Motherships Mod v0.1

Originally Posted by Goblin Wizard

Of course, you can change all your ms armament during a fly. Imo it's cheating but I can't prevent it

I'm waiting for comments

+ It works
o Can't see how many missiles are left - fortunately can just view inventory (press B) instead of using up a perk
- Players can attach any module, not just rockets - reattaching any shield module fully recharges shields to max, this is a big exploit
- Cannot use perk unless hero is launched

I noticed you modded torpedo 1 to have 10 uses. Btw the Alien Dreadnaught isn't the best ship to test missiles, it turns too slowly and it seems to only fire missiles within a narrow arc - most of the time it doesn't even turn to face hostiles but relies on turrets. I didn't attach any turrets at all so the ship just hovered there facing one direction while enemies flew around shooting it. Perhaps this is due to how the rocket slots are positioned. In a way, this is good, since the mothership won't simply spam rockets unless target is within arc of fire. It also only seems to fire rockets if the target is at a certain distance - I noticed it wouldn't fire at point-blank targets. This might be a particular rocket setting though.

[Goblin Wizard]

Alien Dreadnaught isn't indeed the best ship to test but the only one with 4 missile slots now. But imo mothership is not supposed to kill fighters with missiles. The missiles for mothership are those with long range and high damage (and eventually MIRVs). Mothership should use missile to fight with other mothership, battle stations and such.

You're right. This method has many disadvantages. Activating shop via perk is generally an exploit but it's the only way to load/unload missile bay. There is no command in the script which let you do it. You can't add fighter's options to mothership's GUI too. So.. the question is: Is this method really worth to keep it that way? Do we need mothership with missiles that much?

btw If you want to fire at point blank you have to load missile first and then set target (or simply cancel the fire order and set it again). I think it worked that way.

P.S. 10 torpedoes is just a remnant of previous tests.

Yeah, I was thinking of leaving LRMs/torpedoes for mothership. Unfortunately it looks like this method can't work as we would like it to.

[Exakter]

work within the limitations we have then.

You can effectively have dumbfired torpedos.

Use a turret res plasma cannon and remodel a shot to look like a torp.


Though of course butchers or any 'turret' capable ship could use them.

Still, make a low fire rate, slow/medium speed, high accuracy, dumbfired torp that way.

Could rebalance the larger ships so that only other larger ships really challenge them.

Adjust turret tracking, or at least accuracy for HIGH damage weapons. allow the lasers to be those accurate/weak weapons that demolish fighters, but really just splash against enemy shields/hulls with certain exceptions. The medium accuracy / higher damage cannons and then other higher damage weapons would then have a functions. (Rather useless imho as is, considering the accuracy of lasers and plethora of fighters). I'd love to make those dual heavy cannons worthwhile for once.

Btw, i haven't seen it mentioned here... but I so far I love playing with my allies in corvettes and such and have modded some myself (within your mod) to play with. Having destroyers and other vessels playable for allies would be awesome too. Size hasn't seemed to affect the hanger usage really. Ultimately I have adjusted my settings to turn autolaunch off- but that could allow people to adjust configs for larger vessels. It's a bit messy, but.. then fleet actions are really possible.

The missiles aren't a problem, can easily mod them... it's what the rest of the interface allows. The devs really should consider this in the upcoming expansion pack.

As for overall balance, yeah I'm still working on the integrated patch (fleet / mothership / missile mods). Kept putting it off because I thought there'd be updates to this mod, heh. You're pretty much spot-on about the weapons; I'd also been actually considering removing the higher-tier turrets and expanding light gun types. My experience was that at high levels the mothership pilot Bryna&KT turn your ship from a carrier-type into a battleship-type. I often tank battles with it solo without even launching my fighters, that's just wrong lol. Besides, I find 4 tiers of each weapon excessively redundant - how many players even bother with the tier 1 or 2 guns anyway?

Problem is the game only technically recognises 2 types of damage, laser and other. Plus shields are a universal type anyway, aside from the additional laser defence modules - which only few ships carry. There's barely any difference between lasers and particle accelerators (both laser type), and plasma is also similar damage/rate-of-fire except that it isn't laser damage. We can play around with rate of fire, damage, dispersion, range... that's about it I think.

Edit:
Combination mod finished. It's around 30+mb minus the voice pack (I think I'll let you guys download that separately, it's 50mb). Where should I upload this?

[Goblin Wizard]

Originally Posted by Trucidation

Combination mod finished. It's around 30+mb minus the voice pack (I think I'll let you guys download that separately, it's 50mb). Where should I upload this?

I use filefront because it's fast and doesn't have irritating limits for unregistered users like rapidshare or megaupload.

[Exakter]

Well for capital ships, you could build in laser protection into shield modules, or hull rep even, or every bigship module, to show the base laser defense.

That would allow you to make lasers the anti-fighter weapon of choice.

then give every standard ai cap ship at least one or two systems with l-d.

Originally Posted by Exakter

Well for capital ships, you could build in laser protection into shield modules,

If they didn't hardcode the XML files we could simply add laser defense to bigship-type shield modules :/ Hope the expansion will fix that but I'm not really holding my breath for it (would be awesome if they did, there's lots of things that could use combo tweaking).

Edit:
Thanks for the Filefront tip, uploaded and redownload tested ok.
http://www.filefront.com/17267461/SW3CW--combo_mods.zip
It's only 15mb, I forgot to calculate the size after the mods were compressed.

P.S> Goblin Wizard, if I could trouble you for another favour... could you put your mod's changes.txt file as an attachment on the first post? Thanks! Got a firewall at work preventing me from accessing Filefront, heh.