Aeonic's Ship Gallery

[Atarlost]

I went through and gave the whole set some touch-ups:

- Ion pulses are half the speed and twice the lifetime, so they're a little easier to follow instead of just being a stream of dots. They're also a little smaller.

- Ion howitzers are now blue molten bolts that look a bit like what the Xenophobe Arc shoots.

- Light cruisers now have alternating light howitzers along with their four ion pulse cannons.

- Medium cruisers some equipped with alternating light howitzers and dual medium howitzers, and eight ion pulse cannons.

- Huntress-class has three dual medium howitzers up front.

- Heavy cruisers come with two dual medium howitzers and two "turbo" howitzers up front. Their ion pulse cannons consist of three heavy on each wing and a turbo at the back for rear defense. They are also now each equipped with two devastating plasma torpedo launchers.

In general the weaknesses I see with these ships is the obvious lack of rear defense and the high dependence on ion weaponry, making them vulnerable to ships that resist this form of damage. The heavy cruiser is not so much in danger because of its rear-firing plasma torpedoes and the fact that said torpedoes deal plasma damage instead of the usual ion, but most of the other ships will be vulnerable. It might not be a bad idea to change the damage type of the howitzers. I suspect they're also vulnerable to ships with firepower of longer range than theirs (huntress excluded).

If anyone wants to do some play-testing or just see them in action on the title screen, you can download the set here.

It sounds like you're overgunning them even more than they were allready. If they're earlier than the Ares only the heavy cruisers should be easily taking down things like earth slavers.

I've been toying with making the pulse weapons capacitor based. It seems to bring them down to the desired level of deadliness. I also changed some frequencies and added a light blaster to the huntress.

I'll take a look at your version before I send you my revision.

Here's the diff of the version I've been toying with from the version I sent you.

Code: Select all

106,111c106
< 				powerUse=			"30"
< 
< 				counter=			"capacitor"
< 				counterActivate=	"-20"
< 				counterUpdate=		"20"
< 				counterUpdateRate=	"15"
---
> 				powerUse=			"50"
152,157c147
< 				powerUse=			"60"
< 
< 				counter=			"capacitor"
< 				counterActivate=	"-30"
< 				counterUpdate=		"30"
< 				counterUpdateRate=	"15"
---
> 				powerUse=			"100"
198,203c188
< 				powerUse=			"60"
< 
< 				counter=			"capacitor"
< 				counterActivate=	"-10"
< 				counterUpdate=		"10"
< 				counterUpdateRate=	"15"
---
> 				powerUse=			"100"
336c321
< 				particleCount=		"1d16+64"
---
> 				particleCount=		"1d11+44"
338d322
< 				particleSplashChance="50"
752d735
< 			<Device deviceID="&itIonTorch;" secondaryWeapon="true"/>
852c835
< 					(if (eq (random 1 1000) 1)
---
> 					(if (eq (random 1 100) 1)
885c868
< 			<Ship	count="1d3"	class="&scFooYacht;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" />
---
> 			<Ship	count="1"	class="&scFooYacht;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" />
922c905
< 			<Ship	count="1d2"	class="&scFooCruiserLt;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" />
---
> 			<Ship	count="1"	class="&scFooCruiserLt;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" />
959c942
< 			<Ship	count="1d2"	class="&scFooCruiserMed;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" >
---
> 			<Ship	count="1"	class="&scFooCruiserMed;" orders="wander" sovereign="&svDestructiveChaos;" >

I'll take a look at your changes and see how they balance out.

[Aeonic]

I feel better having the quantity of guns fitting the model. If its too much, the damage can always be toned down.

Having capacitors for the ion pulses doesn't sound like a bad idea. I'd like to see how that works out. The plasma torps that I installed have capacitors, so the ship should be able to fire 3 forward and 3 backwards, then have to wait a reasonable delay before firing them again.

BTW I also increased the armor segments for the heavy cruiser to be more along the lines of other ships that size. And because it was getting destroyed too easily. Some sections are non-critical now.

It sounds like you're overgunning them even more than they were allready

That's because I wuv my ships and I want them to blow up everything!!! I'll have to count on you to tone them down.

[Atarlost]

Okay, let's go through this ship by ship. This is preliminary mind you.

No difference in the yachts except that I put capacitors on the pulse cannons. The yacht's firerateadj covers that up though.

For the light cruiser the problem is that your model doesn't have any forward guns that I could see. It suffers less from the capacitor limits I put on the pulse cannons because its rear arc is as good as its forward arc and it effectively trades off arcs.

The medium cruiser was seriously overpowered. You've added an extra forward weapon while I weakened the weapons it currently has.

The heavy cruiser was also on the heavy side with its omni howitzer. This is the one I think you've overpowered the worst. 40d4 plasma is a lot on a tracking weapon. That capacitor timer isn't going to help much on something that's allready so slow. The heavy cruiser was already murder on anything without ion reflect and that removes its one weakness. I think giving it that sort of firepower is going to make it way too powerful.

On a related not I just realized I have all the encounters off by one system level. Right now they overlap the Ares too much.

[Aeonic]

So yacht and light cruiser are fine, and so is huntress I assume although it has considerably more forward firepower. It wouldn't hurt anything to reduce the damage done by the howitzers so that their number doesn't matter too much. I like having the plasma on the heavy cruiser, but you can tone it down to whatever you think is good.

How would you tone down the rest of the medium and heavy cruiser?

[Aeonic]

I was just thinking it might also be interesting to have the ion pulse cannons push targets back instead of just doing damage. Reduce the damage, and it targets pushed back so the ships can use this as a means to keep enemies at bay. That makes them less of a weapon and more of a deterrent.

[Atarlost]

You're suggesting reducing the damage of something that does 3 damage on average. They allready suffer badly against R1 and R5 deflectors because of their low damage. That's why I wanted to put capacitors on them. It's a way to reduce the damage without changing the firerate, which was an aesthetic decision, or the damage, which is about as low as it can be already.

The heavy pulse cannons are only found on the Huntress and Heavy Cruiser. They do a whopping 6 damage a shot on average. If every heavy pulse cannon on a heavy cruiser could hit you at once, which isn't possible because of the geometry, they would do the same damage as the turret on a Deimos class destroyer.

I'm not sure what the light howitzer is supposed to add. It's only on the light cruiser, which has no visible forward weapon, and the medium cruiser, which has four big identical tubes represented by the regular ion howitzer. If you want a forward weapon on the light cruiser I would use the ion torch instead of adding another weapon type.

I notice you changed the armor layouts. You've actually weakened the huntress by adding a forward plate. By putting a seam there the player can't reliably hit either plate and will have to blast through both. You also rounded off some angles. Unless you got the angles from the orignal meshes and my odd angles came from perspective effects the plates won't fall logically. I'm sure the plates on the heavy cruiser don't fall logically because there simply aren't that many seams. You also have some heavy plates. Heavy plate on the heavy cruiser is a mistake. It looks like I made it first though. Because of the armorShield tags the shields hitpoints are limited by the armor they're covering. Even though the Heavy Cruiser, Huntress, and Medium Cruiser have the same shield it has more hitpoints on the heavy cruiser and fewer on the huntress.

A flat render of the first facing would help a lot for placing armor boundaries.

It looks like I had the configurations on the howitzer too wide. It looked okay with the huge glowy shots, but it looks off with the narrower shots. I'll try to figure out an appropriate plasma weapon.

You want the plasma turrets to be those large turrets on the heavy?

[Aeonic]

Okay, so the current ion pulses are fine.

I assume that you're wanting to have one or two standardized howitzers among all the ships? A standard howitzer and a heavy howitzer mostly for the heavy cruiser? I just created weapons as needed to fit the modeled loadout for each cruiser, mostly because it seemed awkward to have a single primary weapon on one side of the ship and a secondary on the other.

Oh, and the model for the light cruiser DOES have forward-mounted cannons. It has four of them, in fact. But they're small, and vertically stacked. You just can't see them from the picture.

I see your argument about the huntress and I have no problem with putting it back the way it was before. I've adjusted the angles based on what I see with my models. I have a system for determining the angles as I'm sure you do.

I honestly don't know what armorShield does, so you'll have to explain that to me, or I can try searching the forums for information.

Top-down images aren't hard to do. I'll put some together and you can adjust angles all you want.

Yes, those two dones on top of the heavy are for the plasma torpedo launchers, or at least they would be if the visuals would let them go on top of the ship.

When you get done fiddling with the current set, send your version back to me so we're not both working on different variations of the same thing, OK?

EDIT - I sent you an e-mail with the top-down pictures.

[Atarlost]

Armorshield makes the shield act like the hull plate ionizer. The hitpoints of the shield are limited by the average hitpoints of the armor. (though not one to one. I'm not sure exactly how the ratio relates to the value of the tag yet) It gives the ships a sort of two tiered regen. They take damage and some is passed on to the armor (at least for some damage types). The shields regen, but not all the way because the armor is damaged. The armor also regens though slower so the shields will eventually come all the way back to full when the armor does.

I've never seen another mod use it so of course I had to try it.

[Aeonic]

On an unrelated note:

Is there any kind of script that I can attach to ships so that they'll just fly around, dock at random stations, then fly around some more? Would be awesome to be able to have computer-controlled versions of custom player ships that actively participate in the game world (visually, anyway).

I suppose I can just have them flying around like you have the Foomerian ships doing here, but it would be nice if they would dock and fly through stargates and such as well.

[Aury]

yes; traderoute order ; look at some of the korolov ships

[digdug]

have also a look at this mod:
http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=194

Mutos was interested in having ships populating the systems.

[Aeonic]

Remind me to go through and make all that Foomerian equipment not for sale, not orderable, and if possible not found on anything except Foomerian wrecks!

[Atarlost]

I'd just do notForSale. That's what the other sovereign specific stuff does. I'll do that in my stuff before I send. I'm doing some tweaking still though. Upping the armor segments at the has made them too robust.

I gave the Heavy Cruiser a Makayev launcher because the grey squares on the front look like they could be missile tube covers. It needed some sosrt of central forward weapon for the AI's benefit and nothing else seemed justifiable by the model. I can do a custom launcher if you prefer.

I also took the standoff away from the medium cruiser. It kept exposing its rear trying to open the distance and it has the proportionately weakest rear firing arc of the set. It does much better with a normal AI where it focuses more on trying to use its forward weapons.

[digdug]

NotForSale, NotRandom, CannotOrder

[Atarlost]

But notRandom and CannotOrder are NOT standard for sovereign specific equipment. I checked every piece of sovereign specific equipment I could think of off hand (Sung, Ares, Urak, and the Xenophobe Lancer) and none of them had cannotorder and only the Qianlong had notrandom.