Updated to 0.98.13
The link in the opening post has been updated.
- Added zero-slot shields for testing
- Corsair IIa now has a levelled gun setup
- Marauders slightly retuned to use zero-slot shields
- Ranx gunships now rarely carry a dual version of their thermo cannon at higher levels
- Ranx gunships now use an experimental slotless shield rather than the monopole deflector
- Several freighters now use more level-appropriate point-defense systems
- The Wolfen/X no longer has a setup that lacks a non-ammo weapon (swapped from the Dragonfly to the SAR/10 and adjusted the AI settings accordingly)
- Wolfen/X, Centurion Block 2 subvariant, and the Centurion Black now use an experimental slotless shield
- Centurion Block 2 subvariant (this is a version only seen in shipyards currently) and Britannia/M now use the correct armor type for their mass classes
- Steel Slaver now correctly has an omnidirectional weapon (damn you shipclassoverride quirks)
- Earthzone 1200s as used by anarchists now carry large armor patches, not small
- Price of Falke 500 smartcannon rounds decreased from 45 to 30 credits each
- Various tweaks to what kinds of fuel rods/assemblies different NPC ships carry
Zero-slot shields
One of the problems with developing enemies for this game is that sometimes you want an enemy to have a terrible shield so that it dies fairly quickly. Because of how the AI works there's also cases where you want enemy ships to run away when the player fights back, and low-health shields are the best current way to get the AI to play nicely with that. This generally requires either a severely underpowered shield of the appropriate level, or giving ships a shield of a much lower level than the current ship or system level. But that doesn't always make sense: why are the Ranx military using commercial monopole deflectors, or the marauders using level one or two shields past Sanctuary? This version of Elemental Shift introduces a test of a new tool for balancing that allows a level-appropriate shield to have worse stats while still being 'balanced' and thus make more sense as a tool for light gunships, tiny battlepods, and other forms of....well....battlefield chaff. The zero-slot shield is exactly that: a shield that doesn't take a device slot. There's a substantial penalty in terms of hard statistics for making an item slotless, and this very hadily solves the problem of needing an 'excuse' to do so. Stat-wise, they're generally
roughly equivalent to being a level below a single-slot shield of the same level, though they often have fast regen and/or recovery times after being depleted. While I don't expect them to be very useful for players, they may find a niche on builds that would normally neglect to have a shield at all, or on ships that are small enough that device slots really count. Their real utility is as a way to experiment with NPC builds that make a bit more sense, and also to look at options for a tiered shield generator system similar to the mass class system for armors as a long-term goal of the mod.
To make this test version of zero slot shields, I've repurposed the existing "A-class deflector" at level one, which was generally only used as a shield for tiny pirate ships and was extremely underpowered to account for that. It's now basically the same, but slotless. I've also renamed and expanded the A-class into three separate shields from levels one through three, which you'll see being used by the charon pirates and marauders on their gunships. There are two other zero-slot shields for now: the Ranx have moved to an all-new slotless shield called the
Trondenes deflector, while some NPC fleet and rogue fleet units have swapped to using the R1-B, an improved and slotless version of the R1 deflector at level 5 (this repurposes the two-slot version of the R1-B in earlier versions of the mod. Sorry, it'll come back eventually, it's just harder to balance two-slot shields than zero-slot ones).
