Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++

A place to discuss mods in development and concepts for new mods.
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Song
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JohnBWatson wrote:
Shrike wrote:
bzm3r wrote:
Shrike wrote:
JohnBWatson wrote:
easily able to defeat a lone Chasm without taking any armor damage (this is very impressive: a vanilla britannia at close range will be wiped out by a chasm 100% of the time).
When I tested it, the opposite outcome occurred...
How do you guys run these tests?
In my case, the head-to-head ship spawner in G.O.D. It's not a particularly fair trial: normally the britannia would get a range advantage for firing missiles, but it models attacks on stations fairly well.
Oddly enough, that's how I tested it as well. I'll try it a few more times and see what results I get.

EDIT: Britannia won 7 out of 10 matches. I alternated which one was selected first, to eliminate that as a factor. All 3 losses were incurred due to the AI failing you mentioned.
Sounds like one (or both) of us is having the RNG be hilarious. Probably me. Generally the britannia (in stock) was toast unless it started pointing right at the back of the chasm.
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A testing run exposed a few bugs, which I've now fixed. SM&M++ no longer requires corporate command (I may release a standalone mod that uses CC content). I'm also planning some changes to lower-level weaponry (mostly additions) to add some variety to the already-pretty-good early and mid game.

In the later game, Bushido is losing the thermo cannon. That's going to move to Makayev instead, and Bushido will receive some energy weapons to replace it.
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Atarlost
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I would suggest the Thermo Cannon go to Rasiermesser instead. Rasiermesser has an ammo weapon thing and has no thermo weapon outside CC. Makayev already has the Mark V in a similar design space.
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Atarlost wrote:I would suggest the Thermo Cannon go to Rasiermesser instead. Rasiermesser has an ammo weapon thing and has no thermo weapon outside CC. Makayev already has the Mark V in a similar design space.
Problem with that is that the thermo cannon is a syrtian war design....I'm not sure if Rasiermesser was around then, but Makayev definitely was. It's more in keeping with their lineup, even if it's technically an obsolete weapon in the minds of their management.
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While working on station defense weapons (which are likely to be held back partly for later stuff), I had a look at the Charon mission to see if I could make it theoretically plausible to win via the use of these new guns. And it's quite interesting: the mission seems set up specifically to be completely impossible: the base starts with 150HP (normally a korolov base would have 250) and has the same horrible level 4 armor that all the other Korolov stations have. The guards are both very fragile against blast and kinetic weapons (against Corsair-IIs and Drakes) and have area-of-effect kinetic weapons: Basically the perfect recipe for friendly fire. On top of that, changes to AI code over time has resulted in the attacking gunships simply sitting at close range and blasting the station before the drakes even arrive. On top of that, the Drakes have internal hitpoints now that make them a very, very tough kill.


...I initially did some tests giving the Korolov base the mother of all kinetic weapons: an 8X repeating Morningstar-based spray weapon. This was fantastic, but insufficient. The drakes are just too hardcore, even with a well-equipped player handling them. I'm considering splitting stuff off to the side and making a proper overhaul mod at some point to make the battle winnable (with difficulty), and upping the rewards to match the difficulty. If the mission was borderline impossible, but very rewarding...... I'd be fine with it, but the rewards simply don't match up to that with now. Right now, accomplishing the impossible can net you an omni particle cannon. Yuck.


....the repeating PK25-based weapon will probably go somewhere else, although it should not surprise anyone that it has something of a problem with friendly fire. This limits the places I can put it, although it is a very good station-defense weapon. I'm contemplating defense options for korolov bases still....they could get a laser-based defense system, or they could end up with turrets.
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pixelfck
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I always thought it would be nice if this mission was winnable, extremely though, bordering on impossible.. but winnable.
It may be nice if the station could upgrade its chances of survival by some item(s) the player could bring in the cargo hold. Since you cannot scout ahead of the Charon system, this would still be chance based: some game you could collect the required stuff, some game the stuff simply isn't there.

Just some thoughts,
Pixelfck

(also, you post may warrant its own topic)
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Well, in some extremely lucky play I've won against the Charon assault in the Charon system. If you have Volkov, some great weapon (like the Slicer cannon, or a good blast weapon) and a heck load of missiles that you're willing to spend, it's possible to destroy the whole Charon fleet before they get in strike range of the station. You'd have to take a bet and run ahead to meet the Drakes though. A good shield helps too because you can block the missiles aimed for the base.
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was this before or after the introduction of ship interiors (internal hitpoints) for capital ships?

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bzm3r
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pixelfck wrote:I always thought it would be nice if this mission was winnable, extremely though, bordering on impossible.. but winnable.
It may be nice if the station could upgrade its chances of survival by some item(s) the player could bring in the cargo hold. Since you cannot scout ahead of the Charon system, this would still be chance based: some game you could collect the required stuff, some game the stuff simply isn't there.

Just some thoughts,
Pixelfck

(also, you post may warrant its own topic)
Maybe success in Korolov missions in the systems before Charon would help make the Charon mission slightly more likely to be won, by gathering those "items"?
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I've had a think this morning after reading replies here, and I think I can see how to make the charon mission more.....interesting. Plotty. Less out-of-nowhere. And winnable, while we're at it. This definitely falls outside my skillset in modding, so I might write it up as a feature suggestion later, or give it it's own thread later. For now though, I'll go back to guns on this thread.
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Both, but with interior you'd need a good blast weapon with WMD, and a lot of missiles, preferably Broadswords or even the... Thermonuclear ones, which are rare, but can also be crafted at a Tinker.
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Today I built the first of the all-new Bushido weapons lineup. This is their answer to the turbolaser cannon: a less powerful gun that is optimised for short-ranged work. It's basically a laser version of the PM6 cannon used by the Slicer. The convergence point of the guns is about 20-25ls away, and the weapon has a shorter range than most other lasers. It also has a different wavelength to other guns, to show off Bushido's technical skill, and because I wanted a more visually interesting gun.


It's not much to look at when it's normal, because the rate of fire is low enough that the convergence isn't all that obvious. When you optimise it though....
BushidoEnhanced.png
BushidoEnhanced.png (37.44 KiB) Viewed 7128 times
...it becomes a lot easier to screenshot. And a lot more dangerous. I'm still working out the balance on this thing, but it's not as good as the dual turbolaser (in general). Currently it has armor-penetration, but I'm thinking about removing that....this is a decent enough gun without it.

Edit: Beams are still getting tuned. They're currently a little too big and glowy....but I'd prefer that to them being boring.
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I'm trying to think of ways to liven up the variety of laser weapons in the game. I can't really spend much time on this (life is busy and annoying right now), but I'm hoping to fix the rather sparse offerings in the laser department of the game....compared to kinetics, it's very under-developed. Bushido is going to be part of this, but I'll need to work on some others as well. Here's what I have planned right now:

-Omni varient of the bushido orange laser. Does not have the "slicer" pattern. Will probably burst-fire instead. Set between the omni-laser and omni-turbolaser in terms of specs.
-Single version of the X-ray laser cannon --> Current weapon renamed to "Dual X-ray laser"
-Omnidirectional version of X-ray laser cannon ---> Current tinker weapon renamed to have a very long but more accurate name.

Other laser stuff:

-Alter laser-cannon array to be useful: replace spread3 config with custom config based on the Trident.
-Add higher-level mining laser?
-Rebuild the modified laser-array from Elemental Shift into a new gun...basically an IM90, only with laser cannons.


This won't make it as diverse as kinetics, but it should help things a bit and give even more laser options in the early game.

Edit: I'm also planning a series of thermonuclear weapons for NAMI. These will start with crude(ish) mass drivers based on their early-game kinetic weapons, and work their way up to massive endgame guns, and will trade damage for armor penetration.....you won't crack shields or splash lots of hostiles, but you should be able to really mess up enemy warships....if I can work out how armor penetration works again.

Edit2: I'm also planning a set of external side-mounted laser weapons by EI.....yes, this means you can fire 6 turbolasers at once, should you really wish to.
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All laser varients are coded into the game at this point, and undergoing balance tweaks....it's looking good. The laser array is actually a pretty decent weapon when you narrow down the spread. It's no turbolaser of course: higher level armors and anything at low level with high resistances will shrug off a hit, but against lighter things it's quite a respectable little gun. It's also surprisingly good against Drakes: if you can get close the 3X spread takes out missiles easily and having three shots instead of one means you burn through structural HP a lot faster than a single or dual laser cannon.

The bushido omni is a bit tricky, but it's in reasonable condition right now. I'm not entirely happy about the effects, but it's decent enough. Lower damage than the omni turbolaser, lower power cost, but it has armor penetration and burst fire to make it handle differently. To take on hardened targets you really do have to enhance it though....although slapping a 40MW enhancer on a 5.5MW gun seems a bit excessive. I might see about making an extra enhancer for the lower-level guns...

Having realised quite late that the tinker omni-X-ray is in fact a bog standard single-laser type of omni, I've abandoned the omni X-ray project for now...I may end up bringing it back in though: This gun is currently nowhere near as overwhelming as it really should be considering how tricky it is to make it...it's not that expensive, sure....but this is very nearly a top-tier tinker recipe. The single X-ray laser however is working juuuuust fine.
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Term is starting up, and the university has been holding up my enrollment.....my masters application is sitting on someone's desk, and until it's approved and in the computer system I can't enroll for courses. Still, I have to sort things out and go talk to examiners. Development is on hold, but I'm reasonably happy with progress. I made a prototype weapon, but it hasn't worked out (despite AssumedPseudonym making a very, very good translisp framework to try to get it to work). I'm hoping to repurpose it for another weapon though, so with luck it will work out.

When I do have time, I think the next thing to make will be the NAMI thermo weapons. Those should be fun....they're basically giant mass drivers. They start out at AK505 size and then just get bigger. The basic principle (written by an ecology graduate who never did nuclear physics) is that they're using the technology developed for NAMI's very popular low-level recoilless cannons, but firing nuclear shells....the energy of impact is used to trigger a small fusion reaction that provides most of the punch (yes, this is bad physics, but this is a universe where kinetics kinda suck). They'll probably top out at level 8 or 9. They're a competitor to Makayev-Energia's howitzer line (and possibly the fusionfire and thermo cannon), but have relatively low shield damage (impacting the shield doesn't let the warhead fire properly) and the armor-penetrator modifier (having a nuclear weapon detonate as it passes through the armor is not very good for your ship). This will be really hard to balance effectively, but it should make for interesting weaponry when I'm finished. They will probably accept the high-speed howitzer loader.
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