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Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2017 12:39 pm
by Keneteu
Created my account for this because you deserve MUCH more attention:

To everyone that spent too much time that they're willing to admit on this game : THIS IS THE ULTIMATE MOD FOR ALL OF YOU

I've been playing with random flagship for a while now, but every random flagship is almost always way too easy to handle.
THIS on the other hand, feels like playing for the first time every time : Every flagship created is unique and had a proper gimmick to hit, which WILL require specific equipment/counter for each, what worked in the past won't ever on any new flagship.

this increases the longevity by at least a 10 times fold, with this I feel like I will (almost) never run out of things to fight
the balance and the new starting ship equipment is also REAAAALLY good, it allows new strategy/approches for each ship, and most of the weapons has been rebalanced as well, allowing for (almost) every weapon to be viable

don't think you'll have a easy time though, even if you have thousand of hours put into this game, each of these flagship is really hard to handle, way more than the original obviously, this is something for those who will enjoy trying to find a lot of strategies to fight one and each of these ships.

and to Gidoza, THANK YOU REALLY MUCH FOR THIS MOD!

PS: Oh, in case you were wondering, a lot of effort has also been put into the flagship's power surges, each adequatly adapted to the new flagships, expect to be really surprised when each of these things pops up
the layout of the flagship is also remade, which deepens even further the originality of each flagship.

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 6:26 pm
by Keneteu
I'm trying actually to go through them in order at the moment, but as fow now, Flagship C is the one that gave me the hardest time since you have to carefully plan EVERYTHING in advance to make it through, so i'd say it's my favorite (for now) considering how much on an hard time it gave me!

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2017 11:40 am
by Keneteu
Maybe flagship E SHOULDN'T have a clonebay, and instead trade the 4 man teleporter on phase 3 with a drone system full of boarding drones, this ship felt like a cakewalk because of the clonebay, i also sensed that it was waaay too weak against hacking

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2018 4:04 am
by ejhockey
Thanks for making this mod! I'm excited to try it out!

I am a Mac user so the CustomFlagshipRandomizer.jar file doesn't seem to run correctly. There is a popup that asks me to identify a directory where the flagship files are, but I don't see how to select the directory.

If CustomFlagshipRandomizer.jar is just to randomize which one is chosen, then no problem, because I don't know what any of them are anyways. :P

That said, what is "CustomFlaghships 1.1.ftl" for? Is that needed or should I just mod with the "Flagship #.ftl" file?

Some kind of readme file would be great!

Thanks again.

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2018 7:49 am
by JLtheking
This is a really great mod :D

One thing I noticed though is that your CE Variant has buggy graphics in the hangar. Is this due to the hangar animations that are now no longer functional with the latest version of FTL?

I would recommend extracting the modified player ships into a patcher-type mod rather than repackaging CE in its entirety!

Another thing I noticed through playing your mod over the past month on the latest version of FTL, is that a some flagship missile weapons shoot missiles of an invalid texture.

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:59 am
by JLtheking
Gidoza wrote:Hm - for the Missiles part, this could be due to the transition to the new patch - I haven't played enough to witness it yet (and also wouldn't be sure how to fix it, to be sure). Could you give additional information?


I can't remember exactly which Flagship variant had the issue (I was using the randomizer). If I encounter it again, I'll let you know!

Gidoza wrote:As for the hangar - I haven't the foggiest; that CE Mod was from the previous FTL version and I had never touched the hangar, so that likely would explain the bugginess of it. Is it worth fixing?

As for repackaging the player ships - I don't think that would work, as they're modded player ships that are ordained for this CE variant in particular. I suppose it's possible to make a separate mod with duplications of each of the weapons though in order that it stands alone and doesn't conflict with anything else (that's the thing - you'd find that if you used those player ships anywhere else then your Engine A ship would magically have no weapons anymore because the power requirements would have changed...).


The way I see it, the main issue is that CE itself is constantly updating, with event fixes, balance patches, and of course graphical issues like that I mentioned, that I think it is worth supporting the latest version of CE. I looked through your ship overhauls and they look really really interesting! I want to try them out but at the same time I don't want to roll back to a previous version of CE (especially with the texture glitching in the hangar).

I'm not too familiar with how FTL modding works, but mr_easy_money was able to support a bunch of "DLC Ship Packs" that required Arsenal+ to work, which is similar to what you managed to achieve? Is it possible to do something like that? Or if that's too much trouble, I think at least think it is worth it to re-fork another version of your ships using the latest version of CE, just for us 1.6.x folks!

Gidoza wrote:Any thoughts on just the nature of the mod itself - like, what is it that you like? :P


If you are referring to the namesake of this thread, I absolutely LOVE it! As I mentioned I am using the randomizer over about 8 rounds so far and it has given me so many fun fights at the end instead of the usual steamrolling of the flagship. Not being able to gear my ship towards a specific loadout meant that, for example, one can't full out go for the best boarding ship in existence in case you meet a specific ship type (you know what I'm talking about :evil: ); you have to learn how to make a good general-purpose ship and adapt to whatever the enemy flagship had for the fight. Many a times, I had to jump away just to restart the fight with a different strategy. Your mod is AWESOME! Thank you, thank you, thank you :D

The bad side is of course sometimes you really meet a loadout that your current ship cannot beat. But I'm taking your promise that all the flagships are balanced to heart, so I will chock those up to bad runs or bad ship loadouts rather than the flagship. Overall though its definitely great. Just need to nail down those weird 1.6.x graphical glitches.

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Thu Apr 26, 2018 9:28 am
by JLtheking
Gidoza wrote:OK well first off (as a re-cap, not saying that you're saying anything or anything...lol), the main focus here is the 26 Flagships package, so I'll prioritize that. The CE mod I made was sort of a thing I did for myself and just shared with everyone because I like to share...basically it was a product of originally just being annoyed at all the internal balance issues of the weapons and Drones - I couldn't stand that there were some things too good to not be worth buying, and other things that just took up space and were never useful for anything (and sometimes playing entire games where not a single thing in the store was worthwhile, doomed by random chance). So now there's lesser and greater things, but everything has its place - I also adjusted the whole trade system (as you see, it has notes about where things sell, and the whole schematic is different), a number of event changes, many of the default settings are different (first-level Shields more pricey for example), and finally the ship starts (all calculated to within 5 Scrap of 1000, by the way). Obviously I'm okay with keeping up with latest updates (though I never cared for the AI crew graphic...), but it seems as though it might be easier to take some of the newer changes to CE and re-incorporate them into the personal mod than it would to adapt the mod to the new CE. In any case, I can imagine that this would be a fair bit of work. Not that I'm not willing...I just might need help for it, and lots more time, heh.


I see! I didn't know that there were so many changes to it other than the starting ships. I definitely agree with your disliking of imbalances in CE. Sorry about hijacking the thread with regards to this topic btw, its just that I'm also a sucker for rebalances (unfortunately not too enthusiastic about Captain's Remix straight out stripping some of CE's features). I'll definitely give your version a try now that you have went into more detail about it!

Regarding upgrading it, I think the main thing is the hangar animations (that are now cut in 1.6.x) causing the glitchy texture, as well as CE now being able to remove trade goods directly from the event itself. Everything else should already be compatible by using the latest CE Resource Pack. I'll give your rebalance a whirl and report back!

Slight Update: Your rebalance is great so far! Sector 1 is especially challenging. Also found out that in addition to the hangar animation bug, weapon tooltips also give an error when playing your mod on 1.6.7 with the latest CE Resource Pack.

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Wed May 02, 2018 11:10 am
by JLtheking
So I played through 5 runs with your changes, and I have got to say it was really fun!

I really liked how you addressed my biggest gripe with CE - that being the boatload of useless weapons and augments - by not just buffing them into a usable state with a reasonable cost, but most ingeniously, addressing many of the utility augments that weren't worth it in base CE due to them using up one of your precious 3 augment slots, by packaging them together into augments that are multi-functional, and upping the combined cost.

This of course makes the game easier, due to increasing the chances that you will find reasonable additions to your loadout in stores, but is also counterbalanced due to higher upgrade costs notably in Shields and Engines. 100 Scrap for Level 2 Shields is brutal! You'll get the scrap back later on due to more space in your hold that is freed up for dealing with Trade Goods.

The addition of descriptions of which sector each Trade Good will sell well, in both the store and in the augment descriptions themselves were also a good addition. Frankly, I was already cheating by looking them up in the .xml files anyway :roll: so being able to know them directly in-game was cool.

My only gripe is that Level 6 and 8 Engines are sooo expensive as to almost never be worth it to go past Level 5. Level 6 costs as much as Hacking or the entire 4th shield bubble! :o I understand that they give you an additional beacon per sector (I really liked the staggered upgraded costs btw) - it's just I can never seem to afford it. From my experience, I usually only get enough spare scrap to get Level 6 once I am at Sector 6/7, but by that point you only get 0/1 extra jumps out of the upgrade, so you're probably better off buying something else. That said, you usually never have enough scrap to spare in the base game anyway, so I guess it works enough to prevent exploits!

But anyways it's a great mod! It's good enough to release it as a standalone along the lines of Captain's Remix, I reckon, if it can be updated to FTL 1.6!! Its definitely how I will be playing CE from now onwards :)

Edit: So I went ahead to make 2 small edits to it - simply to remove the buggy hangar animations, as well as bringing the costs of Artillery down to 80, which is what CE is using at the moment. No idea how to fix the tooltips yet though.

FTL CE ZHO Mod

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Sat May 05, 2018 6:59 am
by JLtheking
Gidoza wrote:Artillery costing 80? Is that because you really like Artillery or because you thought they cost too much?


Yes, I really like Artillery :) And also because I agree with the various mod author's assessment that 150 for Artillery is too expensive. For comparison, CE uses 80 and Insurrection uses 100. Artillery is in my opinion only reasonably usable starting at Lvl 3, which means an extra 80 scrap investment off the base cost. Compared to Cloaking (which also costs 150), which frontloads most of its utility at Lvl 1 and is super easy to use, Artillery requires a lot of investment in upgrades to achieve its full potential AND takes quite a bit of skill to coordinate with your own weapon volleys. Plus, you sometimes have to change up your own weapon loadout as well to take the most advantage of your ship's specific artillery.

It's probably very much a personal preference thing, and maybe a skill thing, but I really don't seem to be able to scrape off enough scrap to afford stuff like this and Engines mentioned above by Sector 7 :lol: And probably also because Sensory Deprivation makes me take more damage than usual. :D

In any case, the hangar animations can be easily solved by going to animations.xml.append and deleting the last few lines at the end.

Gidoza wrote:Get brutalized by any of the Flagships yet...?


Nope, because with my current mod loadout (with SensDep UltraLite that I posted in that other thread...) the only time I can make it to the Flagship is on Easy :lol: and Easy gives you enough scrap to snowball through the game and steamroll any Flagship loadout. Right now though, I'm struggling through the game with your mod right now on Normal (and enjoying it!)

Re: 26 Flagships - Variable Flagship Challenge

Posted: Fri May 25, 2018 6:12 pm
by JLtheking
Gidoza wrote:Well I managed to play through games that included multiple different missiles on the Flagships, and noticed no graphical error. Mind you, I was using the old Resource Pack, so it possibly isn't a fair trial...


Yep, after playing a couple of runs I did not see the graphical issue again... so it's probably just an issue with my previous mod load order...