makes sense to me. it would be great to see how the Navy is like when they're around as fleshed out as Marduk is, so far the Navy is my favorite modded faction to play. I'm not too big on using discord, so if I have anything lengthy to say, I'll create discussion posts on this page. unless if you'd insist on discord.
also as a note if you'd like me to try or test anything I'm all ears, as of now I'm just playing the mod normally and saying something whenever I notice something odd.
the invader cruiser is my most used ship so maybe I'll have to diversify more so it's not the only hull that gets 'playtested' lol

@Anomaly You're rightly encountering these issues due to Marduk having long had balance pushes vs vanilla due to being much older and the Navy having had zero balance passes vs Marduk due to being incomplete. While this kind of feedback /will/ be useful in the long run, I'm waiting for the Navy to be more fleshed out before making any requests for balance feedback. That being said, there are forums on the main Nebulous discord and the Modfleet Fight Club discord that can be used for feedback, just understand that outside of fixing functional issues, balance changes will not be the priority at this time.

to clarify a little more, by "U-turn" I mean rotating 180 degrees not switching movement direction. if it's preferable I can open discussion threads for any further comments or feedback, just didn't think at the time that I'd have so much to type and say lol

I used the show hidden stats mod to show the impact. for an increase of 685 points just to fit 5 Agility drives on an Invader, totaling 2650 points on an otherwise untouched default ship, an Invader can manage a 114 second U-turn and a 90 second roll-over. cruise/flank speed of 30.22/45.33

An Ishtar, one of two classes explicitly stated as being something the Invader is meant to combat, increases its cost over its stock configuration by 20 points with 5 Mobility drives (with the default large engine being as expensive as 3 of them) to manage a 61 second U-turn and 23 second roll-over. speed 17.89/26.84

For comparison, an OSP Marauder with 2 Yard drives for +20 points manages a 135 second U-turn and 22 second roll-over. speed 19.69/29.53

This doesn't take into account the challenges of actually powering an Invader with that many expensive Agility drives, or how to optimize its actual combat ability with only 350 points to spare

This seems odd to me given that Marduk is a more standard faction that can fight at typical ranges, while the Navy is largely restricted to point blank range. Marduk being so much more agile than the "melee" faction seems backwards since it makes them a lot more effective at close range where the agility matters. I would imagine it should be the other way around where Navy ships are easily able to turn very quickly on the spot (while still having the speed to close in fast) while Marduk ships would prefer to sit further away.

Sounds good, I look forwards to seeing how the mod grows. On another note, I played around with the Marduk mod, which I understand as being the main opposition of the Navy. I noticed they have a drive (DSM-250 Mobility) that trades a tiny amount of top speed for a large amount of agility for a non-compounding 10 points each. On larger ships with enough slots they can easily maximize their agility for minimal cost and become more maneuverable than OSP liners and effectively unable to be flanked.

The Navy's equivalent, the TPS-M-450 Agility, has a compounding 75pt cost while buffing both speed and agility, with the compounding cost making it completely non-viable to maximize agility. The Invader is unable to be as or more agile than the large Clan ships it's explicitly meant to match.

@Anomaly This faction is still very early in development and development was stalled for a significant amount of this year due to commission obligations I had. I am as of last week free of those obligations and have resumed work on both Marduk and Navy updates. I will take your feedback into account and also look into the issue you've mentioned regarding the Invader.

and on a related note, when using the Invader, the smaller laser banks on the top and bottom of it that hold PD or light guns appear to have a problem hitting its own hull at angles where the rim of the saucer starts to get in the way, and they don't stop firing either. it seems about 10-20% of shots hit the own ship. I haven't yet tested to see if other ships have a similar issue

as a small clarification, HEKP does do a small amount of damage to shields, but not anywhere close enough to be an actual threat. which does seem fair to me considering how hard it is for this faction's PD to shoot down hybrids as of now

I did some testing and battles as of late. It appears HEKP warheads are completely ineffective against shields. It seems fair enough, as it is this faction has no way to reliably shoot down hybrid missiles, however hybrids using high explosive are still effectively impossible to shoot down while still dealing enough damage to break shields and destroy the ship.

I would suggest something to help against hybrids, either aircraft that are cheap enough to not get much in the way of their close range pew pew playstyle (I feel the ships fall off without using buff modules so it's a concern to me if defenses become too expensive to maintain a healthy offense), or more expensive PD solutions (like new ammo or new weapons) that can replace their stock PD banks with something that can destroy hybrids and fast/high volume threats in general.

@Wolfwynd The Marduk Clan Collective hulls were loosely based on League warships and as such act as their counterpart vs the Navy. Marduk and Navy strikecraft however will be very much directly based off their Colony Wars designs.

Any plans for adding League of free worlds ships, and the fighters for the Navy and League? Love the mod, CW was my #2 fav game series, right after Wing Commander :D

yeah my main tactic is firing armor bolts until they're thoroughly cooked, then firing hull bolts. they maul any ship this way

I feel like perhaps this is an issue of visual and perhaps audio feedback, which I admit is entirely on my end. After doing more battles with the Navy, I think one thing I've noticed that may be influencing the damage output is poor weapon grouping, and the hull masking problem that has been mentioned earlier!

I've been using the medium lasers appropriately (Armour followed by Hull), But I think I need to alter my expectations in terms of their damage output relative to cannons in terms of how they perform. It's clear that they do work against appropriate targets but perhaps I'm not investing a lot of time during battles melting hulls properly!

I'll keep trying them!

@Deja Vroom! I don't want to immediately jump to saying 'skill issue' because that's generally unhelpful, but I am somewhat confused as to how Navy weapons are being seen as weak?

The pen depth for the Medium Hull Laser, which should be your primary damage dealer, outside of capital beams, is the same as 250mm HE, which is only 0.5 less than 450mm HE. Not to mention that Medium Hull Lasers deal 120 Component Damage vs the 80 that 250mm HE does.

As for the beam fall off being extreme, that can't be the case because it uses exactly the same fall off curve that vanilla beams use. The frigate beam specifically is weaker than the vanilla beam simply because it's mounted on a much lighter hull, but from the Destroyer and up, beams should be as strong, if not stronger than their vanilla counterparts.

Are you using the "hull laser" ammo when the enemy's armor is shredded? If you don't, your lasers won't really do any damage at all, while if you do, you'll tend to maul enemy ships even if only a few of your lasers are firing hull beams.

I'm unsure if I'm just having a skill issue, but in general I find the weapon systems for all ships are incredibly weak, even when stripping armour and getting really close to knife fighting range.

They feel really off with low pen depth and low component damage on most weapons, and the particle beams having extreme damage fall-off.

I'm nuts deep in commission work and also my computer threatening to fail on me so I'm afraid the hull masking issue hasn't been a priority of mine as of late, but I can assure you it's not forgotten and once I've gotten at least one of these commissions done, I'll set some time aside to fix this problem. I apologise for the ongoing delay

I opened a discussion on this exact issue, feel free to hop in there if you have more to add on it. Here's hoping they find a solution sooner than later

the medium laser cannon mounts seem to have some hull masking errors as only some of them will fire and the one vertically opposite them won't

That'd be due to the update that pushed the PTB to live. So the issues found on the PTB are now found on the live branch. I believe it's been ID'ed to an issue with AGMLIB, we have to wait for AGM to update that mod for all mods that use it to become functional again.

Yeah. Same. On main branch. Can't even get into a game with the faction either and it reports the same error

Getting the MissingMethodException error that Anomaly reported on main branch myself when trying to make a fleet for this mod's ships.

I could imagine either a token shield with low durability (like a "navigational shield"), or a shield that makes the ship costly to bring. It would also be interesting to have more varieties of shields instead of just 7k for any ship short of a cruiser. I do personally feel that every ship should have the opportunity to be shielded even if only weakly, or at a high price point, since that feels like a core part of the faction's identity. The corvette doesn't even have to have a shield in the quadruple digits, I can imagine something in the hundreds being fair enough.

I get your reasoning either way. Just throwing out my two cents.

@Anomaly The Trespasser-class Corvette isn't intended to be able to run shields on top of its weapon systems, not to mention I feel as though giving Corvette sized hulls that level of durability isn't conducive to enjoyable gameplay.

What shield generator is the corvette supposed to use? There doesn't seem to be any shield or power generators that don't compete with the other for the sole 3x3x3 module slot

Looking forwards to seeing them. Appreciate the answers, and apologies again for the misleading report earlier.

@Anomaly Marduk strikecraft will use more traditional munitions, Navy craft will use munition systems similar to their warships. Strikecraft will not carry beams.

Sounds pretty awesome. Will the aircraft use the same ammo mechanics as the ship guns? Will there be any beam weapons for fighters too?

@Anomaly Yes, there are plans for a full suite of custom craft for both Marduk and the Teranian Navy.

Yea I forgot that I was on testing, apologies. It works fine on main either way, appreciate it. Have plans for custom aircraft?

@Anomaly Right that would have been good to know in the first place. This mod isn't configured with the test version, there's always the risk of incompatibilities. Unless it's specifically mentioned that a mod is compatible with the test version, please only use mods on the main branch to prevent misleading errors.

This error seems to only pop up on the testing branch on nebulous which I was on before. Going back to the main version makes it work properly. Seems resolved as long as I stay on main, but still doesn't work on PTB testing version

@Anomaly I'm hoping that the hotfix I just pushed should resolve your issue, please let me know if there are further problems.

Sounds good; and this error does prevent me from even attempting to create a fleet using this faction

@Anomaly Not sure why that's suddenly becoming a problem, but it's part of something I can probably scrap. I'll try and have a fix out for it this week.

I get this error when trying to make a new fleet with this faction, and I had all of the dependencies loaded.
MissingMethodException: int Ships.HullComponent.GetResourceProvideAmount(Ships.ResourceType)

This is a general message I'll be sharing on all my mods, but as is very clear last week's carrier update broke /a lot/ of stuff, less than expected, but still enough to cause significant problems. I'm going to be working through mods one at a time where I can but be assured that they are all going to be fixed at one point or another. I can only apologise for the inconvenience and hope that the upcoming content will satisfy afterwards.

I just found this mod. I absolutely adore you for having put this together. Now I'm going to go watch all the CW1 and 2 cutscenes on YouTube while I design ships for both sides.

OH MY GOD THIS WAS MY FAVORITE GAME AS A KID

All clear, please ensure you update AGMLIB to prevent issues.

With today's minor update, multiple functions and scripts in my mods have been broken, as such they will likely be unusable for the foreseeable future until these issues are resolved. I apologise for the inconvenience but keep an eye out on the changelog here and Mod Dev in the nebulous discord for further updates.

@ultravires The Tsar and his battle fleets saw everything, knew everything, punished everything...

Glad to see another colony wars fan in the wild! The Dreadnaught and Titan will handle much like the Dreadnaught and Titan currently in the Marduk Clan Collective, super-capital warships if you've experienced them. The Navy is on the back burner as I've been dabbling in other projects and also have commissions to see to, but rest assured this will see completion in the future.

"When I was very young- the Earth Empire controlled the skies..." Very cool. Really interested to see what you do with the Dreadnought and Titan.

@madlarkin8 I'm glad you like them! I used the League of Free Worlds hulls as the inspiration for the Marduk Clan Collective, but that was a more loose interpretation. This is a much stricter adaption.

Cool looking ships, like retro star trek with a more grounded warfighting look. I preferred the League of Free Worlds ships from colony wars, but they have a more traditional ship look so I see why you chose to base it on the Earth Empire.