[MOD TC/AP] Combat Mod 4 - v4.16 17/06/13 - AP 3.0 Compatibility

[imperium3]

I've had a little play around with the missiles and come up with a few ideas.

Rather than dumb fire missiles, you have missiles with very slow turning, proximity detonation and a large blast radius. Then at least you have a vague chance of hitting something with them - good for taking down swarms of fighters.

Heavy torpedos will be much faster with a higher refire rate so you can at least give defensive turrets too many targets to aim at. Theres nothing worse than spending a fortune on twenty Firestorms, just to see that K swat every single one you fire.

I'll keep the Mosquito as fairly useless - just for missile defence really, but everything else will be worth while - even the Dragonfly. Light missiles will be very fast but shorter range, except for one or two specialist missiles.

Rare missiles, like Disruptor, Banshee etc. will have a bit more kick.

Volumes of the larger missiles will go up a bit. These will be harder to shoot down so it stands to reason that you want to be able to take less with you. Also it may help with missile spam where AI M7Ms are involved.

A turret script and Gazz's AI ammo cheat will be essential.

The whole thing will still be based on Imperium3's MRM, but with lots of tweaks.

I'll keep an eye on what changes you make (very nearly come back to TC, so odds are I'll be playing with them a lot soon anyway). Looks like you have some good ideas there, particularly with the refire rate of large missiles (because it's annoying having to wait what seems like hours for multiple Firestorms to launch).

Some of the dumbfire missiles, especially the Tornado which IMO is pretty awesome and intended for targets you can't miss, probably don't need a guidance system TBH. On the other hand the excruciatingly slow Firelance (did I make it too slow?) could well do with it.

Dragonfly already is quite useful - IMHO the "standard missile" along with the Wasp, for small fighters. Comes with a glowing recommendation from Nuklear Slug too, because it's a cheap source of firepower early on.

Capital ship missiles should be fairly large - the difficulty is striking a balance between "ridiculously small" (eg vanilla Hammerhead) and "can't fit anything else into the cargo bay". Especially for ships like the Tyr, space is quite an issue.

Good luck all the same - when and if I get the chance to seriously play TC again, I'll give the MRM a full workout.

[mr.WHO]

IMO missiles should be more or less ballance to counter each class:

Anti-missile - like moquito
Anti-M5 - fast, agile, medium range, like distruptor
Anti-M4 - general purpose missile like Silkworm, buffed Wasp, buffed poltergeist
Anti-M3 - Banshee, buffed Spectre (warhead is OK, but missile isn't fast and agile enough to be a serious thread to anything with turrets, even TS)
Anti-M6 - Hornet, maybe apossible new Terran missile.
Anti-M7 - Tornado, Wraith
ANti-M1/M2 - Firestorm, Hammerhead (this supose to be a Terran missile, Why the hell commonwealth Pirates use it? Leftover nukes from terranformar war??)

Plus specialised misisiles like:
M8 missiles
M7M missiles
other, like heavy dumbfire warheads

[imperium3]

But missiles do need to be differentiated enough that most of them are useful, and not have the Egosoft approach ending up with for example anti-M3 missiles which are pretty much the same in terms of speed and yield (Banshee, Thunderbolt, Tempest) whether they're effective or not. It's just redundant. Plus no single-warhead missile is effective against turreted fighters unless you can fire a bunch of them, and even then it's dicey.

So I favour different approaches from different missiles intended for the same target, which may depend on where they're meant to be fired from. Like my Cyclone missile, which is basically intended to spam the target with so many warheads that they can't all be shot down, is different to the Wildfire which is also an anti-M4 missile.

And some weapons, particularly the Wasp, should not be buffed, as they are awesome already at what they do - you just might have to fire more than one to achieve a result, which since they are often dirt cheap, is not much of an issue.

[paulwheeler]

Funny, I installed this and SRM, as instructed used a factory script-only pack, when I start a game at first it looks fine but when I finally get through the initial installation and message popup stage all stations in terran space vanish. If I start the game without factory script pack all is fine. Any ideas what's going on?

Edit: entered another sector as of terran plot, full of station debris.

This is caused when you have another mod installed that alters TFactories. The CMOD factory pack tries to spawn the new weapon fabs but can't find the entries.

Please check what other mods you have installed.

[paulwheeler]

I've had a little play around with the missiles and come up with a few ideas.
...

Are the ideas you have in mind going to result in added entries to the TMissiles file? If so, may I request that you reserve entries in the TMissiles file for the AWRM missiles to make merging of the two mods easier.

At the moment I'm just adjusting the existing ones. If I do add any I'll definately put some gaps in.

[paulwheeler]

I'm going to keep the general existing spread of missiles. So you get:

Xtra-light (your m5 missiles)

Light (M4)

Medium (M4/M3)

Heavy (M3/M6 and above)


I have moved Hammerhead and Windstalker into the heavy catagory. Remote guided becomes medium.

Xtra-Light will be 1-2 vol, light 2-4, medium 4-8, heavy 10-30. Firestorm is 30 vol and will be XL so Corvettes only. I'm still testing volumes so things may change.

Blast radius have been increased quite a bit - especially for heavy missiles.

Each catagory will get a selection of types. All get at least one swarm except Xtra-light. All get one area of effect missile (fast, low turning, large blast rad, proximity detination). A few will retarget a la flail. There will be a lot of variety in the ranges.

Many won't change much at all (wasp etc) except for a bit of a speed boost. It will take quite a bit of testing though to get them all balanced.

[xalien]

Funny, I installed this and SRM, as instructed used a factory script-only pack, when I start a game at first it looks fine but when I finally get through the initial installation and message popup stage all stations in terran space vanish. If I start the game without factory script pack all is fine. Any ideas what's going on?

Edit: entered another sector as of terran plot, full of station debris.

This is caused when you have another mod installed that alters TFactories. The CMOD factory pack tries to spawn the new weapon fabs but can't find the entries.

Please check what other mods you have installed.

Gah, I totally forgot that I have Complex Cleaner in the mods folder. It's the only thing that lets me build complexes without having 0.001 fps, so I guess I'll try to merge them.

[Spectre01]

xalien, you can try that tubeless complex. It saves some FPS by removing all the tubes.

[xalien]

xalien, you can try that tubeless complex. It saves some FPS by removing all the tubes.

My fps plummets after I drop a bunch of unconnected factories in a totally empty sector so it's not an option.

But seeing as I've got new weapon factories and weapon dealer stations I think that the merge was successful

[HotSake]

Just put Complex Cleaner before SRM so it gets overwritten. The new TFactories file contains the necessary entries for CC to work.

[xalien]

Just put Complex Cleaner before SRM so it gets overwritten. The new TFactories file contains the necessary entries for CC to work.

Yeah, but for that I'd need to uninstall all mods that added fake patches from the bottom up to SRM, then repack CC so it's mod file would be added as a fake patch as well and then install everything back in the same order. Too much hassle, it's much easier and faster to alter TFactories.

[Spectre01]

btw paul, any chance for you to add a weapons dealer for terran? They always have problems with GoD and lose all their weapon factories if you are not fast enough to stablize terran economy. Even with how unstable the commonwealth economy is, if it's not for those new weapon dealers, outfitting a M2 is harder than outfitting an entire fighter wings for a M1.

[HotSake]

Just put Complex Cleaner before SRM so it gets overwritten. The new TFactories file contains the necessary entries for CC to work.

Yeah, but for that I'd need to uninstall all mods that added fake patches from the bottom up to SRM, then repack CC so it's mod file would be added as a fake patch as well and then install everything back in the same order. Too much hassle, it's much easier and faster to alter TFactories.

Are you using Plugin Manager to handle mods? Good luck with that. It's not 100% reliable when it comes to load order. I had all kinds of issues that only went away after I removed plugin manager, unnpacked all my SPKs, and started doing everything by hand.

[xalien]

Just put Complex Cleaner before SRM so it gets overwritten. The new TFactories file contains the necessary entries for CC to work.

Yeah, but for that I'd need to uninstall all mods that added fake patches from the bottom up to SRM, then repack CC so it's mod file would be added as a fake patch as well and then install everything back in the same order. Too much hassle, it's much easier and faster to alter TFactories.

Are you using Plugin Manager to handle mods? Good luck with that. It's not 100% reliable when it comes to load order. I had all kinds of issues that only went away after I removed plugin manager, unnpacked all my SPKs, and started doing everything by hand.

Worked fine so far ... I think.

[HotSake]

Sure, it's not instafail. Just not perfect, you know?

[joelR]

Sure, it's not instafail. Just not perfect, you know?

Also. Its a good idea to get in the habit of creating a txt file with all your Cat/Dat files listed and keep it in the TC folder for reference. For example I write it like this:

14=ComplexCleaner
15=SRM 1.0
16=Etc etc etc

That way you can move them around by renumbering them or whatever you need to do.

[Spectre01]

Or just make them into an spk package. And the plugin manager will keep track of which .cat is which. And it even rename all the .cats according to its numbers even if you made some changes to some fake patch mods.

[paulwheeler]

btw paul, any chance for you to add a weapons dealer for terran? They always have problems with GoD and lose all their weapon factories if you are not fast enough to stablize terran economy. Even with how unstable the commonwealth economy is, if it's not for those new weapon dealers, outfitting a M2 is harder than outfitting an entire fighter wings for a M1.

There already two in the Weapons Dealer script. There are two Darkspace Weapons Dealers in Terran sectors. Plus the secret black market Weapons Dealer also sells Terran weapons.

[paulwheeler]

UPDATE RELEASED 4.4.1
--------------------------------


This is a compatibility update for SRM users only.

Non-SRM users do not need to worry - There are no changes to the CMOD.

[Spectre01]

Paul, I's still suggest you change the gamma kyon hit effects to -1, and the ambient sound to 111. It doesn't have any big visual effect, and those two values reduced the lag dramaticly.