Idea for a mod, wonder what would be doable

[Derpy hooves]

So, I was hoping to work on a mod that would make FTL a little bit more realistic in terms of weaponry and Alien design, I already know that adding new races is not supported but changing the existing ones might work fine.

The first major change is in weaponry and shields, most weapons deal more damage than in vanilla FTL but shields are capable of nullifying more attacks, but some weapons go right through. the major weapon types are

Laser weapons: Similer to the beam weapons in vanilla, laser weapons deal very low ammounts of damage, but ignore most shields and hit multiple areas of the enemy ship. these weapons are highly accurate with around 80-99% hit chance. Laser weapons are also invisible. lasers generally use 2-4 bars of energy but recharge fairly fast

Particle beam weapons: These work almost exactly like the lasers in vanilla they do lower damage than kinetic weapons but higher than laser weapons, particle beams rarely cause hull breaches but can cause fire. particle beams tend to use at least 3 bars of energy and take some time to recharge particle beams are fairly accurate with a 70-90% chance of hitting

Kinetic weapons: a new form of weapon, kinetic weapons deal moderate through high amounts of damage and sometimes have very high rate of fire, they use low amounts of energy but every level of enemy shielding reduces the amount of damage they do by 3. kinetic weapons almost always cause breaches. the main disadvantage of kinetic weapons is low accuracy, rapid fire weapons have around 10-20% chance per shot while single fire have around 50-60%

Missile weapons: Missile weapons are for when your enemies are defenseless and you want them DEAD, missiles do very large amounts of damage and almost always cause breaches usually causing fire as well. missile weapons dont require much energy to use either. the main weakness of missiles is that they are near useless against shielded targets and can be shot down by defense drones.
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Changes to teleporting?:
Would it be at all possible to make it so that teleporting into a ship require that the enemy ship also have a teleporter and it is only possible to teleport back from the teleporter room?

[UltraMantis]

Well laid out idea. My thoughts are that by replacing one set of balanced weapons for another may not improve the game. Also, the vanilla weapons are not only divided by type but also by the kind of damage/effect they have. They seem richer than the wapons you are proposing.

Weapons in FTL do not have varying accuracy. Instead ships have evasion and if it's high enough (random roll from 0 up to evasion value; 55% is max without cloaking) a projectile can be dodged. Beam type weapons cannot miss. Accuracy is a major point in your idea, and the main reason it cannot be done.

Here's what's doable:

Lasers - doable except visibility (beam is hardcoded red, only the contact point can be modded) and accuracy.
Particles - doable except accuracy
Kinetic - afaik shields can only reduce damage if the weapon is a Beam type. Accuracy is again a major problem.
Missiles - doable. if you want them to have a 100% to hit chance, then not doable. sorry.

Teleporting - not doable.
Not sure why you would want to change the way teleporters are used. The idea is to be able to board ships without an invitation. Events that use the system also allow teleporting things in and out of the ship without a second tele. Of course the events can be altered to fit the mod.

[Derpy hooves]

After rethinking things a bit, I feel that I should probably just rename the teleporter to shuttle bay or something.

and the reason the weapons are being changed is to be slightly more realistic, the shield projects an electromagnetic force or something (which is pretty unrealistic still) which slows down projectiles, Lasers are not effected because of the speed at which they travel. Perhaps before doing any major alterations I should wait for FTL overdrive.

Would it be possible to increase the amount of damage done by boarders? their weapons seem to take a while to bring a person down

[UltraMantis]

After rethinking things a bit, I feel that I should probably just rename the teleporter to shuttle bay or something.

This you can do. You can also edit the teleporting animation (but there's a lot to edit).

and the reason the weapons are being changed is to be slightly more realistic, the shield projects an electromagnetic force or something (which is pretty unrealistic still) which slows down projectiles, Lasers are not effected because of the speed at which they travel. Perhaps before doing any major alterations I should wait for FTL overdrive.

Would it be possible to increase the amount of damage done by boarders? their weapons seem to take a while to bring a person down

Don't know about melee damage.

The main issue with your weapons is accuracy which doesnt exist as a parameter. And generally weapons are very limited when it comes to modding them.

[shark]

Sounds like the first day FTL:Overdrive launches, within a week noone will be playing the same version of the game

[kartoFlane]

The project doesn't seem to be moving too much forward though, sadly :( Unless I'm being completely misinformed due to my not visiting the IRC channel frequently.

[UltraMantis]

Well documentation is near complete from what i understand.

[shark]

Well documentation is near complete from what i understand.

lol?

I don't want to be the joykill, but even in real commercial products, the documentation comes last. There is an unknown joy in getting people you never saw eye to eye to do what you want and what you expect of them, and to be able to convey that to you....

In theory, you should have documentation first and then you all have a meeting on how you're gonna do it and keep it agile on a daily basis...

In reality, five people will make something, sixth will start something, two will leave, seventh will re-do the work those two that left did, first three will re-arrange their modules around and within 6 months you're in a situation where it's better *not* to look at the documentation if you want to get something done, and just do it the 'natural' way in the code.

In reality2, documentation is severly outdated because programmers like programming more than writing technical specifications. Even then, time spent writing documentation is time not spent typing solutions to problems. We all assume you can open up the project and understand everything since it's so clear what every bit of it does.

So I don't know if that's a good sign or not. Would be if they feature lock it until Alpha. Won't be if everybody just chips in with whatever they feel like.

[UltraMantis]

not the rtfm type of dox, the documentation of game features and xml syntax.

[DryEagle]

documentation of ftl, not of overdrive. hard to duplicate something when you don't know how it works...