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

[Scoob]

Just to add my experiences - 3.2 Beta 3 + VRO, FE and some other mods - Xenon Capital ships appear to be shooting at me just fine during my limited encounters with them this evening. The only issue I have with turrets really is that "Attack my Current Enemy" does NOT work, unless I actually get HIT by that enemy. I.e. if I'm sitting in a ship's blind spot so it never hits me, my turrets (with the ship or a hard point targetted) will NOT fire while the target isn't hitting me. The moment I move out of cover and it does hit me, my turrets set to "Attack my Current Enemy" instantly wake up and work fine. It's almost as if they don't consider the target an enemy, despite it being RED and my having hit it multiple times with fixed weapons.

Scoob.

[ScandyNav]

The problem with Xenon turrets do exist. But in my game they shoot. Not as intense as before beta 20, but not completely broken/not shoot at all.

[BoostHungry]

Was testing again last night and the xenon turrets would constantly cycle between the locked forward looking position vs swiveling to fire, but at least they wouldn't try to constantly open/close. If I stood in front of them, they would fire, but if I stood above them then they would try to swivel towards me and the give up. I checked my save file and the pilot of the Xenon ship was maxed out, so my issue may be related to the issue that high level pilots cause turrets to break (reported and acknowledged as a bug in the Egosoft forums). If the devs don't take this bug seriously, then I'm going to have to take another break from the game.

[Knjaz136]

How playable is this mod WITh Highways?

As a Freelancer plaeyr in the past, the apearrance of "Trade Lane's" (Freelancer's term, same thing) in X4 is what finally clicked it for me. The ship balance feels horrendous though, as there're clear "the absolute best with no competition" ships, like Nemesis corvettes, combined with the lack of proper M2.
So I'm looking for a great Ship balancing mod, but without cutting important content from the game.

[Rastuasi]

How playable is this mod WITh Highways?

As a Freelancer plaeyr in the past, the apearrance of "Trade Lane's" (Freelancer's term, same thing) in X4 is what finally clicked it for me. The ship balance feels horrendous though, as there're clear "the absolute best with no competition" ships, like Nemesis corvettes, combined with the lack of proper M2.
So I'm looking for a great Ship balancing mod, but without cutting important content from the game.

Issue with the highways is that they pretty much break the game. There's no real need for strategy with the highways because they allow you to bypass security. That is how you get xenon and pirates into core sectors without so much as a shot being fired at them. VRO rebalances all the engines so that you won't notice not having a highway timing wise. Only thing I miss about not having the highway, is easy discovery of new sectors/missions. The highway also messes AI logic up quite a bit, lots of bugs that get pilot AI locked into going back and forth through the same gate, on and off the highway.

As to freelancer, these highways and the highways in freelancer are not even close to the same thing and they serve no game play feature set like they did in Freelancer.

[Knjaz136]

Issue with the highways is that they pretty much break the game. There's no real need for strategy with the highways because they allow you to bypass security. That is how you get xenon and pirates into core sectors without so much as a shot being fired at them. VRO rebalances all the engines so that you won't notice not having a highway timing wise. Only thing I miss about not having the highway, is easy discovery of new sectors/missions. The highway also messes AI logic up quite a bit, lots of bugs that get pilot AI locked into going back and forth through the same gate, on and off the highway.

As to freelancer, these highways and the highways in freelancer are not even close to the same thing and they serve no game play feature set like they did in Freelancer.

Thank you, I thought it's the "preference" thing of original X3 players, but if they currently have such breaking effect on gameplay, then I guess it's worth a try. Will have to find a mod that lets you buy core sector maps, though.

[Scoob]

I think highways going through gates is the issue. Pure intra-sector highways to speed up access to key points, such as resource fields or a distant major station, such a shipyard, would likely be fine. As mentioned above, they are a major security hole as well as making it easy to blast past a blockade without issue much of the time.

That said, I play with Highways and also loved them in Freelancer. I actually preferred the whole "booster ring" approach vs. X4's "glowy magic band" - functionally the same, visually rather different. Plus, I loved how you could disrupt a Trade Lane ring to eject ships, a great Pirate activity. I do wonder if vanilla Highways will ever evolve in X4 at all?

Scoob.

[MiFoludek]

Hi,

Not sure if it is related to VRO or vanilla but my M ships never fire torpedos against K,V Xenons. (I was testing firestorm torpedo on Cerberus).

Is it bug or only my game is broken?

BR

[Shuulo]

Hi,

Not sure if it is related to VRO or vanilla but my M ships never fire torpedos against K,V Xenons. (I was testing firestorm torpedo on Cerberus).

Is it bug or only my game is broken?

BR

1.Make sure torpedo is selected as ammunition.
2. Make sure pilot is at least 3 starts, AI skill has limits on how often it can uses missiles on low skill, sometimes it didnt fire for me as well, having good crew resolves this. (just use some mod for this)

[MiFoludek]

Hi,

Not sure if it is related to VRO or vanilla but my M ships never fire torpedos against K,V Xenons. (I was testing firestorm torpedo on Cerberus).

Is it bug or only my game is broken?

BR

1.Make sure torpedo is selected as ammunition.
2. Make sure pilot is at least 3 starts, AI skill has limits on how often it can uses missiles on low skill, sometimes it didnt fire for me as well, having good crew resolves this. (just use some mod for this)

The M ship has selected torpedo as ammunition and has 5 star crew. (There is no issue with S ship, they are using torpedos very often). The issue is only visible with M class.
The Cerberus has only topredo tubes - no forward guns - maybe that is the reason?

[DemonicWeebAMV]

for some reason this mod, if enabled removes any kind of ship trader from the game

[Shuulo]

The M ship has selected torpedo as ammunition and has 5 star crew. (There is no issue with S ship, they are using torpedos very often). The issue is only visible with M class.
The Cerberus has only topredo tubes - no forward guns - maybe that is the reason?

Ah yeah, this can also be the reason, missile use AI is very unpredictable in X4 unfortunately, hopefully this will be fixed by devs

[Shuulo]

Version 2.1.95, but named 2.2
NOTE: THIS IS NOT 2.2 WITH NEW FEATURES, STEAM is not able to make 2.1.95 version so i had to use 2.2. Planned features for 2.2 will be called 2.3 instead.
Fully compatible with previous saves.
Final version before full work on 2.2 starts, this one brings some polish and a bit of a rebalance due to turret improvements in 3.2 (and potential fixes of remaining issues in next patch according to devs).

Notable changes:
- New Split battleship Gharial designed to go toe-to-toe with heavy ships. Having a bit more HP, one more shield generator 11 L turrets with good coverage but approximately 50% less M turrets than Raptor it is much better suited for long range engagements with enemy battleships. Its also more expensive than Raptor.
- New powered beam weapons that can utilize full power of XL energy generators on Carriers, so only them can mount those extremely powerful weapon systems, only one per ship and race-specific. Raptor does not get one though as it already uses its full potential.
- ALL M and L turrets were slightly nerfed. 10% for general or anti-cap turrets (15% for heavy lances) and 15% for anti-s turrets. This is made to balance them out with better targeting of turrets and to improve surviveability of smaller ships to make them more viable.

Miscellaneous:
- few bugs squashed.
- some weapons that used ambient sound now use correct ones, expect Ion Projector, Tri Beam and Positron Beam, was not able to fix them somehow, will do in next version.

[DeadAirRT]

Just a tip for next time, you can use -minor on workshop tool and it will allow you to update with the same version number. Don't let steam ruin your versioning!

[Shuulo]

Just a tip for next time, you can use -minor on workshop tool and it will allow you to update with the same version number. Don't let steam ruin your versioning!

yeah, could have used that, but really wanted to have new version, as new ship is quite major thing to add.

[Montassiner]

Update: Just saw the comments on the steam workshop page - seems like some issues with turrets still remain in 3.2. Just need to wait for the update.

Hi there,

I am a new player to x4 franchise, and I am playing with VRO + FE (+ escape teleport, better kill credit, autotrade & Autominer Skill tweaks and fly by looting, + no superhighways). I have just saved enough to buy my first Fulmar Battleship. Suffice to say the L Gauss Turrets I bought can't hit a damn thing. A Xenon I was sitting right in front of me and the turrets went out of their way to fire far right - I was stationary as was the Xenon I. And they were consistent with the firing target. (I noticed this with a defense station as well - again we were both stationary.) And the turrets picked a point to fire and kept firing there, even though nothing was there. Is there something I am missing? As a new player I know that I don't know a lot about setting up turrets etc. My L gauss turrets had purple damage mods on them.

I've noticed complaints about turrets years before but I thought much of this had been fixed, is that right?

Monty.

Edit: Added nosuperhighways to post. Playing on Steam (don't know if there is a different version), all mods from the workshop except nosuperhighways.

[Max Bain]

Just one suggestion to improve a bit of performance at nearly no cost.

There are some projectiles with an incredible high rate of fire like the "bullet_gen_turret_m_gatling_01_mk1_macro" with 20 shots per second with 2 barrels, so 40 bullets per second per turret.
So in a big battle with many ships which have this turret mounted its not just the calculation of 40 projectiles per second but also 40 damage calculations per second. For a single entity its no problem with our computers, but I think in a big battle with lets say more than 100 of these turrets shooting (which is really a common situation) thats 4000 projectiles per second and the damage calculations of each impact if it hits.

My suggestion would be to lower the rate of fire to values not much higher than 10 (maybe 15) per second while keeping the overall dps the same. I think no one can see a big difference if a weapon is shooting 10 times or 20 times a second anyway.
For lasers like the "bullet_xen_m_laser_01_mk1_macro" I lowered the rate to 8 shots per second from 10.

To keep DPS the same you simply need to divide the rate of fire and ammunition with the same factor wile multiplying the damage (hull, shield and value).

At least I did this for several projectiles with higher values than 10 (I think highest now is 14 on my end) per second on my private mod to improve performance in battles.
This came to my mind because yesterday I had a battle with around 30 battleships and 150 S ships and the fps went down to around 20 and even sometimes hit the 10 fps mark which is not fun to play.

[Shuulo]

Just one suggestion to improve a bit of performance at nearly no cost.

Yah, ill take a look on those for next version, already did few changes.

[Cedric_FP]

Could someone please suggest what a good mod would be for the heavy lance turret?

Like, does the 'slasher' mod do anything with it's +reload?

Many thanks!

[Manawydn]

Could someone please suggest what a good mod would be for the heavy lance turret?

Like, does the 'slasher' mod do anything with it's +reload?

Many thanks!

Damage+++ It's essentially a laser beam/railgun, so accuracy is already top-notch, as well as having maximum allowable projectile speed. Go for raw damage output on those. For Slow moving projectiles like plasmas, I go for projectile speed. Things that are in the middle, like CIWS can go either way. Projectile speed helps tremendously, but damage gets the job done ez-pz as well.