[WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More! UPDATED for FTL v1.6

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WhiteWeasel
Posts: 248
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 4:36 am

[WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More! UPDATED for FTL v1.6

Postby WhiteWeasel » Mon Feb 27, 2017 3:51 pm

Musteline Aerospace (MLAS) presents my first mod for FTL: Faster than light. This mod aims to add new and (hopefully) balanced weapons with their own strengths and weaknesses into the game for you to come across on your journey to defeat the rebel flagship. Currently this mod adds four new categories of weapons, and various miscellaneous models. Also, weapons with (RR) next to them are weapons with properties based from the weapons from Ring Runner. The developer was kind enough to let me use the authentic audio of their respective counterparts!. UPDATE: After a long hiatus, I've come back to polish this mod and refine it for use in FTL 1.6.14, and possibly future modding projects. ;)

Want to use some sweet ships with some of these as it's starting weapons? Check out it's sister mod here! (Now fully standalone and compatible)


To do list:
TBD

----Weapon Families-----

Railguns
Railguns are my first custom sprited weapons for FTL. Their core principal is that they are a laser that can pierce 1 layer of shields, and they travel at high velocity, allowing them to slip by shield recharges! All railguns have moderate to good breach chance. However their singular projectile leaves the vulnerable to enemies with high evasion.
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Photocasters (RR)
Photocasters are energy bolt spam weapons. They fire one more shot than an equivalent power burst laser. So a 2 power Photocaster II fires four projectiles. BUT they are notoriously inaccurate, even worse than flak. To the point where trying to target a specific system is difficult, and it's often better to aim for "center of mass".
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Photocaster Cannons (RR)
They are for all intents and purposes, heavy flak. Dealing 2 points of damage per projectile. However they have less projectiles than their flak counterparts, resulting them in being less effective against shields.
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Gemini Weapons (RR)
Gemini weapons are highly specialized system disabling weapons. They are great at doing that, but are often lacking or have no killing power of their own.
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Resonant Beams
Chain beam weapons that start off weak, but become stronger each time they are fired. Though technically more powerful than their counterparts, they take time to chain up.
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Longbow Missiles (RR)
Longbow missiles are weak one damage weapons, but they incredibly cheap for their power cost, and their missiles have a modest chance of inflicting side effects like fire and breach on hit making them punch above their weight.
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-----Miscellaneous Weapons-----

Anti-Bio Beam II
Image This is a very rare Bio beam that does massive crew damage, and pierces shields.

Stun Beam
ImageA beam that does right what it says on the tin. But it's far from harmless, thanks to it's low energy level of being a damageless beam, is ignores shields as if it were conventional light. It's low cooldown makes it incredibly useful at disrupting repairs, or delaying FTL.

Terminus Missiles
ImageAn anti-bio missile that will obliterate whatever unfortunate humanoid is sanding in the room this targets. It also does light hull damage and has a low chance of breach.

Janus Missiles
Image The swiss army knife of missiles. They are common and cheap due to their widespread use for their utility. They are a unique missile that has system damage and hullbust. So you can choose between doing more hull damage, or doing less, but knocking out an extra bar of systems. They are considered superior to the Leto and a viable sidegrade to the Artemis.

Hephaestus Missiles
ImageA cheap, no damage incendiary missile that starts fires in the room they target, and does minor crew damage.

Multiple Warhead Missiles
(Uses same sprite as the charge missiles) A decently powered missile fired with three fake decoys to distract defense drones. Though it its possible that the real one might get shot down by chance. Still, 3/4 odds to succeed is better than being totally shut down or wasting missiles.

Scalpel Beam
An obtainable, and modified mini beam that has a low breach chance.

Get the download here! Currently at version 1.6 for FTL 1.6.14
Changelog

Code: Select all

1.6
-Updated to be compatible with FTL 1.6.14
-Compatible with the F5 Mercury ship mod as it's now fully standalone.

MAJOR OVERHAUL AND RE-BALANCE OF ALL WEAPONS
--------GLOBAL CHANGES------------
-Changed internal ID's to make working on the back end more easy in the future.
-Truncated vestigial parts of the mod; unused weapons, wip's, and leftovers from the starfighter ship.
-Reduced stick out on most weapons sprites so they are less likely to appear as floating on certain ships.
-Fixed custom tips not displaying correctly.
-Revised tool tip/description information to be more informative and accurate.
-Toned down the secondary effects on various common weapons like the scalpel beam and longbow missiles, they were too effective for how common and low tier they were. This should make encountering them on enemy ship less frustrating.
-Slightly reduced the price of most weapons.
-All weapons with full shield pierce have been set to 10 (from 5)

RAILGUNS
-All railguns all have been set to 1 shield pierce to tone them down for both as and against a player, and be more mechanically consistent.
-Fixed sprite vanishing when firing.

PHOTOCASTERS
-Added photocaster cannons
-Reduced targeting radius of the photo vulcan to be 150. (Was 200)

GEMINI WEAPONS
-Gemini beam drone has 100% evade chance vs anti drones, and is slightly faster.
-Gemini Seeker missiles are obtainable.

RESONANT BEAMS
-Reduced the cooldown of the large resonant beam significantly (22->15). The rationale is that, now, by the time this beam chains enough to become as strong as a glaive beam, the glaive beam already has fired twice, which usually means the battle is over. And thus the large resonant beam has been buffed to be competitive with the glaive.
-Fixed issue with small resonant beam chain_glow not appearing.
-Added a "medium" resonant beam that chains twice and consumes 3 power.

OTHER WEAPONS
-Added slight crew damage to haephestus missiles to encourage use as an anti-crew weapon.
-Added an extra decoy to multiple warhead missiles.
-Buffed stun beam to be longer, and have guaranteed stun chance.
-Removed The fast recharge laser and the stun beam 2. The FRL was more of a proof of concept weapon as my first weapon, and the stun beam 2 is redundant with the buff to the original stun beam.
-Changed terminus missiles to 2 system damage instead of 2 normal damage, and slightly reduced crew damage. (Still enough to one-shot humans however)

OLD CHANGELOG
1.0
-Release
1.3
-Minor Sprite Tweaks
-Weapons available to enemy ships
1.3.5
-Increased targeting area and cooldown of Photo Vulcan (final RoF is still the same)
-Rephrased Photocaster text to be more clear with how many (true) projectiles they fire
1.4
-Added Resonant Beam
1.4.1
-Changed Resonant beam to resonant beam II
-Made Resonant beam II more rare (was too common)
-Added Resonant beam I
-Made Scalpel Beam sprite more distinct
-Changed Bio Beam II Tooltip
Last edited by WhiteWeasel on Thu Jan 05, 2023 10:37 am, edited 9 times in total.
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WhiteWeasel
Posts: 248
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 4:36 am

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby WhiteWeasel » Mon Feb 27, 2017 4:20 pm

Reserved in case I need the space.
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randomness5555
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Joined: Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:11 pm

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby randomness5555 » Thu Mar 02, 2017 12:21 am

Very cool looking weapons! Will certainly be testing them out when I have time (darn uni deadlines!). Would you consider letting me use one or two of them for the eventual C-layout of the BWI Bulwark? I don't know which ones yet (*I'll want to test them first) but it'd likely be the railguns or the photocasters maybe since I really like their art.
WhiteWeasel
Posts: 248
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 4:36 am

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby WhiteWeasel » Fri Mar 03, 2017 9:57 pm

randomness5555 wrote:Very cool looking weapons! Will certainly be testing them out when I have time (darn uni deadlines!). Would you consider letting me use one or two of them for the eventual C-layout of the BWI Bulwark? I don't know which ones yet (*I'll want to test them first) but it'd likely be the railguns or the photocasters maybe since I really like their art.

Finally. I've haven't been able to access the forums because of browser issues, but as for that, I'm not sure. As a fellow modder, I'd really encourage you to make custom weapons so you can have something that perfectly fits with the theme of the ship you are making.
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randomness5555
Posts: 11
Joined: Sat Feb 18, 2017 6:11 pm

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby randomness5555 » Sat Mar 04, 2017 1:00 pm

Fair enough, I did actually have a weapon lined up for it anyway, I just liked the look of these. Good luck with future modding! (and I've had issues with this forum as well, sometimes not being able to get on at all and sometimes unable to stay logged in, that might not just be a problem at your end)
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fdagpigj
Posts: 84
Joined: Sat Apr 25, 2015 3:14 pm

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby fdagpigj » Sun Mar 05, 2017 10:37 am

WhiteWeasel wrote:Finally. I've haven't been able to access the forums because of browser issues, but as for that, I'm not sure.

At some point a few days ago ftlgame.com automatically redirected to subsetgames.com and I was not logged in the first time after that happened and now both domains seem to work again but I was unable to login when I tried on ftlgame.com (because that's what I have bookmarked) so it's kind of a shame they stopped redirecting to subsetgames.com, unless me being unable to login was just a temporary issue or something.
WhiteWeasel
Posts: 248
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 4:36 am

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby WhiteWeasel » Tue Mar 07, 2017 12:14 am

Wow, a whopping 48 downloads! So far how are the weapons playing out? And the ship pack only has like 13... Are new ships less popular?
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Chrono Vortex
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Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby Chrono Vortex » Tue Mar 07, 2017 12:29 am

WhiteWeasel wrote:Wow, a whopping 48 downloads! So far how are the weapons playing out?

I gave it a shot, and the weapons I found seem to work pretty well. Albeit I didn't find many since I had CE and most of the other weapon mods installed...

WhiteWeasel wrote:And the ship pack only has like 13... Are new ships less popular?

Well, there are about 250 more ship mods than there are weapon mods. It makes sense that they'd get more attention.
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Chrono Vortex
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Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby Chrono Vortex » Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:36 am

There're a couple knit-picky issues with Longbow Missiles. First of all, when you mouse over the weapon in the UI, it says the weapon type is "Blast."

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You can fix this by adding <flavorType>Missile</flavorType> to the blueprint.

The fire point is also ever-so-slightly off.

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WhiteWeasel
Posts: 248
Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2014 4:36 am

Re: [WEAPONS/DRONES] Railguns, Photocasters, & More!

Postby WhiteWeasel » Mon Apr 03, 2017 1:45 am

Chrono Vortex wrote:There're a couple knit-picky issues with Longbow Missiles. First of all, when you mouse over the weapon in the UI, it says the weapon type is "Blast."

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You can fix this by adding <flavorType>Missile</flavorType> to the blueprint.

The fire point is also ever-so-slightly off.

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Thanks for the info, I'll get on that soon. EDIT: Anyways, balance wise, how are things playing out, I tried my best to make it so they aren't objectively better than most vanilla weapons.
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