[MOD] Missiles Rebalance Mod v1.2, Updated 25/9/2010 [Lost File Appeal]

[djrygar]

but cost is connected with cost of producing (amount of resources - ecells, ore, food). So its fixed. Cyclone should have like 5-7k dmg per warhead (usually not all warheads land on target) with retargeting, this will make it worth buing /using

[imperium3]

but cost is connected with cost of producing (amount of resources - ecells, ore, food). So its fixed.

Aha! No, it isn't. It can be changed by adjusting something called the "relative value" which affects the price of the missile and the resources required to make it. It's all explained here but I warn you, it gave me a headache trying to understand it.

Version 0.3.1 released! It's mainly a small fix for a few odd prices, but the Cyclone's damage has been improved as well.

Full changelog (such as it is):

-Firefly price increased to approx 900 to reflect increased damage.
-Cyclone price reduced to approx 6700, damage per warhead increased to 4k [1].
-Firelance price doubled as it is now significantly heavier than vanilla.

Linky here: [LINK]


[1] @djrygar: I may increase the damage further but it'll need a bit more testing first. I know what kind of punishment the Flail (5k per warhead) can dish out, so I'll try to make the Cyclone not quite as lethal, though still highly dangerous.

[djrygar]

no, I guess 4k is fine, esp with changed price.
2-3k was actually close to wasp (wchich is dirt-cheap), but 20 times more expensive, so that was my problem with it. its very fine now i guess.

as for M4 becoming obsolete. I forgot i'm using ship rebalance so some fighters are faster than usual. but I guess you should tune things to vanilla ships.

Agreed. The only danger though is that the missiles end up too fast, because if the likes of a Thunderbolt (say) can easily catch an M4, then the entire class of M4's is obsolete. EDIT: Unless of course the missiles aren't manoeuverable enough to catch an M4. Hey, with that reasoning I could even make the torpedos quite fast as well Rolling Eyes

Of course. Even smaller/medium yield missiles, even fast, are not insta-killers. Speed had its own downsides.
M4 use turrets to destroy missiles and try to shake them down (outmaneuver)
. You can easily see how xenon fighters with their PBEs are efficient in taking down missiles shot at them (xenon fighters are very agile, easily outmaneuver everything besides fast swarm missiles). also - faster missiles have bigger turning radius. Torpedos in BMTC were quite fast (like 170m/c) but you don't end shooteing them at LX - maneuverability and blast radius is one reason, and price is another. It not worth to shoot 80kcr-worth missile at some lousy fighter to get 1000 cr bounty/mission payment, and shooting hammerhead at LX will more likely kill you, not him.

fast missile version of BMTC's mod was simply enjoyable to play with. give it a try and you'll see ( http://www.deadlyshoe.com/x3/bmtcv2m.rar - this is the 'fast' version ). played a lot with it and I ensure you that fast missiles are not balance breakers. Of course you have to remember about lifespan

right now I'm in trouble Your mod fixes things that were irritating me (like this 1-unit cargospace hammerheads), but i REALLY miss BMTC speed. They FEEL more like missiles, not bombs. And thats great thing considering we are playing space shooter so shooting should be enjoyable

[someone else]

you wanna increase speed but are worried by missiles getting too... powerful?
nerf the manouverability while raising speed.

[mrscribbler]

I really like this mod so far. I also have an idea - I've always thought that we could use a fast cap-killer dumbfire that can be fitted on and fired by fighters, starting from an M5.

Something like the following:

Size: 20-30 (S)
Speed (without corkscrew): 400-500 m/s
Speed (with corkscrew): 200 m/s
Range: 1.2 km*
Yield: 400k
Blast Radius: 200 m.**
Load/Reload: 10 sec.***


* Range should be determined by the distance at which fighters break off from an attack on a cap ship. The idea is to force fighters to get up close before they can fire this baby off.
** Might keep the AI from using it in dogfights, but not knowing if that's the case, you might have to go with a slower version to avoid having it wasted on M4s or M3s.
*** Not sure if load/reload can be changed.

It's always struck me odd that the missiles designed to take out low-end fighters are the ones that can be avoided by low-end fighters the easiest (I think I've gotten hit by a firefly missile exactly twice in both X3s), while the ones that are a bigger danger to caps are the easiest in the world to shoot down because they're slow and they attack head-on. You could also make these missiles/torpedoes much deadlier if you caused them to corkscrew. It might not even be too CPU intensive since these missiles would be the last ones to be spammed.

I also think that you could stand to speed up the the poltergeist. It seems a little slow now.

[apricotslice]

Let me know when you consider this finished, and I'll add it into the Merge Mod if your agreeable.

[imperium3]

Ooh, lovely! TBH it still needs a bit of work atm (among other issues I think I may have ruined the Tornado by totally nerfing its speed, and since not all fighters can carry L size, the Firelance is a bit specialised), and that may take a while since I just started uni and things are a bit manic atm

I'd love to have my name in the superbox (as part of the merge mod), though I'm not sure if Ego is still taking submissions for that. I pity the poor programmer that has to make XBTF Vista compatible!

[apricotslice]

The superbox was put back a while due to the next patch thats due, so no time constraints at the moment. But the sooner you get it done, the soner it comes out of beta

[imperium3]

New version released! Since the mod now includes pretty much all the changes I intend to make (bar a little bit of tinkering), I'm calling this v1.0.

Changes made:

-Overhaul of missiles' speed. Now there are 3 rough categories of missiles:
-Type I: small, light missiles, built primarily with speed and accuracy in mind. Speed generally >450
-Type II: medium missiles, powerful but still small enough to fit on a fighter. Speed is sacrificed for firepower, generally around 250
-Type III: big scary torpedos. Large enough to fit in powerful engines and a large warhead. Not very manoeuvrable though. Speed around 300.

Download link and overview in first post.

[paulwheeler]

Hi,

Just installed this - excellent work!

The speed increases really help to make missles (esp. the Hammer) viable again after installing the Missile Defence Mk2 script.

One thing I've noticed - the Wildfire missile is no longer a swarm. Is this expected behaviour?

[imperium3]

Wildfire is not intended to be a swarm, nor should it be in vanilla either. Did you have another mod which caused that? (I think CMOD may have messed with missiles). This one does overwrite all changes made by any other missile mods. If you're really attached to it I can send you a separate version with swarm-wildfires, but I don't think it's necessary.

On the subject of swarms, check out the Cyclone, which has grown into a mini-flail (even the retargeting). I got barraged by Argon One during testing, and it was scary. Warheads everywhere!

[paulwheeler]

I have the CMOD installed too so that must be it.

I'm not that attached... not if we have a replacement with the cyclone anyway! I'll give that a try tonight.

I love the flail so it'll be good to have something similar I can fire from my Collosus.

[Esgaro]

Nice mod. I've always loved missiles, so it is nice to see a mod which gives them a little more bite. The general speed boost was badly needed. The slow speed of a lot of the missiles was just sad, really. Missiles should be able to be outmaneuvered by smaller ships, but they should be difficult to outrun. The fact that everybody used swarm missiles 90% of the time illustrated a problem right there

I think the changes to the tornado's damage might have been a little much, as it was already a pretty damn powerful M3 missile before, and the one dumbfire which was really worth using. I would probably favor upping the speed instead of the damage. Even so, I wouldn't consider it a big deal. By the time a person can manufacture them in numbers, they probably aren't flying an M3, and it isn't the sort of missile I would probably equip wingman M3s with. Those guys are more likely to get tempests, or the new improved cyclone.

[imperium3]

Hi Esgaro, glad to hear you like the mod!

WRT the Tornado, you're right, I probably have made an error there. The aim in increasing the damage was to keep total damage above that of the Firelance, but I forgot that Tornado already has a significant advantage over the Firelance: speed and swarminess. Plus, you'd be a fool to launch a Firelance at point blank range without Missile Safety installed.

I'll have a fiddle with Tornado, and see if I can balance it out a bit more. Actually I think you can take out one of the lighter-shielded TLs in one volley with these, which ain't right. It should still be fairly lethal though!

EDIT: OK, I've tweaked the tornado a bit, and the new version is now available to download from the first post. I basically reduced the damage close to the original (but still a little higher) and improved the speed and reduced the size to compensate.

If you spot anything else that looks a little odd, don't hesitate to post it here and I'll correct it!

[paulwheeler]

I've been firing a lot of missiles recently and I have a few thoughts...

Now I installed the Missile Defense Mk2 script and that pretty much renders missiles useless as a rule. You have to be very lucky for one to get through the defense unless its a swarm.

On the other hand I like the fact that the turrets try to shoot the missiles down. Ignoring them is unrealistic.

So... I was thinking that many of the missiles could use a bit of a speed boost. Also is there any way of adding shields to missiles or increasing the hull? (I'm thinking boarding pods here especially).

I don't want every missile to get through like vanilla, but if I launch a barrage of hammers it would be nice if a couple would get through a K's defenses... ISRs make short work of them with Missile Defense Mk 2.

Swarm missiles seem to do OK, but standard ones just get shot down so easily. I fire Banshees most often from my Collosus (I pick up so many after battles) and they are really slow and too easy to shoot down.

I think I'd rather all missiles were much faster but less damaging.

What do you think?

[imperium3]

Yeah, the fact that missiles are so easy to shoot down is a bit of a pain. The main problem is that the missiles' hitboxes are so large that you varely need to aim at all in order to take them out. So what can I do about it?

-Shrink the hitbox: This can apparently be done by altering some level of detail on the missile model itself, however this would have to be done to each and every model, moreover requiring skills which I don't possess. So for the meantime that's out the window.

-Make missiles tougher: Sadly, AFAIK for regular missiles that's impossible - if some clever modder out there does know a way I'd love to hear from them. The only exception, strangely enough, is boarding pods - their HP is defined in a seperate little file named Globals. So I'll have a look and make sure it wouldn't be incompatible with anything much (as I aim to make this turkey compatible with as many other mods as possible), and for boarding pods this might well be a viable option.

-Speed: Yes, increasing the speed will make missiles harder to hit and to some degree that's what I've already done. However, I'm worried about a couple of things, namely 1)Missiles become so fast, that the player cannot offer a meaningful defence or have time to evade. This would especially be a problem for M3s without turrets like the Barracuda, which rely on the player's reflexes to shoot down incoming missiles. Also 2)The vanilla missile defences would become even more of a joke than they already are. Bear in mind that this mod is tuned towards vanilla TC - it's nice if it makes MDMk2 or MARS easier to beat, but that's not the aim of the mod and I won't do so at the expense of vanilla users. So on balance, I probably won't increase the speed of these missiles without a lot of thought, and/or a large baying mob demanding that I do so.

Conclusion then: Sorry paulwheeler, it looks like there isn't really much I can do about that within the scope of this mod. I will look at making the boarding pods tougher, but other changes will require a lot of testing, time which I don't have to spare owing to lectures and nother modding project which will go up on the forums either today or tomorrow.

Keep throwing the feedback at me though

[paulwheeler]

No worries.

If you feel like doing a special MDMk2 tailored verison of this then that would be great!

Its a great mod anyway - far better than vanila.

Cheers

Paul

[imperium3]

As things stand, synaptic detonator missiles are all but useless. Maybe one or two of those could be "converted" to a defence-breaking missile? IE, one whose prime directive is to actually hit the target regardless of MARS etc, but without much of a warhead?

I'll have a think about that and see if it's worth implementing. More than likely it'd be unnecessary under vanilla (but no one uses those missiles anyway so no loss), but it might be a cool addition with turret scripts running.

[apricotslice]

Idle thought.....if the boarding pod is in globals, cannot all missiles be added to globals in the same way ?

Docks can all be changed by adding them into hq. Maybe the missiles can all be changed by adding them into globals ?

As I said, an idle thought.

[vampirecosmonaut]

I wonder how many thousands of hull points you would need to add to a boarding pod to stop MARS from destroying it... I added several thousand points to a boarding pod and MARS still make quick work of it.