What is this madness, I actually wrote some shitty lore for a custom ship of mine?
After designing the first stealth ships, the engi soon realised that to be invisible, you yourself must not see. As most species rely on vision, they ditched the idea of a living pilot and instead created an advanced AI. So the next iteration of the stealth ship was born and was equipped with powerful short-range sensors. Naturally, a shield generator was still out of the question to keep it as agile and silent (and most importantly, cheap) as possible, and since it would have a cloaking system, drones would not be a requirement either.
As the rebellion raged on and past attempts at contacting the base had apparently failed, this ship would be their last hope, so it better last all its way to the Federation base. It was not doing terribly well during initial tests, and so the zoltan decided to join forces and equipped it with a super shield in hopes of making a near-unbeatable ship with minimal sacrifices.
They were still planning to keep it manned to ensure it stayed in fighting shape until the end. However, when the hour came to send it on its journey, anyone competent enough was needed to fend off the rebels long enough to allow it to even escape the hangar in the first place. And so the autonomous craft would have to be sent out without anyone to maintain it. The medical supplies were instantly put to better use, but there was no time and need to dismount the life support system. Last minute, an engi tossed it a modified bomb in hopes of allowing it to better maintain itself.
Anyways, the basic idea was to create a ship without normal shields but instead both cloaking and zoltan shields, and I decided I might as well make it an AI ship.
Downloads
v1.1:
Dropbox
The only change since 1.0 is that I fixed the door links.
v1.0: Dropbox
(If you need a mirror, do let me know)
Strategy
(I don't even know if that's a good title for this section but can't think of anything better so screw it)
A bit sturdier than the vanilla stealth ships, but also has a somewhat weaker offense (despite the adv. flak being outrageously good in terms of DPSPP (DPS per power) it is still a flak weapon so taking down specific systems is tough, and it's the only offensive weapon it starts with).
Unlike most auto ship mods out there, this one doesn't start with drone control. However drone control is normally needed for two things, speeding up repair times so you don't have to wait eleven years after every rough battle, and dealing with lanius boarders (or other boarders, if your doors fail or whatever), and because I don't want to take up two weapon slots for that, I wanted to combine them into one bomb, but that means it has to cost a missile to use else it could probably be abused in some way to kill enemy crew. Which means it kinda sucks for postbattle repairs, but what can you do. I did make it heal 1 hull point as well just to give some compensation if you do use it for repairs, hopefully that doesn't make it too powerful since you can convert all those free missiles you get into dozens of free hull points throughout a run. I have no idea, I don't playtest my own ships beyond sector 1 (and if I did, I don't know if I've invested enough hours into the game to really tell), this is all very experimental.
Also, has max level sensors from the start! Yay for forcing underused features of the game down your throat! But on the bright side, it allows you to see if aiming for that running rebel auto-scout's engines is worth it compared to its piloting.
Other useful info
- Replaces Zoltan A. Why not Stealth A? Because my first ship uses that slot, and I have no reason to reuse slots yet, and to be honest, I don't feel an urge to make a more zoltan ship than this (hmm, what about zshield+shielddrone...)
- 5 starting power
- Features about 150% less jokes than my previous ship (Sufdawg)
- Has 2 drone slots if you buy drone control. Duh, I don't want to break the HUD if I don't have to.
- Does not have a room assigned for artillery so I guess if you're playing with CE you might want to use a mod that sets the rarity of artillery to 0
- Still no custom art for the custom weapons because I can't be bothered
- My first auto ship! Be mindful of the problems that comes with an auto ship: Losing crew while not having any crashes the game (fix), and you can't buy crew at stores, and some other minor issues.
- Keeps up my annoying tradition of making cringeworthy ship names just to sneak in parts of my username...
Showcase videos
Biohazard063: Episode 1
stylesrj: Episode 1
Anistuffs: Normal: Episode 1 - Shieldless challenge: Episode 1
Thanks to Anistuffs and Biohazard063 for some thoughts regarding the custom weapon's balance and stuff I guess