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.
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...
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.
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.