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Za'lek Cores and Outfit Rework #2027
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* Added two new cores for the sting * Lowered mass/energy but doubled cpu usage for za'lek weapon outfits
by 70 with exception of the starbridge that is already very light.
I am in doubt on the topic of faction-specific cores. I think we should clearly decide what should be given by the cores and what should come with the ship model (maybe that has been done back then when the core concept was introduced) Because I get the feeling that diversifying cores like that is making things overly complex for no real benefit for the regular player, and exposes us to exploits. Plus, it makes balancing really hard. |
tl;dr I'm not set on doing faction cores and outfit trees, but we need to think about how to differentiate things a bit more than what we have
I think that's a valid criticism. As you mention, giving exclusive access to slots to factions does lower the slot sharing mechanic, and blurs the line between ship and core bonuses.
I don't think we necessarily need a perfect balance. There will always be some stronger combinations, and as a single-player game, I don't see that as being much of an issue. Maybe instead of focusing it as a "Za'lek faction slots" it might make more sense to think of it as "high tech" vs "low tech". Right now, all the outfits are balanced on a single tier, which while it is easiest to do, it makes it so everything is boring and bland. Basically most weapons are just minor flavours of the same thing: same EPS, DPS, etc. with only the damage type changing. That is bad. Some ideas to combat this are:
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* Added two new cores for the sting * Lowered mass/energy but doubled cpu usage for za'lek weapon outfits
To add to the high/mid/low tech idea to make it a little more durable against "hacking" or at least balanced is maybe to have pirates (and maybe other factions via them or directly) steal ship organisation ideas from the player for themselves -> I feel like the pirates are a natural fit for this but government agents might be interested in doing the same if the player ship is clearly superior! (e.g. EPS/DPS calculation). |
Sudden thought... one thing that worried me when I was playing is that there are an awful lot of things, particularly core outfits on the outfit pages of stations and planets... however, most of the time, they are little to no use to me because they are not the correct size for my current vessel or even an vessel I own. |
You'll be glad to hear that we have something like that already :) |
Oh! I hadn't realised... I guess it is not in the Steam version (0.9.2) yet or I'm doing something wrong? I was also going to suggest that the little letters in the corners of the outfit icons match the ones for the menu tab in the outfitters but then I realised there is a mismatch due to Cores all being put together and being removed from the ones they would naturally be in. I don't know if that'd helpthough, the letters are pretty small (at least at my res. and font size. |
It's on the nightly which you should be able to opt-in on the beta tab. Once your save goes nightly, it is isn't really very possible to go back to 0.9.x. That said, we have a new save system now so it should create a directory for your old saves.
If you have a high-dpi monitor, you should probably enable scaling. I play with 1.4 scaling which makes everything 1.4x bigger, useful given that my screen has pretty high DPI. |
Closing as this is quite dead. |
In order to further differentiate ships and make things a little less uniform, I'm working on giving Za'lek their own cores and reworking outfits to work with them. I'm interested in getting feedback on the changes.
Basic ideas for Za'lek outfits and cores is as follow:
This is applied to the following outfits:
One other change that I've had to do to make destroyer systems less appealing to corvettes is to increase their mass. However, at the same time I have lowered the mass of the destroyers so, in general, there should be no change for all ships equipping their corresponding core. There is, however, one exception. The Starbridge already has very low mass so I haven't touched it, which sort of leads to it being nerfed. I'm not entirely sure how to fix that without making the patagium engine either too good, or making it lighter than a corvette.
Cores
The idea is for the Za'lek to use their own engines and systems, and rely on the low-end unicorp armours. For this reason two new lines of engines and systems are introduced. Currently these only exist in medium and large formats given that the Za'lek drones have all the functionality directly built in and are not player-acquirable.
ZCK-(M,H)-{MASS}
. They have roughly 50% of the energy, 200% CPU, and 100% shields of MilSpec Orion cores.ZPD-(M,H)-{MASS LIMIT}
. They are roughly like the equivalent Tricon engines, but with 60%ish mass limit, much lower energy consumption, have a bit more speed vs thrust/turn, and also use a tiny amount of CPU (significant if not using ZCK).The cores are designed to complement each other well, giving much more CPU with lower mass at the expense of much less energy regen and mass limit. This makes them work really well with the new Za'lek weapons, but trickier to use with other weapons due to low energy.
(Beam) Weapons
The Za'lek beam weapons have had their CPU usage double, but mass and energy usage halved. They are usable with the Za'lek cores, but outside of specific set-ups, they are hard to use with other cores due to high CPU usage. However, they can be used and complemented with launchers.
Fighter Bays
The Za'lek fighter bays are significantly lighter now, but use significantly more CPU. In general, you won't be able to use more than one or two without the Za'lek cores on other ships.
Testing
This is still a sort of preliminary stage, so I haven't tightly integrated anything else. I'm interested in getting feedback on how it feels. In particular, the following questions are important:
You can give yourself all the cores with the following code (they are also available at Zied):
TODO