Thanks for the feedback! As you may be able to tell, I worry about making my mods too powerful and giving the player too much of an advantage. I might be overdoing some of the worrying and killing off the player in the process.
Maybe try a 50/50 or 75/25 chance of either a laser amplifier or a kinetic upgrade in the box. Evens it out in case you play Sapphire.
That's a great idea. Do you think that makes it too easy to identify the refurbished patcher arm, though? Would it be better to leave the enhancer in the Drake as loot so the player has to kill the Drake in order to get this information?
EDIT: I misunderstood. You mean the kinetic enhancer, not the cannon accelerator! My bad.
A couple of times the Drake had nothing at all in it to loot. I went to the second system, opened the box and came back to Eridani. I sat on the stargate while the guards from the nearby Mining Stations killed the Drake. Then docked with the Drake wreck to find nothing at all. This happened twice in about 6 games.
It could be that the looting and damaging percentages in wrecks cancelled out the Arm or Array. You may have to place the item (Arm or Array) directly into the Drake wreck after it gets killed. But I'm not sure. Other times there is a lot of damaged and undamaged loot available.
Hmm... that's not good. The Drake might have run out of missiles, but it should still be dropping damaged items that were installed on it. I make a loot table with a 50/50 chance of leaving either an arm or an array, so something should be appearing every time the Drake dies.
This has never happened to me, so it might be that our Transcendence setups are different. If I were getting the problem in my games, I'd modify the compact solar panel array OnUpdate code (ExtSmartDevices.xml, line 392) from
Code: Select all
<OnUpdate>
; Check to see if device needs to hide or un-hide, and if so, do the action
(block Nil
(setq gItem (deviceUpdate gItem Nil) )
)
</OnUpdate>
to
Code: Select all
<OnUpdate>
; Check to see if device needs to hide or un-hide, and if so, do the action
(block Nil
(setq gItem (deviceUpdate gItem Nil) )
(objSendMessage gSource gPlayerShip "If a smart solar panel array is screaming inside of a Drake's cargo hold and no one hears, did the screaming actually happen?")
)
</OnUpdate>
and I'd modify the Drake's look table to make sure it always dropped an array (ExtSmartShips.xml, line 70) by changing
Code: Select all
<Table>
<Item chance="50" count="1" item="&itRefurbishedPatcherArm;"/>
<Item chance="50" count="1" item="&itCompactSolarPanelArray;"/>
</Table>
to this:
Code: Select all
<Table>
<Item chance="100" count="1" item="&itCompactSolarPanelArray;"/>
</Table>
If the Drake is carrying the device, you'll see the device talking to you, and you'll have a better idea of where the problem is actually happening.
The attack feels overpowered with 6 or so Corsair II's. It's pretty much instant death for EI500 and Sapphire. They can't kill them quick enough and they can't get away. Even the Wolfen struggles a bit.
Also the Drake is prety hard to kill. All of these ships pictured below had been pummeling away at it for a couple of minutes on autopilot and it still ain't dead. Maybe take the patcher arm out or drop the armor back to Heavy Reactive.
I think you're right. It's asking too much of the player to upgrade to level 4 armor and buy a bunch of missiles just to take on the Drake, and the level 3 reward the Drake drops probably isn't worth the trouble. I originally had the patcher arm installed on the Drake to leave a clue that my mod has new types of armor repair devices, but if the Drake is going to drop an undamaged one now, it really doesn't need one that's installed. I can also drop the number of Corsairs from 6 to 3 if you think that will make the attack manageable.
It's sad that so many friendly ships can't kill the Drake quickly if the Drake can regenerate its armor. Maybe NPCs' fire rate adjust is too penalizing.
I still like the idea of being able to give the Array (or whichever goodies) back to the Drake. It gives the player a chance to get away if the Charon forces are too great. It also makes the player think about the costs or benefits of trying to keep it.
I like that idea too. I'm working on playerships at the moment and will be able to come back to rewrite the code for the Drake later on.
.
".
.)
