[MOD] [TC/AP] X3 Rebalance Mod (XRM) - Total conversion - v1.30d (02.12.13)

[Seraph Kaoru]

BTW - Just dropped Expnobody's new USC M2+ in to replace Cadius' Nagoya and it looks superb!

The question is now, do I replace the Solaris/Saitama with Expnobosy's M1+?

Weighing in a little late here, but - currently, we have two ships (the Tokyo and the Polacca) running around with exactly the same model - (the mobile mining base has a different, awesome-looking model, even if it's mostly just a refit of the Tokyo's model, so I'm leaving it out of this for now.)

For aesthetic and usage reasons, it's sort of been strange to have a carrier that stows 40 ships and a TL that stores 9, with vastly different loadouts, cargo capacities and roles having the exact same model. However, if you were going to replace the current Solaris with a new one - maybe you could give the Polacca the old Solaris' model? It actually looks somewhat like a TL - especially compared to the design of the Mammoth. The Nagoya is a bit of an odd duck, I was initially going to suggest something similar for it, but if you were going to replace the Polacca's model I think that the design of the Saitama/Solaris fits it much better (and thus keeps an awesome model in the game.)

If you aren't replacing the Saitama/Solaris, the same suggestion could sort of be made for using the old Nagoya as the Polacca's model, because stripped of its turrets that big ol' bulky backside of the Nagoya's just screams 'cargo space' to me. But turret-stripping is a non-trivial issue (or at least making it look good) so whether that's feasible or not, I have no clue. I also understand that some folks, upon learning the Nagoya and a couple of other ships are from other continuities, would prefer them removed, so. Do what you think is best!

None of this really touches on the fact that I think the vanilla Tokyo and Osaka look totally weird, as others have said, heh. Oh, and I really like the idea of beefing up missile size for AP (even if I don't have AP.) Bigger, more glowy missiles are going to look more imposing, more menacing, especially once Litcube finishes re-touching the missile boat script and we've got M7Ms launching gleaming-yellow salvos that burn like little stars through the galactic night.

What happened here? I'm actually enjoying reading posts in this thread again.

Mizuchi mentioned lesbians. Obviously.

if you/anyone okay with Nexus ships being in XRM, then might as well include other sci-fi ships... bring on USS Enterprise, Star Destroyer, Andromeda etc... Razz

I'd argue this isn't quite the same. Star Trek, Star Wars and even the Andromeda series are all extremely well-known, blockbuster media properties (especially the first two.) You can't really dissociate the origins of a Star Destroyer from wherever it shows up, it'll always feel like a Star Wars cross-over.

Nexus is a seven-year-old game that most people ('most people' being arguable on a forum full of space-game-lovers, admittedly) have never heard of or played, with low sales numbers and a sequel in aeternal limbo. If the models from there - with the tweaking they've been given - fit the aesthetics of the USC, they might be more usable just because users would be more easily able to dissociate them from their source material (or not even realize they were 'transplants', as it were.)

I think that the Tobosaku A/B fit the Terran aesthetic better than the Nagoya, personally, but none of them are terrible models by any long stretch (and the Tokyo looks far more like something out of Star Trek than they do, heh.)

If it was up to my phone's predictive text, we'd replace all the lasers with lesbians.

I'm not sure how that'd balance out, though. (Carefully, I'd imagine.)

Still, way to think outside the box, Android.



I guess.

Bring on the Phased Repeater Girls, I suppose?

P.S.: Paul, I am totally of the camp that will heap yet more work onto your shoulders by requesting that big hulking "Command Ship" as a logistics M0. Currently I've been using a slightly-modified Tepukei for the same purpose, but a fleet as big as the USC's would almost definitely have dedicated logistics ships (designed for the servicing of everything from fighters to frigates or up, stuffed full of supplies, munitions, and with monstrously-huge amounts of cargo space, but likely a relatively sparse armament for its size.)

Then again, I played War In Heaven like 93 times, so I'm probably in love with the idea of logistics ships far too much to make an objective determination about this.

[Spectre01]

So like, after I did the first Terran mission as a Argon (the mission where you escort a TP to Heritic end), the game keeps CTD after the AP landed on the Orbital patrol bsee (the CTD happens 2~3 mins after the TP has landed). Not sure about the cause. Gonna start another game to see if something is indeed bugged.

Update: I loaded a save 4 mins before the crash. Cheat warped myself to another sector. The game didn't crash. Then enter Heritic End again, see some Terran pirate fighting USC fleet. And the game still not crashing.

No idea what went wrong.

[Nick 031287]

someone help me with any advise? i dunno what could be best weapon to use for m Xperimental shuttles

Impulse Ray emmitter
Energy Bolt chain gun
Electro magnetic repeater
Electro magnetic plasma cannon
Partical accelirator cannon
Mass driver
Ion Disruptor

which ones of these?

[deca.death]

Two issues:

I just bought second HQ, mostly for capital parking space. I've noticed that they don't share same schematics. I don't care for that too much, but then I've realized newly bought schematics added just to new HQ, not old anymore. I'm guessing original game wasn't designed for player to have more then one HQ and deals with that poorly. Am I right?

Kill asteroid with a cheat? Will it come back to haunt me? :) Or should I build mine then first to get rid of it permanently, like in vanilla?

Anther thing, I would like to assign macro command to a single key, for example, press single key to open "jump and fly to station" command menu. Or "set all turrets to missile only", you get the idea. Is this right tool? Script: Hotkey Manager. I'm trying to read through that post, it's obviously more complex tool then my simple needs are but am I getting old or stupid (or both) but I can't determine is that thing what I'm looking for and how to set up shortcuts I've mentioned.

[deca.death]

someone help me with any advise? :( i dunno what could be best weapon to use for m Xperimental shuttles

It's hard to say, because every weapon has it's strengths and weaknesses. It also depends how many gun mounts and w. energy you have, and what are your targets, so there is no "best". I would probably go with EMPC, arm one shuttle and take it up for walk in hostile space to see if it "fits", MD could be interesting solution too.

[manole]

Two issues:

I just bought second HQ, mostly for capital parking space. I've noticed that they don't share same schematics. I don't care for that too much, but then I've realized newly bought schematics added just to new HQ, not old anymore. I'm guessing original game wasn't designed for player to have more then one HQ and deals with that poorly. Am I right?

Kill asteroid with a cheat? Will it come back to haunt me? Or should I build mine then first to get rid of it permanently, like in vanilla?
.

Blueprints only get added to the newest HQ. Use Saetan's Enhanced Equipment Docks or Lucikes OTAS Outpost II if you want docking/storage without messing up blueprints (they are set up so only your original HQ gets blueprints).

[Lord Dakier]

How does XRM look for stability on AP these days?

I'm looking to start a new game but if theres a patch which is non-save compatible then I guess I'll just hold out for a couple of weeks.

[Nick 031287]

someone help me with any advise? i dunno what could be best weapon to use for m Xperimental shuttles

It's hard to say, because every weapon has it's strengths and weaknesses. It also depends how many gun mounts and w. energy you have, and what are your targets, so there is no "best". I would probably go with EMPC, arm one shuttle and take it up for walk in hostile space to see if it "fits", MD could be interesting solution too.

i dont think it carries enough mounts for Mass driver to make enough punch.

i thinking maybe the Energy bolt thing, the EMPC Velocity isnt fast enough to make enough hits on other fighters...
the EM repeater could be good, but might lack pi thinking maybe Energy bolt Chain gun, seems to be the all around, it has decent Velocity speeds to hit other fighters, but im thinking what about the EM repeater? its weaker an lil less range but it has more fire rate and more velocity

[A5PECT]

...maybe Energy bolt Chain gun, seems to be the all around, it has decent Velocity speeds to hit other fighters...

XRM utilizes projectile size as a sort of "hidden stat" for weapons. Don't be fooled by the EBC's encyclopedia entry, its small projectile makes it less effective against fast-moving fighters despite its fire rate and projectile speed. It's most useful against large, slow targets like heavy fighters and corvettes.

[mib666007]

I think the only thing weapon dealers need is a higher base price on everything..balanced and satisfying. I love the need for them but they just need a balance

The prices cannot be altered, without altering them everywhere. Also this affects production rates and resource requirements, even in player fabs.

Again, we are limited by the game's engine.

Ah, ok. I'll probably just delete them then from my with some station delete cheat. The problem for me is they really ruin immersion -- like when I was flying around like "where the heck is a particle accelerator cannon" ..everywhere was out of stock. Then I found the weapons dealer with 50 and I was honestly very confused, wondering if I had cheat on xD

There isn't a way for an artificial life setting to bump up the price or something? I just know Hephaistos Corp. Station building service or the other "Yalamandis Corp. ship construction " at the top of scriptting right now balance convenience this way(ie, you pay more for your bucks.) The weapons dealer feels like I'm going to a sit down restaurant from France at McDonalds

[Nick 031287]

...maybe Energy bolt Chain gun, seems to be the all around, it has decent Velocity speeds to hit other fighters...

XRM utilizes projectile size as a sort of "hidden stat" for weapons. Don't be fooled by the EBC's encyclopedia entry, its small projectile makes it less effective against fast-moving fighters despite its fire rate and projectile speed. It's most useful against large, slow targets like heavy fighters and corvettes.

well then whats best against fighters out of this list?

Impulse Ray emmitter
Energy Bolt chain gun
Electro magnetic repeater
Electro magnetic plasma cannon
Partical accelirator cannon
Mass driver
Ion Disruptor

[A5PECT]

Electro magnetic repeater

I don't have too much hands-on experience with EMRs, but watching Terran NPCs use them leads me to believe they're a good choice.

My favorite fighter-based anti-fighter weapons are PRGs and PBEs. However it looks like those aren't compatible with the shuttle.

[Seraph Kaoru]

Ah, ok. I'll probably just delete them then from my with some station delete cheat. The problem for me is they really ruin immersion -- like when I was flying around like "where the heck is a particle accelerator cannon" ..everywhere was out of stock. Then I found the weapons dealer with 50 and I was honestly very confused, wondering if I had cheat on xD

There isn't a way for an artificial life setting to bump up the price or something? I just know Hephaistos Corp. Station building service or the other "Yalamandis Corp. ship construction " at the top of scriptting right now balance convenience this way(ie, you pay more for your bucks.) The weapons dealer feels like I'm going to a sit down restaurant from France at McDonalds

Leaving aside your final statement (they have several McDonalds in Paris, and they are actually generally way nicer and more pleasant to eat at than American franchises, one of 'em once got rated as a four-star restaurant) Hephaistos and Yalamandis operate through menus. That's the funny thing about menus - the people making the scripts can set any prices they want, because they aren't dealing with in-game shops. The prices Hephaistos charges for stations are modified on the fly by Hephaistos because the Hephaistos menu is entirely script-generated, and Yalamandis works the same way, I believe.

You couldn't do ware creation this way, short of magically adding wares to the playership. Hephaistos can spawn stations in space, Yalamandis can spawn ships, but the closest a script-created shop could do (without creating an entirely new shopping interface that would be entirely menu-driven, and thus far harder to buy from or navigate) would be to plotz guns you buy down in the middle of a sector near you, after you pay for them.

The experience you describe ("flying all around looking for PACs and finding them out of stock everywhere") is one of the primary reasons those weapons dealers exist - because the game is Not Good at distribution of weapons. If you hadn't run into the Dark Space weapons dealer, you'd probably still be looking for PACs. How long do you really want to search to outfit ten fighters with really super-basic weaponry?

Arguments that 'there's no point to building complexes' are pretty silly, too. Here's the thing - if you are only ever going to have one Paranid, or Teladi, or Argon, or Terran ship, in the entirety of your game, yes, these gun-dealers obviate the need to build complexes. But if you're going to have more than one - if you're going to have ten, or more, and especially if you're going to have the numbers you will likely have (dozens or hundreds of a given shiptype, by late game) then it's ridiculous to say that a single dealer who barely carries enough stock to outfit a couple of large destroyers is going to remove the need for you to build complexes.

Sink a hundred and fifty million into a weapons-production complex, and you will never need to spend credits on the weapons it's producing again, in the entire game, more or less. (Especially if it's self-sufficient - that initial investment basically means you get free guns of that factory's type forever, from that point on.) Maintaining your own factories gives you a massive amount of extra elasticity in supply that the weapons dealers will never be able to match.

If the game ends for you after you get an M2, then I guess I could see why you'd think the weapons dealers are a "cheat", given that you may decide not to ever build any factories, but for folks who are building destroyer battlegroups with carrier escort and subsidiary frigates, corvettes and fighters, the weapons dealer just isn't going to cut it for outfitting their ships - nowhere close. They'll have to maintain their own, sufficient industry, or wait a few (or more) hours between outfitting every single ship.

Also, there are a number of weapons that you can't buy there, anyway. Kha'ak and Xenon weapons, for instance. The Weapons Dealers exist almost exclusively to give early-to-mid-game players the opportunity to buy small numbers of weapons (relatively - 80 PACs seems like a lot, until you realize that's only enough to fill the main weapons banks of 2 wings of M3s) without having to spend hours hunting down whatever equipment dock has been lucky enough to get in a shipment, lately.

Running from equipment dock to equipment dock and getting successively more frustrated until you find the one that actually stocks a PAC or two is not a sign of skill, or willpower, or determination. It's just a chore you had to do all the time in vanilla until you bought your first weapons complex, and you're still gonna have to do that eventually in XRM.

TL;DR: Hephaistos and Yalamandis operate exclusively through script-created menus, the weapons dealers draw from the exact same price-production-stock limits as everything else in the game and thus can't be changed without changing everything else, no matter how you change those values, and the only other solution is creating an entirely script-driven weapons buying interface, which would be clunky and unpleasant and take up a lot of time for little return. Additionally, weapons dealers aren't unbalanced because inevitably they will be unable to keep up with the demands of player industry and fleets, sooner rather than later.

[Sn4kemaster]

...maybe Energy bolt Chain gun, seems to be the all around, it has decent Velocity speeds to hit other fighters...

XRM utilizes projectile size as a sort of "hidden stat" for weapons. Don't be fooled by the EBC's encyclopedia entry, its small projectile makes it less effective against fast-moving fighters despite its fire rate and projectile speed. It's most useful against large, slow targets like heavy fighters and corvettes.

well then whats best against fighters out of this list?

Impulse Ray emmitter
Energy Bolt chain gun
Electro magnetic repeater
Electro magnetic plasma cannon
Partical accelirator cannon
Mass driver
Ion Disruptor

None of the above.....lol

PBE without a doubt....it's all in the velocity not the power ( but they have got a good bit of welly behind them anyway )

Of the above list EMR is best unless your targets are slow fighters the its the EMPC maybe!

[mr.WHO]

Hey Paul is this is the M1+ you have from expnobody?
http://bbs.deeptimes.org/data/attachmen ... mnj56z.jpg

This thing would be greate for USC Aran like ship.

[deca.death]

-- like when I was flying around like "where the heck is a particle accelerator cannon" ..everywhere was out of stock.

Yeah, "good old days" when I had to manually search 10 sectors to buy freaking ISR for my new vette and when 9 out of 10 EqD were totally empty. And you actually miss that /need that for immersion? :) I say thank God that's shi*t is over and good riddance! ;)

Blueprints only get added to the newest HQ. Use Saetan's Enhanced Equipment Docks or Lucikes OTAS Outpost II if you want docking/storage

Another script? nah, forget it then. It was too expensive for parking loft anyway : ) I'll just keep them lined up in space :)

[Jumee]

-- like when I was flying around like "where the heck is a particle accelerator cannon" ..everywhere was out of stock.

Yeah, "good old days" when I had to manually search 10 sectors to buy freaking ISR for my new vette and when 9 out of 10 EqD were totally empty. And you actually miss that /need that for immersion? I say thank God that's shi*t is over and good riddance!

this is what I'm going through right now in vanilla AP (man I can wait for that content patch to be done so that I can be done with vanilla and go to XRM again )

and I have to say that even through my very limited TC XRM experience (around 20 hours barely) I really liked weapons dealers, because right now I have a 1.5 billion complex + another 1 billion complex producing all the weaponry I need, and building them was a pain

now when I got to this late stage I ofcourse need that complex but early on when I just built that it was such a tedious and close to pointless process, and just the fact that the entire universe's production is not enough to outfit a destroyer is just silly

so definetely big for weapon dealers

[expnobody]

Hey Paul is this is the M1+ you have from expnobody?
http://bbs.deeptimes.org/data/attachmen ... mnj56z.jpg

This thing would be greate for USC Aran like ship.

no, it's the smaller one..

[Nick 031287]

...maybe Energy bolt Chain gun, seems to be the all around, it has decent Velocity speeds to hit other fighters...

XRM utilizes projectile size as a sort of "hidden stat" for weapons. Don't be fooled by the EBC's encyclopedia entry, its small projectile makes it less effective against fast-moving fighters despite its fire rate and projectile speed. It's most useful against large, slow targets like heavy fighters and corvettes.

well then whats best against fighters out of this list?

Impulse Ray emmitter
Energy Bolt chain gun
Electro magnetic repeater
Electro magnetic plasma cannon
Partical accelirator cannon
Mass driver
Ion Disruptor

None of the above.....lol

PBE without a doubt....it's all in the velocity not the power ( but they have got a good bit of welly behind them anyway )

Of the above list EMR is best unless your targets are slow fighters the its the EMPC maybe!

well Klohunt3r maybe right about the EM repeater. it has the same valocity as the PBE and more damage and longer range, but not as fast fire rate. but seems to do well as i obseved 2 xperimental fighters take on a swarm of kha'ak an wiped the floor with them

[Sn4kemaster]

Where u getting the figures from?

Dmg per second PBE is well above EMR in power???