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I know what you mean and I wish I could do that. :) I've asked Sol to enable rotation of defenses and we did some initial testing. While it works great for the most part, there's a really bad bug that will cause all defenses to yeet off the edge of the map and disappear if any ship flies directly through the center point of the map.
Since we haven't figured out a solution to this or why it's even happening, rotating defenses can't be left in. In 3.6 I did adjust the defense blueprints to bump up the side and all around strength so it wasn't quite as advantageous to fly around the side.
I consistently see AI that I've set to take ECM over shields perform much worse early game and it tends to be quite a while before they get Class III shields too. Increasing the size would just gimp them more. Remember if you aren't facing missiles, ECM is worthless while shields will always be useful regardless of strength.
Partly I think there may be some errors in the hit calculation in the game. I haven't completely focused on tracking it down, but cannons seem to preform much better than the very low hit chance they have at the start of the game would indicate. A second possibility is that my using 5s as the base for weapon cooldown allows for enough shots to make up for the loss of accuracy.
Either way, I think the probably course if shields need something would be to reduce the space needed for Class I rather than change ECM.
I feel like Multi Phasic shields could come down too, or take up more space. It is about half the size and cost of an actual Class III shield module but it lets you add triple the points on top? Current 5x Mod has it matching Class III at 100% of base. In principle, I think it should either match whatever Class III is, or it should fall somewhere between the strength of Class III and Class V. If it is stronger than class V shields on its own, then I think its a bit too good for where it sits in the tech tree.
To fix this I started looking into size changes which became a bit of a mess so I stopped on that direction and instead started looking into an across the board shift if weapon cooldowns.
Initially the plan was to move from a base 5s "turn" to a base 10s one. However that made some weapons feel like they rarely fired and didn't make for much fun when your plasma beam takes nearly a minute between shots.
To fix this I've created a slightly different curve for translating things starting with 10s and going to 40s, which is only applied to the black hole generator. This keeps the base cool down for everything under 30s but also increases the cannons to 10s cool downs.
Further, there have been some tweaks to shield sizes to make the take more space on larger ships as you get more advanced shields. The goal here is to make the trade off between shields and armor more viable and to reduce the total weapons most large ships mount to make them a bit less overwhelming.
All of these changes take a long time to test,especially to make sure none of the AI blueprints got messed up with the shield changes causing them to have inadequate space for weapons.
Pulsar I'll look at again, it's meant to be short range and they used to work, at least on their own. Mixed with other weapons they probably won't fire unless an enemy ship flies into Pulsar range.
I've reverted the changes to cooldowns because it got unworkable with some of the higher delay weapons and systems. Instead I've instituted at 25% damage debuff on all weapons and specials outside of missiles to see if that gives a similar effect.
I also found a few problems with the Starfortress blueprint and reduced the size of Death Rays and the Black Hole Gen by 25 units which gets things back in order.
Ok, I heard back on the pulsar from Sol. The engagement distance is an average of all the weapons on the ship and the pulsar just counts as one. Since it's got such a small range, most often it won't fire unless a ship is close to it or unless the ship only mounts the pulsar. I typically put them on frigates that can hit in groups to strip shields quickly and don't mix weapons.
I've also decided to revisit something Sol added a while back that allows me to change the size of nebulas. There were some oddities which stopped me from using it, but I have a better understanding of how the game adds them which is leading to much better results.
It always bothered me that the battlefields were as bland as they were so I've started adjusting asteroids and nebulas to make it more interesting. Nebulas in particular will now entirely blanket the battlefield. This will help the AI since it doesn't understand how to use smaller ones tactically and make things like hard shields a much more valuable choice.