Subset Games Forum

So I ended up playing this mod for about 7 hours last night and here are some things I noticed.

First off it didn't wait for full shields to throw battleships at me. Which was rough the first time I played because it seems to have started throwing them at me when I had 6 power in weapons, which was unfortunate cause i was playing the stealth ship and had not gotten shields at all yet. Turns out you reeeeeeaaaalllly can't kill the battleship if you don't have shields.

Second there was an event with a crystal ship where it asked for missiles to kill pirates this event is bugged, when I gave them the missiles it didn't take any missiles and then it took 8 scrap away from me instead of giving me scrap.

Third I ran into some text in a couple events about saving the federation and wondered if that is the way it is supposed to be.

Finally on the subject of the battleship I am very pleased with the challenge of the boss so far, even completely maxed on everything i could not beat him using the strategy I had started with, however, he can't beat me either (mostly cause he does eventually run out of drones) so what i have to do right now is turtle up while i am waiting for my jump to charge and then run away like a little girl. My current plan is to run from sector to sector looking for new weapons and refitting my crew while running away from the battleship as soon as possible in the hopes of being able to school him when i have reworked my ship. A strategy which has worked for ~15 sectors although it is really hard to find higher level weapons for some reason .

Btw the strategy I started with was to do the crystal ship type B and try a boarding strategy but the battleship just rocked my guys and cloaked while they were getting killed so i couldn't retrieve them.

Thank you for an excellent mod and let me know if there is anything i can do to help you.

cadenzaforte wrote:First off it didn't wait for full shields to throw battleships at me. Which was rough the first time I played because it seems to have started throwing them at me when I had 6 power in weapons, which was unfortunate cause i was playing the stealth ship and had not gotten shields at all yet. Turns out you reeeeeeaaaalllly can't kill the battleship if you don't have shields.

After the first test, I changed the event to be dynamic. Basically it could be one of three things, either max shields, 6 weapons (probably should up this), or 6 engines (same as weapons). I'm going to re-work the event this weekend, and include multiple types of "Battleships". One for each race, and they will trigger based on different requirements. Initially I was looking for a ship that would be a challenge for a "maxed" out player ship. However, what exactly determines maxed out? What will eventually happen (I hope) is that you will run into a variety of "stronger" than average ships. Not all will require a maxed out ship to beat, but they will trigger earlier than a "maxed" out ship. Hopefully providing a scaling type of feeling.

cadenzaforte wrote:Second there was an event with a crystal ship where it asked for missiles to kill pirates this event is bugged, when I gave them the missiles it didn't take any missiles and then it took 8 scrap away from me instead of giving me scrap.

Third I ran into some text in a couple events about saving the federation and wondered if that is the way it is supposed to be.

I will look into, and fix these.

cadenzaforte wrote:it is really hard to find higher level weapons for some reason

I'm planning on going through the event rewards and updating anyone that gives out a weapon. Due to the fact that you never actually progress in sectors, the games autoReward for weapons will always give you a weaker one. It's likely going to be a decent amount of work because I would need to trigger an EventList for the reward to keep the rewards somewhat random. This is the kind of thing I will put more time into once I have working "Battleships" that the majority seems to feel work.

cadenzaforte wrote:Thank you for an excellent mod and let me know if there is anything i can do to help you.

You're welcome, and any testing will help me tremendously, as that is what I have the least amount of time for, and the ship balance is the most important thing about this mod!

I also wonder if you(or anyone) is having any issue building up? Do you clear the Civilian sector beacons before going to the exit?

I had some issue at the very start when I first played because I wanted to start with the stealth ship, but starting without shields is always hard. I have found that if you can make it through the first three sectors you are pretty set after that, until battleships rock your face.

The difficulty progression is remarkably similar to playing the vanilla game on normal difficulty instead of easy, it punishes you at first (when you can run into larger ships that kill you dead) then gets easier (when you can beat most ships in each sector) then gets much harder. (when you start spawning battleships)

0.1.6 feedback, data.dat version. Wait, no - looks like the 0.1.5 and 0.1.6 data.dat versions have the same timestamp and filesize? Yeah, battleships don't have working weapons...

Guess I'll have to use the GMM version. Call me old-fashioned, but requiring over 5 megabytes of binary to perform a single file replace operation is everything that's wrong with modern computing


Okay, using 0.1.6 GMM version.. err, the battleships still don't have any weapons? And I stumbled upon the same buggy event as cadenzaforte did (taking scrap instead of giving it & a typo, Priate instead of Pirate )

DrkTemplar wrote:I'm going to re-work the event this weekend, and include multiple types of "Battleships". One for each race, and they will trigger based on different requirements. What will eventually happen (I hope) is that you will run into a variety of "stronger" than average ships. Not all will require a maxed out ship to beat, but they will trigger earlier than a "maxed" out ship. Hopefully providing a scaling type of feeling.

All of this sounds great, keep up the good work.

DrkTemplar wrote:Initially I was looking for a ship that would be a challenge for a "maxed" out player ship. However, what exactly determines maxed out?

Depends on what you can use to determite that, I'm not really familiar with FTL modding.
- You could probably check if all systems and subsystems are maxed, but that trigger would be easy to avoid.
-> Check if player has n points total in systems and subsystems?
- Can you check total scrap gained? By the time player has accumulated >2200 scrap, they can afford to completely max out any ship and they should already have skilled crew and some good equipment.

DrkTemplar wrote:I also wonder if you(or anyone) is having any issue building up? Do you clear the Civilian sector beacons before going to the exit?

Some ships are very hard to start with and loot/shop luck can play a large factor, whilst others are much easier. Just like in vanilla. I always clear the first sector.

The way I tend to play, I explore every beacon until I have a solid ship (whilst avoiding the battleship requirements) & good amount of extra scrap, then I start shop-jumping with the help of a slug crewmember's clairvoyance until I have the weapons & augmentations I want.

Starting balance is pretty good, imo... until you get to the battleships. It's easy to start encountering them "too" early on (assuming they're meant to test maxed & well-equipped ships), unless you know & purposefully avoid the triggers. And there are so damn many! They seem to appear in a vast majority of of "empty" beacons - feels a bit repetitive right now, but will probably be perfectly fine once you get more ship variety in.

This sounds bloody amazing. I am simply filled with glee at the prospect of being able to pilot my magnificent space cruiser trillions of miles.

I just got ravaged by a battlecruiser with 2 lvl 2 anti ship drones. FUN.

epeli wrote:0.1.6 feedback, data.dat version. Wait, no - looks like the 0.1.5 and 0.1.6 data.dat versions have the same timestamp and filesize? Yeah, battleships don't have working weapons...

I show downloads for 0.1.6, so you must have had that version. 0.1.5 was only up for about 30-40 minutes before I realized some issues I wanted to fix. I only show 3 total downloads for that version before I posted 0.1.6. I could start adding the version number to the file.

epeli wrote:Guess I'll have to use the GMM version. Call me old-fashioned, but requiring over 5 megabytes of binary to perform a single file replace operation is everything that's wrong with modern computing

The GMM version only includes the files that are changed, while data.dat includes them all. Data.dat is 952.5 kb, while the GMM version is only 173.7 kb. If you'r referring to the Mod Manager itself, it does do more than replace a single file, but you would want to talk to the owner of that for more information about why its as large as it is. I personally prefer to just replace the data.dat file myself, but wanted to support GMM and anyone that would rather use a manager.

epeli wrote:Okay, using 0.1.6 GMM version.. err, the battleships still don't have any weapons? And I stumbled upon the same buggy event as cadenzaforte did (taking scrap instead of giving it & a typo, Priate instead of Pirate )

I'm not sure why the Battleship wouldn't have working weapons, it seems to work for others. I'll have to think about this some more. I assume since you weren't using GMM before, you're not including other mods, right? If you are, its possibly they are updating the blueprint.xml file, and maybe overwritting my changes? I had to create custom weapons for the Battleship because it was reported that the ship couldn't get through a players defenses. Did the ship have weapons but never used them, or didn't have any weapons attached at all?

I'll fix those other errors, scarp, typo, mention of saving the federation in the next build.

epeli wrote:Depends on what you can use to determite that, I'm not really familiar with FTL modding.
- You could probably check if all systems and subsystems are maxed, but that trigger would be easy to avoid.
-> Check if player has n points total in systems and subsystems?
- Can you check total scrap gained? By the time player has accumulated >2200 scrap, they can afford to completely max out any ship and they should already have skilled crew and some good equipment.

As far as I know, you can only trigger off of one system. I tried using multiple, but it didn't work. So I can check your pilot, or your shields, etc, but not more than one. I don't know if I can check total scrap.

epeli wrote:Starting balance is pretty good, imo... until you get to the battleships. It's easy to start encountering them "too" early on (assuming they're meant to test maxed & well-equipped ships), unless you know & purposefully avoid the triggers. And there are so damn many! They seem to appear in a vast majority of of "empty" beacons - feels a bit repetitive right now, but will probably be perfectly fine once you get more ship variety in.

With version 0.1.6 they do only appear in the "empty" space beacons, but you've given me an idea. I personally didn't like the empty space beacons, its like why bother the captain with nothing, right? Haha. However in the base game you have a "time limit" so hitting an empty beacon could be considered a negative thing, and has its purpose. Without that time limit, an empty space beacon really has no purpose (except loss of 1 fuel). Although, I don't see why I couldn't trigger these "boss like" ships off of another event, which I personally would like much better. I'll look into this idea. Thanks!!!!

*EDIT: It would be a lot harder to control how many of these potential "boss like" ships you encounter. There is ~23 beacons per sector, and a lot more events. It might be better for me to write some event to use instead of an EMPTY space event, this way if you don't trigger the ship, you still get some kind of event.

Marioking9 wrote:I just got ravaged by a battlecruiser with 2 lvl 2 anti ship drones. FUN.

Next version should have some "easier" level ships you encounter earlier, and harder level ships you encounter late in the game.

DiEvAl wrote:

DrkTemplar wrote: As far as I know, you can only trigger off of one system. I tried using multiple, but it didn't work. So I can check your pilot, or your shields, etc, but not more than one. I don't know if I can check total scrap.

Try creating 3 events like this:
1. If player doesn't have max shields, do nothing, else goto 2.
2. If player has weapons goto 3, else goto 1.
3. Spawn battleship.
Can't try it myself, because I'm on android.

I bet that would work, and would solve the minimum one system requirement. Thanks!

This is a great mod so much fun but it is really annoying when batttleships appear and are so over powered. Also a bug i had reached an event (i cant remember which one but it was one editted by the mod) it gave me two options but i accidently clicked on 3 and it went to a new event where there was an engi cruiseer or something when i had been fighting a mantis ship