xdiesp wrote:Setting aside what mods do as I focus on vanilla, the issue with equipment being situational is part of the rock\paper\scissor side of the game: the starting Mantis B shield is unbeatable against engis, or a sitting duck against autoships.
About the Burst Laser III's cost: no starting ship has it, but it resembles the Glaive Beam's uberness so I treated it like that one on the Stealth B. Should it cost more (100)? It is still a comically slow weapon, uses 4 energy and gets screwed forever if hit in Sector 1. But powergaming is the bane of all things, here's hope people wouldn't all create Burst III + Leto setups.
Later on today I'm going to post a randomizer utility I'm working on to create semi-random ships according to these rules.
edit
Here is the randomizer utility.
http://www.mediafire.com/?6f2e48ra5a5y844I called it "FTL Random Ship Maker", but what it gives you is just the blueprint of what you'll have to build by yourself in the editor. I tried hard to avoid totally random scenarios such as having a ship equipped exclusively with 3 bio-beams ^^'', but it can still generate plenty akward types of ships! Here's the log it makes:
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- you have been given command of a constitution class ship! select constitution and press start... .
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- your ship is equipped with... ion blast 1 (weapon) boarding drone (drone system) engi medbot dispersal (augmentation) anti-bio beam (weapon) .
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- you have been given command of an apollo class ship! select apollo and press start... .
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- your ship is equipped with... heavy laser 1 (weapon) mini beam (weapon) repair arm (augmentation) .
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- you have been given command of a stalwart class ship! select stalwart and press start... .
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- your ship is equipped with... heavy pierce laser (weapon) ion blast ii (weapon) .
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- you have been given command of a kobayashi class ship! select kobayashi and press start... .
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- your ship is equipped with... teleporter 2 pads (system) burst laser ii (weapon) .
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- you have been given command of an excelsior stealth ship! select excelsior stealth and press start... .
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- your ship is equipped with... boarding drone (drone system) burst laser i (weapon) ion bomb (weapon) ...and favors cloaking over shields .
You come in here, say you're no programmer, say stuff like this
Setting aside what mods do as I focus on vanilla,
while in the modding section, flaunting that ship randomizer....
Who made the ship randomizer? If you can master that, you can master modding FTL. And realizing where the system breaks - at the first step of implementing it.
Here's an idea - now that you probed it and got 'assured' that it works out, make an event chain that handles ship creation at start. Make an event that strips the ship of weapons and augmentations, and adds those you click on.
It seems to me that you are now wasting your time on a useless utility that won't get you any closer to your (requested) goal. it's a d100 simulator with 4 lookup tables, yay. it's solving an imaginary problem.
For starters, different ships (classes) should have different amount of starting cash. So there's the second tip of your balancing fork. Balancing weapons towards 'starting cash', and balancing 'starting cash' to scale with the selected ship/crew.