Succession #4

[whaleduck]

The problem is the loot that you can get. You have extremely powerful, yet balanced weapons that are sufficiently expensive to be balanced, however if you find and sell these weapons then you become a kazillionaire and can eventually buy anything else in the game. We actually need to either make some of the weapons less expensive, reduce the chance of finding these weapons as salvage, or put them on a different item table so that we can control to a finer extent where and when they spawn. Or maybe even increase the sell penalty greatly.

Maybe you could make the weapons impossible to find as loot(not even damaged because tinkers pay lots for things like damaged APAs)

[PM]

For what it is worth, the last time I played a game with PSD, I spent an hour or two grinding Ventari, then fabricating their reactors into undamaged 250MW and 500MW reactors, and sell them in bulk to Black Market stations. This is how I get enough money to buy things worth close to a million credits. Grinding Ventari also meant I can slap the orthosteel armor I loot from (numerous) Ventari wrecks to the 24 segment capital ship wingmen I acquire. I imagine succession (which I have not played yet) can provide more looting opportunities than an unmodded game.

Speaking of succession, if save files will be uploaded to Xelerus, I might join in on the fun.

[Jay2Jay]

I uploaded my save to Xelerus and so did someone else because neither of us could get Dropbox or github to work.

[RPC]

Hi, digdug pointed out that there's another lagfix I could do for weapons extended.
I loaded the most recent save for ~5 seconds, it should work.

<digdug> delete from line 1101 to line 1117
<digdug> that smoketrail is invalid and permanent painted effect
<digdug> resulting in terrible lag as the bullet will remain forever in space

Also updated first post with the fix.
Fixed WE5.

[Autohummer]

I initially intended for the Eagle and Falcon to be sold in high-level Ringer/CW armoured stations only. Must have forgotten to fully code that in. I admit it is way OP with 7 hardpoints, though.

The FL pack is actually quite modular, if the new weapons/shields are proving too much of a clutter, simply leave out their XMLs.

I made a patch for your FL ships, which weakens them a bit. Still a bit overpowered compared to other ships, though. Since dual laser/recoilless and the like can count as two guns, I halved the hardpoints (rounding down). Starflier and other small fry get no linked fire slots. (dual recoilless plus launcher should emulate Starflier's three gun configuration). Hawk has two slots, a primary on the left wing (missiles fire from the middle), and linked fire slot on the right. Falcon adds the rear slot. Eagle has primary weapon slot in the middle, and three linked fire slots, including turret in the back. Eagle now has six armor segments. All ships except for Starflier have been slowed to .25c, and I might slow them further to .22c. The patch is done, barring trivial tweaks, but the PSD6 update is not.

Eagle/Falcon sold at late game stations does not help much if all ships are selectable at the start. I did what I could to make them weak enough as starter ships, and they are bending the power boundaries.

Thanks for the work, I'll not include the more powerful ships as starters in the future.

[RPC]

Anybody want to take a turn?

[TVR]

Sure thing - checking the save out for 24 hours.

Update: Paper Fleet has become unstable, causing multiple game crashes, will need another 24 hours.

[TVR]

Are you eager to find out how Succession #4 is going, or why haven't I posted the save?

It's because we won, over a week ago:

Code: Select all

<Score name="FourFire"	shipClass="CTE-6000 eagle-class Heavy Fighter"	genome="1"	score="194530"	epitaph="left Human Space on a journey to the Galactic Core"	time="D:0x1 M:0x208a90c"	resurrectCount="5"	adventureUNID="200000"	debug="0"/>

But I botched scoreboard copy+paste (I forgot that the WINE clipboard is not persistent...)

Nonetheless, we were only one system away from Heretic at the beginning of the turn, and staying in that system too long invariably resulted in crashes: the Paper Fleet has become incompatible with newer versions of Transcendence, for example, it checks a deprecated variable in the dockscreens, making it impossible to buy or install anything at the Paper Fleet stations. The AI behavior code has also become unstable, causing game-crashing errors every so often for reasons unknown. All 4 of the resurrections counted above (from my turn) were the result of reloading after game crashes.

This meant it was impossible to update the equipment on any of the ships, speaking of which, did not include the Ancoras because they had mysteriously disappeared from the fleet. Fortunately, the Eagle was already kitted out with a gamebreaking combination of 2 Mk.7 Howitzers and 3 ion guns (All of which had at least a ~60 degree swivel), that I did not need to change anything. I still added a +140 enhancement to shields and 3 more Ranx beam cannons, but that was just icing on that top.

So came Heretic, first thing I did was use one of our 30-ish system map ROMs to chart all the stations. Then, after a quick stop at Taikon to install the beam cannons and some ICX, did the Ringer mission first, because killing the Huygens was a breeze with the amount of firepower we had. Tried the Ares next, but apparently we never encountered the Antartica, so they turned us away. Well screw them, I thought, because the Iocrym blew them up shortly after.

I figured I might as well help the Svalbard in the meantime, and I thought my ICX systems would be able to hold off the Pteravores, so I didn't bother to clear them out before hand. Boy was that wrong, my ICX systems were set to defend either the Svalbard or our Eagle, which left the other unprotected from the pteravore swarm. And so the Svalbard had to go.

Doing the Taikon next was supposed to be an easy combat mission, but hilariously, there were so many Xenophobe fighters that their puny lancer cannons actually collapsed a 2200 hp L10 shield in seconds. In hindsight, I shouldn't have ignored the Sisters, because by the time I got a hold of the Iocrym artifact, the Taikon station was lost.

This, of course, left only Nares-Strong. In recognition of its importance, the Ranx dreadnaught (armed with 3 omni katanas) and Antares (armed with omni fusionfire + tritiums), which had been camping around the stargate up to this poitn, received the sacred duty of guarding it. The mission was a success, but the station fell to the Iocrym shortly after despite its defenders.

One ROM short and all research stations destroyed meant grinding the sentinels, destroying over 8 waves of them before taking the fight to their station and salvaging a ROM. The fact that the Svalbard was destroyed earlier meant no Sentinel viruses, but honestly, there was no need. The ICS died in little over a minute of spacebar-ing.

In conclusion, this has probably been one of better Succession games, having over 10 turns in total. Still, there were stability issues, like with the previously mentioned Paper Fleet, and it seemed like there was a shortage of players near the end of the Succession. Some of the new mods, like the upgraded Centauri, were a blast to encounter and to play with. I would say that the Freelancer pack could have used some more progress, as the 9-linked-weapon-slot Eagle and the level 10 shields that drew 1 MW of power were a bit much, but that was not unexpected. Also, we identified some shortcomings in the PDMod and stock AI's guard command, so overall, I'd call this a very successful Succession. Maybe next time, we'll get to play with the Black Market Expansion as well.

[RPC]

Ok, I'll consider Succession #4 to have been concluded.
I might as well start Succession #5 in that case...

[PM]

When will that be? I have some mod updates coming in a few days.

[RPC]

I will have one week where we deliberate over mods and then it will start next Sunday PST.

[FourFire]

We're at Heretic now.
Couple things/issues with the Succession:

#1: We become too powerful too early. Middle game becomes late game and late game is a huge grind. We had a few million credits by the time we hit St. Kats whereas in the vanilla game that amount of cash is seen only during late game. This surplus cash allows us access to *everything* and at that point we're only limited by what the RNG spawns.

Make enemies harder
-Have Dynamic Systems buff enemies (this idea will probably get shot down)

#2: We have too many items. There's tons of usables that we don't even use, and most of them are left unidentified for the rest of the game. Ammo piles are left untouched and there's no actual use of launchers. We stick with the ammoless weapons, and we're fine for the rest of the game.
Couple ideas:
-remove some item mods? Maybe WE5 is enough?

Right now we have 800 New Weapons, WE5, Freelancer Pack, New armors, Items 912, PD mod, Mining Pack and Utility Items adding stuff to our cargo hold. I'm sure around 4 of those mods add around ~100 items to the game, and the question is when will we ever find a use/ even *use* them at all?

#3: Nanite shield is definitely overpowered for PSD ships. Even at 25000 credits we can still afford it due to massive amounts of loot. Is there another way to fix the nanite shield, or should we remove it altogether?

#1 I could surely just not grind for extra cash, and leave us just not too poor to buy fuel on my turn.
Yes, you should make enemies harder, but be careful as to not break compatibility with encounter expansions (maybe you can edit encounter expansions directly?)

#2 clutter: there is too much, especially with ammo we don't use/ammocrates, and random useables which noone uses. the higher level barrels which some mod adds are really nice, but apart from that, repair droids and Rotolooter it can all go.
I think we should actually keep the smaller mods which add some items such as 912items, New Armors, PD mod
but perhaps you can use part of 800 Weapons (we only really need the omnidual, multitarget launcher omnidual and launcher multitarget varaints of weapons, just chuck the rest of the .XMLs), and (this IS going to get shot down) not use WE5 at all (the extent of unidentified weapons became a really annoyance for me this succession, and I'd rather have fewer, more common weapons which I can be sure are useful for next time).

#3 Yes remove the nanite shield, lets play properly, if you want crazy armor regen for your capship, make the effort to obtain 10-20 patch spiders.

[digdug]

not use WE5 at all (the extent of unidentified weapons became a really annoyance for me this succession, and I'd rather have fewer, more common weapons which I can be sure are useful for next time).

you know you can identify all the weapons in Eridani ?
But I suppose that with a complicated mod experience such as Succession, maybe it's a good thing to remove WE5

[FourFire]

Yes I know that, but whoever starts the game gets to choose whether to do that or not, and usually it isn't me.