Flagship Randomizer 1.29 for AE, ACE and ACE Infinite

[Sleeper Service]

I once encountered a Flagship that said it had its secondary rooms connected to the main ship, but when I got there, it was only the main guns as per usual. Has that been fixed too?

Nope, not yet.

[Russian Rockman]

I like that the main flagship guns can only be actual hull damaging weapons now, but maybe you should make it more likely (if not guaranteed) for the flagship to have ion and beam weapons as it's secondary (support) weapons. I don't want all of the flagships to end up like NarnKar's. Especially since the flagship can only have 1 beam weapon, that makes it very rare for it to get ANY beam weapons.

Nice work on the GUI!!!

[NarnKar]

TBH when I first heard about the randomizer, I thought it would work like this:

-one ion or NHD weapon
-one laser weapon
-one missile weapon
-one beam weapon

Kinda like the original flagship, but with mild variants of weapons here and there.
I'm not sure if this is too far from your vision, rannl, but that's just what I first thought. As it were, it happens to avoid the "too many lasers and missiles" issue and the "too many NHD weapons" issue at the same time.

[Sleeper Service]

IMO that would take the magic out of it. I think a more restrictive randomizing routine would just box the flagship in again. And the whole idea is to create new challenges. I'll go on a leap and say that your roll is actually manageable with defense drones and good evasion. The dual burst lasers will be much less threatening in phase two and you won't suffer long time shield loss in phase one from ion weapons. In phase three you could even depower the shields between the surges.

[NarnKar]

I suppose my rolled flagship is manageable. It's just a little...DIFFERENT...is all.

[Sleeper Service]

Please note that there are some problems with the event generations in the current version. You might not be able to look at the data as intended. We will fix this soonish.

[NewAgeOfPower]

Nice GUI!

I rolled an AE only ship, and I got:
"A breach missile and a triple burst missile launcher as its main guns"
And its secondary weapons were "a burst laser battery and a burst laser battery"

Oh boy. Ohhhhh boy.

Cloak, defense drones. My standard play is to Cloak, then reroute power from your engines & defense drones to shield overcharger drone(s), then swap right back as the missiles come at you, once your cloak is down and your Supershield has some charges in it.

Gold ranked Engineer and Pilot can push your evasion over 50%, which is a lifesaver.

[Russian Rockman]

IMO that would take the magic out of it. I think a more restrictive randomizing routine would just box the flagship in again. And the whole idea is to create new challenges. I'll go on a leap and say that your roll is actually manageable with defense drones and good evasion. The dual burst lasers will be much less threatening in phase two and you won't suffer long time shield loss in phase one from ion weapons. In phase three you could even depower the shields between the surges.

I agree, I don't want the flagship to just half one of each weapon like vanilla. Then it couldn't have duplicate types of the same weapon.

BUT, I also don't want the flagship to always have more missiles and lasers. Since the main weapons are now guaranteed to have missiles and/or lasers, probability wise that decreases the chances of the secondary weapons being ions or beams, especially beams, since they are drawing from an expanded pool. I REALLY think to maintain some variety you should make it much more likely (2x / 3x) for the secondary weapons to be ions or beams. While still insuring that the main weapons are lethal weapons and without removing the possibility of getting all missiles/lasers.

NarnKar's triple laser flagship is not a coincidence I think. I believe it is partly a result of the new Maths.

Also, 5thHorseman had a great idea of implementing a seed so that people can share their loadouts! OMG I got a flagship with all missiles. I am not sure if the "seed" would work between updates, but it would be a really neat feature nonetheless. I suppose that's not really necessary though because you can just save the .ftl file and share that, which may be more reliable...

[NarnKar]

A double laser, double missile flagship, Rockman. While not triple-laser, it's still kind of...boring, I guess?

[rannl]

Well, I'll start by explaining how the weapon selection algorithm works.

All weapons are selected from a single pool. The 4 weapons are selected - the first 2 are the main guns, the last 2 are the secondary guns.
Each weapon selection must obey a set of rules, which are of 2 types - limiting rules and at least rules.
The limiting rules reduce the amount of weapons in the weapon pool for all future selections, based on previously selected weapons.
So a LASER limit of 2 will remove all LASER weapon from the pool after 2 LASER weapons have been selected.

The at least rules make sure that a weapon type is selected at least a certain amount of times.
So a LASER at least of 2 will select only from the LASER type weapons untill 2 LASER weapons have been selected.

I used limiting rules for LASER/ION/MISSILE/NHD (non hull damaging) with a limit of 2 and BEAM with a limit of 1.
Then I added an at least rule on LASER+MISSILE of 2 - meaning that the first 2 selected weapons must be of the LASER or MISSILE types.

This means that after selecting the main guns, the secondary weapons are just as likely to be LASER/MISSILE types as they are to be BEAM/ION types.
So statistically the flagship will be more likely to have LASER/MISSILE type weapons.

There can be many solutions for a more uniform weapon selection.
The primary weapons could be selected from a LASER/MISSILE pool and the secondary weapons from a BEAM/ION/NHD pool. The limiting rules will be the same, the at least rule won't be needed.
I think this might appeal to the majority of opinions I've seen here.