[MOD/SHIP] F5 Mercury Types A, B, & C w/assorted weapons v0.85

[WhiteWeasel]

Work resumed as of Feburary 16, 2017!

My ship is the F5 Mercury from one of my favorite indie games Ring Runner. The Mercury was was the king of mobility, essentially the Z-fighter of star ships. It was a bit fragile, but can hit hard and fast, and retreat into distance in the blink of an eye. To reflect these traits I've taken the time and effort to make them into FTL ships! What makes these ships different from most other (even modded) FTL ships is the use of the two weapons slots configuration. The weapons bays on the Mercury were small, but to make up for that it was equpped with a unique fixed weapon slot. In FTL this translates into the form of artillery. To play up the fragile speedster role the F5 filled, I have changed the system blueprints of shields to max out at 6 instead of 8 and reduced the price of engines (380 scrap to fully upgrade, now only takes 255). The two weapons bays will provide a unique challenge as your conventional weapons don't really scale that much as you progress. So don't neglect your artillery since that's where a lot of your firepower comes from. The fact you can't just slap any piece of junk in your third weapons slot to be useful, and anything you do find has to compete for your current slots, your starting weapons will be a bit better than average to make up for the lack of scalability. Also, none of these ships do mind control or teleportation, as any extra slots they take need defensive capabilities.

All three ships are functional and playable, all they need is a mini icon to be finished. They might need more balance tweaking. This mod has my weapons pack bundled into it. Though a bit out of date, you can look at the page of my weapon pack if you want some info about the weapons,
Get the ship set (With combined modpack) here! Currently at Version 0.85

To do list
-Make mini icons
-Balance refinement?

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F5 Mercury
Crew: Human, Engi, Zoltan.
Augments: Shield Charge Booster, FTL Recharge Booster.

Weapons: Heavy Repeating photocaster - fires more shots than an equivalent power burst laser, but it's very inaccurate. And a longbow missile launcher. The missile itself is weak with only one damage, but has a decent chance of inflicting side effects with it's 3/10 chance of fire/breach/stun and sports a short cooldown and will pack a decent punch until you find an upgrade.

Artillery: The Titan beam is your bread and butter, the beam ignores shields like the fed cruiser, but it's beam twice as strong, in addition to having a decent breach chance. The beams downside is that it travels slower than the fed beam and is not even half as long (still longer than a pike beam though). This will more often than not be your killing blow when things get hairy.

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F5R Prototype
Crew: Slug, Engi, Zoltan.
Augments: Adv. Scanners, Drone Recovery Arm

Weapons: Gemini Seeker Missiles - Advanced missiles that bypass MK I defense drones and inflict 2 normal and 2 system damage, (4 damage total an hit system) and will stun any crew inside. Essential for picking off weapons when you are vulnerable and shields for when you go on the offensive. Stun Beam II - A shield bypassing beam that stuns enemey crew. No damage, but it's FAR from harmless. It's shorter cooldown than the regular (obtainable versions) make it really good a stunlocking crew in fires/vacuums, halting repairs, or keeping the enemy FTL from charging if you target the helm.

Drones: This ship has the unique 4 slot drone bay to make up for the lack of direct killing power of the Gemini Artillery beam. Shield Overcharger MK II - A one power variant because the three power version is useless. Combat Drone MK I - This is your main source of damage as your other weapons are primarily disablers. Thanks to your recovery arm, you can use drones liberally.

Artillery: Gemini Artillery Beam - A short laser beam that does 3 system damage and stuns enemy crew inside. However it is NOT shield-piercing This Artillery's cooldown is only 20 seconds. So it's "weak" effect offset by it being a much more spammy artillery.

The Spray & Pray

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The Spray & Pray
Crew: Lanius, 2 Engi

Augments: Weapon Pre-Igniter - This ship was sorta of a joke of mine. What if I made the Simo-H but with the weapon Pre-igniter instead of that stupid shield drone? I think starting with the best augment in the game is a much more fair trade off for starting with no shields or cloak.

Weapons: Longbow Salvo missiles - Fires four 1 damage missiles across an area, good since it is not stopped by shields. Repeating Photocaster MK I - Three projectiles in an area, but is hard to target specific rooms with.

Artillery:This ship NEEDS to hit hard and fast, and starts with a whopping level 3 artillery!

Changelog:

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.70
-Added three ship classes, changed stun beam color from blue to yellow to be in line with vanilla stun weapons.
.80
-Added gibs for the three ships.
.81
-Added sprite for the Starfighter B's gemini missile launcher
.85
-Corrected weapons text and typos.
-Adjusted mount points for ships and sprite offsets for photocasters and railguns.
-Changed Gemini beam drone sprites to be more in line with vanilla FTL colors.
-All mercury layouts now support: Clonebays, Teleporters, and Hacking.
-Due to room constraints. Only the Mercury A supports mind control.
-All mercury layouts start with level 2 drones upon acquiring drone support.
-Corrected Titan beam artillery having hullbust and system damage when it was not supposed to.

[R4V3-0N]

glow for the pilot console on the first image is a bit not properly aligned (Superluminal 2 has a option to give a zoom in window pop up to help with stuff like this.

Ship looks nice and may play it soon. However the rooms do stick out of the ship rather often but it's a problem with most small custom ship designs.

[NarnKar]

What's the artillery?

[WhiteWeasel]

What's the artillery?

They are in the code bars! I put them with the ship descriptions in the code bar to save space!

[NarnKar]

They are in the code bars! I put them with the ship descriptions in the code bar to save space!

I only see lines that say Artillery - Level 1. My question was more "what is the artillery weapon, is it the artillery beam"? Or did you make a custom artillery weapon?

[stylesrj]

Artillery: Erasmus Artillery is beam that fires a no damage, but system crippling beam that deals two system damage and two ion damage to any system it hits, it also has a high chance of stun. The beam ignores shields and travels across the ship quickly like it's non Ionizing counterpart, the gemini drone beam. The beam is still in the experimental stage, as of now I won't give it any drawbacks until I play test it a bit as it's lack of killing power is already prevalent. (Also remember that the F5's must have better than average artillery to make up for the small weapons bay)

As anything with Shield Piercing goes and ion damage, the shields will take 2 points of ion damage, followed by the beam ionising the system(s) involved (and if it hits shields, another two bars!) then finally the shields take another two points of ion damage.

So be careful I suppose? Because ion beams can be ridiculously overpowered at high levels, crippling enemy ships before they can do pretty much anything (especially when combined with Level 3 Cloak)

[WhiteWeasel]

Artillery: Erasmus Artillery is beam that fires a no damage, but system crippling beam that deals two system damage and two ion damage to any system it hits, it also has a high chance of stun. The beam ignores shields and travels across the ship quickly like it's non Ionizing counterpart, the gemini drone beam. The beam is still in the experimental stage, as of now I won't give it any drawbacks until I play test it a bit as it's lack of killing power is already prevalent. (Also remember that the F5's must have better than average artillery to make up for the small weapons bay)

As anything with Shield Piercing goes and ion damage, the shields will take 2 points of ion damage, followed by the beam ionising the system(s) involved (and if it hits shields, another two bars!) then finally the shields take another two points of ion damage.

So be careful I suppose? Because ion beams can be ridiculously overpowered at high levels, crippling enemy ships before they can do pretty much anything (especially when combined with Level 3 Cloak)

I was unaware that ion weapons even with <sp>5 still hit shields. In that case I might halve the damage so it only does one sys, one Ion

EDIT: I might drop the ion damage completely, because wow it makes the damage reapply for every room it hits. The most dangerous enemy in the game was single-handedly incapacitated with one beam.

[stylesrj]

Yeah, there was an Ion Beam cruiser a while back before AE and that was so overpowered.

You could always remove the Shield Piercing though so it just strips shields.

[WhiteWeasel]

Now I have a new loadout concept for the F5R Prototype:
Gemini Artillery - Essentially an Erasmus beam stripped of the ion damage, so sp5 two system damage beam.
Gemini Seeker Missiles - Two system damage and one Ion damage for two power and 16 cooldown.
Mercurial Beam - Extremely short beam that deals one damage and has a whopping 20 second cooldown. The upside is that the beam can chain three times and is stronger than a glaive beam by the fourth shot!

This ships downside is that it's Artillery and and secondary weapons are pure disablers and it's only damaging weapon is very slow burning.

[R4V3-0N]

yea... Ion + beam = instant ionisation of shields (including super?) in 1 hit, which may mean a uber long reload of a 1 pixel length (aka can only hit 1 room) ion beam with long reload could be the most balanced you can go as well as very high power.

The factor of ion damage doesn't matter to much, rather it's 1 or 5 it has the same effect on the shields but it is the effect on the systems that matter, change to how 'good' you want it to be I guess.