If you can't manage the heat of course you don't like it. The key to using that kind of weapon is that you spend most of your time dodging not firing. Zig zag in, fire until the ALTs start firing and zig zag out. Then when the ALTs stop go back in. Or if you're up against a bunch of Chasms or something you decide when to attack or dodge based on your own weapon's cycle.PM wrote:I just tried +150% ATC, and while it is decent, it cannot kill a Phobos or dominate other worst-case scenario endgame fights before the weapon overheats. I do not trust myself at not overheating and breaking temperature weapons during a heated moment. Thus, I do not use ATC if I can get comparable or better weapons. If I want to use +150% thermo weapon, I would use either Hecates if I want ammoless or TM7 cannon if I am willing to suffer ammo for power.Atarlost wrote:And if you use any thermo weapon when level 9 gear is on the the table and aren't enhancing it to the limit you're using the wrong gun. ATC enhanced kills things fast and misses don't cost nearly as much as misses with a howitzer.
Shrike's Mines & Missiles ++
Literally is the new Figuratively
It may have been forgotten at some point....but this is sorta my mods development thread. Please do not get into long debates about endgame weapon balance here. A few posts here and there is cool. Long back-and-forth stuff like this? Seriously pushing it off-topic.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
Planning a few new weapons to work off some of the stuff that's coming in 1.6. Unfortunately, enough is changing that a full rebalance of some stuff is inevitable for 1.6, so that's delaying stuff some more.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
I decided to quickly bash out some new tinker weapons. These aren't fully in the game yet but I'll add the recipes at some point.
First up, the repeating slam cannon. Take a DK10 Arbalest and a Slam Cannon, mash them together, and you get yourself this thing:
Not exactly a new idea, but it's the sort of thing the tinkers would make.
Secondly, the quadruple turbolaser cannon, a level 5 dogfighting weapon. It's pretty good, so I'll have to make it a bit pricey to build.
It's rather a neat little weapon, bringing extra DPS out of the already pretty solid turbolaser design. It suffers from drop-off more than the X-ray, but has superior effects on multihulled stations and internals.
Finally, the gimmick gun for SM&M++. This weapon isn't supposed to be practical, safe or efficient. I bring you...the death laser.
It looks cooler ingame.
Absurdly powerful 5-shot burst, with a very low rate of fire. This is the only laser weapon with a WMD rating, and it's a very high WMD rating. This makes it both very good, and very bad at certain tasks. Two-slot requirement, illegal, will have very hefty crafting requirements. To make people like it some more, it also (for now, since it's built out of a mining laser) has mining. So if you feel like mining with a weapon that fires once every 1.25 seconds and can also blow up small planets, this is......really still not something to get. It's good for a laugh though, and it is technically still quite good in skilled hands.
Obviously this one is going to be quite hard for me to balance.
------------
All of these are very WIP: I haven't run balance calculations on them yet and when I do they're going to have some serious changes.
First up, the repeating slam cannon. Take a DK10 Arbalest and a Slam Cannon, mash them together, and you get yourself this thing:
Not exactly a new idea, but it's the sort of thing the tinkers would make.
Secondly, the quadruple turbolaser cannon, a level 5 dogfighting weapon. It's pretty good, so I'll have to make it a bit pricey to build.
It's rather a neat little weapon, bringing extra DPS out of the already pretty solid turbolaser design. It suffers from drop-off more than the X-ray, but has superior effects on multihulled stations and internals.
Finally, the gimmick gun for SM&M++. This weapon isn't supposed to be practical, safe or efficient. I bring you...the death laser.
It looks cooler ingame.
Absurdly powerful 5-shot burst, with a very low rate of fire. This is the only laser weapon with a WMD rating, and it's a very high WMD rating. This makes it both very good, and very bad at certain tasks. Two-slot requirement, illegal, will have very hefty crafting requirements. To make people like it some more, it also (for now, since it's built out of a mining laser) has mining. So if you feel like mining with a weapon that fires once every 1.25 seconds and can also blow up small planets, this is......really still not something to get. It's good for a laugh though, and it is technically still quite good in skilled hands.
Obviously this one is going to be quite hard for me to balance.
------------
All of these are very WIP: I haven't run balance calculations on them yet and when I do they're going to have some serious changes.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
-
JohnBWatson
- Fleet Officer
- Posts: 1452
- Joined: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:17 pm
The repeating slam cannon could use some additional spacing on the shots. At present they overlap a bit, which looks strange.
That aside, looks nice. Very in keeping with how the Tinkers go about their business.
That aside, looks nice. Very in keeping with how the Tinkers go about their business.
Regrettably, this isn't possible right now....the gap between shots in a repeating weapon is hardcoded and can't be altered. It's on ministry as a thing to do later though.JohnBWatson wrote:The repeating slam cannon could use some additional spacing on the shots. At present they overlap a bit, which looks strange.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
I've finished most of my coursework for this semester now. I've got one take-home exam and a field project (and some paperwork) to do, and then that's that for a few weeks. Hopefully this means I can get some more stuff built into the game then. I've temporarily ditched my kinetic sounds.....they were too harsh and got really annoying after a while.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
Re: death laser
5 shots at 1.25 sec is not that slow.
Re: repeating gun with gaps (i.e., ways to fake it)
The easiest way to do this is with capacitors, but the global recharge time makes it impossible to have a consistent rhythm; and speeding it up with a weapon optimizer is useless. Not to mention an eyesore on the screen.
Another much more complicated way is to "fire" more than four times, which requires a variable like charges to keep track (and reset to zero when salvo is done), and if the variable equals a shot that should have a gap, do not let it fire for this tick. Works great, except the side effect is lying weapon stats, such as 3d6 (x10) instead of 3d6 (x4), and the code is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The side-effects are unacceptable to me, and I hope delays in repeating weapons get support soon.
5 shots at 1.25 sec is not that slow.
Re: repeating gun with gaps (i.e., ways to fake it)
The easiest way to do this is with capacitors, but the global recharge time makes it impossible to have a consistent rhythm; and speeding it up with a weapon optimizer is useless. Not to mention an eyesore on the screen.
Another much more complicated way is to "fire" more than four times, which requires a variable like charges to keep track (and reset to zero when salvo is done), and if the variable equals a shot that should have a gap, do not let it fire for this tick. Works great, except the side effect is lying weapon stats, such as 3d6 (x10) instead of 3d6 (x4), and the code is much more complicated than it needs to be.
The side-effects are unacceptable to me, and I hope delays in repeating weapons get support soon.
Download and Play in 1.9 beta 1...
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!
Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
Drake Technologies (Alpha): More hardware for combat in parts 1 and 2!
Star Castle Arcade: Play a classic arcade game adventure, with or without more features (like powerups)!
Playership Drones: Buy or restore exotic ships to command!
Other playable mods from 1.8 and 1.7, waiting to be updated...
Godmode v3 (WIP): Dev/cheat tool compatible with D&O parts 1 or 2.
It's slow enough to make it difficult, but not impossible to use. Balance is way off right now though so it works out as being seriously overpowered.PM wrote:Re: death laser
5 shots at 1.25 sec is not that slow.
Edit: Looking at Github, ammo weapons are getting serious changes in 1.6. I may have to redo large parts of the mod at that point to bring in those shifts....or I might not. We'll see what's in the final version.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
I've started porting the 1.6b5 changes into SM&M++. I've also buffed the M5 Nemesis so it has a (50%) damage boost over the M2. The missiles also turn up in slightly larger quantities than in vanilla, but less than in the last SM&M++ alpha.....since they're a lot more powerful now. Unfortunately, something about the cosmetic tweaks is messing with the damage display.
I've also started work adding some misc items into the game. I've altered the Eridani mineral water to state that it comes from the moons of St John's World and is then bottled at Starton Eridani.....and added a lower-level counterfeit version that's bottled from a tapped coolant line on the station. Because that hypothesis for where it cam from was too fun to allow to die.
Edit:
Other stuff I'm aiming to do:
-Port over the MAG launcher and missiles, ditch the complex and buggy multi-mode system and just rebalance the launcher directly.
-Possibly turn the alternate modes into new items.
-Play around with the mining pods and see about an illegal "modified" version with a bigger boom.
I've also started work adding some misc items into the game. I've altered the Eridani mineral water to state that it comes from the moons of St John's World and is then bottled at Starton Eridani.....and added a lower-level counterfeit version that's bottled from a tapped coolant line on the station. Because that hypothesis for where it cam from was too fun to allow to die.
Edit:
Other stuff I'm aiming to do:
-Port over the MAG launcher and missiles, ditch the complex and buggy multi-mode system and just rebalance the launcher directly.
-Possibly turn the alternate modes into new items.
-Play around with the mining pods and see about an illegal "modified" version with a bigger boom.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
Today I moved home from uni for the break. I've started porting new stuff from 1.6b5 into the game again.
New changes:
-MAG launcher is now as it is in vanilla
-Added radiation to 98R High Flux MAG to match its description as a radiological weapon.
-Added armor penetration (level modifier of 6) to 3K siege MAG as an experiment. May rework further to make it a good counterpart to the Shieldbuster.
-Reduced range of High Flux MAG to make it less of a bombardment weapon
-Increased travel speed and reduced lifetime of 3K Siege MAG to make it easier to aim.
TODO:
-Test more ingame, see how it works. Consider area of effect for Shieldbuster and 3K MAGs.
----
The other thing I need to do is fix up all the broken/wrong images in SM&M++. Thanks to old copy-pasting, they're all over the place.
New changes:
-MAG launcher is now as it is in vanilla
-Added radiation to 98R High Flux MAG to match its description as a radiological weapon.
-Added armor penetration (level modifier of 6) to 3K siege MAG as an experiment. May rework further to make it a good counterpart to the Shieldbuster.
-Reduced range of High Flux MAG to make it less of a bombardment weapon
-Increased travel speed and reduced lifetime of 3K Siege MAG to make it easier to aim.
TODO:
-Test more ingame, see how it works. Consider area of effect for Shieldbuster and 3K MAGs.
----
The other thing I need to do is fix up all the broken/wrong images in SM&M++. Thanks to old copy-pasting, they're all over the place.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
New stuff:
-New new sounds snKinetic1 and snKinetic2. Replace snRecoillessCannon on low-medium damage kinetic weapons. They're rather underwhelming, but that's the idea.
-Remastered and revised snHowitzer2 to be nicer on the ears (and on your speakers). Reduced volume to more suitable level relative to snHowitzer1
Todo on sounds:
-Explore library code (I'm toying with splitting SASS back out of SM&M++ and trying to get it as an official library for mod/extension devs...or just releasing it as a separate library)
-Remaster positron lancer sound to work around new quirk in sound mixer introduced in 1.6b5
-Heavy and high-velocity kinetic sounds
EDIT:
More changes!
-Added tracking to Dragonfly Missiles System based on changes to 1.6 (mine is still a different weapon with more usefulness, but it also has the tracking)
-Did not add multitarget (as 1.6 has in vanilla) because it's not necessary.
-Did not port over revised projectile graphics for dragonfly because it's harder to work with than just hardcoding the damned thing. (DamageScale is pretty much useless when used on an effect that's attached to a single projectile because it's inflexible and annoying to work with. Granted, it's inflexible and annoying to work with anyway, but at least with multiple weapons using a common effect it actually does something)
-Reduced mass of dragonfly cartridges (in vanilla they're 50kg each, which is way too high)
-Added new ministry ticket about issue that prevents me from making the dragonfly look good now. I can either have tracking, or it can look good. I'm hopeful that in time I can have both. This old bit of engine code is also a pain for some other weapons, so it's about time I put that up there.
-Renamed dragonfly ammo to be more sensible. You now have the D100, D200F, and D500M. I'm tempted to alter these even more from vanilla so that only some of them are trackers. We'll see how that goes...it would probably require more missiles, but that's not a bad thing.
-New new sounds snKinetic1 and snKinetic2. Replace snRecoillessCannon on low-medium damage kinetic weapons. They're rather underwhelming, but that's the idea.
-Remastered and revised snHowitzer2 to be nicer on the ears (and on your speakers). Reduced volume to more suitable level relative to snHowitzer1
Todo on sounds:
-Explore library code (I'm toying with splitting SASS back out of SM&M++ and trying to get it as an official library for mod/extension devs...or just releasing it as a separate library)
-Remaster positron lancer sound to work around new quirk in sound mixer introduced in 1.6b5
-Heavy and high-velocity kinetic sounds
EDIT:
More changes!
-Added tracking to Dragonfly Missiles System based on changes to 1.6 (mine is still a different weapon with more usefulness, but it also has the tracking)
-Did not add multitarget (as 1.6 has in vanilla) because it's not necessary.
-Did not port over revised projectile graphics for dragonfly because it's harder to work with than just hardcoding the damned thing. (DamageScale is pretty much useless when used on an effect that's attached to a single projectile because it's inflexible and annoying to work with. Granted, it's inflexible and annoying to work with anyway, but at least with multiple weapons using a common effect it actually does something)
-Reduced mass of dragonfly cartridges (in vanilla they're 50kg each, which is way too high)
-Added new ministry ticket about issue that prevents me from making the dragonfly look good now. I can either have tracking, or it can look good. I'm hopeful that in time I can have both. This old bit of engine code is also a pain for some other weapons, so it's about time I put that up there.
-Renamed dragonfly ammo to be more sensible. You now have the D100, D200F, and D500M. I'm tempted to alter these even more from vanilla so that only some of them are trackers. We'll see how that goes...it would probably require more missiles, but that's not a bad thing.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
Been doing some light tweaking before locking down and waiting for 1.6b6. The next beta improves the Urak weapons that I'd handled with my current alpha, so I'll be testing those and hopefully swapping my code over to a pure cosmetic overhaul once that beta is available for testing.
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
Updated for 1.6RC2:
-Urak Howitzer has small AoE over the vanilla weapon, but higher damage.
-Upped range and power use of Advanced Urak Mass Driver to match vanilla (mine was a slightly lower-ranged weapon for some reason)
-Re-added Rasiermesser SmartShield system. It's a tracking point-defense system with very nice intercept range.....but it needs smartcannon ammo, and it's level 6. So keeping it running may be challenging. Also point-defense is still very buggy.
Image from my ministry bug report on this. Note the shells tracking a missile that's already dead.
Next steps:
-Revise Dragonfly (or just dummy it out)...I need to shrink the projectiles and knock the damage down a bit (the damage is easy to fix, the bad looks...not so much)
-Do a quick once-over of the other point-defense systems.
-Content quality pass
I am hoping for an initial public release in the next few weeks to more or less coincide with the release of Transcendence 1.6
-Urak Howitzer has small AoE over the vanilla weapon, but higher damage.
-Upped range and power use of Advanced Urak Mass Driver to match vanilla (mine was a slightly lower-ranged weapon for some reason)
-Re-added Rasiermesser SmartShield system. It's a tracking point-defense system with very nice intercept range.....but it needs smartcannon ammo, and it's level 6. So keeping it running may be challenging. Also point-defense is still very buggy.
Image from my ministry bug report on this. Note the shells tracking a missile that's already dead.
Next steps:
-Revise Dragonfly (or just dummy it out)...I need to shrink the projectiles and knock the damage down a bit (the damage is easy to fix, the bad looks...not so much)
-Do a quick once-over of the other point-defense systems.
-Content quality pass
I am hoping for an initial public release in the next few weeks to more or less coincide with the release of Transcendence 1.6
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.
New features:
-Redid my old Auton Overhaul, fixing a vanilla bug with power use and allowing full use of all autons in the game (only matters when running CC). In addition, the autosentinel starts with a Class A shield.
- Removed Dragonfly launcher (for now). I'll have to work on this some more in the future.
-Nerfed the ICX significantly: does less damage per shot, but has a few tweaks to make it a little better maybe? It at least *feels* ok.
-Rebuilt Longreach as a new item. You may like it.
Edit: Finalised PD systems as follows:
ICX: 3-round burst with slight inaccuracy (which actually makes it more effective because of how PD targeting works). 1d4+6 laser per blast. 25ls detection radius
SmartShield: Tracking system, uses smartcannon rounds. 35ls range. Slightly buggy because of the engine issues.
Longreach: Military autocannon. Slight inaccuracy. Small radius effect on hit (requires direct hit because of engine issues). Light thermonuclear damage, moderate-high ROF. 50ls detection range. Be careful how and where you use this thing.
TODO:
-Mines!
-Redid my old Auton Overhaul, fixing a vanilla bug with power use and allowing full use of all autons in the game (only matters when running CC). In addition, the autosentinel starts with a Class A shield.
- Removed Dragonfly launcher (for now). I'll have to work on this some more in the future.
-Nerfed the ICX significantly: does less damage per shot, but has a few tweaks to make it a little better maybe? It at least *feels* ok.
-Rebuilt Longreach as a new item. You may like it.
Edit: Finalised PD systems as follows:
ICX: 3-round burst with slight inaccuracy (which actually makes it more effective because of how PD targeting works). 1d4+6 laser per blast. 25ls detection radius
SmartShield: Tracking system, uses smartcannon rounds. 35ls range. Slightly buggy because of the engine issues.
Longreach: Military autocannon. Slight inaccuracy. Small radius effect on hit (requires direct hit because of engine issues). Light thermonuclear damage, moderate-high ROF. 50ls detection range. Be careful how and where you use this thing.
TODO:
-Mines!
Mischievous local moderator. She/Her pronouns.