Subset Games Forum

It's not really the cockpit that's always vulnerable, but more of a certain area of the screen where everything past a certain point the Defense drone has a hard time attempting to protect. My best visualisation of where this line is drawn is between the Teleporter and Oxygen rooms on MantisA. Leave your Mouse there and use the arrows to scroll through the ships to see which rooms are affected by it.

EDIT: Pushed the update after another scouting run for intel. Which was going swimmingly well: got a bunch of cool drops, and had my defensive stance set up just fine for where I was. I even had a fully intact hull for once.

And then, this.

Fire Bomb MkI is missing the MkI.

Similarly, instead of Small, Teleporting and Big, why not put the three Mk on the normal tele-bombs?

Unless the I in the Mark I is being displayed in a place that makes it invisible, it's there.. the Mark II was however completely named wrong.

The Teleporting Bomb and the Big Bomb are the same weapon. I just personally like the sound of the short-name Telebomb for some reason.

Oh, and updates and stuff. Thanks to SS for pointing out an error with one of the Zoltan ships. Also included is a rebalance of the rewards for rescuing and not forcing a slave from a slaver ship to join your crew, since as it currently stands, the chance of good coming from it is far too small in comparison to the other two. And the fire missile got a new name, which I hope sounds much better than before.

Woah, having the targeting jammer instead of the advanced disruptor really makes a difference in the early sectors for the Man o' War. It's the first time I could maximize the whole ship in Normal thanks to the almost nonexistent damage I had to repair, due to me having upgraded my defenses earlier than usual. And I didn't even have cloaking and defense drones until sector 5.


Found a Heavy Pierce MkI and two MkII along the way, and finished off the flagship with my most fearsome salvo to date (while a minelayer drone MkII was jsut doinng his stuff). I could also prove the Chaff's effectiveness thanks to a Pegasus I also found.

Anyway: consider dropping the Burst Laser MkII to 9s reload, so it has at least a single advantage against the Dual Laser.

More updates courtesy of having more footage to take intel from. Things that have been changed in the CE patch include the stats on the Fire Ray and Telebomb (and I guess the Fire Bomb III) getting some alterations, and the rather glaring mess-up that is leaving the Stealth Cruisers in the vanilla ships section with four weapon slots. That's pretty bad.

EDIT: I also just had an idea of how to potentially retain (some of) the system repair functionality of the Repair bomb weapons without causing these glitches I've heard of but been unable to replicate.. their system damage was changed to -1. What this means in theory is that the system it targets can no longer be over-healed, as logic would dictate that the system damage is not applied should the system already be at full strength, as my own tests in the past seem to indicate.

I'm still a bit interested in how it bugged out though, as I don't think full-health systems are totally immune to -1 system damage bombs. I remember once I hit my doors system with it mid-jump, I ended up with lv2 doors despiute I only having lv1 door control. And on one of my most recent runs where I carelessly spammed those bombs at shields, engines, weapons and helm, I ended up not being able to recieve any manned bonus at all (could still jump with a pilot though), with the evasion from pilot-less advanced cockpits (and mine still being lv1).

All these bugs probably disappear if the system gets damaged enough though, I remember that at least the door control indeed had an extra invisible health bar.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if it was your intention, but the sMPK-CE alternate starting loadout for the stealth cruiser is at 3 weapon slots too now.

And the Weapons Jammer might be a liiiiiiitle OP as a starting gear for the Man o' War. Being able to take away two bars from the enemy weapons is a huge, huge deal, specially for one that can betray surrender truces. I do believe that such ability now would comnpensate for it starting without a combat augment.

Mr. Mister wrote:Also, I'm not sure if it was your intention, but the sMPK-CE alternate starting loadout for the stealth cruiser is at 3 weapon slots too now.

And the Weapons Jammer might be a liiiiiiitle OP as a starting gear for the Man o' War. Being able to take away two bars from the enemy weapons is a huge, huge deal, specially for one that can betray surrender truces. I do believe that such ability now would comnpensate for it starting without a combat augment.

The Stealth cruisers were meant to have three weapon slots since that's what they have in the vanilla game. I fell back on that decision a while back in the development of the main kit (and to be fair, from personal experience, being locked to three weapon slots doesn't affect your ability to fight as much as you would initially think).

I should see that augment for myself, since I've personally come to the conclusion that the Shield Disruptor is, so far, the single best augment in CE, to the point where I'm heavily considering weakening its availability. Stripping every ship in the game of one Shield layer makes miracles happen. It's made me consider stripping alt-ZoltanA of it, but as to what loadout to put in its stead, I'm quite clueless..

Mmm... the Zoltan A doesn't need a shield disruptor anyway, since it can perfectly get through 2 shields, as long as the enemy doesn't have tier 2 defense drones. It would be better balanced without it, really, specially now that Zoltans ships have cooler surrender rewards. Look at the Zoltan A: the swarm missile and the mining beam can deal great hull damage, but little concentrated system damage (the mining laser only does one syustem damage per room). This means that it can trigger a surrender window while the enemy still has functional weapons, so it's quite probable that refusing surreder would make you take a hit. The Zoltan B has more concentrated system damaging potential, but it wants to end things quick before the ZOltan shield goes down.

So I believe you can take the shield disruptor away from the Zoltan A. And to make things more interesting and nerf the ZOltan B a little (because the Zoltan negotiating addition buffed it), why not change its starting crew to 1 engi and 2 Zoltan? Or just 2 Zoltan and give it a Drone Jammer to compensate.

For the Slug A, I would say it doesn't need to start with any combat augment. If anything, you might want to give the Slug B a FTL recharge jammer (the vanilla one, not the combat aug) to give it one more chance to shoot the Baal minelauncher against self-destructing auto-satellites.


Remember that you can alwas modify the starting crew to further balance things. One of the things I don't really like aout the Slug and Zoltan ships is that both layouts have only a single starting race. What if you added an hologram to the Slug B?

Amidst some of the most ridiculous wind speeds I've seen in years, changes were done, primarily to the Player Ships, as I wrestle to try and make something that works somewhat. Still heavily unsure of some of these, particularly the RockA's starting missile. I also put together a new graphic for one of the drones.

Mmm, I'll have to break my unlock-all-ships-again-with-CE and re-unlock them with the editor in the name of testing then.

See though, if the Helios Missile was on the 3-damage league, it would be more appropiate as their starting equipment, as its shorter cooldown wouldn't be so unforgiving.

EDIT: I'm not sure, but if you wanna keep the crystal weapons red, maybe you should make unique blue versions of them for the Crystal A to start with. Also, the Light Crystal MkI the Bravais starts with has a bomb-y impact animation.

Also, did a failed run on the Rock A, and guess what I found on the very third jump? A Trident Missile battery.