[Ship][AE] Custom Arwing [v2.1]

[sul]

Thanks for the reply Gencool (no offense taken of course its your mod).
- Gotcha the ships having no shields look more like the star fox experience, and its a great twist on the FTL gameplay too. I checked the casing is at 30% indeed in your blueprints.xml.append. On my last playthrough I omitted that upgrade (thinking it would be the usual 15%), so I'll buy it next time and see how it goes. 75%-90% could work well too, it would be a matter of testing that it is not too easy through an entire (or several) gameplay.
- The other changes are me messing around with the code for fun, I agree you dont need to change them. Mainly I had rebalanced to put shields on Slippy and Falco for the same reason as Fox, so with the above it should be ok.
- Great Fox giving you additional drones is a great idea ! In fact, I started a quick run with Fox today and the recovery_drone_arm and it is somewhat too easy/boring (in the first sectors at least). Its more interesting to not want to spend drones so you take more calculated risks (and even make the recovery_drone_arm unavailable in stores).
- For a patch, I dont think I would make any substantial changes that you cant do yourself so no need for uploading. But I'd like to finish an entire/challenging run with Fox (for glory !). For this I'll try some tweaks you suggested myself (probably system casing for a start) but just until you post some updates. My main problem in the run is still the flagship surges that are kind of unavoidable. I'll let you know how it goes, I'm sure you enjoy the feedback from players using your mod.

[sul]

I just finished my run with Fox, defeat again It was on easy with little tweaks like titanium casing 70% and 3-6 drones given at each store. I always had more than 15 drones and used them heavily in the last sectors, so maybe 3-6 was too much (but then I was on the easy level gaining many additional ones). Started maxing weapon, then maxing defense drones, then artillery level 3, and finally got the system casing by last sector. Once again, flagship was a nightmare I barely made it second round. The systems held well with the casing but hull damage was huge ( from the beam weapon especially). I will have my revenge.

[Gencool]

Well, that's an improvement, still, I guess...

Makes me wish there was more we could do with mods.

Some of my favourite (impossible) ideas include changing the cloak to be a 1.5 second long cloak, but with three charges (upgrade for more charges), and having Falco-drone and Fox-Drone able to shoot down enemy drones (around yours and the enemy ship respectively), both of which would be some help here.

I mean, if I was able to do /anything/, Id let the player give basic commands to their copilots, but let's not dream unacheivable dreams.

[sul]

Its been a while, just went back to playing the mod (a run with the slippy the slug). Man that mod is awesome !

[Madagascar]

An excellent mod Gencool!
All those little touches are what really make it awesome!

Though the difficulty difference between Fox and Peppy is really large and suns/asteroids are nasty to these ships.

[Madagascar]

Found a bug though: Slippy's wingman upgrades don't actually do anything, the charge time on the supershield stays at 8 seconds.

[Madagascar]

More feedback:

The descriptions of Slippy's drones are incorrect, the level 3 is the one that gets lockdown and the level 2 is the one that gets system damage.

The description of Fox's drone in the non-_EXTRA upgrade dialogue is incorrect, it mentions shield-piercing rather than double damage. Similarily the description of Slippy's drone in that dialogue is incorrect.

The smart twin laser's cooldown doesn't actually decrease to 5 after the first shot, it takes 5 shots, just like the twin laser.

Why does Peppy have the long range scanners when he needs them the least? He has a shield and is thus not as vulnerable to asteroids. Couldn't they go to slippy instead?

Hyperlasers are too easy to get.
As it is I often skip several upgrade steps and get the smart hyperlaser in sector 4-5 where it's quite overpowered.
The smart hyperlaser is approximately comparable to a pair of Burst Laser Mark IIs and a pair of Ion Blast Mark IIs, so 10 power worth of top-tier weapon systems in a 5 power package.

So I've got a couple of suggestions regarding that last one:
Make the hyperlasers be one more power each.
Make weapon system upgrades more expensive. It takes 40 to get to 2 power, but only 20 to get the next level and 30 the one after that.


Here's a tweaked version of your mod I made with some of these changes in case you like those changes but are too busy to make them yourself (I'd submit a patch file but I'm unsure whether you'd know what to do with it).

[Madagascar]

So after a number of tries I finally beat the game with a non-Peppy ship. On easy. With a store just next to the boss I could go to heal up in after every round.
And I'm now convinced that it's not possible to beat the boss more than 1 in 3 times with non-Peppy ships.
Peppy himself I've won on hard with. The hyperlasers are incredibly powerful once they've had a bit to wear shields down and your drones are OP (except Peppy drone, see below). Peppy is probably a top tier ship, Fed A+ level, even without a drone recovery arm making the game a cakewalk.
Everyone else on the other hand? Drones and beam weapons are simply too nasty. We're talking worse than Stealth B here! At least that ship has plenty of empty rooms and crew to repair things! It can also get shields early on.

The main problem I think is just that you can't actually mod shield drones recharge times. So that 2 second recharge on Peppy's drone that would make things a lot more survivable? Doesn't exist. I can't think of any great solutions but a start may be to give a renamed Zoltan Shield for the Peppy drone level 2 upgrade. Dunno about the level 3 one though...

[BrenTenkage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brjD5Dg ... e=youtu.be

Well that was fun.

[BrenTenkage]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgZasU7PSgw and did a live stream of this