[MOD] Variety and Rebalance Overhaul (VRO) 4.x

[Shuulo]

As I already mentioned, I do not plan to make it separate.
Every change here is for the reason.

There is no point in large ships without turrets in OOS, as they currently are in vanilla due to critical bug - thats why at least M turrets are indestructible (I really considered making even L turrets the same). If you want board ships without consequences and in easy way then sorry, this is not how I see this game, there should be a challenge.

Agility, speed, HP and shield health of ships are fully balanced against new weapon damages and behavior and to make combat more variable and fun, what is the point in balancing guns around poor game design in ship balance regards? Even if I release weapon module it will be a total mess, thats what it was at first when i started developing VRO and then came to realization that without changes to ships there is no point in making weapons as I want them.
You can unpack the mod and just delete the assets/units folder and try it yourself, its lame imo.

Boost was deactivated because its shit, abused by player and AI is utterly broken in using it. You can unpack the mod and delete the assets/props/engines folder to revert this change.

I will not release the mod in modules, VRO is being created as an overhaul to how you experience the game, as I see it, as I like it.
But you are free to do whatever you want with unpacked mod on your PC, its like 5 minutes learning how to unpack files and revert any change in it. Just do not post any patches based on my work without talking to me first.

[Thecrippler]

As I already mentioned, I do not plan to make it separate.
Every change here is for the reason.

There is no point in large ships without turrets in OOS, as they currently are in vanilla due to critical bug - thats why at least M turrets are indestructible (I really considered making even L turrets the same). If you want board ships without consequences and in easy way then sorry, this is not how I see this game, there should be a challenge.

Agility, speed, HP and shield health of ships are fully balanced against new weapon damages and behavior and to make combat more variable and fun, what is the point in balancing guns around poor game design in ship balance regards? Even if I release weapon module it will be a total mess, thats what it was at first when i started developing VRO and then came to realization that without changes to ships there is no point in making weapons as I want them.
You can unpack the mod and just delete the assets/units folder and try it yourself, its lame.

Boost was deactivated because its shit, abused by player and AI is utterly broken in using it. You can unpack the mod and delete the assets/props/engines folder to revert this change.

I will not release the mod in modules, VRO is being created as an overhaul to how you experience the game, as I see it, as I like it.
But you are free to do whatever you want with unpacked mod on your PC, its like 5 minutes learning how to unpack files and revert any change in it. Just do not post any patches based on my work without talking to me first.

this is why i love your mod to make game challenge i hope in the future you will able to make projetacls a bit bigger special the pulse and plasma something similar like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUr0U9WDSAc at video 4.50

[Wonsz]

I think the mod is great the way it is now. Disabled boosting made enemies more challenging - they don't lose their shilds in a futile attepmt to escape out of player's range. Also, together with Rise of Ossian Riders, we get tough, demanding enemies with invulnerable turrets that can inflict some loses even to powerful fleets, so there's finally something to do in game when you have billions of credits.

[Scoob]

I do agree that boost, as implemented in vanilla, is a pretty poor feature. You can insta-boost away from anything if you have shields, then engage travel mode for instant high speed travel. Alternately, if you're actually getting your behind whooped by an opponent and your shields are down, you can't flee. While AI use of boost is better in 2.6, they don't totally drain their shields, they still don't quite appear to obey the same rules as the player at times. All in all, it's better off disabled in its current form and ships having their natural speed advantage preserved keeps the classes a little more distinct too.

If however there was a way to make boost separate from shield drain, and it only gave a 10-20% speed boost for a couple of seconds, then had a long-ish cool down timer, it'd be quite fun. No more spamming boost, but saving it for when you really need it. Great for the player, but I doubt the AI would use it appropriately. Only a thing for Fighters though really.

I'm currently testing the 2.6 Beta, so am totally vanilla for that reason and it's a bit painful at times and fire fights are far less pretty.

In the past with this mod I've started afresh, are there consequences of applying it to a game in progress? I.e. ships with weird hull values and the like? I would quite like to continue my vanilla save with some mods when 2.6 is officially released. No worries if not though.

Scoob.

[Warnoise]

I do agree that boost, as implemented in vanilla, is a pretty poor feature. You can insta-boost away from anything if you have shields, then engage travel mode for instant high speed travel. Alternately, if you're actually getting your behind whooped by an opponent and your shields are down, you can't flee. While AI use of boost is better in 2.6, they don't totally drain their shields, they still don't quite appear to obey the same rules as the player at times. All in all, it's better off disabled in its current form and ships having their natural speed advantage preserved keeps the classes a little more distinct too.

If however there was a way to make boost separate from shield drain, and it only gave a 10-20% speed boost for a couple of seconds, then had a long-ish cool down timer, it'd be quite fun. No more spamming boost, but saving it for when you really need it. Great for the player, but I doubt the AI would use it appropriately. Only a thing for Fighters though really.

I'm currently testing the 2.6 Beta, so am totally vanilla for that reason and it's a bit painful at times and fire fights are far less pretty.

In the past with this mod I've started afresh, are there consequences of applying it to a game in progress? I.e. ships with weird hull values and the like? I would quite like to continue my vanilla save with some mods when 2.6 is officially released. No worries if not though.

Scoob.

I think view on balance is subjective. I tried this mod, while there are indeed lots of great aspects in it, I got discouraged by the ship flight feeling and lack of boost. Whenever i find myself in firing range of xenon K when using a Nemesis, it is 100% death for me. I attacked a xenon K using about 10 Nemesis and 6 Perseus. 4 Nemesis died before even reaching the target, of course at the end they all died without doing significant damage (only dropping shield)

In the end I found myself spamming L ships everywhere since S and M ships became very useless for their costs. While it indeed makes the game more challenging, I am sorry to say this, it is not fun (for me at least). The battles look better, that's true, but seeing how useless anything below L class has become, I think it became closer to X-rebirth in that aspect.
That being said, I am not taking anything from this mod. It is a great a mod and its success proves that. But it isn't simply for me.

[Shuulo]

Scoob, you can enable it mid-game, ships will have wrong hull values. They will repair eventually, especially large ships due to natualr crew/drone repairs.
Loadouts for existing ships will also be vanilla-style, but new ships will have better loadouts.

Warnoise, I totally understand what you mean, I specifically made fighters and M ships kind of chaff, that works poorly without correct coordination.
L ships are more tough AND more expensive.
Nemesis specifically is a glass cannon, with 5 m guns it can deliver a lot of damage quickly but will surely go down without screen. Also, paranids have the worst M Shields, try to use teladi ones.
I see were people can dislike this kind of a balance, but I always disliked vanilla balance in all x titles, where a dozen of fighters can take down a destroyer, while being 10-20 times cheaper in cost.
VRO forces you to make a more varied and bigger fleet, or rely on support from fleets of other factions, taking xenons 1on1 is not the best idea.

[Shuulo]

Though if you Warnoise have some concerns more on balance than on general approach for it, let's say prices difference etc, I'll be happy to hear and maybe change something so that it can be a better experience for you.

[Scoob]

In my experience, both with this mod and vanilla, when going against L-Class targets or stations, properly equipped fighters are your best tool. I traditionally send in fighter groups first to take out turrets - though I understand VRO now makes some invulnerable? - along with shields, then my heavier ships are at less risk.

I used this tactic most effectively vs. stations where an M-Class ship will die in seconds to the stations heavier turrets, yet fighters tend to be a little too fast to be hit.

I do hope the issue with turrets being stripped quickly OOS can be resolved to fix the balance, though that's a vanilla fix of course.

What I do hope can be fixed also is weird AoE effects that don't take into account obstructions. I.e. I take a hit to the front of my ship, but the engines at the rear get taken out, rather than just surface element in the impact area. Rare, but annoying lol.

Btw: What are the impact on performance with this mod? I suspect it balances out vs. vanilla due to bullets generally having the same life-time while being faster and longer-ranged. Quite difficult to figure out I imagine due to the game's performance quirks. I.e. I see slow-downs in larger battles, which you'd expect, yet the game doesn't recover sometimes post-battle, though it was fine prior to it.

Scoob.

[Shuulo]

I don't see any difference in performance in vanilla and VRO from my side.
I tried to make weapons without huge number of projectiles, it's even lower than in vanilla. E.g. vanilla plasma turrets just spam projectiles

[Madwack]

I like this mod and how it all works.

Something I think that would be well COOL is if the ships that are @ travel speed would have some sort of a trail behind them like......say something like this..... https://i.imgur.com/fLDtKUO.jpg

[Shuulo]

yeah, this would be nice, but i do not see a way to implement them specifically for travel mode.

[Madwack]

yeah, this would be nice, but i do not see a way to implement them specifically for travel mode.

There must be a switch that goes off like when as a player i click shift-1, the computer must do the same.....could it not be added to this switch?

Could the engine effect be edited to do this?

HAHA me no give up

My coding abilities goes as far as editing the music and the soundfx and editing Audio.

[teleportationwars]

yeah, this would be nice, but i do not see a way to implement them specifically for travel mode.

There must be a switch that goes off like when as a player i click shift-1, the computer must do the same.....could it not be added to this switch?

Could the engine effect be edited to do this?

HAHA me no give up

My coding abilities goes as far as editing the music and the soundfx and editing Audio.

You could do something around the move_to in the ai orders that move ships around. There is an effect library like the sound library and you can play effects with a method.

[Shuulo]

Version 1.9 - 2.6 beta and release compatible

New:
- Addition of Xenon missile destroyer V with accompanying long-range cruise missile and anti-fighter missile
- Xenon P now has additional missile launcher

Balance:
- Ion weapons have even more anti-shield damage, but lower anti-hull
- Shotgun-type weapons have damage fall-off and are more powerful on close range
- S and M pulse and beam weapons damage increased
- some tweaks to paranid fighters so they are a bit more maneuvarable. small tweaks to other fighters
- Xenon N and M are now very different light and heavy fighters.
- due to 2.6 improvement to faction economies Xenon destroyers have a bit more hull, Xenon K now wields a pair of Xenon Maulers instead of Obliterators
- small tweaks here and there

Note: M turrets are still not destructible as provided fix in 2.6 was not as good as I hoped, ill continue tests and will try to find a solution.

[Tanvaras]

Just chiming in to say "Darn Great Mod!" Hopefully it will continue to be worked on as Split DLC goes live etc. This is my current "Goto" mod.

[Shuulo]

Just chiming in to say "Darn Great Mod!" Hopefully it will continue to be worked on as Split DLC goes live etc. This is my current "Goto" mod.

Thanks for kind words!
It will 100% require an extensive update as 3.0 + split dlc will bring a lot of assets changes, but I'll try to update it as fast as I can.

[Chrizzeay]

I feel like CWIS is not as effective as it should be against missiles. It is especially noticeable if the ship is moving. Is it still limited by vanilla turret calculations being bad or can it be buffed in some way? I have noticed that it tends to shoot slightly behind the missiles as they approach closer and at long range they seem ineffective as well even though it is firing at the missiles almost head on, could be due to reduced accuracy at long range. I feel like it should not struggle as much as it is currently against only one missile but rather get overwhelmed when there are many. They also get worse the closer you are to the launch, probably due to target acquisition time.

I have done some playing around in the mod files with varying results, but it is hard to know what balance you have set up around the weapons and then keep it. The better they are against missiles the better they are against small craft as well. I did some limited testing with the laser turrets as well, although it is hard to tell I fell like they could be a little bit better as well. Oh and are swarm missiles impossible to defend against? Can that be modded to work?

Other than that I really like the mod thus far, and combat feels much better than it did before. I had some fun playing around in the files as well, reduced the velocity of the CWIS bullets to a realistic amount and increased the lifetime and fire rate. Looks really really cool but is probably horrible for performance and was horribly inefficient att killing anything.

[Shuulo]

snip

Yep, turrets still have this bug with targeting, so can't do anything about it unfortunately. It's not so evident as in vanilla due to overall faster projectiles.
Ciws was meant as anti-fighter weapon for now, as there is no possibility to create anti-missile weapon with current turret bug. I suggest just ignore missile defense command.
As for swarm missiles, yep, it's impossible to defend against them. If you think they can be re-balanced in some way let me know

[Angsaar]

Could a subset of beams with "instant" focusing but low power compensate enough? Similar to an MWO LAMS

[Corporeal]

Trying to test out weapons more methodically raised a bigger problem: some of the weapon effects are freezing my game. The "plasma incinerator" (M Plasma II) reliably reproduced the problem whenever it hit anything within hit-effect rendering distance. Tagging a P at the limit of its range was okay, but as soon as I got close enough to see the projectile hit, it'd freeze and thrash the cpu. Stuck in an infinite loop maybe?

Running Steam version on Linux with a decent Nvidia card, if there's any kind of diagnostic I can spit out to help track the problem.

[ETA] Playing with graphics settings seems to have fixed the problem. FXAA -> MSAA

For me changing the ricochet chance to 0.01 solved this. My money's on a difference in how DBZ errors are handled. Seems having maxhits over 1 causes an automatic ricochet evaluation. If those are tied into graphics distance, 3d sound, etc it would also explain why graphics fixed it. Betting on DBZ though.

bullet_gen_m_plasma_01_mk2_macro.xml
<bullet speed="2500" lifetime="2" amount="3" barrelamount="1" icon="weapon_plasma_mk2" timediff="0.004" angle="0.9" maxhits="3" ricochet="0.01" scale="0" attach="0" selfdestruct="1" />