rannl wrote:Nice catch RR. I looked at the flagship system pools, aparantly the cloaking tag on the third stage has a spelling mistake, which explains why it didn't show up.
As for the drones, Sleepy and I decided to include all the drones one might encounter during the flagship fight. Those include the 2nd stage drones which always appear, and possible 1st stage drones which are used only if a drone system is chosen for the 1st stage. I understand this might be confusing, so I can rework the description so that the 1st stage drones are mentioned with the description of the 1st stage systems, and the drones descripion will be changed to a secondary systems description.
Sleepy has the final word, I'll just make a version with the possible changes.
By the way RR, did you try the random flagship using a randomly generated player ship
?
I DID! I tried a randomized kestrel first, with 3 pretty good weapons, but only power for one of them. And 2 shields. I died in about sector 4 or 5.
An auto-assault melted me, I neglected to upgrade my defenses because I was trying to get more weapon power
.
Then I tried using a randomized Torus which had only two weapon slots and 4 drone slots. It started out with a 3 shot burst laser, but in sector 1 I picked up a charge laser, also with 3 shots.
Those weapons got me all the way to the end of the game. I desperately tried looking for additional drones, other than my two anti-crew/system drones but I never found any good ones until sector 7. The ship became OP with 8 shields and 8 engines because I took a lot of risks to get scrap and got lucky.
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Glad you found out the bug with the cloaking. I see now what the problem was, cloak vs. cloaking, I'm loking forward to fighting a flagship with a super shield AND cloaking now.
The flagship can also have cloaking on stage 2 right?
Also, how do you handle that if the cloaking room or drone room was on a wing section? Does the flagship just "apparently" have a backup system in the middle of the ship if the wing is lost?
Or would there be a way to install the cloaking system in the middle of the ship instead, from the beginning? I personally don't really care if the system has to jump around.
About the drones, I think reorganizing that bit of data might be a good idea. I see why you went the way you did with the drones, you have to list all possible drones you might face, but can't guarantee a drone system will actually be present. Only listing the drones with 1st phase and 2nd phase descriptions when a drone system is present would fix any confusion. Also, it seems like the flagship can't use drones on phase 3? But I think that should be a possibility. It would be really nice to fight a drone heavy flagship.
Lastly, have you considered changing the events in the last stand with the tool? Not only can you change the text on each phase, but you could make it so that there is a tiny chance of the fight appearing in a hazard. The flagship could try to lure you into an asteroid field where it is protected by it's superior shielding, or it could lure you into a sun where it's fire suppression system gives it an advantage, or a pulsar where it's ion shielding gives it an advantage, or it could try to ambush you within a nearby gas giant.
Much like CE did before AE!!!
You could also cause other events to happen like another rebel ship gets a lucky shot on you from a distance and you start out the fight with a fire in your engine room. Or some extra boarders could teleport on to your ship. Or the flagship could use a combat augment to disable some of your weapons, drones, or (God forbid) life support. (That last one could be included in "special tech the flagship may have installed").
You could even have some good events happen after destroying the flagship. I did this a long time ago. You can change <event name="BOSS_ESCAPED"> to an eventList and add two events to the list. You cant tell which order they will appear in, but one will appear after defeating the boss in phase 1 and the other after phase 2. You could have some reinforcements show up give you some supplies, a crew member, or patch up your hull a tiny bit with emergency armor plating. Or you can have something else bad happen...
Anyway just some ideas.
I would have died if it weren't for my maxed out engines and 4 shields. I also got a hull repair drone in sector 7! The first 2 phases I was able to handle no problem, but somehow I took a whole bunch of damage in the 3rd phase and died, but not before taking the bastard down with me, earning me an awesome victory. 
For the systems, the data said that the flagship would have a cloaking and hacking system in the first phase, and a hacking and cloaking system in the third phase as well. The flagship did have a hacking and cloaking system in the first phase, but it did not have a cloaking system in the third phase. The flagship was also supposed to have many different kinds of drones, but it only ever activated 2 in the second phase and it did not have a drone system in the third phase. So basically I prepared a lot to face 2 phases of cloaking and lots of drones, but the flagship was disappointingly underwhelming as it did not have any of those things. 
We are getting there.
