FTL Captain's Edition 1.308/Inf 1.301b/EL 1.308

[Auron1]

However one thing I am planning to do to cut clutter in my weapon packs is to make them sector specific... for e.g. my Autocannons and Machine guns can only be found in civilian and rebel sectors... Gauss rifles can only be found in Engi sectors... I could shift some vanilla weapons to be prominent in their intended sector i.e. beams and ions for zoltan and engi sectors. Perhaps CE could have a tighter control on say where Scatter lasers or light lasers could be found?.. I honestly have no clue. Overall I am quite happy with the options and availability in CE...

In a way I want CE to have more weapons but I know how FTL handles more weapons, Sadly it just feels like 3 drones/ weapons at stores is just to little sometimes. If only we can assign events to make shops sell specific goods, i.e. a missile weapon store or an anti personnel trader.

In "FTL Supremacy", there are many Weapons Smugglers who sell you different weapons, augmentations and drones. They are not a shop, meaning that when you happen to meet them, you have only that chance to buy 1 item.
They even offered to duplicate a weapon you already have for a fixed amount of scraps.

[R4V3-0N]

However one thing I am planning to do to cut clutter in my weapon packs is to make them sector specific... for e.g. my Autocannons and Machine guns can only be found in civilian and rebel sectors... Gauss rifles can only be found in Engi sectors... I could shift some vanilla weapons to be prominent in their intended sector i.e. beams and ions for zoltan and engi sectors. Perhaps CE could have a tighter control on say where Scatter lasers or light lasers could be found?.. I honestly have no clue. Overall I am quite happy with the options and availability in CE...

In a way I want CE to have more weapons but I know how FTL handles more weapons, Sadly it just feels like 3 drones/ weapons at stores is just to little sometimes. If only we can assign events to make shops sell specific goods, i.e. a missile weapon store or an anti personnel trader.

In "FTL Supremacy", there are many Weapons Smugglers who sell you different weapons, augmentations and drones. They are not a shop, meaning that when you happen to meet them, you have only that chance to buy 1 item.
They even offered to duplicate a weapon you already have for a fixed amount of scraps.

Weapon duplicators... that sounds like it could be a cool Captains Edition event in Lanius sectors... pay lanius scrap and they make a weapon like one you already have....

[stylesrj]

Ok, so after doing a failed run with a ship armed only with AP weapons, I think empty beacons are getting a bad rap. No, what's really cluttering up the green sectors are those damned trade ships you can't interact with unless you have trade goods or you're a pirate. They might as well be empty beacons except without the option to socialise. And you'll encounter them a lot which is probably why some might think there are too many empty beacons.

[R4V3-0N]

Ok, so after doing a failed run with a ship armed only with AP weapons, I think empty beacons are getting a bad rap. No, what's really cluttering up the green sectors are those damned trade ships you can't interact with unless you have trade goods or you're a pirate. They might as well be empty beacons except without the option to socialise. And you'll encounter them a lot which is probably why some might think there are too many empty beacons.

Sometimes I wounder why can't some of them offer an occasional quest or something... like that one ship that asks about how the war is going when he learned your a federation... he might hint that there may be a fed outpost somewhere or some federation ship you should check out.

[Sleeper Service]

as for the "music addon", I have used it twice, but I don't recall hearing anything different from the standard background musics...

The new tracks will only play in new CE sectors. Vanilla sectors retain their original soundtrack.

Ok, so after doing a failed run with a ship armed only with AP weapons, I think empty beacons are getting a bad rap. No, what's really cluttering up the green sectors are those damned trade ships you can't interact with unless you have trade goods or you're a pirate. They might as well be empty beacons except without the option to socialise. And you'll encounter them a lot which is probably why some might think there are too many empty beacons.

Adding socialize option to those is under consideration, although that kind of dilutes the rules for what constitutes an empty beacon... Actually you already described all the ways that can counteract these events: Don't travel to green sectors, get trade goods, or commit piracy. Green sectors are pretty good overall, these events where a way to diminish the returns you get there.

Weapon duplicators... that sounds like it could be a cool Captains Edition event in Lanius sectors... pay lanius scrap and they make a weapon like one you already have....

A lot of these request basically amount to you guy wanting to be given more free advantages. You can already do this by playing on easy or using scrap advantage mods.

However one thing I am planning to do to cut clutter in my weapon packs is to make them sector specific... for e.g. my Autocannons and Machine guns can only be found in civilian and rebel sectors... Gauss rifles can only be found in Engi sectors... I could shift some vanilla weapons to be prominent in their intended sector i.e. beams and ions for zoltan and engi sectors. Perhaps CE could have a tighter control on say where Scatter lasers or light lasers could be found?.. I honestly have no clue. Overall I am quite happy with the options and availability in CE...

Again I'm opposed to derandomizing the game cause that takes some of the opportunities away. If I start with this then where to stop? I think the same complaints and more would arise from regulating the game like this.

I think I'm in agreement with Gidoza about one thing - the stores are cluttered with useless garbage that makes the chances of getting something useful very low.
Perhaps some manufacturing augments should be restricted to be constructed only on the ship. Hell maybe it doesn't even need to be an augment. Set the event to "Drone Control" or "Missile Weapon" and have us spend a lot of Scrap building the weapons required like a more expensive store (or would that be overpowered/hard to script and thus requires the augments for those reasons?)

Again, this basically ammount to assuming that the game should make aquiring consumables for cheap super easy, which neither I nor the devs agree with. I hope you voice these complaint to Subset as well each time you find Emergency Respirators, Repair Arm, Advanced FTL Navigation or Distraction Buoys instead of a Preignitor or Weapon Recharge Booster in shops. What would help is posting a list of Vanilla augs that you consider worth puchasing/not worth purchasing, then posting the same list for CE augs and see whether the percantage of instant buy gear differs widely. I might then adjust prices accordingly. Consumable production augs might get cheaper either way, you have a point there. But I don't think the player should automatically be able to produce consumables of cheap whenever needed.

I'm on the fence about weapons balance though. FTL typically screws me over with only selling missiles or beams when I need a means of taking down enemy shields... but it does mean the 3-shot Flak and the Burst Laser II are becoming an endangered species.

Yeah, but there are other weapons that perform just as well. Scatter Flak, Burst III, Burst Scatter II, Charge Laser III... Also the game is supposed to screw you over.

[Auron1]

Weapon duplicators... that sounds like it could be a cool Captains Edition event in Lanius sectors... pay lanius scrap and they make a weapon like one you already have....

A lot of these request basically amount to you guy wanting to be given more free advantages. You can already do this by playing on easy or using scrap advantage mods.

No Sleeper, I disagree here: I can even start with 25,000 scrap but if I can't find a useful weapon, all those scraps are good for nothing.

[Sleeper Service]

You pretty much always gonna get artillery or hacking or an offence drone system, providing ample fall-back options to get through enemy defences. Plus you'd be untouchable. Scrap wins the game.

[Sleeper Service]

As for concrete suggestions, I have a Word file in the works where I'm commenting on [mostly] every Augmentation, Weapon, and Drone. Weapons and Drones get a few tweaks, but particularly for Augmentations I'm advocating to remove several of them or combine the features of certain pairs in order to reduce store/random drop burden and make both purchasing and random drops more meaningful.

Cool, send it my way and I can take it into consideration.

Sorry, but I have to agree with Auron, here. Scrap, in theory, wins the game - but in practice, CE is so bad at offering good drops or good options in stores that what Auron is complaining about is a factual reality in many of the games I have played

Well this depends on what you consider good drops I guess. And as mentioned, artillery and hacking will pretty much always pop up in shops during a run due to the way system availability works.

[Sleeper Service]

Well you already gather that, like the devs, I don't think that the game becomes more interesting if its balance is more symmetrical.

I'm not sure of your meaning, here. There's a difference between symmetrical balance and actual balance. Not every item needs to be exactly the same, but they need to be balanced enough within reason that there a functionally weighted options and that the game is not totally dependent on the RNG.

Yeah but how exactly do you draw this line? Based on the notion that you don't get enough good gear? I can't tell how you estimate what is within reason and functionally weighted. I do that by lining everything up with vanilla DPS/power value as far as that is possible and consider that within reason, cause CE gear ends up being in line with vanilla gear. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Well, looking forward to your points on what exactly isn't and how it should be changed.

As for Artillery - while it's cool and regularly available, the fact of the matter is that I don't always have time to finish a run all the way through in one sitting, and I'm not about to be fiddling with the "work-around" for it every single time I play a game. I'd rather have a proper set of drops and decent arsenal choices on a regular basis and have Artillery removed from the game than have Artillery in the game: because I'm not always playing the whole game in one sitting, Artillery becomes meaningless, and it ends up taking the slot of something I might actually be looking for (like a Cloning Bay, for instance) in that third slot. This is less of an issue than other stuff I'm raising, but basically this is just one more illustration of "Store Clogging." I'll take a CE without Artillery and less (but worthwhile) weapons choices over a plethora of stuff any day.

Fair enough, the main point I tried to make was that scrap will win you the game in a way or another. If you don't want to take the choices that do that then fine. But I'm a little on the fence about whether the mod should change for thousands of users, partially because you don't want to take artillery into account. Again, looking forward to your exact balance suggestions.

The comment is fair, but only to a degree. I may be able to get Hacking every game - but this doesn't help me if I've never seen a weapon drop, and have visited several Stores only to find Baton, Bo, and Pike Beams. Sure, I can Hack the Shields - but what, am I going to peck away at the shields with my Pike Beam until the opponent is dead? I'm not exaggerating, here. I can easily play 6 or 7 games in a row and find diddly-squat for meaningful weaponry to accomplish anything at all.

Again, I'd probably argue that you might be a little too selective about what you consider worthwhile to use. To put my stuff into perspective: Guys like Bio reported of having about a 60% winrate with CE on normal. Dazero has about a 5% win rate on hard even, a difficulty the mod was never designed for. The gear selection simply can't be that "game ruining" if that stuff is possible.

[Sleeper Service]

By the way - would I be able to get a copy of that document that has all the current weapon prices, power costs, and so on?

blueprints.xml.append, its part of the git repo.

After getting through Normal with every ship, I've started on Hard, and so far I'm managing upwards of 10% win rate

Wow, that's pretty awesome! Well if you have mastered CE on normal... Again, the mod was never intended to be played on hard (as mentioned in the OP) and I don't intend to balance it for that. If your critique is based on your experience on hard then I don't have much to say about it other that you don't play the mod as it is intended... the resulting experience is your choice.

Okay, I can agree with your point here. I suppose my issue is that the very nature of the Artillery's showing up in the Store becomes a bias against players who don't finish the game in a single go

I mean its not even that, its biased against players who can't be bothered to use the artillery fix, thats like a two minute investment isn't it? And in your case not even that, the mod is stacked against you cause you play on hard.

As for Hard - it would be kind of fun if we got the Scrap of Easy, with massively buffed enemy ships. I've always found Hard to be a drag because having lots of Scrap is entertaining, and I'd rather just fight truly tougher ships than have less money. Yeah, I guess less money does make it harder and is less work...but it's also more frustrating. But in my imaginary world of editing (because I'm awful at computer programming, but can sit and do the math and testing for stuff in a game for hours), I'd love to see a computer AI that fights like a player: targets specific systems, is smart with boarding parties, intentionally repairs systems in certain ways and doesn't leave the Pilot if they don't have to, and so on.

Yeah there just no real way to mod that kind of behaviour in. Enemy AI is largely off limits.