Fnord Lightbringer wrote:Do you have an AP beta build for us to try?
I'd be willing to test this but I've come to loathe the galaxy selector in TC compared to the one in AP, I'm not going back
What do you think I've been doing all week? Do take note that it's really just the core essence of the mod, ships and guns and bullets and shields and the like - things like the waretemplate and universe file are going to require a lot more work and TC scripts may be a crapshoot due to AP changes.
Anyway, some notes regarding some of the new ships included in AP compared to TC:
* The "luxury yachts" presented a couple of problems. In-game descriptions make them out to be rather feckless little compensators, but for a game that's really kind of the OPPOSITE thing you really want - TPs are already marginalized enough compared to other ship types, so who wants another batch of equally-marginalized ships? Thus I decided to treat them as "boarding corvettes" - even better shielding and weapon power capacity than M6+ varients that puts them nicely inbetween M6 and M7 (interestingly the very concept used for the Hyperion, which is the base that spawned the luxury yacht craze). The heavier shielding and weapon energy lets a skillful pilot whittle down a target's shields (or simply stay alive while a more powerful ship does it as opposed to imploding spectacularly like a TP tends to if a big ship looks at it) and then swoop in to launch a bunch of marines
* Ships like the Albion Pride and AP Gunner, in keeping a bit with their original vanilla loadouts, are treated as "strike corvettes" capable of mounting capital-grade weapons like PPCs and PBCs in their main gun slots - useful for devestating precision attacks on single targets, though the reduced gun counts make them less useful in other situations.
* The new Drone Carriers are divided into "light" and "heavy" varients based on their weapon mountings - ships like the Griffon are considered "heavy" DCs and as such split their energy between shielding and weapon energy a lot more than carriers tend to, but are also a bit more slower, matched to their race's respective missile frigates. "Light" carriers like the Boron one are faster (same speed as regular M7s) and have a heck of a lot more shielding, but with only the minimum of weapon energy capacity to let them defend themselves.
* And then of course the big damn M2Ps like the Kyoto and Megadalon and the I are treated as M0s in the same fashion as the Valhalla.
The highway idea sounds awesome and would be worth a try, but it could also mean that the Xenon patrols lose a lot of their bite, they'd only be threatening through traffic, not the actual sector infrastructure.
In putting more thought of implimentation into it, I think any kind of an NS-included "highway" system is probably going to be limited to Terran sectors - while it'd be nice to do something like that throughout the whole galaxy that would also require a massive amount of in-system manual checks in order to ensure that things don't screw up, not to mention a lot of changing of existing object placement (asteroids in particular). A script-based system that deletes currently-existing asteroids and aligns gates would probably work much better.