sM Polish Kit: Insurrection v1.6 [CE Support + Modules]

[Mr. Mister]

While you're at it, coupd you up the price of life suppof to, say, 40 scrap? It is curently at 0, and while I know how to make the vortex start with sensors instead of oxygen, also having to edit life support's shop price at every update would b more work, and it's not like it would conflict effect anything else in sMPK.

BTW, CE's new light anticrew artillery laser is the nemesis of my AI Vortex now: it can pierce three shields at least, can't be intercepted because light lasers are fast, and kills holograms in one hit.

I lost three of my five holograms to it, and I like it. Haven't ended that run yet, but I want to end the game while still carrying a Zoltan I licke up early on, and who's been chilling in the lv1 medbay since, doing his own thing and helping atthe occasionl blue choice.

[slowriderxcorps]

I guess the minor alteration to the Life Support costs has now been made. A few graphical alterations have been made though in addition: a new enemy Hull meter graphic that shows the hull points in groups of 4 points instead of the 11 it used to have for some reason.. and also a weapon graphic or two in the CE patch, the ones I recall being the Auto Laser Mark II and the new Hull Missile weapon, which kind of looks really off-center by default.

Oh, and MantisB's defense drone got changed.

[Mr. Mister]

Talking about the hull missile: I thought you upped its base damage to 3, but it seems as if that isn't the case (at least before that last post of yours and its update). If you up it to 3, maybe you should also give it -1 system damage for a total of 2.

Also, I told ya a LS-less Vortex is fun.

[slowriderxcorps]

Talking about the hull missile: I thought you upped its base damage to 3, but it seems as if that isn't the case (at least before that last post of yours and its update). If you up it to 3, maybe you should also give it -1 system damage for a total of 2.

Also, I told ya a LS-less Vortex is fun.

I'm still torn on the Hull Missile.. currently, the 3-damage variant is exclusive to base sMPK. However, as enemies in CE have access to this weapon, I'm going to take an approximate guess that giving enemies in Sector 1 a weapon with the potential to completely destroy you in FIVE shots is a very bad idea, and so I left it with its previous stats.

EDIT: Oh, and just to put it out there in regards to the documented run: if you're flying No-man army, do not sell your AP Drone and keep at least one System Repair drone, as with no crew alive you have no means whatsoever of repairing breaches if you do that. I realise this was backed by holograms, but it's still something to keep in mind.

[Mr. Mister]

I know, I accidentally sold my repair drone by sector 6 (didn't mean nor need to do it).

Selling the hologram generator is a tricky decision though, as I've found out: by doing so, you'll limit yourself to your current crew and whatever you can recruit in events. You can see how I ended up with only one crew after a rather unfortunate encounter with a light pierce laser (I don't quite like the name, it's not ominous enough. Maybe you should change its long name to concentrated light anti-crew laser).

I somehow was able to get lv4 shields and lv6 engines as soon as sector 4.


On the hull missile: if you're worried about the buffed version appearing in sector 1, maybe you could tamper with its rarity on the lists so CE's mini-hull variant is the one that appears on the early-game.

[slowriderxcorps]

I believe I had removed all the Hull weapons from the spawn lists at one point when making the change, however in the ned, I decided that such a move wasn't really what I was hoping for, so I went back on it.

Regardless, after waiting half an hour to acquire 1.092, the patch has been re-tasked and upped. One thing I noticed though was that some of the new Crystal weapons which did use Carnelian-esque colours got changed back into vanilla colours. Curious as to why that is..

[Sleeper Service]

Cause I put them on the Bravis in the player ship addon and I wanted them to match the colour of the ship.

[slowriderxcorps]

Got it. I thought it was that they just don't seem to look good at all in red.. even though I did actively compare the way it's lit up compared to the standard Crystal weapons and it's exactly the same. Perhaps something could be done about that.. at some point.

Regardless, one little thing has been added in that the new Crystal weapons have been added to the Rock sectors in a similar way to how they are in sMPK, as in the Mark I weapons can appear in Rock-controlled sectors and that and the Mark II weapons can both appear in Homeworlds.

EDIT: A bit of tinkering and experimentation later, I've come up with this, and implemented it into the patch (current CE weapon on the left, edited weapon is on the right).


EDIT 2: Also included now is an 'attempt' at trying to fix the Carnelian-esque colours on the red Crystal ships. I should define that the thing that looks weird with these graphics is that the diversity between the brightest and darkest parts of these graphics is too large, resulting in bright sections that literally looked white, and dark sections that were completely black, darker than even the outline of the vessel itself. However, trying to simply alter the look of them from the original blue ships doesn't really work as well as you would expect.. it's doable, I just haven't figured out exactly how to go about it.

I guess the reason I was trying to have a go at this was that I was mulling over potentially using the Type-B enemy graphics resource in some fashion in sMPK, except it's lacking Crystal-B colours.

Before stopping myself from thinking allowing the player Artemis Missiles, the Heavy Pierce laser and Breach Bomb Mark I into the loot pool for the base game was a good idea (it probably isn't.. though I guess I will trial the inclusion of some of them), I also went through and did a sweep of every weapon in the CE patch, altering rarity values in an attempt to try and make the more generally useful weapons more common and niche weapons less so. I haven't touched Drone rarities however. I remember this one weird issue back in the day when any drone that I had set to have a Rarity of 4 would never show up at all for reasons unexplained..

EDIT 3: Yeah, this is getting silly, but ideas keep on coming up in my mind. An alternate version of sMPK is present at the moment with the items I have decided to trial in their inclusion in the loot pool (the Artemis missile, Drone Reactor Booster and Titanium System Casing). After a lot of mulling over in my head, I decided that any other exclusive augment wouldn't make much sense in a conventional environment, the Breach Bomb I isn't really that useful on anything other than SlugA, and the Heavy Pierce Laser is too good at what it does, much like the Mini Beam.

This hasn't stopped me from adding these things and more to the CE patch, however. Now included is a chance for these super-special racial augments to appear in their designated sectors with moderate rarity (except the Zoltan Shield, which has absolute minimum rarity due to how powerful it is).

[Mr. Mister]

Very wierd thing: CE reverses the texture filenames of the Scythe and Javelin (aka FLAIL_DAMAGE) beams. I'm not sure when it started doing so, but since the sMPK-CE CP doesn't, that makes those two beams use each other's model. You can just check the Scythe the Zoltan A alternate starts with to see it.

Because the one on the right on BA's image is the one that does the 2 damage, right? The one that very appropiately has characteristings resembling the Halberd.

EDIT: Just now I saw your edits on your post. I kinda want to see the Heavy Pierce Laser MkI into the enemy pool, as it's a bit silly if you think about it that they can have the MkII and MkIII but not the MkI. With a higher energy cost than the normal Heavy Laser MkI, a longer cooldown, and the fact that with the alternate starting layout add-on you no longer startn with it, it would only make sense to let it be fired upon you. I would think the same of the Breach Bomb MkI too, moreso if you consider that heavy bombs aren't a threat to the player's crew because of how slow they are. Breach bombs are useful not only gor the Slug A, but fot anything else too when fighting an auto-ship. The player Artemis, though... I would either replace the enemy artemis with the player's, or the opposite. Don't put both versions on the enemy pool, now that would just be confusing.


The Drone Booster could be pretty nifty if placed only on Engi stations, since those things are huge and round. And talking about stations: there isn't a layout B-themed version of any of them (apart from the Rockmen's, which is instead the B theme only), right? It would be interesting if someone could do that.



Also, could you explain what's up with the Mini-Beam? It's been a long time since I played vanilla FTL, but your words and your decision to replace the Hasta Beam with the Mini Beam suggest to me that the vanilla Mini Beam the player starts with on the vanilla Stealth A is a unique player variant with some edge (like the Artemis), but I don't seem to fully get why you decided to scrap the Hasta.

Further EDIT: Also, maybe you should rename the Pernach and Maul to Rays instead of Beams, to stay consistent with the fire, anti-bio and drone rays.

[slowriderxcorps]

Alright, um, words.

I actually didn't notice that, for whatever reason, the two mining beams use their opposite graphics names. It's awfully strange. Regardless, that's now been fixed. As for the weapons and pools thing, I was referring to the ability for the player to find these weapons for their own ships, not for enemies to use them. The Drone Reactor Booster is already implemented on the Engi Hospital, as it turns out, but not the Drone Harbour. Also, the lack of Type B colours for stations is because there actually no Type-B graphics for the stations, save for the Civilian ones (and technically the AI station).

The difference between the StealthA's Mini Beam and the one that can occur as a drop in CE is literally just the cost of the weapon. It was deliberately made very low in the base game for reasons known most accurately by the devs, so for that reason, I've left the weapon on that ship alone. However, for its cost, the effectiveness of the weapon is too good to warrant such a price, so the drop variant actually costs a bit.

And point taken on those two weapons, that has been implemented. I guess this calls for an increase to the version number.