FTL Captain's Edition 1.308/Inf 1.301b/EL 1.308

[Mr. Mister]

Raven, the thing is just as sleepy said: if you a projectyle with ion damage can pierce shields (instead of teleporting directly), then it will deal ion damage to both the shield AND the system room it hits.

[Sleeper Service]

Hm thinking about it, Dry Eagle proved that projectiles with very high velocity never contact with shields and pierce everything, even Zoltan shields... that might actually be a possible workaround for the effector drones... Let's try that.

[R4V3-0N]

Hozzah! I feel more happy now that I could have found a loop hole

also how do beams react with ion damage just curious? or shield piercing (that isn't 5)

[Sleeper Service]

Beams always ionize shields completely. Not great for balance. I'm not sure how shield pierce reacts with beams damage reduction. I'm also not sure if damage reduction is applied to beams sys or pers damage.

[Kain2000]

Curious Observation:

I found that the Federation Cruiser (only ship I tried on this mod, will be trying other ships at some point) seems to be rather underpowered in the weapons range. I mean, I stock up on four weapons I feel are quite useable (still had the stock Dual Laser from the beginning that comes with the Cruiser) two of which require 2 power and two of which require 3 power, yet you only have enough Weapon System Slots to power 3 out of 4 weapons, especially since the two of the weapons requiring 3 power/slots are very useful against the enemy but you have to shut one down in order to power the other. (And even though I acquired the pre-ignition system, it still is a bit of a pain). And having 3 of the 4 weapons powered (two 2 and one 3) takes up the full Weapon Slots, so shutting a 2 down doesn't quite help

I made it all the way to the final sector/8 with no problem but when I started going up against Rebel ships for certain (haven't gone up against a Rebel Capital Ship, oh god...) well I happened to been going up against one equipped with quite a few missiles that just loved the taste of my hull, and before he jumped away (don't know why, they were winning) I was pretty much below 50% hull. And knowing that their Flagship has the Missile Launcher that fires 3 large missiles, well I knew for certain that there was no point in continuing, even though I did save & quit for later attempt.

I love the new additions to the game, I've gone up against quite a few stations and had no problem against them, but when some of these new weapons require a bit of power and slots that a ship doesn't have, it seems like the Federation are inferior to power distribution and requirements than the Rebels are, considering they can power practically all weapons without a problem.

Also, meant to take a screenshot of this but didn't, I one of the augmentations, think it had something to do with recycling fuel or ammunition or something around there, and it says 'Requires an empty BACON' XD. I smell an A.I. Paradox right there (Portal 2 anyone?), EMPTY BACON haha.

You do know you could throw all your events and all the other definitions and such through Word so you could find any typos? Just suggesting, otherwise hilarious

[kartoFlane]

The problem was how the AI targets rooms with beams. It always targets the exact middle of a random room and then draws the beam towards the exact middle of a another room. Some positions on some ships that where frequently take by crew (helm and weapon console on the Rebel fighter for example) can not be hit by this targeting pattern.

Possible idea how to fix: how about placing a 0x1 room along the top wall of the pilot room? That way the drone's beam will sometimes begin it's path at the center of the wall, and hopefully cut through the pilot.

The chance of this happening will still be pretty low, though. It'll also give a bit of an advantage to regular beams, as they'll deal an additional point of damage if targeted right. Not sure if this can be fixed by room layering, though (placing the 0x1 "below" the pilot room)

[Sleeper Service]

True, that would probably work. Always nice to see more applications for those hidden rooms. Although that would involve changing a lot of ship layouts, let alone identifying which one have this "dead-angle" tiles where crew can't be hit by beams. Lot's of busy work for one drone.

R&D news: High velocity projectiles still seem to contact with shields (they just surpass Zoltan shields?), so they still apply their ion effect to them. I didn't realize that the Ultrasonic Cannon in Decent into Darknes actually uses regular shield piercing as well. Effector drones will remain in the dungeon of neglected drones for now.

[dalolorn]

R&D news: High velocity projectiles still seem to contact with shields (they just surpass Zoltan shields?), so they still apply their ion effect to them. I didn't realize that the Ultrasonic Cannon in Decent into Darknes actually uses regular shield piercing as well. Effector drones will remain in the dungeon of neglected drones for now.

However, the ability to pierce Zoltan shields does present other opportunities...

[PaladinGreco]

That said, I should mention that in sMPK they can only pierce through two shields (and they deplete a bubble if they can't get through). I think it makes them more balanced, both for the player and specially enemies, since hull damage is a far bigger deal for the player ship than system damage is.

I used to think the same thing. Then back in 1.05-something, the Auto-Terminator, some Auto-Drone Carriers, and various Riggers took me aside to [strike]gruesomely murder[/strike] have a word with me. System damage on that scale is death, and the hull just had to slowly catch up. It doesn't seem like such a big deal, I know, until suddenly your shields, engines, and/or weapons are damaged/down. From there, it's run away if possible, or die. Before the [strike]anti-system[/strike] anti-crew missile drone nerf, usually it was 'or die', as your engine room was likely breached and on fire forever.

Thankfully, this is a lot more rare now, and FTL deaths are much less soul crushing than this tended to be.

--

Anywho, I haven't written a post here with any bug reports because there aren't any bugs to report. Typos are everywhere, but what else is new. You know, now would be a good time to run the mod files through M$Word, while nothing is broken.

Or get together a team of people to spell and grammar check the files for you. Each person would be given a number of files to check, and after checking them, they would send them back to you with a log of what they changed. Very orderly, very controlled. Again, this is the perfect time to do this, before the next update presents more bugs.

And on that note, for future added events or events you changed, you could have select people, who are good at proofreading, review those events for errors, and send them back to you before release.

mmmm, bacon

[Sleeper Service]

I though about putting the event files in github and let everyone interested correcting away for a week. But now is actually not the good time for that, because I work on events all the time and putting either the corrected version of the xmls in the actual current one or the other way around is very tedious and prone to errors (I have no overview of what I change and keeping a log is tedious). So proofreading will happen at a point when there is not so much to do, probably after the next update and it's usual quick fixes. It might surprise you, but I actually use auto correct quite a bit. Wrote bacon correctly there, you see?