[MOD][COMATOSE] Open Artillery v0.32

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Russian Rockman
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby Russian Rockman » Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:09 pm

RAD-82 wrote:
Russian Rockman wrote:CLOAKED MISSILES!!! Like the ones in the Captain's Edition, which can't be shot down by anything.

Sorry for the off-topic, but how is this even possible? I can't see any way to prevent Defense II drones from firing at everything.


You're right. I really meant everything BUT Defense II Drones since I wasn't thinking about them at the time. I was just thinking about making them exactly like the Captain's Edition ones.

However, I did hear from slowy that you might be able to use the dronetargetable<> tag to make even lasers uninterceptible now. So I'll have to try that at some point.

I'll take a look at what the problem is with the new version dmi3 as soon as I get a chance.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby Russian Rockman » Sat Apr 26, 2014 10:06 pm

I figured out what the issue was with crashing. It was just a duplicate closing tag in kestrel.xml.

I'll probably add a few things and then upload the new version. I added a custom bomb image for the Slug artillery using a recolored version of one of Sleeper's unused bombs. I also imported the Stealth missiles from CE to use on the Stealth Cruiser.

I wasn't able to get the Stealth Missiles to be completely ininterceptable. :( Right now the Stealth Artillery fires 3 cloaked missiles that do 1 damage each. They don't have any other special attributes except that they cannot be intercepted by LVL 1 Defense Drones. Maybe it could be 4, but because it doesn't cost missiles I thought 3 would be more balanced. The Ifrit in CR costs 100 at a store and fires 4 cloaked missiles, but costs missiles to use.

I might redo a few of the room images to make the colors on them more distinct. Based on my recent discovery that the room images become slightly transparent in game so they are harder to see.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby RAD-82 » Sat Apr 26, 2014 10:27 pm

dmi3 wrote:I'm uploading it on the off chance that someone else can figure out the problem and fix it.


I knew I kept forgetting to do something... :|
edit: Ninja'd; guess that's what I get for not looking at it sooner.

I've finally looked at it and here is what I see:
  • kestral.xml has </weaponMounts> twice; since there is nothing to close, I don't know if this is causing a problem.
  • Actually, I think that might be the problem, since the only other thing I can see at a quick glance is the <shots> on ARTILLERY_GENERIC, which wouldn't crash the game until it tried to shoot at a ship that has fewer rooms than the number shots the weapon has. There is a <shots>6</shots> and a <shots>5</shots> on this weapon. I'm pretty sure the game overwrites the 6 shots with 5, but even at 5, CE has auto-ships that use 4 rooms, so the game can't handle the lack of a target for the 5th shot. (At least pre-AE it couldn't, I assume it still can't.) I think this could be changed from a LASER weapon to a BURST weapon. While each projectile uses a different target, the game doesn't have a problem re-using a target when all rooms have been targeted. However, BURST artillery can only do one shot, so all projectiles would occur at once, rather than individually.
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Russian Rockman
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby Russian Rockman » Sat Apr 26, 2014 10:51 pm

RAD-82 wrote:
dmi3 wrote:I'm uploading it on the off chance that someone else can figure out the problem and fix it.


I knew I kept forgetting to do something... :|
edit: Ninja'd; guess that's what I get for not looking at it sooner.

I've finally looked at it and here is what I see:
  • kestral.xml has </weaponMounts> twice; since there is nothing to close, I don't know if this is causing a problem.
  • Actually, I think that might be the problem, since the only other thing I can see at a quick glance is the <shots> on ARTILLERY_GENERIC, which wouldn't crash the game until it tried to shoot at a ship that has fewer rooms than the number shots the weapon has. There is a <shots>6</shots> and a <shots>5</shots> on this weapon. I'm pretty sure the game overwrites the 6 shots with 5, but even at 5, CE has auto-ships that use 4 rooms, so the game can't handle the lack of a target for the 5th shot. (At least pre-AE it couldn't, I assume it still can't.) I think this could be changed from a LASER weapon to a BURST weapon. While each projectile uses a different target, the game doesn't have a problem re-using a target when all rooms have been targeted. However, BURST artillery can only do one shot, so all projectiles would occur at once, rather than individually.


DID YOU DO THIS SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH ME DOING IT? Cuz I found the crash cause yesterday... :roll: It seems like you may have identified another crash cause with the 6 shot laser though so nice work. I'll have to test that some more, but if 6 shots does crash the game then changing it to a BURST artillery is the best solution. Actually that might be a really good idea if just for balance purposes because the shots will miss more so maybe we'll just do that anyway. ;). I'd like to use a custom sound that uses the boss's artillery sound from the 3rd stage if that's what we do.


Not to make you overwhelmed dmi3, but... I've thought about a plan for where this mod can go after we get just the player ship artillery working.
  • Step 1: Get all player artillery working
  • Testing to balance all player artillery
  • Apply a blue options for all artillery weapons to vanilla events
  • Extend artillery to enemy ships by creating some alternate ship layouts
  • Apply blue options for all artillery weapons to events in mods like CE
  • Extend artillery to enemy ships in other mods like the Captain's Edition

So were still on step 1... But if we end up get this working with enemy ships it will add a very interesting dynamic to the game I think.


Also, one thing I would really like to have included... EVENTUALLY is to have the Artillery double as an indicator for the faction ships in CE. So if you want to sell Mantis Pheromones for example and still be able to pirate people without consequence, you can still do that if you have the artillery system.
Last edited by Russian Rockman on Sun Apr 27, 2014 10:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby Russian Rockman » Sun Apr 27, 2014 9:12 am

I was using the artillery again before I upload the next version to test how they work again. Here are some of my observations, comments, and suggestions about them so far. They seem to be balanced pretty well actually.

At a cost of 135 you'll really have to save up to get the artillery and so you won't be able to rely on it completely, however it is still a very good option and very useful late game, in case you don't come across any stores with weapons for example. :)
  • The Generic Artillery will probably have to be changed to "Burst", it wont look as cool :( , but it is necessary because otherwise it will crash the game when used against any ships that don't have 6+ rooms. Maybe it will balance it a bit since it will have a slightly higher chance to miss with it's 6 lasers... CE has ships with only 3 rooms, which is a bit problematic, but can be worked around.
  • I got the Stealth Artillery working well by importing the stealth missiles from CE. I'm not sure if it should have 3 or 4 missiles though. They cant really be shot down so 3 missiles should be fine but they also will have to be "Burst" and therefore they'll have a slightly higher chance of missing so they should probably be 4.
  • The Mantis Artillery can't heal your own crew, I tested it and apparently negative personnel damage only works on bombs. :( So instead it should probably cause a bit of personnel damage instead. This is more dangerous for your crew if they are on the enemy ship, but like you said they are supposed to fire it "before" boarding, also mantises are fast and if you have a level 3 Teleporter you can pull them out and back in again. For that reason I think the Stun time should also be 10 seconds, and I think system damage should only be 1 to make it different from other weapons. I also changed the sound of the firing and hit to MantisSpit and Splat. ;)
  • The Slug Artillery should have an equal chance of both fire and breach itching 6/6, just so you never know exactly what it's going to do. I have attempted to make an orangish Slug bomb using an unused CE model. I looks pretty good.... Also, I'm not sure how the Slug "Cluster Bomb" will work on ships with only 3 rooms in CE. I feel like reducing the number of shots would make it not as useful, but then again it's pretty powerful... I just want it to be worth it's 135 scrap. We'll see... Either way, I think it should have a stunChance too, maybe if it also kept it's light system damage and personnel damage it could still be a good crew killing weapon with only 3 shots?...
  • The Engi artillery I think should have 2 ion damage each so that the effect lasts at least 10 seconds, that's half the time of the maximum cooldown. I don't want it to be too powerful against shields though... So maybe instead it could just have a few more shots and/or a smaller AOE? This requires additional testing. Either way though I changed all the launch and hit sounds to the Lightning storm sounds, it's very cool. ;)
  • The Zoltan Energized Beam is great for taking out multiple systems, but it's 3 damage just seems to be too much. It takes waaay too long for the enemy crew to repair everything. Ideally they should be able to get everything up and running again right before the next strike. Therefore, I think it should be 2 system damage rather than 3, and/or it should be a bit shorter, the slight fire chance was a nice touch also btw. :)
  • I understand why the Lanius artillery has a slightly lower breach chance than the Rock Artillery has fire chance. It's a bit strange to have it guarantee a Breach in every room it hits. Then again though, I think it is a bit unreliable as sometimes I've had it do absolutely nothing. At least the fire on the Rock ship can spread, breaches only affect one room and since the beam sometimes only hits one tile in specific rooms on specific ships it can take ages to cause a breach in a specific room. So basically what I'm saying is maybe the Lanius artillery could get a higher, but maybe not completely guaranteed, breach chance and just be slightly shorter to compensate.
  • Finally, an idea for the Crystal Artillery!!! It should have about 3-4? (1-2 shield piercing) Crystal projectiles, a little less than the laser artillery because of the shield piercing. Each shot should do one standard damage, Lockdown a room, and have a slight chance of breach, as well as some stun. (-1 personnel damage though just to prevent it from hurting your crew, it won't actually heal them.) that way it's just a bit less frustrating and you can use it when your Crystal boarders are actually on the ship. Otherwise the Lockdown could be a hindrance rather than a help.
  • And one more thing... I'm not sure how Chaining (or Charging) works for the artillery weapons. I'm assuming it doesn't work right, BUT it is possible... And if that is the case then that means that it could be very useful for balancing certain artillery with other, as it would basically give the weapon a longer recharge time without breaking the UI.

EDIT: Also, some things I thought I would mention to you.

I think all mod-append tags should be replaced with mod-overwrite. This makes it simpler to replace the Fed artillery name and also makes this mod compatible with other mods that may add artillery in the future.

Also, to make the mod compatible with mods like sMPK, which edits every player ship's .xml file, I would like to use mod: tags in there as well just to add a 5th weapon mount without editing anything else. (FANTASTIC JOB IMPLEMENTING THOSE BY THE WAY dmi3!!). I talked to Vhati about how to do this and he said it would be possible , but only after he releases SMM 1.5, which will be "soon"(TM) :roll: . So if we do that this mod will require SMM 1.5 to be installed.

Ok, now that should definitely be everything that was on my mind...
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby dmi3 » Thu May 08, 2014 4:11 pm

I'm back. Thanks to you two for finding that problem with kestral.xml. I'll fix that and some other things (never thought about the 6 shot problem) and put up a new build soon.
Russian Rockman wrote:I'll probably add a few things and then upload the new version. I added a custom bomb image for the Slug artillery using a recolored version of one of Sleeper's unused bombs. I also imported the Stealth missiles from CE to use on the Stealth Cruiser.

Cool. I'll incorporate those changes as soon as you're ready.
  • The Generic Artillery will probably have to be changed to "Burst", it wont look as cool :( , but it is necessary because otherwise it will crash the game when used against any ships that don't have 6+ rooms. Maybe it will balance it a bit since it will have a slightly higher chance to miss with it's 6 lasers... CE has ships with only 3 rooms, which is a bit problematic, but can be worked around.
Alright. This will be in the next version.
  • I got the Stealth Artillery working well by importing the stealth missiles from CE. I'm not sure if it should have 3 or 4 missiles though. They cant really be shot down so 3 missiles should be fine but they also will have to be "Burst" and therefore they'll have a slightly higher chance of missing so they should probably be 4.

Seems like a good idea. One solution could be 3 missiles with a very small burst radius, so that they won't miss. The problem there is that you would only hit 1 room.
  • The Mantis Artillery can't heal your own crew, I tested it and apparently negative personnel damage only works on bombs. :( So instead it should probably cause a bit of personnel damage instead. This is more dangerous for your crew if they are on the enemy ship, but like you said they are supposed to fire it "before" boarding, also mantises are fast and if you have a level 3 Teleporter you can pull them out and back in again. For that reason I think the Stun time should also be 10 seconds, and I think system damage should only be 1 to make it different from other weapons. I also changed the sound of the firing and hit to MantisSpit and Splat. ;)
The lack of healing is a shame, but I'd rather not have any risk of killing your own dudes. I've actually noticed that, if your artillery has one more bar than teleporter, it has double the cooldown. This means that the best strategy with Mantis Artillery is to teleport your crew over immediately, turn on the artillery, teleport them back as soon as the teleporter charges, let the artillery fire, and then send in the mantises one more time to finish them off. I'd also like to get unique projectile graphics, since the laser doesn't make much sense.
  • The Slug Artillery should have an equal chance of both fire and breach itching 6/6, just so you never know exactly what it's going to do. I have attempted to make an orangish Slug bomb using an unused CE model. I looks pretty good.... Also, I'm not sure how the Slug "Cluster Bomb" will work on ships with only 3 rooms in CE. I feel like reducing the number of shots would make it not as useful, but then again it's pretty powerful... I just want it to be worth it's 135 scrap. We'll see... Either way, I think it should have a stunChance too, maybe if it also kept it's light system damage and personnel damage it could still be a good crew killing weapon with only 3 shots?...
3 shots are problematic because you have a high chance of completely missing the crew. Then again, making it too good against crew makes boarding riskier. Maybe I'll emphasize the breaching, fire, and stun, to make it more of a jack of all trades.
  • The Engi artillery I think should have 2 ion damage each so that the effect lasts at least 10 seconds, that's half the time of the maximum cooldown. I don't want it to be too powerful against shields though... So maybe instead it could just have a few more shots and/or a smaller AOE? This requires additional testing. Either way though I changed all the launch and hit sounds to the Lightning storm sounds, it's very cool. ;)
The original idea for that one was that it would take down shields without being very effective against systems (because of the big AOE). It might be worth tweaking, though.
  • The Zoltan Energized Beam is great for taking out multiple systems, but it's 3 damage just seems to be too much. It takes waaay too long for the enemy crew to repair everything. Ideally they should be able to get everything up and running again right before the next strike. Therefore, I think it should be 2 system damage rather than 3, and/or it should be a bit shorter, the slight fire chance was a nice touch also btw. :)

2 system damage seems fair. As much as I'd like to take credit for the fire chance, I just forgot to remove it when I copied the Vindicator's blueprint. Maybe that should be increased to 2 or 3.
  • I understand why the Lanius artillery has a slightly lower breach chance than the Rock Artillery has fire chance. It's a bit strange to have it guarantee a Breach in every room it hits. Then again though, I think it is a bit unreliable as sometimes I've had it do absolutely nothing. At least the fire on the Rock ship can spread, breaches only affect one room and since the beam sometimes only hits one tile in specific rooms on specific ships it can take ages to cause a breach in a specific room. So basically what I'm saying is maybe the Lanius artillery could get a higher, but maybe not completely guaranteed, breach chance and just be slightly shorter to compensate.

I was worried about Lanius artillery being overpowered, but if it's been failing to do anything it should probably be buffed.
  • Finally, an idea for the Crystal Artillery!!! It should have about 3-4? (1-2 shield piercing) Crystal projectiles, a little less than the laser artillery because of the shield piercing. Each shot should do one standard damage, Lockdown a room, and have a slight chance of breach, as well as some stun. (-1 personnel damage though just to prevent it from hurting your crew, it won't actually heal them.) that way it's just a bit less frustrating and you can use it when your Crystal boarders are actually on the ship. Otherwise the Lockdown could be a hindrance rather than a help.

Sounds fine to me.
  • And one more thing... I'm not sure how Chaining (or Charging) works for the artillery weapons. I'm assuming it doesn't work right, BUT it is possible... And if that is the case then that means that it could be very useful for balancing certain artillery with other, as it would basically give the weapon a longer recharge time without breaking the UI.

I came up with an idea for the UI. We could change the bar to a graduated one, so some weapons would shoot at different levels than others. The upgrade list would be the same for all, though.
I think all mod-append tags should be replaced with mod-overwrite. This makes it simpler to replace the Fed artillery name and also makes this mod compatible with other mods that may add artillery in the future.

Also, to make the mod compatible with mods like sMPK, which edits every player ship's .xml file, I would like to use mod: tags in there as well just to add a 5th weapon mount without editing anything else. (FANTASTIC JOB IMPLEMENTING THOSE BY THE WAY dmi3!!). I talked to Vhati about how to do this and he said it would be possible , but only after he releases SMM 1.5, which will be "soon"(TM) :roll: . So if we do that this mod will require SMM 1.5 to be installed.

I still don't know that much about SMM, but it's worth a try. I'll look into this.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby RAD-82 » Thu May 08, 2014 4:31 pm

I think there is more I could've replied to, but I'm only going to mention this one thing.

I got the Stealth Artillery working well by importing the stealth missiles from CE. I'm not sure if it should have 3 or 4 missiles though. They cant really be shot down so 3 missiles should be fine but they also will have to be "Burst" and therefore they'll have a slightly higher chance of missing so they should probably be 4.

Seems like a good idea. One solution could be 3 missiles with a very small burst radius, so that they won't miss. The problem there is that you would only hit 1 room.


Multiple projectiles from BURST artillery actually use different rooms for each projectile, so it would still hit 3 or 4 different rooms.

I suppose a radius of <=17 is required to make it work like a normal shot (evaded purely through dodge chance), and you get to see what rooms are actually targeted by a red dot.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby Russian Rockman » Thu May 08, 2014 6:12 pm

RAD-82 wrote:Multiple projectiles from BURST artillery actually use different rooms for each projectile, so it would still hit 3 or 4 different rooms.

I suppose a radius of <=17 is required to make it work like a normal shot (evaded purely through dodge chance), and you get to see what rooms are actually targeted by a red dot.


BURST projectiles won't crash the game though when used against ships with 3-4 or less rooms right? :|
They don't seem to actually "target" different rooms even when used as artillery. They can hit different rooms, but I thought they acted more like 1 shot weapons... Either way if the cloaked missiles had only 3 shots they could be fired normally, otherwise they'd have to be BURST.

dmi3 wrote:The lack of healing is a shame, but I'd rather not have any risk of killing your own dudes. I've actually noticed that, if your artillery has one more bar than teleporter, it has double the cooldown. This means that the best strategy with Mantis Artillery is to teleport your crew over immediately, turn on the artillery, teleport them back as soon as the teleporter charges, let the artillery fire, and then send in the mantises one more time to finish them off. I'd also like to get unique projectile graphics, since the laser doesn't make much sense.


Well my logic was that if you accidentally stun your own crew and the entire enemy crew isn't stunned then your crew will end up taking more damage than if everyone just took straight damage. Ideally you wouldn't want your mantises on board when the artillery hits. I guess if you're fighting in a 1x2 room with 2v2 people no one else can fit in there and so then you'll be safe? That's fine I guess. Either way the best strategy would probably be to teleport in and if you don't beat the enemies by then pull your guys back, let the artillery fire, and teleport back. So at least it should have 10 seconds of stun. Also, I suppose you could make the mantis artillery into missiles or bombs. Bombs conflicts with the slugs a little bit though so maybe corrosive mico-missiles with a breach chance?

3 shots are problematic because you have a high chance of completely missing the crew. Then again, making it too good against crew makes boarding riskier. Maybe I'll emphasize the breaching, fire, and stun, to make it more of a jack of all trades.


4 shots will only crash the game on certain CE auto-ships, the bombs are kind of worthless against those ships anyway, but I still don't like the idea of it being able to crash the game. I did notice that with a fully upgraded Slug Artillery you can kill the enemy crew every time if you're patient enough. I don't really want it to be able to kill the enemy crew with just the artillery anyway. My idea for this weapon was that it should be a big hindrance and keep the enemy crew "occupied". Even with just 1-2 system damage with fire, stun and breach it will take the enemy crew a while to fix all those problems. Even if only 1 bomb hits it could be annoying.

dmi3 wrote:The original idea for that one was that it would take down shields without being very effective against systems (because of the big AOE). It might be worth tweaking, though.


The problem is that if the enemy has less than 4 shields the effect will not last as long. Especially if you're using drones. At 10 ion damage they would stay down for 20 seconds if the enemy has at least 2 shields. In that case though it might be OP... So maybe you could keep it at 1 ion damage/5 seconds each and give it a few more shots... If RAD-82 is right about the shots all targeting different rooms maybe you could give it a smaller radius as well, so that it's a little more effective against systems when the enemy happens to have less shields. This artillery is actually one of my favorites because it isn't "lethal" on its own but because others are I feel like it should have a slight boost.

dmi3 wrote:I was worried about Lanius artillery being overpowered, but if it's been failing to do anything it should probably be buffed.

Well I understand why you gave it a lower probability than the Rock one. Because otherwise it creates just a straight line of breaches. :lol: But yeah, sometimes there are rooms that the enemy crew will hide out in when the rest of the ship has been drained of oxygen and then the artillery sometimes has to hit the room one or 3 times before creating a breach. This is another one that can really be overpowered for crew killing reasons. Perhaps giving it just a 3-5 tile range and a higher breach chance would make it more reliable for causing breaches in the places it hits, but not necessarily better. For me at least, if I have the ability to kill the enemy crew I will always do it even if it takes three times as long... I just like killing people... :twisted: so I kind of feel like this artillery, at least when it is not at max power yet, should mostly be used for creating breaches and making it very difficult for crew to repair things and keeping them occupied.

dmi3 wrote:I came up with an idea for the UI. We could change the bar to a graduated one, so some weapons would shoot at different levels than others. The upgrade list would be the same for all, though.

I think we've been doing pretty well so far with balancing the artillery at 40 seconds each, but this is a good idea. It wouldn't be hard to do that if we give it 5 second intervals, and we could make the bar the same length at all levels maybe... Actually I just found out it is possible to change the descriptions of the artillery upgrade in the misc.xml so instead of saying 50-40-30 seconds it could say %125-100-75 charge time. The descriptions of the weapons could have the base charge times in them!!! This could be good for things like the mantis artillery, which takes a really long time to charge up and is really only good for stunning crew before boarding, or for increasing the time of more powerful weapons like the laser artillery. It could also balance the Lanius and Rock beams, and allow the Stealth cruiser to fire a larger wave of missiles without being broken. It makes balancing much easier. :D

dmi3 wrote:I still don't know that much about SMM, but it's worth a try. I'll look into this.

You don't need to do anything. I already talked to Vhati and he told me exactly how to do it. We just need to wait until SMM 1.5 for it to work. (Some bug). In fact a lot of the stuff I was talking about up above I already changed in the same format as last time. I'll send you that version tonight when I have some time. That should make your job a lot easier. I wanted to hear your opinions on weapon tweaks before actually changing anything so thanks for that. I might even whip up a graduated artillery timer real quick. ;)
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.2

Postby dmi3 » Thu May 08, 2014 9:52 pm

New version is working. I fixed the crashing, rebalanced some of the weapons, and added crystal artillery. One interesting thing: I changed the Generic Artillery to BURST, but forgot to set a radius. It seems like it's defaulting to 0 and hitting in the center of six random rooms, but I need to test some more.
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Re: [MOD][WIP] Open Artillery v0.32

Postby Russian Rockman » Sat May 10, 2014 3:13 pm

Hey dmi, I went through all the files in the new version and made a few small changes, fixed a few problems. There were a few ships that had the artillery overlapping other systems, the crystal ship was using the laser artillery, and other things like that all of which I can't remember right now.

Anyway, I fixed every noticeable problem and redid all of the interior images since I wasn't happy with some of them. Also, I added in the Stealth Artillery and the Slug Bomb animation. Finally, I spent Several hours testing each ship's artillery and seeing how they work. Before I upload the new version though I just need your opinion on a few more things, mostly to do with some final balancing. Just tell me what you think and I'll add in some final tweaks then I'll upload it here.

After this next version is uploaded you should finally be able to upload this to "Working Mods". Yeah!!! :D :D All artilleries are finished so there's nothing left to do, maybe you'll need to make a few more changes in the future, but it's pretty much done and "working". Thanks again for starting this and constantly updating it!

Anyway, please give me your opinion on the following so I can just make a few more tweaks. I'll test the mod again and see how everything works before uploading the next version.

SORRY FOR ANOTHER WALL OF TEXT, THERES JUST SO MUCH TO COVER. :roll:
  • Generic Artillery: I can confirm that the 0 radius thing you found does work ;) , the artillery will always hit the center of random rooms and will not miss more than normal. I checked the Fed C Flak Artillery and it has a radius of 35, so that is why it does not miss very often. While this can be useful, I actually think that having a higher chance of missing would balance the artillery since it has 6 shots. So maybe it should have a radius between 35-70 and/or only 5 shots. What do you think? Also, keep in mind that the artillery fires "heavy" lasers with a higher fire and breach chance than normal lasers, which also makes it even more powerful.

  • Engi Artillery: With the discovery that the radius applies to each room individually when using Burst Artillery, the radius for the Engi ship should probably be decreased to something like 70, that way it still won't be as good against systems, but right now it often even misses the shields entirely. :lol:

  • Mantis Artillery: Same as the Engi Ship, I think the Mantis Artillery should have a radius of 35, with this tweak it should hit pretty much every room on the ship, making it extremely useful for boarding preperation. :) I do not think the weapon should do system damage though because it has sooo many projectiles and such a large range. A very slight breach chance is fine though. What do you think? Also should I change the projectiles to tiny "scatter" missiles? I think the artillery should be like CE's flashbang missiles, just with added Mantis flavor.

  • Slug Artillery: After playing with this the 3 shots is not a problem at all, in fact it feels like the weapon got stronger! :lol: I was generally able to kill the enemy's crew every time with a level 2 artillery. It is much more effective than the Zoltan artillery because the enemy crew has to deal with the fire and breaches before they can repair their systems. I think the weapon should do only 1 system damage to keep the Zoltan Artillery more unique. Perhaps the Breach/Fire chance should be changed to 5/4 also so that it has a high chance of causing a hazard, but still not a %100 chance. I also added in a slight stun chance.

  • Zoltan Artillery: 2 system damage is a lot better than 3 system damage each! But now the beam is a bit more on the underpowered side than the overpowered side. To find the middle ground a had an idea, what if the beam also stunned crew? Even if it just stunned them for just 3-5 seconds that would prevent them from repairing the systems right away and give the beam a little while longer to charge up again. The fire chance should probably be decreased back to 1 though in that case, I noticed that it was setting a bit too many fires. Which brings me too...

  • Rock Artillery: This thing is sooo satisfying, but right now it's a monster. :lol: A Fire Beam in vanilla gas a fire chance of 8 and a length of 140. The Sunfire Beam is basically the same, but nearly THREE times as long. So it is impossible for the enemy crew to put all the fires out before the beam charges up again. Even at 1 power it isn't hard to kill the enemy crew with this... :roll: So it should probably either have a Fire Chance of 6 and/or a shortened beam length, something like 250-300???

  • Lanius Artillery: I really like this one, I like the description, and I like what it does. However, it is slightly buggy, I will use an analogy yo explain... In CE Sleeper originally had an Anti-Bio Beam drone. It was buggy because it would not hit certain rooms due to the way the AI aims beams, therefore it could not do what it was meant to do it could not kill off all the enemy crew because they would hide in the rooms it could not hit. So he took that drone out of the CE mod. The Lanius Artillery does sort of the same thing right now, it will often hit the same few rooms and drain the oxygen from them entirely, but will not hit other rooms at all. This isn't as much of a problem with the Rock Artillery because fire spreads... Fire also does system damage so that is another plus over the Lanius Artillery.

    So here is my suggestion for the Lanius... I think it should be more of a flak type weapon than a beam, that way it will be able to hit all rooms with the same probability. It could fire something like small shards of Lanius metal which embed themselves in the enemy ship and not only cause breaches, but suck the oxygen out of rooms. It would also add even more variety to the artillery... One less beam... But I think something like this is necessary for the weapon to work more consistently.