Corporate Command Game Balance

[george moromisato]

I'm in the middle of making some bug fixes and updates to Corporate Command and I'd like to solicit game balance improvements. I believe each of the new player ship could use some tweaks. I've got some ideas, but I'd like to hear yours.

Manticore
The Manticore is probably the easiest of the three ships, but its lack of shields causes problems against EMP and radiation. Is the trade-off worth it? At least some people have been able to get pretty far. For example: http://multiverse.kronosaur.com/transGa ... K8bUNBo%3d

Freyr
The Freyr currently gets a swivel mount for Rasiermesser weapons. Unfortunately, there are very few weapons available to it. In the next version I plan on adding more Rasiermesser weapons, which will help a little. Nevertheless, this ship seems very fragile. What do people think in general?

Constellation
The Constellation probably needs to start with a better auton. Other than that, what do you think of the balance? Does it need to be stronger? How do you like it in practice?

Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

[PM]

Freyr: When my late-game goal is high level non-Rasiermesser hardware, why would I want to use this instead of the faster and smaller Wolfen unless I like to look at the Freyr?

Constellation: The auton bay should not sell for so much. It is so tempting to sell it for enough credits to get level 4 or 5 equipment at the start of a new game. Also, in the games I play, I often mine early, which requires mining hold, and an auton bay gets in the way of that. All the more reason to sell it, then buy back later. Sure, Constellation is inferior to the EI500 in every way once midgame arrives and any ship can get an auton bay (using Trading Post if desperate enough), but it sure makes the early game easier.

[george moromisato]

Freyr: When my late-game goal is high level non-Rasiermesser hardware, why would I want to use this instead of the faster and smaller Wolfen unless I like to look at the Freyr?

Constellation: The auton bay should not sell for so much. It is so tempting to sell it for enough credits to get level 4 or 5 equipment at the start of a new game. Also, in the games I play, I often mine early, which requires mining hold, and an auton bay gets in the way of that. All the more reason to sell it, then buy back later. Sure, Constellation is inferior to the EI500 in every way once midgame arrives and any ship can get an auton bay (using Trading Post if desperate enough), but it sure makes the early game easier.

Has anyone tried Dvalin's Ion9 with the Freyr? Is it worth it? Either way, we need more high-level weapons for the Freyr. Perhaps a level 9 base-cracker?

On the constellation: Perhaps the auton bay should not be replaceable on the Constellation? Maybe the auton bay should not be sold separately?

Good feedback--thank you.

[PM]

Has anyone tried Dvalin's Ion9 with the Freyr? Is it worth it? Either way, we need more high-level weapons for the Freyr. Perhaps a level 9 base-cracker?

While I have not tried this with the Freyr, the Ion9, which is hard to get, is just inferior to the Ferian Cannon. Ferian Cannon has a better damage type (plasma is not resisted strongly enough to matter in part 1), good DPS, can mine asteroids, crack bases, and can be obtained much earlier and more easily if player does not mind killing Ferians. I cannot think of anytime I want to jump through hoops (by giving away several high level items better used elsewhere) to obtain and use the Ion9 when I can just beat up Ferians until a warrior drops an intact cannon. Ferians are rather common.

Update: Just tried it (via godmod). It is good, but mainly because many of the best options of previous versions were removed or weakened. (No more longzhu stacking, weaker IM90, etc.) Ion9 with +80% to +100% (when getting +150% ion weapons these days is too hard otherwise), with Freyr auto-aim is good. Probably not the best or top-tier option, but maybe second-tier, or at least not a complete joke.

[PM]

One more question/comment: Are there any cargo hold expansions that grant 150 or more tons of cargo space? If not, the Manticore's maximum expansion limit of 200 tons is impossible to reach. 150 tons is the best it can get without third-party mods.

[Song]

Right.

Freyr:

One problem is that the swivel gun targets the nearest enemy regardless of whether it can hit it. This can lead to annoying delays in dogfights where it's aiming away from what you're shooting at. I'm not sure how this could be fixed (maybe a limiter on where the game looks for targets for it to within the cone +/- 45-50 degrees or so) though. Problems with getting the Ion9 are serious, but could probably be fixed by tweaking vanilla in a future version to make the Dvalin sidequest more realistic.

Otherwise, it's an excellent ship, and a genuine glass cannon. Possibly auto-start with a visual display enhancer or a targeting ROM so we can snipe at long range right off the bat, which seems to be what the freyer is optimised for.

Manticore: Maybe see what can be done in terms of armor HP boosts on makayev armor, or some bonus against EMP and the like. The only other problem it has is that it's hellishly slow, which means without a shield you're kinda vulnerable since you can't run away that well. On the other hand, it isn't a bad ship.

Conny: Hooboy. People know my opinions on this already, and the thread with my big rants is still around so I'll keep it fairly brief. The conny currently is unworkable. Autons run like lemmings into combat and are hard to pull out of combat, the auton bay can't even fit basic particle cannons to autons, and the supply is horrible. But sticking to issues purely with the ship:

-The starting gun is useless. The moskva 11 is a gun for fast gunships, not slow freighters. I would replace this with a custom/reworked omni weapon with a range of 30-40ls: close enough that it's worse than a laser, but far enough away that you can actually physically shoot hornets and the like with it.
-Assuming the auton bay is fixed to work properly, it should either be made a fixed item on the conny (or have the conny have an "improved" version over the standard sellable bay), or tweak the buy/sell prices. At present, you can sell it for a lot of cash, go grind for yet more cash, then buy it back for a net loss of only ~6K. At present this is a required strategy to do well with the conny. It really shouldn't be.
-Keep in mind that fixing the auton bay on the ship removes the option of stripmining sectors, which is one of the best ways to grind for cash, and conny pilots must have a good cashflow in order to repair autons.
-I would give the ship a 300D auton, or something between the 300D and the autosentinel. Alternatively, I would give the autosentinel a laser deflector. This isn't as important if the gun is fixed to be useful, but at present if your first auton gets killed, you're screwed.
-If the auton bay is reworked, it'd be nice to be able to name autons, so you can keep track of them better.
-Apart from the basic autosentinel the only autons that are stocked in any quantity are the ones that try to kill you (which can easily overpower a starting conny) and the mule. It's better in CC than in vanilla, and 1.2 did fix a lot of the RNG problems that made this worse.....but making sure the player has access to autons that can be upgraded right through the game is really important It may be worth auto-identifying all autons for conny players, on the grounds that the ship is equipped with gear for this purpose. That stops a player buying their first (well, second) auton only to immediately get killed by it.
-BTW: I'm not sure this is the case, but I have a suspicion that with the auton bay you can stack fully loaded mules inside each other. If this is the case then it's awesome, but should probably be fixed.

In short, the current conny could use a few tweaks. There's a lot that can be done, but I suspect that even only doing a few of those things will make it a lot more workable.

[FAD]

Manticore:
I'd suggest having a little easier access to meteorsteel-based armors for this ship, so as to allow its worth to get past the radiation and ion effects. My few run-throughs with this ship had me begging for such armor in early/mid game, though not enough segments could be found...I died horrible deaths due to the lack of supporting armor and never made it to St K's. Maybe tweak some of the new armors intruduced in CC to help counter these weak spots somewhat?

Freyr:
I've never been a Rasiermesser weapons fan, aside from the Smart Cannon...and it doesn't need swivel. So this feature had crippled my enjoyment of playing the ship. However if you're planning on adding in some additional beam-type weapons by Rasiermesser, to me it may bring enjoyment back into playing it. Although I'm not understanding the concept of making this ship (or any playership) exclusive to certain weapon manufacturers, other than that being a challenge all in itself. At any rate, this was my least favorite ship, although it does have potential if the broad gap in the weapons department is narrowed or closed. I never made it far enough to see how well the Rasiermesser scientist's weapon faired on swivel.

Constellation:
The Constellation was my go-to ship in my run-throughs, in that it just kept my interests in seeing how well I could upgrade autons to actually be worthy little defenders. But that blast cannon as a starting weapon seriously hurts this ship. It's not a very practical weapon at any cause, and does not complement the ship's combersome manouverability while having a belly full of loot. Maybe give it a 10ls extended reach would suffice? The problem with the auton bay is that the ship can support up to 200 ton cargo, and this causes me to have to swap the auton bay out for a cargo hold when needing to do some serious selling of merchandise, and then swap back when wanting/needing to work on autons. This gets very costly, and annoying.
I like the idea of not being able to remove the auton bay, but I would hope the trade-off would be to allow the full 200 T cargo capacity, and no cargo holds can be installed? This could present a unique challenge with all the illegals and ores out there.

As an additional suggestion, though I'm not sure how feasible or realistic it is... It would be nice if for whichever ship the player chooses, certain items would be a little more frequent, while other items geared for the other two ships be a little less frequent. I've noticed that while playing the Conny, most stores are well stocked with the new Rasiermesser weapons, or when playing the Manticore, autons are everywhere, including in loot and oftentimes more than one.

[Song]

Manticore:
I'd suggest having a little easier access to meteorsteel-based armors for this ship, so as to allow its worth to get past the radiation and ion effects. My few run-throughs with this ship had me begging for such armor in early/mid game, though not enough segments could be found...I died horrible deaths due to the lack of supporting armor and never made it to St K's. Maybe tweak some of the new armors intruduced in CC to help counter these weak spots somewhat?

This is an excellent point. The "NoShields" tag is currently just a horrible horrible thing. Maybe make some more makayev armors that have it in exchange for high boosts to blast/kinetic/EMP resistantance (keeping meteorsteel as being better). And maybe make meteorsteel dust boost some stats in exchange for the crippling "your shield has died" penalty.


Maybe some makayev competitor to the Rassiermesser V-series powered armor would make sense. Armor that regenerates at speed X, but at a higher speed if you have the armor-repairer (in addition to the base regen gained from the device). That gives the option of a relatively weak armor that regens like crazy if you enhance it with regen nanites and the makayev armor repairer. You can sort-of do this with duralloy armor, but that stuff is weak enough that it isn't really worth it in most cases.

Combining these two would make sense: A rapid regen, decent bonus armor that can't have shields and isn't quite as good against energy atttacks as Meteorsteel could be very workable.

[george moromisato]

Update: Just tried it (via godmod). It is good, but mainly because many of the best options of previous versions were removed or weakened. (No more longzhu stacking, weaker IM90, etc.) Ion9 with +80% to +100% (when getting +150% ion weapons these days is too hard otherwise), with Freyr auto-aim is good. Probably not the best or top-tier option, but maybe second-tier, or at least not a complete joke.

That's helpful--thanks. It's probably worth it to increase the Ion9 to level 9 (boosting its damage) to compensate for all the hoops. It might still not be competitive, but it's a step in the right direction.

BTW, two other Freyr enhancements might help:

1. Increase the swivel a little bit. Right now it is a 20 degree arc; it could be increased to 30 degrees.
2. Add some UI to tell what ship is being auto-targeted. This might take some of the unpredictability out of it.

[george moromisato]

Right.

Freyr:

One problem is that the swivel gun targets the nearest enemy regardless of whether it can hit it. This can lead to annoying delays in dogfights where it's aiming away from what you're shooting at. I'm not sure how this could be fixed (maybe a limiter on where the game looks for targets for it to within the cone +/- 45-50 degrees or so) though. Problems with getting the Ion9 are serious, but could probably be fixed by tweaking vanilla in a future version to make the Dvalin sidequest more realistic.

Otherwise, it's an excellent ship, and a genuine glass cannon. Possibly auto-start with a visual display enhancer or a targeting ROM so we can snipe at long range right off the bat, which seems to be what the freyer is optimised for.

Manticore: Maybe see what can be done in terms of armor HP boosts on makayev armor, or some bonus against EMP and the like. The only other problem it has is that it's hellishly slow, which means without a shield you're kinda vulnerable since you can't run away that well. On the other hand, it isn't a bad ship.

Conny: Hooboy. People know my opinions on this already, and the thread with my big rants is still around so I'll keep it fairly brief. The conny currently is unworkable. Autons run like lemmings into combat and are hard to pull out of combat, the auton bay can't even fit basic particle cannons to autons, and the supply is horrible. But sticking to issues purely with the ship:

-The starting gun is useless. The moskva 11 is a gun for fast gunships, not slow freighters. I would replace this with a custom/reworked omni weapon with a range of 30-40ls: close enough that it's worse than a laser, but far enough away that you can actually physically shoot hornets and the like with it.
-Assuming the auton bay is fixed to work properly, it should either be made a fixed item on the conny (or have the conny have an "improved" version over the standard sellable bay), or tweak the buy/sell prices. At present, you can sell it for a lot of cash, go grind for yet more cash, then buy it back for a net loss of only ~6K. At present this is a required strategy to do well with the conny. It really shouldn't be.
-Keep in mind that fixing the auton bay on the ship removes the option of stripmining sectors, which is one of the best ways to grind for cash, and conny pilots must have a good cashflow in order to repair autons.
-I would give the ship a 300D auton, or something between the 300D and the autosentinel. Alternatively, I would give the autosentinel a laser deflector. This isn't as important if the gun is fixed to be useful, but at present if your first auton gets killed, you're screwed.
-If the auton bay is reworked, it'd be nice to be able to name autons, so you can keep track of them better.
-Apart from the basic autosentinel the only autons that are stocked in any quantity are the ones that try to kill you (which can easily overpower a starting conny) and the mule. It's better in CC than in vanilla, and 1.2 did fix a lot of the RNG problems that made this worse.....but making sure the player has access to autons that can be upgraded right through the game is really important It may be worth auto-identifying all autons for conny players, on the grounds that the ship is equipped with gear for this purpose. That stops a player buying their first (well, second) auton only to immediately get killed by it.
-BTW: I'm not sure this is the case, but I have a suspicion that with the auton bay you can stack fully loaded mules inside each other. If this is the case then it's awesome, but should probably be fixed.

In short, the current conny could use a few tweaks. There's a lot that can be done, but I suspect that even only doing a few of those things will make it a lot more workable.

Lots of good ideas here.

I'm going to debug the Freyr targeting and see what I can find. Also, I think I'll add UI to show the current auto-target.

I like the idea of more Makayev armor for the Manticore.

For the Constellation, I wonder if adding better starting armor would help? Right now the ship is way too fragile, in my opinion. I like the idea of having the auto bay be permanent; but obviously we'd have to increase the starting ship's survivability (a better auton--or two--would definitely help).

BTW: I think I handled the Mule correctly: the mass of the Mule should include all its items. If you try to bring it aboard it won't work unless you have enough cargo space.

[george moromisato]

Manticore:
I'd suggest having a little easier access to meteorsteel-based armors for this ship, so as to allow its worth to get past the radiation and ion effects. My few run-throughs with this ship had me begging for such armor in early/mid game, though not enough segments could be found...I died horrible deaths due to the lack of supporting armor and never made it to St K's. Maybe tweak some of the new armors intruduced in CC to help counter these weak spots somewhat?

Freyr:
I've never been a Rasiermesser weapons fan, aside from the Smart Cannon...and it doesn't need swivel. So this feature had crippled my enjoyment of playing the ship. However if you're planning on adding in some additional beam-type weapons by Rasiermesser, to me it may bring enjoyment back into playing it. Although I'm not understanding the concept of making this ship (or any playership) exclusive to certain weapon manufacturers, other than that being a challenge all in itself. At any rate, this was my least favorite ship, although it does have potential if the broad gap in the weapons department is narrowed or closed. I never made it far enough to see how well the Rasiermesser scientist's weapon faired on swivel.

Constellation:
The Constellation was my go-to ship in my run-throughs, in that it just kept my interests in seeing how well I could upgrade autons to actually be worthy little defenders. But that blast cannon as a starting weapon seriously hurts this ship. It's not a very practical weapon at any cause, and does not complement the ship's combersome manouverability while having a belly full of loot. Maybe give it a 10ls extended reach would suffice? The problem with the auton bay is that the ship can support up to 200 ton cargo, and this causes me to have to swap the auton bay out for a cargo hold when needing to do some serious selling of merchandise, and then swap back when wanting/needing to work on autons. This gets very costly, and annoying.
I like the idea of not being able to remove the auton bay, but I would hope the trade-off would be to allow the full 200 T cargo capacity, and no cargo holds can be installed? This could present a unique challenge with all the illegals and ores out there.

As an additional suggestion, though I'm not sure how feasible or realistic it is... It would be nice if for whichever ship the player chooses, certain items would be a little more frequent, while other items geared for the other two ships be a little less frequent. I've noticed that while playing the Conny, most stores are well stocked with the new Rasiermesser weapons, or when playing the Manticore, autons are everywhere, including in loot and oftentimes more than one.

Thank you--that's very helpful.

I definitely like the idea of more armor for the Manticore.

In theory, you should be able to use Mules to carry stuff beyond the Constellation's cargo hold, no? Wouldn't that offset the limited cargo space?

[FAD]

Thank you--that's very helpful.

I definitely like the idea of more armor for the Manticore.

In theory, you should be able to use Mules to carry stuff beyond the Constellation's cargo hold, no? Wouldn't that offset the limited cargo space?

The problem with relying on the mule to hold additional items to sell, is the max no-buy in stores. So if I'm holding 25 segments of armor and my mule is holding several of the same type of armor as I am, the store will not be interested in buying any more of that armor from me. That's why I swap out the auton bay for the cargo bay, to carry it all in one shot to sell and get rid of it.
Actually, I use my mule to hold items I want to keep, not sell, while using my ship's hold for items I want to sell.
The Constellation being a freighter, that 200 ton cargo space is very inviting, and I like to make the most of the ship as possible. That's why I've been swapping out the bay for the hold. I like both features this ship offers, just don't like having to keep swapping them out.

[Song]

Re: Cargo hold/mules.....Why not make it so that when you visit a shop the inventory of your mule autons is part of the sell/buy screen (Edit: Only if they're close enough to you, of course), so you can load/unload them directly? Might need some unusual UI stuff, but there's no reason why a trader wouldn't be able to dock their mules to their own ship as said ship is docked to the station....and load cargo through the cargo hold and into the station docking bay. Maybe make it so you can select which holds are visible (Show All, Mule 1, Mule 2, Ship's Hold, ETC), and/or color-code by hold so you can unload 300t of ores at once if you find a station that will willingly buy it....and maybe choose which holds you want to load things into. That offsets the inability to smuggle or mine efficiently by letting the conny handle bulk trading far more efficiently. The trick is making sure the player could recognise when something is in a mule, so they can be sure they don't accidentally sell things from the wrong hold.


Edit: This also potentially allows a bypass to the no smuggling/no mining problem, if it's combined with the ability to install mining/smuggling gear on an auton.

[PM]

Shrike mentioned this above, but the Constellation really needs a better starting weapon. The Moskva 11 is only viable on fast and agile gunships, not slow and clumsy freighters. Maybe it is time to add an omnidirection recoilless cannon in the core game, then give it to the Constellation as a starter weapon. There is no early omni kinetic, the lowest is level 4 RK15. Alternatively, give the Constellation a SmartCannon or omni laser instead.

If the Constellation gets an integrated cargo device by virtual item, something needs to be done to prevent another cargo hold from displacing it. Events only prevent direct (un)installs, not indirect actions by displacement by installing another device, as posted here.

Autons need some of their stats filled in. Autons aside from AutoSentinel and Luminere's two autons have missing fields, one of which is reactor power which limits them to less than 10 MW devices. This leads to situation where auton bay cannot reinstall the original weapons of 1M autons.

One of the current endgame power options that was not weakened is +150% thermo weapons, because (uncommon) tritium injectors can be ordered three at a time, instead of only one (rare) ion power capacitor at a time. Corporate Command added stronger thermo weapons and an enhancer that makes infinite thermo cannon ammo. Perhaps a new Rasimermesser weapon that can be added is a thermo weapon for the player who wants to stack tritium injectors.

[PM]

Problems with getting the Ion9 are serious, but could probably be fixed by tweaking vanilla in a future version to make the Dvalin sidequest more realistic.

I need to give multiple undamaged level 9 and 10 items to have a realistic chance to get the Ion9. Might as well keep one of them and sell or transmute the rest. Dvalin as currently implemented is the biggest trap in the game.