Rebel Flagship Design

[meklozz]

Loading up the customflagship and then flagb seems to give me something that works just fine:



Which files are you meant to load anyway..? You could clean that up, both the files seem to hold the same stuff and all you really need for your final archive with the flagship are tiny data files with no images or sounds or any of that for anyone to have to keep re-downloading all the time or just to fill up space on the hard drive.

@edit
There were no drone images on the second phase and it crashed on the last one, though. And oxygen and I think medbay were merged. And this first phase seems really weak, btw.

[meklozz]

I didn't have CE isntalled at the moment indeed, that explains the drone images.. And after trying a couple more times, it often crashes on the first phase, too, not just the third, so it might be some random element making issues, which is odd, since I don't think there should be any.

And medbay and oxygen, not clone bay, are melded in phase two, I can see that in the files. (same room assigned)

I saw the augments for phase 1 now, so that makes it stronger by some. Not sure how clone bay interacts with multiple phases and all that, if you can't get a full crew kill that would be a good buff actually, but then again the AI shouldn't trigger in phase 1, so I dunno.

I'll keep trying, having so much stuff (and some duplicates, flagship blueprints in autoblueprints?) in those files is kinda making looking through it tedious, though, just hard to tell what's needed and what's redundant.

@edit
Removing boss_1.txt stops the crashes (I'm only loading FlagB.ftl, now), there must be something wrong with the layout, I'd suggest remaking it in superluminal, maybe some door links or whatever is a problem.

[meklozz]

There must be a point where the game checks if the crew is dead to know whether or not to put them on the next phase, and I have no idea whether suspended clones count. You should probably test it to make sure the balance is right (whichever way you go) if you aren't sure either.
Keeping the clonebay down is usually a big part of a boarding strategy, so I think this will only matter with some loadouts, if something uses ion bombs maybe or something similar. Either that or if the player won't even know about it until they start having clones come back.

Turning off oxygen is a CE exclusive and only happens through event on the third phase, always. Nothing to do with AI, as far as I know, or directly with boarding, though that is why it's there. If the crew abandons ship anyway, why leave oxygen.

[meklozz]

I can't say for sure. You should try editing the BOSS_AUTOMATED event (events_boss.xml) to limit enemy oxygen like CE's BOSS_TEXT_3 does, but I think that might only appear once at the time you kill the crew. So even if it works, you might run into something like: crew kill in phase 1 > oxygen off > phase 2 with o2 active > phase 3 with o2 active (unless still deactivated as in CE permanently).

[meklozz]

It's possible, I'm gonna be honest I tend to click through no choice events almost automatically by now. I never know how many moons there are.

@edit
And I don't really know what'll happen if you don't have a non-DLC version of the flagship, but if your weapons are in the blueprints.xml even if they use AE mechanics, they may still work with AE off (I thin ksome vanilla weapons got AE effects [stun?] and there's no problem). Yeah maybe someone else can tell for sure, but it shouldn't take you much more than just copy the blueprints and delete the _DLC part. But either way I'd just make it work first and worry about the rest once you know you can make a single flagship work properly, the same with all those extra weapon files and all that, just focus on one thing first so it's easier to fix any problems without having to go through everything, then add more.

[meklozz]

It crashes on start of the fight on my save, too. I might go through a fast game later, would I need to use CE with it or any particular difficulty?

Aside from that, though, flagships from the flagship randomizer work just fine after loading a save, and it stil seems to be the same txt file causing issues, moving it to randomFlagship causes it to crash, moving another txt to your mod makes it work (with a wrong layout). I don't know what it could be.

[meklozz]

The txt is in there, and it should be, it's where the layout lives. It's just that something must be off about it compared to the randomflagship flagships or something.. Did you have any success with any other flagship layouts?

[meklozz]

Ok, so I played around with it a bit more, and adding just one room to every flagship phase let me play through the whole thing from my save without problems. Removing rooms from randomflagship files also made the game crash, so I think this is the culprit. Not sure the exact number needed for each phase, but like I said, just one room that couldn't even be accessed did it.

That also brings it to 19, which I believe is the number of rooms on non-hard flagship for vanilla.

I can't say for sure if this was only a problem for me because I didn't start a new save, or a bigger limitation, but you should check if that solves any other issues you have.

Also, while I said the first phase was weak-ish, the third phase? What the..? Cloak and a regenerating zoltan shield are a crazy combination, weapons aren't that scary admittedly, but still quickly regenerating flak and that annoying beam made my test ship have a work out and finish with all of 1 hull left.

You might want to ask if the randomflagship creators had any issues with this, or whatever. Also, I'm still playing without CE, so not sure about your issue with crash on jump away, didn't happen to me.

[Sleeper Service]

I think I generally increased and lowere the room count without problems. I generally did not touch the rooms that the flagship used for systems though, I resized and moved them for certain layouts but other than that I left them intact, so i didn't had to change room numbers for system rooms in the blueprint. But if adding a room fixes things then there might be some problem with room linken and that stuff. Does superluminal recalculates links when adding new rooms? Gidoza have you tried the automated room linking function in Superluminal? Does that fix things?

[meklozz]

I have tried redoing the [door, right?] links, did not help. Even tried creating the same layout from scratch (yeah, these things irk me), still issues. At a point, I also just took the rooms of one of the random flagship flagships and threw them around the place a bit so the links must have been terrible and still no crashes.

Curious what you mean by you resizing and moving the rooms, I thought random flagship had some sort of a generator? That's why I was curious, figured there must be some rules you figured out and fed into it, but from what you say I guess it just randomizes the weapons and has some amount of set layouts?

Btw, were the forum and the site down for a ~day for everyone?