[3.2/2.5 MOD] X3TC Naval Shuffle 1.3.3.3/1.1: Now reasonably AP compatable

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 06:13

Actually yes I recant on the 600m/s PPC shots, as sitting at 475m/s seems to put it in a pretty comfortable spot...I'd say ballpark of 525m/s would probably as fast as a capital class weapon should go, any faster and hitting capital class ships would essentially be a turkey shoot.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 06:39

One other problem I'm worried about is that the capital guns have to compete with the race beam weapons for slot occupancy - the Tri-Beam Cannon's only 500 meters short of the PPC, and the Fusion Beam Cannon actually overshoots the PSP's range by about 200 meters. If the capital guns take 10/15/20 seconds to reach their target, and if the bullet speeds are low to the point where they're able to whiff with some regularity (especially with the increased capital ship speed/maneuvering) folks might pass up capital guns in favor of a full beam load (which to be fair has an allure all its own) since they're guarenteed and instant hits (on anything larger than an M3, anyway) even if they've got a lower DPS. Capital bullet speeds of around 650-700, even though it'll make it possible to take out fighters and the like with them (which'll happen anyway if the player decides to beam-boat or use flak) will at least give capship guns that much more of an edge to make people want to use them.

lamoyja · Post by **lamoyja** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 16:40

I think it'll be fine. AI is super dumb when it comes to using beam weapons. So unless they do super overpowered damage when in the hand of npc's, it shouldn't really matter.

Given the choice, I'd probably use beam weapons even if they were far inferior anyways

Thats probably one of the reasons why egosoft never seriously released beam weapons into the universe. They figured no one would use anything else.

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 16:44

Yes but as the beta currently sits, the only way to get those super beam weapons is through a cheat package (that I know of anyway), or spawning them on an equipment dock. That alone means that the players ships alone will be the ONLY ones in the universe capable of being a beam-boat, which is a bit unfair to the poor AI buggers we have to fight.

That plus in terms of OOS combat, there are no misses for ANY weapons, that means if PPCs are set to double damage and fire like a machine gun, they'll obliterate everything in their path.

What about having the beam weapons range cut down to roughly 6km (+/- for racial variants), and balance them so that they are a tad higher damage-wise than CIGs? If the draw of a weapon is instant hits and 100% accuracy then I would even venture to say that the overall damage output should be lower, and the benefit of the weapon is in system combat and guaranteed hits instead of having to worry as much about missing your target.

The pewpewlaz0rz are cool and all, but the trick is giving them their own perticular role that doesn't involve having to gut another class of weapon systems to CREATE a role for them.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 19:01

Shadow_Wolf33 wrote:Yes but as the beta currently sits, the only way to get those super beam weapons is through a cheat package (that I know of anyway), or spawning them on an equipment dock. That alone means that the players ships alone will be the ONLY ones in the universe capable of being a beam-boat, which is a bit unfair to the poor AI buggers we have to fight.

True, but that's just a matter of getting into Jobs and messing around with some of the strongs or values for equipment selection.

That plus in terms of OOS combat, there are no misses for ANY weapons, that means if PPCs are set to double damage and fire like a machine gun, they'll obliterate everything in their path.

I don't suppose you've got any links leading to a good specific breakdown of TC OOS, do you? The stuff I'm reading says it's done in 30-second blocks in which each gun fires once, so I don't exactly follow you comment. Although if some of the stories I'm reading are anything to go by capital ships need every bit of help OOS they can get.

What about having the beam weapons range cut down to roughly 6km (+/- for racial variants), and balance them so that they are a tad higher damage-wise than CIGs? If the draw of a weapon is instant hits and 100% accuracy then I would even venture to say that the overall damage output should be lower, and the benefit of the weapon is in system combat and guaranteed hits instead of having to worry as much about missing your target.

The Tri-Beam and Plasma Beam are already only a little more damaging than the CIG and ISR (~15% and 10% respectively) but're also more than twice their volumes and're a class heavier in terms of mountability - plus, as noted, their hit rate on anything that's an M3 or lighter's far from 100% thanks to the random beam angling. The one thing that makes them look overpowered is that their one biggest competitor's bullet by default is so slow that it's easy for fighters to dance around them and for capital ships at range to pull dodge maneuvers and avoid a good chunk of the fire.

The pewpewlaz0rz are cool and all, but the trick is giving them their own perticular role that doesn't involve having to gut another class of weapon systems to CREATE a role for them.

I wouldn't say that they're gutting other weapons to make their role. Think of the FBC, TBC and PBC more as mid-range omnisituational weapons: they can be used against capital ships to deliver concistant and immediete damage, but don't have nearly as much an impact as dedicated capital ship guns in terms of DPS, and they can be switched around to anti-fighter duty, but while possessing a far longer range than the dedicated anti-fighter weapons are prone to frequent misses at range because of the fanning effect, whereas flak weapons are guarenteed hits on fighters because of their area-of-effect munitions. Jacks of all trades, but masters of none.

What I could do is try and beef up some of the other weapons (like maybe increase flak weapon ranges to 3 km) to make them more appealing, and perhaps also jack up the beam weapons' energy requirements to make them even more power hungry than the capital ship guns.

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 19:48

For out of system Combat I really think Gazz would be the person to talk to about the semantics, since he wrote the "OOS Combat Rebalance" mod (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=249331) which is quite good once you make sure to disable the debugging output.

Perhaps the best way for tweaking the beam weapons vs. capital weapons would be to do it almost irrespective of each other? It seems like you're on the same train of thought that I am as far as weapon conclusions go. I'm just being a pain in the arse to make sure the big blue balls of death I enjoy using so much don't get crippled, or made to be the only gun worth equipping somehow.

I guess the trick at the end of the day is to still maintain some form of balance across the weapon systems, but hey that's what betas are for, and opinionated goobers like myself.

Oh, on a side note, when you re-balanced the turrets, did you intend to re-structure the amount of gun slots as well? I noticed on my Panther, the turret slots for the Top and Bottom went up to 8 slots from 4, and on my Hyp. Vanguard the turrets were effectively doubled. I didn't go through and check EVERY ship, but just wanted to verify those changes were intended. I know that using my Panther as a carrier and having to hold missiles for my fighter wings + jump energy + spare guns/shields in case of replacements, the storage on it can run pretty tight. Perhaps if you're going to increase the number of available gun slots in a turret, then an increase to the cargo space for the effected ships would be a good idea.

Oh, and a drop-in upgrade DEFINITELY screwed up some of my ships in my current game, it wasn't pretty but I managed to salvage it. My Panther's bottom turret was filled with IRE's that I wasn't able to remove or do anything with....but it seemed to only affect a few existing fleet ships, and the problem was fixed when I bought/built a new ship and re-equipped it.

Such is the price of not wanting to start over to help test.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 20:16

Shadow_Wolf33 wrote:Perhaps the best way for tweaking the beam weapons vs. capital weapons would be to do it almost irrespective of each other? It seems like you're on the same train of thought that I am as far as weapon conclusions go. I'm just being a pain in the arse to make sure the big blue balls of death I enjoy using so much don't get crippled, or made to be the only gun worth equipping somehow. I guess the trick at the end of the day is to still maintain some form of balance across the weapon systems, but hey that's what betas are for, and opinionated goobers like myself.

I don't think you're going to have to worry about PPCs becoming obsolete or inferior to the beam weapons, as they'll still be in the most powerful class of weapons; they won't kill stuff exactly as fast, but that's more to give capital combat a bit longer length, and round-for-round they're going to beat almost anything else senseless.

Oh, on a side note, when you re-balanced the turrets, did you intend to re-structure the amount of gun slots as well? I noticed on my Panther, the turret slots for the Top and Bottom went up to 8 slots from 4, and on my Hyp. Vanguard the turrets were effectively doubled. I didn't go through and check EVERY ship, but just wanted to verify those changes were intended. I know that using my Panther as a carrier and having to hold missiles for my fighter wings + jump energy + spare guns/shields in case of replacements, the storage on it can run pretty tight. Perhaps if you're going to increase the number of available gun slots in a turret, then an increase to the cargo space for the effected ships would be a good idea.

Turrets with single guns got kicked up to double gun slots as per Geekey's request, though admitably I didn't take into consideration the effects on cargo since for most of the affected were TS' and M6s', who at worst lose another 60 volume from filling out their turrets with HEPTs, their largest mountables. I'll go through and kick up the cargo capacities for affected M7s and the like since those ~25 volume concussion impulse guns can add up fast.

F.A.B. · Post by **F.A.B.** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 20:25

i really don't see what you think the problem is with beam weapons. they are just long-range flaks, nothing else. what's the difference between killing fighters in ~7km or in ~2km?

if you worry about the balance, make beam weapons available for npc vessels (in slots where they can equip anti-fighter-weapons) and give them some more escort to make sure they are still a threat.

lamoyja wrote:I think it'll be fine. AI is super dumb when it comes to using beam weapons. So unless they do super overpowered damage when in the hand of npc's, it shouldn't really matter. [...]

where did you get that information?

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 20:25

It might be a good idea to limit that somewhat on frigates, as in my opinion probably the only ships that should be roaming around with 8 gun slots on a turret would be the M1/M2 class, just seems a bit out of whack on a M7, especially one that isn't a dedicated gunboat.

Oh, have you uploaded any new version of minor changes? or do you save it for a major release type?

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 20:49

The need to give M7s and other reworked-turret vessels actually made me think about something. How do you guys feel about having the subspace compression reduced on TS ships and giving them higher bases to compensate? The problem as I see it's that due to the price curve for doing additional cargo space once you hit a certain point you'd simply be better off buying another ship - filling out the last 1000 units of a regular TS alone is somewhere between five to 10 times the ship price alone, and doing so for a superfreighter makes it almost eight times as expensive. SSC is useful on fighters where you're fighting for ever cubic meter of volume you can get, but on freighters the end simply cannot justify the means. The only reason I don't think to get rid of it entirely on TS' is because so many scripts for ship generation use fractions of max SSC plus X, so outright elimination would have ships running around with wierd numbers of them.

Shadow_Wolf33 wrote:It might be a good idea to limit that somewhat on frigates, as in my opinion probably the only ships that should be roaming around with 8 gun slots on a turret would be the M1/M2 class, just seems a bit out of whack on a M7, especially one that isn't a dedicated gunboat.

True that, but remember too that even with that many turrets they still don't hold a candle to M1s and 2s due to the limited payloads they can carry - at best they can do concussion impulse generators and ion shard railguns, plus PSGs and flak. And considering that this is the Split we're talking about, having tons of guns tacked on is almost expected..

This also alerted me to the fact that apparently I missed a bunch of single-gun turrets, or at least the Argon ones. :headdesk:

Oh, have you uploaded any new version of minor changes? or do you save it for a major release type?

I prefer big releases on a weekly basis, I can't see the point of releasing something for every little thing especially when I'm getting feedback about mistakes and whatnot.

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Thu, 4. Feb 10, 21:46

Sorenson wrote:The need to give M7s and other reworked-turret vessels actually made me think about something. How do you guys feel about having the subspace compression reduced on TS ships and giving them higher bases to compensate? The problem as I see it's that due to the price curve for doing additional cargo space once you hit a certain point you'd simply be better off buying another ship - filling out the last 1000 units of a regular TS alone is somewhere between five to 10 times the ship price alone, and doing so for a superfreighter makes it almost eight times as expensive. SSC is useful on fighters where you're fighting for ever cubic meter of volume you can get, but on freighters the end simply cannot justify the means. The only reason I don't think to get rid of it entirely on TS' is because so many scripts for ship generation use fractions of max SSC plus X, so outright elimination would have ships running around with wierd numbers of them.

That sounds like an excellent idea, as long as the max cargo space values don't get reduced. Having to spend three times over the cost of the freighter to expand the cargo space is quite an annoyance. Maybe bump up the base cost of the freighter a bit to compensate (a BIT, like 50,000 credits..)

True that, but remember too that even with that many turrets they still don't hold a candle to M1s and 2s due to the limited payloads they can carry - at best they can do concussion impulse generators and ion shard railguns, plus PSGs and flak. And considering that this is the Split we're talking about, having tons of guns tacked on is almost expected..

Yeah the Split ship design philosophy slipped my mind in regards to that, never mind...makes perfect sense from that perspective. Although 8 flak guns means even M3 fighters go *poof* pretty fast, which is awsome anyway.

This also alerted me to the fact that apparently I missed a bunch of single-gun turrets, or at least the Argon ones. :headdesk:

Perhaps I should try and expand my applet to include gun emplacements and quantity of gun slots on the emplacement, being able to see all the data at once in an excel spreadsheet might be useful to your tunings.

I prefer big releases on a weekly basis, I can't see the point of releasing something for every little thing especially when I'm getting feedback about mistakes and whatnot.

Just thought I'd ask, so I could make sure my mirror wasn't out of date.

lamoyja · Post by **lamoyja** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 00:54

Well, I'm going off the assumption that NPC's would use beams the same way my turrets do.

I.e. in pulses and making sure to not aim at enemies.

The Khaak also seem to use theirs in pulses as well. Though they do seem to hit fairly well.

NPC's just don't seem to be as overpowered with beam weapons as a smart player. I'll focus fire a fighter and kill it quickly, while an NPC will take about 5-6 times as long to pulse that same fighter to death.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 01:34

They're generally not as powerful with anything as compared to a player, smart or otherwise. They don't seem to use the FS1 aim assist, and the AI's apparently hardcoded to fire in bursts, as you'll notice with any kind of PRG or PBE-equipped vessel. Part of that actually makes me think I should knock down the RPM of some of the high-speed guns so that the AI can better utilize them. About the only thing they're as good as with is missiles, but considering a blind gerbil can use missiles with about the same general efficiency as the player that's not saying much.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 05:01

Okey-doke, folks, I've got something spinning around my head and I want to unleash it and see what you think.

One of the things that sorta' sucks about trying to do any kind of high-end galaxy conquoring stuff's acquiring the goods that let you start your roaring rampages of revenge; you need PPCs and Ion Cannons and 1/2 gJ shields and all that good stuff, but their relvals are so high that it takes hours and hours and hours and hours to produce even single units, and outfitting single ship, let alone a massive death fleet, means many hours spent leaving X3 on 10X SETA hoping that your self-sustained factories don't suddenly bug out or your sector defense fleet doesn't gets squashed by a single buggery Kha'ak Scout. So I've been thinking of some way to calculate a good effective price for wares, and I think I might have something, for lasers at least:

(((H+S) x F) / 60) x (R+V) * 1.1

where H and S is Hull and Shield damage per shot, F is firing rate, R is maximum range in kilometers and V is bullet velocity in km/s. So we take our friendly-but-oft-ineffective Impulse Ray Emitter and do the math:

21 + 220 = 214 * 400 = 96400 / 60= 1607 (was .6 repeating)
1.394 + 1.162 = 2.556
1607 * 2.556 = 4107.492 * 1.1 = 4518.2412

which is pretty darn close to the standard going price for an IRE (4676)

HEPT:

10976
3.741
45167 v 140236

Naval Shuffle PPC:

27543
7.28
220564 v 934904

But this isn't exactly useful without an idea of how that translates to manufacturing time. We know that RelVal is a direct translation of such - how many seconds it takes to manufacture a good or cycle of goods - but its effects on price can wary, anywhere from 50x to 64x. Assuming that the minimum price on any good is the "break even" point for resources spent (which it probably AIN'T, but will do well enough for some quick shots in the dark) the PPC uses the 50x relval price mod,

First I need to find the break-even point for my new numbers. In the case of the pPC this seems to be average divided by 1.0638294967057725788281881180232 (thank god for Scientific Mode on Calculator) which gives us 207330; divvying this by the 50x priceval modifier for the PPC, we get 4146.6 seconds, or 1:09:06, approxometily; a player-manufactured PPC takes more than four times that, 4:48:00. Dang, that's sure one heck of a speed-up from vanilla values!

Of course, what only makes Vanilla even worse in this regard is that Egosoft decided to essentially gimp the player by making player relvals 20% higher than those used by the NPC factories, costing us both time and resources for little good reason. One more thing to put in the "stuff I've gotta' fix" section.

The one thing that's going to make this a bit problematic is beam weapons: while the beam is technically instantanious, the formula in-game is a multiplier of beam lifespan times velocity, and plugging the numbers in the regular way causes the end result to shoot right over even the heaviest capital guns in terms of cost, when in-game at most they're only two or three percent more costly and in many cases are under or break even. I could try using the result of subtracting Beam Lifetime from 1 second, which would give a result of anywhere from .3 (tri-beam) to .750 (fusion beam), as beam lifetime also determines how fast damage is imparted.

I'm liking where these numbers are heading, since it cuts down on some of the number inflation you see with the high-end stuff (and which some members of the forum seem obsessed on preserving/increasing...) but I'd like opinions and ideas even more.

EDIT: Oh man, I'm messing around with the Terran Missiles to see if that whole 750 m/s idea really would be as bad as that one dude suggested, and 750 m/s poltergeists are awesome. I've got a good mind to set their refire rate to like .1 s so we can have us a good ol' Itano Circus.

Aquitaine · Post by **Aquitaine** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 15:16

Just a quick note to say THANK YOU for this and keep up the good work. I spent a few hours with the X3 editor updating the 'Improved Ships' piece of CMOD for 2.5 but this is far and away better, and absolutely necessary in terms of 'fun game' philosophy. The late-game manufacturing morass is also near the top of my list of things that Could Be Better.

Shadow_Wolf33 · Post by **Shadow_Wolf33** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 16:47

The faster build time on weapons is definitely a good thing, as long as it doesn't cripple the profitability of SELLING said weapons when you have a huge stockpile. When I build my weapon plexes for my fleet operations I generally go off multiples of 5 for number of end producers and it gives me rather good results. So I'm all for decreasing build times of guns and such, so long as the price remains consistent in such a way that <teladi>there are still profitsssssss</teladi> to be made by selling the item.

Oh, and if you decrease build times for the love of god make sure you do it for Concussion Impulse Generators and Ion Shard Railguns, building up a decent stock of those to outfit corvette wing patrols can be INFURIATING....I usually set those up VERY early in my weapons plex build so that I have a good stockpile.

Oh and be careful with beefing up Missile speed TOO much, we still need to have reasonably good missile defense options on our boats. I'm running MARS for turret control, and if they get to the point that uber-MARS can't shoot down Missiles, that's when you know you've gone a step too far.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Fri, 5. Feb 10, 18:03

Aquitaine wrote:Just a quick note to say THANK YOU for this and keep up the good work. I spent a few hours with the X3 editor updating the 'Improved Ships' piece of CMOD for 2.5 but this is far and away better, and absolutely necessary in terms of 'fun game' philosophy. The late-game manufacturing morass is also near the top of my list of things that Could Be Better.

Aw, shucks, thank you! I'm just trying to make this game as enjoyable and non-aggrivating as possible, and while I understand some people can't enjoy this mod because of certain issues or prefer more "hardcore" space sim design and whatnot, it's nice to see that the basic tenants I'm basing Naval Shuffle on appear to be agreeable to at least some folks.

Shadow_Wolf33 wrote:The faster build time on weapons is definitely a good thing, as long as it doesn't cripple the profitability of SELLING said weapons when you have a huge stockpile. When I build my weapon plexes for my fleet operations I generally go off multiples of 5 for number of end producers and it gives me rather good results. So I'm all for decreasing build times of guns and such, so long as the price remains consistent in such a way that <teladi>there are still profitsssssss</teladi> to be made by selling the item.

Since I'm pretty certain Relval factors into a station's total capacity for items as well as determining their overall price, there shouldn't be too much of a problem of being able to sell as docks should be able to buy more of the items, hopefully in a proportional-enough level to match the current total values of weapons when doing a zilch-to-full transaction.

Oh and be careful with beefing up Missile speed TOO much, we still need to have reasonably good missile defense options on our boats. I'm running MARS for turret control, and if they get to the point that uber-MARS can't shoot down Missiles, that's when you know you've gone a step too far.

One idea I'm toying with at the moment is trying to classify missiles into short and long-range based on their performance characteristics and their intended targets. Because a Poltergeist is designed to track multiple targets and to switch targets as they're destroyed, they'd have considerably longer lifetimes and ranges than, say, a Beluga, which is a single-round fighter-to-fighter missile which would have a considerably shorter lifespan, enough for a single max-range strike or two or three dogfighting ones, and the Wraiths, Hammerheads, Phantoms and Shadows would have good long lifetimes since they're designed for attacks against capital ships and stations and benifit from early launches. I'm not quite sure how MARS will react to the increased speeds since I don't use it, but inbetween the lessening of the lifetimes for a good number of missiles and the lessening of damage on fighter-scale missiles (no more insta-gibs if you're fighting someone on equal footing, at least in fighters) it shouldn't be burdened too much.

Serial Kicked · Post by **Serial Kicked** » Sat, 6. Feb 10, 01:52

This is a great rebalance mod. Probably the best available so far. Good work!

I've a comment, though. Dunno if it's included or not (i've not checked when my game was running) and i've not read the whole topic to check it out. But here's a suggestion that i've "stolen" from either jlehtone or Nanook:

The TM has little interest ingame, and it doesn't really makes sense that TP are able to board ships when TM can't. So what I am basically proposing is to give the "boarding pod" missile ability to most TM, and switch TP/TM max marine count for all races. So, a TM could deploy its 4 M3 with Ion weapons to lower the shields while sending a bunch of marines to take the enemy ship.

I would be glad to give you a script that enable boarding commands on TM
(or whatever command on whatever ship kind, btw).

Aquitaine · Post by **Aquitaine** » Sat, 6. Feb 10, 02:00

This makes sense to me too. The whole TP class is a bit weird; nearly all of them are passenger ships with maybe one or two qualifying as real military transports, whereas the entire TM line are clearly military in nature. Why you'd send your marines in a greyhound and not an APC is beyond me.

Sorenson · Post by **Sorenson** » Sat, 6. Feb 10, 02:07

Serial Kicked wrote:The TM has little interest ingame, and it doesn't really makes sense that TP are able to board ships when TM can't. So what I am basically proposing is to give the "boarding pod" missile ability to most TM, and switch TP/TM max marine count for all races. So, a TM could deploy its 4 M3 with Ion weapons to lower the shields while sending a bunch of marines to take the enemy ship.

I've actually changed things up so that ships of the M6/7/1/2 and TL/TP class can use boarding pods - anything that can hold marines, really - and while I've not checked the exact capacity for TMs it'd literily be all of two minutes to enable them to use it if they actually can carry marines. And thank you for the kind words.