Subset Games Forum

My recommendation would be for him to wait until you release your final version for AE-less FTL, and then translate that.

The reason I suggested the ion-damaging vengeance projectyle is because then you can have actual end-game strategies based on it if your weapons and drones' loadout's shield piercing ability is just one bubble short: you just wait until the crystal shard hits, and then you fire at the enemy. It would also be the only ion weapon with shield piercing, which on one-layer shields would ionise the shield AND then hit a room and deal hull and ion damage to it. It wouldn't be unbalanced at all considering its random nature. In the endgame, turning your engines off to recieve a bunch of damage and fire a salvo of multiple shards could be an actual desperate strategy to ionize two shield layers from the enemy.

If that is even possible. I see your point. It would also work on either Crystal ship because blue+red=Purple!!!
It would also be cool if it worked like you intend. It would be like it lost some of its charge traveling through the shield. A very unique weapon.

But shooting more than one standard shield piercing projectile even would still be good and wouldn't have to something you were relying on, just a perk. I don't think its possible anyway, but the purple Crystal weapons would indeed be a nice addition for standard weapons.

No, purple shards would be unique to the crystal vengeance. And that beaviour of shield-piercing ion weapons is more of a curse than a blessing balance-wise, but here is the one place where I think it coul be applied effectively.

Similarly, sleepy... say you were to do a 4-power, heavy and slow-charging, ion focus beam with 3 or 4 ion damage. Would its short duration and length of 1 and short duration properties ensure that it would only apply said ion damage to shields (and no more), and would it not ionize the system it targeted too if it deployed all shields? I know you wanted to put ion beams but their behaviour against shields made them unbalanceable, but if this focus approach works, huzza.

I was only talking about IF they couldn't be added in the Crystal vengeance then they could be made regular weapons instead.

About the ion beams there are several things wrong with them, and the beam unfortunately will always be red which isn't very "iony". They would be really cool to have though if they worked properly. I liked the proposed name of the baton beam also, perhaps that could be made a weak ion weapon since it's for law enforcement rather than military ships. Ion beams would only be good because of the fact that they do not miss, but regular ion blasters seem better and ion beams seem to not be lore friendly exactly. Perhaps Sleeper should just wait for the AE to implement that. It seems like they're expanding beams a little bit. I tweaked with the ion beams myself a little bit and was able to make a really long ion beam that went through 3-4 systems and I increased the speed to a ridiculously high number. The beam only ionized 1 layer of shield, but it would ionize only 1 or 2 of the 3-4 systems it passed through It was really weird... So since they were unreliable in that sense I threw that idea out the window.

What did you think about any of the other thing I talked about? Specifically the other way for the Crystal quest to work in all Rock sectors only once? We'll it doesn't have to be only once, but it could work in all of them the first time and maybe make it more difficult to do it a second time.

I was not SUGGESTING that you have to choose between the crew and the scrap. I am telling you that the mod currently makes you choose between the crew and the scrap. You don't currently get both, at least not as of the last time I got that result which was in 1.098 and I haven't seen anything in the patch notes about it. As a concept the AI not wanting you "desecrating its corpse" makes some sense and is also funny. But would the AI really insist that you not only leave its old body intact but that you also leave its ordnance and fuel behind too? It is after all dependent on the success of your mission for its continued survival. You would think it would unload the fuel/missiles/parts at least, and possibly even a functioning weapon (the weapons are probably security-locked, of course...but wouldn't they be security-locked to that specific AI? And isn't it coming with you?)

In and of themselves the AI surrenders are fine. The problem is that within the greater context of the game they don't make any sense. In basically all circumstances, in FTL when you have to choose between a random result and a certain result, there are some possible random results that are better than the certain result (unless of course the random result is white text and the certain result is blue text). If there were NO possible outcomes of a random result that were EVER better than a certain result, then taking the random result would never make sense.

Think of it like this: Let's say you can choose between taking a dollar, or rolling a 6 sided die and if you roll a 6 I give you five dollars (but on all other rolls you get nothing). In the long run if we did this game over and over again then you would have more money by taking the dollar every time (the certain result). But if we were only going to play the game once, and you needed five dollars to buy something specific, then you would have a reason to roll the die. Now imagine I offered to give you a dollar, or you could roll a die and if you roll a 6 I give you a dollar (but on all other rolls you get nothing). Now there is never a reason to roll the die; you should always just take the dollar.

My point is that currently there is never a reason to let an AI surrender except maybe in the first sector (in the first sector the scrap reward is probably going to be less than 20, and some ships really need crew fast), and that is a little at odds with the rest of the game. Even adding in a very small chance for the AI to delay the rebels (for instance) might address this issue, as a fleet delay can be pretty significant at all levels of the game. But the current "best results", as near as I can tell, are a free sector scan (maybe worth it at the start of a new sector, but generally you'd rather have the scrap) or a free holo-crewman (worth a flat 20 scrap that doesn't scale). And it's cool that it is very random, I love the system as it is, I would just like it if there were at least some possible result that was better than simply destroying it. Because right now every time I accept the surrender of an AI, I feel I have made a dangerous strategic mistake, because there is no possible result that can be better for me than simply finishing it off.

I don't know that adding some ionic flavor to the vengeance projectiles would make much difference. The biggest problem with them is that in vanilla most (I -think- the 4 power defense drone can) defense drones can't shoot them down, and in CE there are 1-power drones that can. Nor can you control when the crystal vengeance goes off so as to fire chaff or other weapons at the same time to overwhelm the drone. Nor is this an uncommon problem as you are a lot more likely to see a ship with defense drones in CE than in vanilla. Personally I'm of the opinion that the augment can't be truly made workable for CE (with current hardcoded limitations) and should instead be replaced by a unique Crystal trade good with a low retail value except possibly in Rock Sectors. Even if you can engineer it now, I can't see where I would ever burn all three of my augment slots to get a 100% chance of a low damage retaliatory projectile that will often be shot down.

Edit: I realize that there is a theoretical benefit to the surrender in that combat stops immediately and the AI has no more chances to hurt you (although of course it has a chance to hit you with an automatic shield-piercing hull hit if you roll that surrender outcome...). However as a practical matter if an AI is surrendering due to hull damage, you have almost certainly deprived it of the ability to fire on you by disabling its weapon/drone systems.

I must have just misunderstood what you said Cloud... You could have just explained in 4 sentences rather than 4+ paragraphs... I got it after the first line...

I do see your point now, still sticking with my ideas, choosing to have the AI join your crew should probably give you the reward for destroying the ship as well, YES, I agree.

Again, I'm still not even sure it's possible to give the Crystal Vengeance ionic projectiles or more than one, but that's why I said it should be 3 standard ones at least because then not all of them could get shot down, and not every ship has defense drones anyway. The boss only has one on the 2nd stage. Then there is the fact of course that the Crystal Vengeance aug makes boarding extremely stressful because you could inadvertently kill your crew. But the Crystal ships are brokenly overpowered in general so it's not like you even need to board every ship. Having a better Crystal Vengeance aug might even be a nice way to nerd the ship and make it more unique at the same time. Crystal Vengeance doesn't have to be useful though... Several of the faction specific augments aren't, but with the new blue options they have become way more useful.

ikeelyou300 wrote: perhaps the Boss's weapon rooms could be connected to the rest of the ship?

Apparently, that is messing up the crews pathing and has them ignore the weapon rooms. Odd and obviously glitchy, else I would immediately do it.

ikeelyou300 wrote:Mr. mister also suggested changing the Crystal Vengeance projectile to a purple electrified projectile.

I liked the idea to gain a temporary advantage by droping your engines and deliberately taking hits. But IMO a crystal ion weapon does not match the lore and feels quite out of place. The crystals are obviously relying solely on their physical projectile weapons and their shield piercing. I want the aug to remain true to that. Having it fire multiple projectiles does not work, unfortunately, I was going for that before. Also keep in mind that the aug can also used against you. I'm also not sure if it would actually work as Mr. Mister described. As far as I know, shield piercing projectiles with ion effect always apply their ion damage to shields first, you basically cant piece shields with ion.

ikeelyou300 wrote:On the subject of the Crystal Quest...

I'm pretty sure this will be working out fine. The possibility of two trips to the secret sector will remain extremely slim. I'm also not exactly sure if the unique= tag really works like that. I can't proof it but I feel like unique events are reset after each sector. I at last think that you can find the same unique event several times in different sectors during one playthrough.

ikeelyou300 wrote:Cloudmoon got me thinking about the auto-ship surrenders. I think the AI surrenders are currently fine as is, but it couldn't hurt to add in a few more outcomes.

Yeah, like pretty much any event. Feel free to write them, there is a still thread for that linked in my sig. I take them in if they match the requirements. I will fix that scrap reward incoherency though...

ikeelyou300 wrote: Lastly the Advanced Drone Reactor/AI/CPUs augment should maybe be necessary for using any of the drones to delay the Rebel fleet including the mine layer drone.

That thing became pretty useful on its own with engineering. The drone options are already limited due to their uneconomic nature.

ikeelyou300 wrote:Also, it would be very interesting if somehow that AI hologram could give you some blue options to communicate with other auto-ships.

Agreed, their should be some more blue options for the AIs. Still looking for occasions. As for the nature of individual AIs: My picture of them is that they can have a huge range of actual intelligence and capabilities. The combat avatars that some boarders deploy are barely sentient axillary fighters. Other avatars, like the curator drones or the ones you can generate are fully sentient and quiet smart. As the surrender event states, the specific Auto ship AI has transcended its programming. Regular Auto satellites are not that smart.

Mr. Mister wrote: Would its short duration and length of 1 and short duration properties ensure that it would only apply said ion damage to shields (and no more),

Nah, I'm pretty sure I tested this once, didn't work.

ikeelyou300 wrote: I tweaked with the ion beams myself a little bit and was able to make a really long ion beam that went through 3-4 systems and I increased the speed to a ridiculously high number. The beam only ionized 1 layer of shield, but it would ionize only 1 or 2 of the 3-4 systems it passed through It was really weird... So since they were unreliable in that sense I threw that idea out the window.

Did you test this on enemies with multiple layers of shields? Also do you remember how high you set the speed?

Cloudmoon wrote:My point is...

I'm pretty sure I already agreed on enabling this scrap reward for coherency. Apart from that: AI surrenders are simply not meant to be very reliable or good. That adds contrast. You obviously learned that and just like never fighting alien spiders, you just will never again accept AI surrenders. Sure, one could change the spider event or the surrender so that they has even outcomes. Obviously the devs did not want to do that for the spider event. IMO the contrast this event ads, contributes to the entire experience. If nothing is bad, the good or even stuff appears less good as well. The surrender outcomes also contributes to the characterization of the Rebels auto devices.

Some reasons people might want to take this surrender, even though it would never make any sense from a purely success/gain/dollar oriented perspective:
- Player does not know it and wants to try it out
- Player has pity on the AI
- Player believes that continuing the fight will actually not be worth it, considering damage/scrap gain ratio
- Player does not want to die
- Player is tired of fighting this turret
- Player hopes to die due to hidden turret missile batter (unlocks one of CEs imaginary achievements)
- Player hopes for a free sector map
- You hope to gain a unique crewmen. A Rebel turret that gained full sentience, turned it's back on its masters and joined your crew as an avatar, travelling the galaxy and living through all kinds of adventures. It also will have a unique name each time.

Two victories ago I won with the Supercharged, a Zoltan boarding ship: I modified the B with a Rock (for pilot) and 7 Zoltans, and a 4-Zoltan teleporter. I won some boarding victories in sector 1, but since the TP was only L1 and Sensors L1, I ended up boarding a ship which had too many Mantises and at least 3 crew. I tried to run around till my TP was back online, hoping I could save most of my boarders, but only one survived. That ended my boarding till late in the game (sector 7?), even though I did pick up a Mantis along the way. I suppose I moved the Rock to the away team, but that would have meant a Zoltan pilot, so I didn't.

For some reason crew was hard to come by; most of the game I had the Rock, Mantis and 4 Zoltans. Until I got to sector 6?, which was a quarantine sector. I upgraded my Medbay to L2 and decided to investigate the two distress signals I saw right at the beginning of the sector. Both gave me a Zoltan, so now I had 6! Later in the sector I went to another distress call, hoping to get a less squishy meatsack for boarding. It was an event which killed off my Rock and a couple Zoltan, but gave me three Humans. Before I left the sector, I lost one of those humans. But at least I had a new pilot and a Mantis/Human away team.

This run was much better than some of the recent ones I've had. Weapons were pretty good: Ion Burst x2 (starting), Burst Laser Mk II, Hull Beam Mk II, plus an Auto Reloader. I had a Light Defense Drone Mk II, an Antiship Drone Mk I, which I swapped with a Heavy Antiship Mk II for the last boss phase, and a Hull Repair Drone, plus the Zoltan Shield. I maxed power (in addition to the 4 Zoltans), shields, cloak and teleporter; had L5 engines, L7 weapons, L3 drone control, L2 everything else except for L1 O2. I did not take any damage in phase three, finishing with full HP.

First of all thanks for the response Sleeper.

Sleeper Service wrote:

ikeelyou300 wrote: perhaps the Boss's weapon rooms could be connected to the rest of the ship?

Apparently, that is messing up the crews pathing and has them ignore the weapon rooms. Odd and obviously glitchy, else I would immediately do it.

Yeah I understand the dumb path-finding, but that's why I said you would need to give the Boss a system repair drone because it WILL repair the weapons room. You don't have to do that, but something to consider... Before I thought this would help with the event with the sun, but that isn't really an issue anymore with the AI takeover. But for my own purposes I've done this for myself and this is basically what happens. I gave the Boss a system repair drone and it will go repair the artillery rooms so basically anyone I teleport in, if they leave, the room will be repaired so I have to keep someone in there if I want it to stay down. The system repair drone will just keep coming until I hit some other system and i gets a new target... To fix the issue that no one comes to fight you in the artillery rooms I gave the boss a combat drone as well (all this is the first phase), but that made it really hard to destroy the weapons rooms because you have to basically teleport one team in to have them distract the combat drone and teleport another team into a different room then teleport the other team out before they die and its just a big pain... With the addition of the artillery in the first phase I thought that bit was unnecessary. It's weird that the drones' pathfinding is fine, but the human crew's pathfinding is dumb.

On another note I gave the boss more crew on the first phase and guess what? they carried over to the subsequent phases, the wierdest thing is though if you give them other races those races will become humans in the next phases, but they will still carry over...

Sleeper Service wrote:

ikeelyou300 wrote:Mr. mister also suggested changing the Crystal Vengeance projectile to a purple electrified projectile.

I liked the idea to gain a temporary advantage by droping your engines and deliberately taking hits. But IMO a crystal ion weapon does not match the lore and feels quite out of place. The crystals are obviously relying solely on their physical projectile weapons and their shield piercing. I want the aug to remain true to that. Having it fire multiple projectiles does not work, unfortunately, I was going for that before. Also keep in mind that the aug can also used against you. I'm also not sure if it would actually work as Mr. Mister described. As far as I know, shield piercing projectiles with ion effect always apply their ion damage to shields first, you basically cant piece shields with ion.

That's a huge bummer, but I kind of knew it couldn't be changed. I don't think Crystal Vengeance is as worthless as most people think though and giving it a higher percentage helps it a bit. It's just that compared to the other augments it isn't as good. The only reason I keep ANY of the other special race specific augments is because of the Blue options hey give in CE. If this had those I would consider keeping it more, but tying Blue events to the Crystal crew themselves would probably be better.

Still, would you consider making a weapon such as the one Mr. Mister proposed? I'll test out how missiles with ion damage works and get back to you. I don't think its buggy like the ion beams. It just sounded so awesome... a PURPLE Crystal weapon oooooh....

EDIT: OK, apparently ion missiles with shield piercing DO ionize a shield as they pass through it, strange and sad, but I haven't tested it with more than one shield yet, it might still be a useful and cool weapon if it doesn't completely destroy level 4 shields.

Sleeper Service wrote:

ikeelyou300 wrote:On the subject of the Crystal Quest...

I'm pretty sure this will be working out fine. The possibility of two trips to the secret sector will remain extremely slim. I'm also not exactly sure if the unique= tag really works like that. I can't proof it but I feel like unique events are reset after each sector. I at last think that you can find the same unique event several times in different sectors during one playthrough.

I tested the eventList thing out and it does work. if you had something like this:
<eventList ="****">
<event load="event 1"> x99 (Yeah that may be overkill, its just the principle)
<event load="event 2"> x1
</eventList>
<event="event 1" unique="true">
<event="event 2" unique="false" or -nothing->
Then %99 of the time the eventList will call the first event and then after that if the eventList will only call the 2nd event.

However, you think that the unique events reset after each sector. I haven't tested that, but I will test that and get back to you. The event itself may also need to be an eventList, rather than an eventList inside an event, so far thats the only way I've tested it. Again I'll get back to you on that.
If this did work, then what? You wouldn't have to make travel to the Crystal sector twice impossible. You could just do the first part to ensure that the Crystal crew always set a quest marker the first time.

EDIT: Ok, so when I first tested this it was on the final Boss, the event that gets called after beating stage 1 & 2. I changed it to an eventList which called 2 other events I made up. It worked fine without any problems and I could make this event different both times and give different rewards. However, so far testing this on other sectors very strange things have happened. I changed like 3 things and the game crashed... It also looks like what you were saying about the unique events being reset may be true. I'm going to test this a bit more, I dont know why its not working, but I'm about to give up.

Sleeper Service wrote:

ikeelyou300 wrote: Lastly the Advanced Drone Reactor/AI/CPUs augment should maybe be necessary for using any of the drones to delay the Rebel fleet including the mine layer drone.

That thing became pretty useful on its own with engineering. The drone options are already limited due to their uneconomic nature.

Point taken. You've already done a good job explaining the fact that they can also work autonomously, but ineffectively pretty well in the text anyway.

Sleeper Service wrote:

ikeelyou300 wrote:Also, it would be very interesting if somehow that AI hologram could give you some blue options to communicate with other auto-ships.

Agreed, there should be some more blue options for the AIs. Still looking for occasions. As for the nature of individual AIs: My picture of them is that they can have a huge range of actual intelligence and capabilities. The combat avatars that some boarders deploy are barely sentient axillary fighters. Other avatars, like the curator drones or the ones you can generate are fully sentient and quiet smart. As the surrender event states, the specific Auto ship AI has transcended its programming. Regular Auto satellites are not that smart.

I was thinking maybe if you had already had a Rebel AI ships join you it could talk to other Rebel AI ships or the rogue AIs, but there is no way to distinguish between normal AI and Rebel AI ship. What you're saying makes sense, maybe if you have an AI crew, which could also be a Rebel AI ship that has "transcended its programming" it could talk to another AI ship. Maybe using what i was thinking sometimes the drone will give up, shut down its weapons and ask you to kill it. You can try to get it to join your crew instead, this may have a 50/50 chance of actually working in addition to the random chance of it happening. If you fail maybe the drone is "insulted" and reengages you. Maybe if you already have an AI crew it could talk to the AI ship and convince it to join you or for other events it could ensure that the AI ship gives you another benefit like the sector map.

Sleeper Service wrote:

Mr. Mister wrote: Would its short duration and length of 1 and short duration properties ensure that it would only apply said ion damage to shields (and no more),

Nah, I'm pretty sure I tested this once, didn't work.

ikeelyou300 wrote: I tweaked with the ion beams myself a little bit and was able to make a really long ion beam that went through 3-4 systems and I increased the speed to a ridiculously high number. The beam only ionized 1 layer of shield, but it would ionize only 1 or 2 of the 3-4 systems it passed through It was really weird... So since they were unreliable in that sense I threw that idea out the window.

Did you test this on enemies with multiple layers of shields? Also do you remember how high you set the speed?

I tested this on enemies with 4 shields and it only got rid of one bubble. Luckily, even though this didn't work right I wrote it down. It depends on how long the beam is. The speed must be between (11-15) X (the # of pixels) The exact length can only be determined by testing. One specific one I wrote down was 900 speed & 140 length. This causes 2 ion damage (as a 1 ion damage beam) to the ship's shields and 1 damage to approx. a random half of the systems it passes through. Again, weird...

Mr. Mister's idea would actually work as a focus beam. The beam would need to be 1 pixel 12 speed probably. It would do ion damage to both the shields and the system. A plus is that it is so fast you cant really see the beam. You could call it an ion ray instead or something maybe...

Sleeper Service wrote:

Cloudmoon wrote:My point is...

If nothing is bad, the good or even stuff appears less good as well. The surrender outcomes also contributes to the characterization of the Rebels auto devices...
...
- Player hopes to die due to hidden turret missile batter (unlocks one of CEs imaginary achievements).

Very good point there could be more events, but they don't have to necessarily be better. AND LOL!!! CE should totally have achievements!!!!! What are some of the other imaginary achievements guys?

ikeelyou300 wrote: Yeah I understand the dumb path-finding, but that's why I said you would need to give the Boss a system repair drone because it WILL repair the weapons room. You don't have to do that, but something to consider... Before I thought this would help with the event with the sun, but that isn't really an issue anymore with the AI takeover. But for my own purposes I've done this for myself and this is basically what happens. I gave the Boss a system repair drone and it will go repair the artillery rooms so basically anyone I teleport in, if they leave, the room will be repaired so I have to keep someone in there if I want it to stay down. The system repair drone will just keep coming until I hit some other system and i gets a new target... To fix the issue that no one comes to fight you in the artillery rooms I gave the boss a combat drone as well (all this is the first phase)

Maybe those paths could get characterized (visually or in event text) as service-shafts, only used by small system repair drones? Or just only by drones, if we settle on AP-drone too?

It would explain why no human walks there but droids do, lore-friendly. BTW, i like the idea of AP drone that makes it PITA to disable those guns. Currently, they're joke, you destroy them once and forget about it. Repair drones + AP drone would make it necessary to either destroy drone control first, or have really tough boarding party (I would think about rocks + setting it on fire, but heck, sysrepair drones and AP drones are fire-proof - well, at least fire would keep sysrepair drones busy, instead of repairing system while we're fighting with AP)

Cheers,
/Estel