going to be the ones that LIKE it, and thus won't respond well to even constructive criticism. That assumes that the general thread-viewer has any understanding of game balance.

If nobody else dares, I may as well post them. Modders aren't malicious. Not to mention that if tension escalates, we have globalmods.

HMGs don't even have to be the primary guns for them to be effective. For ships that lack the slot for Devastators, they can triple up on acting as acceptable point defense, killing off shielded fighters, and fluxing out flanking frigates.

i certainly don't want to argue with the retarded sycophants that always fill up threads like that.

the creators are often reasonable on their own, but add in the cheerleading crowd and, well, it ain't worth the effort.

Officerless AI ships with knife-fighting weapons and missiles (especially harpoons) opt to stay in missile range and don't even try to get into knife-fighting range, even if the missile racks are empty. You can more or less eliminate that behavior by giving them nothing but ~500 range weapons. As in, don't give them any missiles at all.

dude, that ship was on auto. no officer.

>I think a major component of my leeriness about Veeky Forums is how many of them pirate the game and so are still playing 0.7.2 cracks, or older versions of the mod; that makes it hard to take a compendium of their balance advice seriously. The guy* who sent me that outright said he hadn't played it.
>So, that buys less with me than it would otherwise.
>*assuming this is a single person and not a shared user account.

so basically he's looking for excuses to ignore feedback. i'm not surprised.

i think someone needs to post a screencap of people telling animeposting EBT poorfags to get a job and cough up the $15

>hey this guy played an old version and identified something as a problem that i also found to be a problem later

>let's disregard the rest of his feedback based on this

how someone aquired a game has nothing to do with how good they are at comprehending balance issues, or the sincerity of their feedback

are you the zelenograd guy? post your refit screen I want to test that monster

no, but he posted it last thread. it was basically just two D-M autopulse lasers, a bunch of D-M railguns, and a bunch of D-M pdbursts

>>*assuming this is a single person and not a shared user account.

>he doesn't know

WHAT WOULD THAT EVEN MATTER? fuck sake

"oh what, SEVERAL PEOPLE put their heads together to come up with this feedback?! better disregard it then"

see this is why i told that bulletpoint faggot not to bother

>I can't say much about DME weapons as I haven't played nearly enough with the vast majority of them, but IMO, it's fine to have a better version of a vanilla weapon with some differences as long as OP cost is increased enough.
it's totally okay to have flux-positive bursty weapons that lets you skimp out on vents as long as OP cost is high enough!

Eh, considering 1 OP is somewhat equivalent to 10 flux venting it CAN be balanced.
Keyword is "can"

>implying i didn't get a legit key from the thread

themesong: youtube.com/watch?v=R044sleOW6I

10 flux is much better than one op

the only legit key was for 8.0 not 8.1
if you have one for 8.1 can you share it?

Do the jbe stuff

that black dude has a tiny head

tiny!

Right. OP cost is just one facet of weapons balance and these people can't seem to see past the OP-per-DPS ratio.

OP costs start to matter less and less as weapons are designed to be bursty enough for whoever's at the helm, be it the player or the AI, to hop in and out of range and dish out debilitating blows per volley. Hell, even DPS doesn't matter if per-shot damage is high enough to nearly flux out ships of the same weight class in one alpha strike.

Alright guys, help me out. What's a better weapon approach for my mod.

Main armaments in all sizes will be ballistics with long range, high accuracy, low damage, and high fire volume doing kinetic damage. Ships will have strong armor and point defense, but average mobility and really poor shielding. This much I have established. What I'm not sure on is....

>Main armaments do additional energy damage when hitting ships, but not shields.
>Secondary armaments deal EMP or frag damage with overlapping PD fields, with some extra energy damage.
>Tertiary armaments are low capacity (to limit massive alpha dumps), self loading, high velocity, unguided HE rocket launchers. Maybe scarier versions as built-ins on some ships.

Or....

>Main armaments do additional EMP damage when hitting ships.
>Support armaments are be weak but long range and accurate HE beams that fire in short pulses.
>Tertiary armaments will be frag + energy damage.

The idea is for the faction to be difficult to fight with the current fighter meta, strong against high tech opponents, but somewhat vulnerable to heavily armored HE spewing death bricks. Destroyer and cruiser focused, with a small variety of frigates that work well as escorts but falter in solo combat, and maybe a lone capital of some kind. Very, very few fighters and carriers. Maybe a single cruiser carrier and some decks on the capital. (This is all justified in the lore)

Opinions?

how ethical is tyrador?

kinetic emp is overdone

t. guy doing kinetic emp

As a rule, ballistics shouldn't have EMP in most cases (even though many mods do have them...) because it's energy weapons thing. I think first option is better.

the carrier has 2 large missile slots and 2 large energy slots and some smaller slots, it also has 4 hangars, however it's armor is only 800

so.. pretty ethical

i hate your fleet, faggot

>>Main armaments do additional energy damage when hitting ships, but not shields.
Stop. The whole "extra damage/effect when $CONDITIONAL" meme is overdone to death across all mods. If it doesn't show up in the damage type icon, then don't deal that damage.

>Stop. The whole "extra damage/effect when $CONDITIONAL" meme is overdone to death across all mods. If it doesn't show up in the damage type icon, then don't deal that damage.

yes. please.

if your onhit only does damage, delete it.

>so are still playing 0.7.2 cracks
who the fuck is still playing 0.7.2

>>if your onhit only does damage, delete it.
What else can you do though? Physics fuckery?

us dirty 4channers are, make sure to ignore everything we say.

Aw heck, I thought I hacked 0.8.1, but I was darn bamboozled, it's actually 0.7.2 that I downloaded from official site!

all kinds of shit. it's basically just a "run this java" hook

you could trivially make a gun that would cut the targets HP in half, break one engine every hit, reset his AI, forced a flameout, changed his shields to omni, etc etc. most ship properties are easily manipulated from the context.

or you just spawn a minor partible effect. that's generally all you should be doing.

A particle effect is not interesting gameplay wise

no but it sure looks pretty.

some of the impact effects are cool
>tractor beam
>hammerclaw knock back
but stuff like that should be used sparingly, if you're getting hit with whacky weapons like that all the time it's going to get really annoying

Even vanilla does it with EMP weapons and the Tachyon Lance.

Alright, that's fair. This is why I'm bouncing things off you guys before I try to release a shit mod.

So if I'm going to have a lot of high accuracy, long range, low damage projectile spewing kinetic ballistics as my primary weapons, how should I supplement them? The faction can't be completely useless against armored opponents, but I figured people would hate ballistics that did primarily energy damage even more.

I'm going for lots of projectiles spewing around at high speeds and long range, creating overlapping fields that are a bitch for fighters or frigates to get through. Ships like the Dominator, Enforcer, or Onslaught however should be able to power through the kill zone and facehug / ram them to death by overloading their weak shields and out-DPS'ing with HE.

Sounds like the second approach with some tweaks is the better choice. Kinetic ballistics at all three sizes with the occasional EMP gimmick (a la Mjolnir), fairly weak small / medium HE pulse beams, and some supplemental accurate, long range fragmentation ballistic PD. Energy damage seems like a good fit, but I'm not sure how to work it into ballistic projectile weapons.

I really want to limit HE potential so they can't just pop low tech opponents shields at range and rape them to death.

>tfw no "haunted" faction with ghost missiles that makes the AI shit its pants and fire all of its weapons in terror

>Energy damage seems like a good fit, but I'm not sure how to work it into ballistic projectile weapons.

fuzed grenades with plasma HEAT(-like) jets instead of standard explosive warheads

What about a weapon that instantly empties the target's flux but does damage based on the amount of flux released?
Bigger ships have more area to affect so they take less damaged by a given amount of flux than, to say, a destroyer.

I should add that one way I figured I could help settle them in was with ship systems that modified damage types temporarily or something, but I'm an absolute scrub script kiddie and I need to keep my shit fairly simple because I won't be able to code anything very interesting.

>Zelenograd
I performed some testing without any skills nor officers.
Exploration loadout defeats simulator Onslaught, but standard does not.
I've made my own loadout with perforators, heavy linear cannons, ion beam, pds and broadsword-theirfurytorpedobomber; performs somewhat better than exploration loadout.
My loadout has, so far, defeated Onslaught (60% hp remaining), Conquest (I don't think any HP was lost), Odyssey (no scratch on the hull) - and it all was done while SS was running in the background, without me interacting whatsoever. Whether those results are bad or good is up to you.

>What about a weapon that instantly empties the target's flux but does damage based on the amount of flux released?

the ai wouldn't know how to deal with it. doesn't sound very fun to play against either

I think adding a ballstic weapon with sabot-like shot behavior would be pretty cool. Fire a single slug that splits into multiple rounds near the enemy.

Or hell, just add a literal shotgun to the arsenal.

Make HE heavy needler for lolz

I can see a way a player can turn it against the enemy, mostly by use of heavy armor.

oh now that would chew up fighters

But would be barely effective against shields and heavy armour. Niche weapon and if you're even more of a dick, make it slow ships down.

HE needler with excellent accuracy and on-impact EMP damage and oh also higher rate of fire and more flux efficient but it costs 20 OP so it's "balanced"

Bulletpoint fag here.
Had a little PM exchange with the guy, let's just say it didn't go too well.
I can safely say that DME is, at least for me, blacklisted indefinitely unless in the case of exceptional events.

is Blackrock part of the "heh nothing personnel" faction mod list? the ships look pretty damn good and i'm getting tired of the "fresh off the shipyard" look on other mods

I was thinking the small and medium weapons would just be constant ~300-400 shots per minute with very low individual projectile damage, but that on one of the large weapons I would do something like a needler that fires in smaller but shorter and more frequent fast bursts. Kind of a pulsing "bbbrrppp......bbbrrppp......bbbrrppp" constantly.

Maybe I'll just separate it and have two archtypes. A constantly firing high ROF kinetic, and a burst firing energy. The energy only in med / large sizes and the kinetic in all three.

Small and medium HE rocket launchers to supplement, but maybe some HE pulse beams. I was hoping to avoid much in the way of beams, especially because a small HE beam would be too exploitable on other ships. Maybe as a built-in.

Very subdued, unobtrusive noises for all weapons so the constant firing doesn't make your ears bleed and cover up other sounds.

Depends on the ship.
Imaginos and Morpheus definitely fit in the *teleports behind u* *unsheat katana* category, though their supply consumption is through the fucking roof (and they have little defense against beams due to a lack of shields)

What about a sandblaster as a weapon?
Tons upon tons upon tons of very small, very fast projectiles going at extreme range but they do fuck all for damage (1 damage each)

>though their supply consumption is through the fucking roof

yeah i mean, they perform like a good ship one size larger, but they also cost at least that much in every category, including deployment costs, so fair enough

blackrock does have the problem of looking and feeling considerably higher-tech/magical than vanilla though

Why do projectile weapons have a maximum range in space?

take a beam, make it yellow, change the texture and give it a high scrollrate. low beam speed, like 800.

mitebcool

same reason why your ship stops accelerating once you go past 200 su/s velocity

because it's a video game that has to make concessions in realism to make the gameplay better

>blackrock does have the problem of looking and feeling considerably higher-tech/magical than vanilla though
They do look like a strange mix of Romulan ships and Evangelion patchwork.

Use a planet to store all my stuff. KT comes over, invades it and takes it over. One of the few planets they have taken over in my game.

Thanks game... wtf.

owned scrub