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

[Kartoffelr]

IIRC the shop prices for ressources don't change - only repair cost gets higher.

[Delphi]

Well, 1.095 seems to mark the return of the oh so slightly OP Testrel cruiser

Perhaps you might consider removing it in the next release

[Kartoffelr]

The zoltan need more diplomatic training


And a second strange one.

[The Captain]

The zoltan need more diplomatic training

Yes, they do. Clearly these are hasty negotiations. The Rebel fleet would also advance a jump or two if the Zoltans took the time for a proper negotiation.

[Sleeper Service]

Huh, that doesn't seem logical in lore context. Combat drones are controled from short-range drone control, and deactivate, when ship using them jumps away/get destroyed. If anything, leaving drone would give rebel fleet a free (micro) scrap reward

Besides it gives unnecessary (IMO) OP to keeping a dummy drone system with dummy drone on board (just for this one purpose, never to be used in fight). I haven't noticed drone control being UP, does it really need boosting?

Yeah controlling them in combat seems to take a lot of energy. Although having them execute a simple ambush or just have them fly around to distract the Rebels might still be possible *shrug*. CE kind of introduced drones being capable of simple tasks autonomously, I might point that our in the flavour text some more. The option is also hardly buffing the combat drones, it's pretty much the most uneconomical thing you can do with drones. It can help you when you are in a tight spot or have a lot of excess drone parts and want immediate profit from them. Apart from that the option is not too great.

Negotiating surrenders in accordance with the Law will sometimes have some trade-offs, but should overall include higher amounts of actual scrap. Please reports if the regular offers turn out to be better too often. Basically the Zoltan offers are the rewards you'd get for destroying the ship, sometimes minus some resources. Occasionally the negotiations can go wacky and the result is random.


So what's this whole engineering thing?

I started to illustrate in the OP that CE tries to allow to play certain play styles that not always are just connected to your weapon choice or combat tactic. Some of these play styles become available with certain player ships. There was also the idea to upgrade augments around. Altogether this led to the engineering system.

On-board engineering let's you customize your ship into certain direction, in a way completely independent from your standard system upgrades. Engineering options become available at empty beacons if you have certain gear (mostly augs). Your crew will be able to build another augment of the same type or a new augment that supports you other gear. This needs time and more resources than simply buying the augment at shops, but makes it easier to customize a ship for a certain play style. A lot of the vanilla augments are less powerful on their own now, but offer to fully dedicate your ship to the advantages this augment holds.

Example: Bullwark
The bulwark is a heavily armoured missile boat with a hard boiled crew that is ready to engage in piracy. From the start, it has all this qualities available, but it can further specialize in each of them. You can add additional layers of armour plating to turn it into a real Rock ironclad, sacrificing cargo space and/or missile manufacturing capabilities in the process. Even if the ship would not come with the ammo manufacturer (player ship addon), you could still build it aboard to make your missile based load-out more feasible. Any ship that has a missile weapon can do this, which globally makes missile based load outs more accessible. The bulwark captain can also get rid of the manufacturer, to gain more cargo space for piracy.
This are the meta play-styles that are available from the start, but the ship is not bound to them. Depending on the gear you pick up, you could also customize the bulwark to become a fast shield charging defence ship, a fast reloading gun slinger craft or even a dedicated hacker vessel. Engineering and specializing always remains an additional option, but the ship can also just mix augments and the advantages that come with them, as usually.

It is planned to extend this system further, some ideas:
- The mining beams could allow to produce a beam drone (these already can scout sectors for mineral rich asteroid fields)
- There should be some coherent way to customize the ship for trading, but I haven’t figured one out yet



1.095b
- Testrel banished, back into the ship testing environment with you!
- Some Zoltan ship options that lacked requirements fixed

[Kartoffelr]

What is a "Testrel"?

[CorrosionX]

Sorry to bother you guys again but I've downloaded the reskin pack, it comes up on mods and I patch it but I can't change the skins. The mantises are all dark green with red war paint and zoltan are the glowly teal colour and I can't change their skins either.

[Sleeper Service]

You cant change the skins ingame. But you can patch in the skin packs you want, which are then used for the corresponding faction. The pack contains a readme that explains that...

[CorrosionX]

You cant change the skins ingame. But you can patch in the skin packs you want, which are then used for the corresponding faction. The pack contains a readme that explains that...

I couldn't open the read me it wasn't in a txt file for some reason.

[Sleeper Service]

Ah yeah that problem... you might be able to rename it to .txt ... anyway, the bottom line is you have to choose one pack for each faction that you want to use manually and install them. Crew skins cant be changed in game and multiple packs for the same faction and side will override each other.