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

[Sleeper Service]

Sorry that your CE experience was not that rewarding. Still, most things you point out are actually not really related to the mod. The Mantis ship layout and systems are no different from vanilla, so is the occurrence of Zoltan shielded enemies (CE actually makes them less likely to appear in sector one.) Most people realize that boarding is still superior in CE, even with the nerfes going. I'm sorry that you met a very strong enemy on your first jump, drone ships will probably removed from sector one cause they are often criticized for beaming to lethal. Still, CE did not put that enemy there deliberately to annoy you, its all random and vanilla has a chance to generate strong enemies on the first jump as well. Also Mantis A is known to have a rocky start, isn't it?

[audens]

Hi

This is the first mod that I've tried on FTL and it's a very good experience. That said, it's also pretty harsh (as you have adviced). Well, then I tried to download the Infinite Addon to re-balance a little the difficulty, but I couldn't. I tried with another browser with no success.

Please, can you post another link, or fix this one? I'll be grateful if you do it.

Thanks by advance, and excuse me if this is a little weird-written. English is not my natal language.

[Sleeper Service]

I added a MediaFire link for Infinite to the OP, hope that works for you.

R&D news: RannI made quite some progress with the procedural weapon generation tool. I'm definitely hyped for this. The utility is so universal applicable that it could already diversify enemy shipBlueprints as well. For creating armored or understaffed variants and many many more kinds of ships.

[Russian Rockman]

I just fought the final boss on CEi. Maybe it was just my loadout, but it was indeed much harder. Which is a good thing. I have a couple suggestions though.

For CEi: I think the Defense Drone 3 should be limited to the 2nd stage. Only because the 2nd phase is still the "drone phase" and the 3rd stage I've always thought was the more "tank phase." It seemed like at least 3/4 of the shots I got off missed so I could barely hit the boss anyway and the little damage I did was repaired by the Hull Repair Drone when the Zoltan Shield recharged. I think if you really want it to have a Defense Drone perhaps you should give the Boss a slightly less strong defense drone on this phase since it is hard enough already and it keeps the drone phase a little more distinct from the third phase. If you want to keep up the difficulty maybe just increase the engine power even more. I don't remember if it already has max power.

The oxygen being instantly depleted on this stage is fine for CEi. It prevents you from boarding at all. Maybe try giving the Boss a lvl 4 teleporter though because that should be instant or really fast cooldown. That or slightly increase the number of boarders because the boss seems to suffocate its own crew too fast. And for both CEi and regular CE I think you could add some text to explain why some of the crew still dies. You could explain that there is an oxygen leak and that is why they are trying to get off the ship. It you could say a few brave soles stay behind to manually initiate the FailSafe, which is the Advanced AI.

Also, I don't think it would be too bad to give the Boss some drones on the 1st phase as well and connect the weapon rooms on the 1st & 2nd stages. And maybe decrease the charge time of the artillery. On CEi the artillery still seemed to come very slow so the 1st stage does not seem to gaining difficulty to keep up with the CEi curve. The charge time is fine on regular CE though.

For Regular CE: I think the Drone Uplink Jammer should still work on the 3rd stage drone control. Or maybe the text should at least explain that the AI is hack proof because I was surprised when my Drone Uplink Jammer did nothing, until I looked at the code and saw that all effects on drone control get cleared.

Perhaps it may not be too bad of an idea to make an encased drone control system on the third stage. The drones would still spawn somewhere, but then of course they wouldn't be able to heal which could be an issue

I don't think the AP drone that spawns on the third stage is necessary because you can't really board the ship anyway. Except with AI crew and even then whatever damage they could do would be stopped by the swarm of Ststem Repair Drones. Unless you really swarm the ship with AI. If you want, maybe you could give the Boss a 2nd system repair drone instead.

And last something that's not too big of an issue, but could potentially be an issue. If you kill all the crew on the 1st or 2nd phases the AU Boarding event can happen more than once. This could probably be resolved by changing that event to an eventList which then calls two+ different events. One could be %99+ percent probable and unique, the other could be non-unique and not cause a boarding to happen a 2nd time. Yes this works, I've tested it. Don't have to do that though. It's your mod.

P.S. One more thing that's been bugging me for a while. Us the Boss Ion supposed to fire 4 shots? I never really understood the point of that. 3 shots can already take out 2 shields if they all hit and the weapon only has 3 barrels. It is the only Boss weapon that shoots more than 3 projectiles. Do you think maybe you could change that back...

Also, glad to hear that the Infinite Loot script is working. Another use for that would be to create more variation of ENEMY weapons in main CE. They could all be changed slightly from the player variants slightly and that could be used even in the normal Captain's Edition.

[Russian Rockman]

Another unrelated comment. I ran into the Curator event and thought it was awesome. It would be really cool to have some more events that continue on indefinitely. There is definitely room for some more events like this. Like one example I could think of would be a sub-questlne involving the war between the Engi and Mantis, starting with the Mantis war camp quest, maybe. A sequence of missions involving attacking the Mantis which get increasingly more difficult. or a series of missions involving research or peace keeping operations for the Zoltan. What would be even cooler is if these could maybe somehow be linked to the ship quests. And what would be even cooler than that is if you do maybe three of the missions and they give you a reasonably powerful "unique" weapon to be used against the Boss, or alternatively some augment, that would allow you to choose a Blue event and get assistance from them in some way when you fight the Final Boss. Maybe even a different ending, lol. (Say maybe that what you get is some honorary thing making you a commander in the Engi Brigade or the Zoltan Intergalactic Peace Corps. When you equip it they will come to your aid.) I just think something like this would add replay value for the whole game and for those ship missions which would no longer just be "Oh cool I got the ship so now I never have to do that mission again." And they could add some cool flavor to all the different factions, things like this give the game some RPG elements.

EDIT: This sort of concept might even be able to be related to the "wingmen" idea for the Federation Cruiser. At the beginning of each sector or something you send you wingmen off to other parts of the sector and get a quest or a couple of quests to fight of Rebels in that sector, maybe even have them slow the Federation fleet pursuit. You get the Federation Cruiser after you have already beaten the game once so it could maybe even be like you are continuing the game. An idea similar to the "Federation Strikes Back" mod. It might even be possible to change some of the main text for the game, adding some text if you have artillery for the first beacon telling the story of the heroic efforts of the Kestral which detroyed the flagship previously allowing the Federation to regain its strength and how the Rebels have rebuilt the Death Star, I mean Flagship, and now you must take the fight to them. When you get to the end maybe you could even use the Blue artillery option to get some whole new text about how you've joined up with the FEDERATION assault team making its assault on the final REBEL stronghold and you must fight the flagship again. Maybe you could even be the commander of the Federation forces everyone has been waiting for, promoted after your heroic journey with the Kestral.

[Mr. Mister]

Quick question: If you want two weapons to use the same base model but different glow colours/maps, do you still need two instances of what is the same base texture, or can you use the same but linked to different glow textures?

EDIT: Also, can you use the GAME_WIN flag or whatever in any event other than killing the flagship for good?

[Sleeper Service]

Quick question: If you want two weapons to use the same base model but different glow colours/maps, do you still need two instances of what is the same base texture, or can you use the same but linked to different glow textures?

The weapon can just be linked to a different glow image (via a new anim sheet that uses the same base weapon.)

GAME_WIN flag or whatever

Unfortunately, something like this does not exist. You can not have the player win in a different way than by killing the flagship as far as I know...


On the Infinite Flagship:
I though about encasing the drone system, but I rather wanted to give the player a chance to shut the drones down to get the upper hand. This also makes it possible to disable that annoying defense drone. The eventlist suggestion for the boss boarding is pretty elegant, I think I'll put that in at some point. That the drone uplink jammer does not work was not really intended... Yeah, would be helpful I guess...

[Mr. Mister]

The weapon can just be linked to a different glow image (via a new anim sheet that uses the same base weapon.)

That means you could try giving each weapon's variant on IL a different glow colour, right?

[Sleeper Service]

With some extended functionality and a lot of edited spare glows foe each weapon, yes. We are focusing on the purely stats based functionality right now though. The tool is running as intended for weapons now:



But the SMM seems to have some problems handling this amount of blueprints and we still have not tested ourselves how this would actually effect loading times ingame. I'm pretty sure the game caches all blueprints when starting up, so it should not effect ingame loading. But I'm not entirely sure.

[rannl]

With some extended functionality and a lot of edited spare glows foe each weapon, yes. We are focusing on the purely stats based functionality right now though. The tool is running as intended for weapons now:



But the SMM seems to have some problems handling this amount of blueprints and we still have not tested ourselves how this would actually effect loading times ingame. I'm pretty sure the game caches all blueprints when starting up, so it should not effect ingame loading. But I'm not entirely sure.

Modded weapons + updated weapons lists patched successfully with SMM on windows
Game loaded fine, no lagging. Enemies using modded weapons