Very interesting ship concept! I like the lore and uniqueness of it
It's a shame that it's a little over-powered, though. Slug repair gel, rock plating, and that weapon piercing everything is a joke. I think I have an idea how could you fix it, and also the problem with...
foveros wrote:
I never realized that if you gained any crewmembers you have no way to let them die!
That could really clog up the clonebay. Some ways I could fix this:
1.Add an oxygen system (I dont really want to do that. Imagine that ship with 2 mantis boarders. It would be really OP.
2.Remove the backup DNA bank(Making your ghosts killable with no way to gain more
3.Add a reconstructive teleport, lessening the need for constant respawns
4.Modify all events not to give crew. That would be a lot of work though.
...by making it compatible with CE only, and recommended to play with CE infinite. This way, you could ad renamed AI crew member generator instead of rock plating (on empty beacons, the ship could create more "ghosts", *and* make rebel fleet pursuit as Federation fleet pursuit (which, in CE Infinite, is delayed).
This way, it would be nicely compatible with story you have written for it - the jettisoned log written by last crew member was found, and Federation fleet detachment is hunting for the sinister ship. You would only need to change rebel fleet graphics to fed fleet ones (I swear there is some mod that have those graphics, actually, and it could be borrowed), + modify every CE's event text about rebel fleet to make it mention federation. (for a starter, it could be siomply replace 'rebel*' with 'federation' - would produce some funny looking text, that could be fixed later, or via reports from players).
The last stand could have event texts replaced to indicate that Fed fleet finally surrounded shard, and perform long range artillery attacks that will, over time, break it to pieces - until you manage to kill Fed flagship sending their fleet into disarray (and, probably, escape into deeps of space for good). Not to mention that CE Infinite leaves the point when we want to meet flagship up to the player, so one could have as long deep space flight, as she/he want.
CE Infinite (delayed) fleet pursuit and exponential system upgrades would keep the game interesting - having fleet pursuit completely disabled removes the (even limited) tension, that is one of major gameplay points of FTL. Roaming around freely without danger in your back (and with standard upgrade prices) would make game boring REALLY fast.
Also, CE have event text option to *not* accept any new crewmembers in 99% of crew-giving events, so it would be additional way to fix the problem. renamed DNA bank can be kept or not, it doesn't matter that much with internal AI generator (renamed to match ships lore, of course).
Yea, it would be some work to make it perfect (although, the "initial" release without event text fixed shouldn't be that much), but by cooperating with Sleepy's CE content, you could create a really interesting ship/conversion mod without that much of a hassle, that would still match FTL lore.
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Now, apart from technical side - as I said, I like the ships' lore very much. considering the rule that "all technology that is more advanced than ours by enough orders of magnitude is indistinguishable from magic", I see the "Creations" of ship (echoes) as "holo" projections on quantum level, having parts of their former-living self personality, totally controlled by shard master unit. Most common folks would just call them sinister ghosts
That's why I see no problem with generating more when ship is undisturbed. Player can roleplay gaining skill by echoes as essences of crew from other, defeated ships, that get assimilated to Shard's bank.
BTW, this, way I don't see any problem with clone bay graphics - after all, Shard assimilated with ship's electronic/cybernetic, so it could use modified (twisted) cloning technology to recreate it's echoes.
If you have enough dedication for this project you could to - gradually - modify some events to reflect sinister nature of Shard - cooperating with Sleeper (getting informed about new/modified events in new versions of CE Infinite) you could slowly make it into FTL lore-friendly total conversion, where we play as the ultimate bad guy
/Estel
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If you find any bugs, please post about them so I can fix them.
