[MOD][WIP] FTL Infinite Space

[3.14]

@Pyroh
I'll fix the typo in missile, however I didn't change anything related to the slug description. I'll look at it and see if I'm having the same problem.

@3.14
There is a list of +weapons on the first page, bottom of the original post.

As for ships maxing out to the point of not taking any hull damage, and having more money than they need... I'm going to have to think about this for a bit, and see if I can come up with something. I can provide the option of ending the game "retiring", but off the top of my head the only way I can do that is to destroy your ship with an event.

Questions...

1. Why do you feel the enemy can't do hull damage to you? Defense Drones? Kill them too quickly?
2. Should I reduce the scrap payout on Cruiser fights to slow the scrap buildup?
3. Would adding in a type of "Story Arc" event that continues based off a dummy augment provide enough interest to continue to play after maxing your ship?
4. What would you like to see happen or be available when you've basically maxed your ship?

do not have an ending for this mod!
it's infinite space for a reason.

1) i have pre-igniter. with 2 +small bombs and 2 +Burst3's, i nail their shields, helm and weapons instantly.
even when the enemy has 2 defense2 drones that shoot down lasers, it only stops 4 shots of my 10shot volley.

2) reduce scrap payout at the start of the game. or if you cant, reduce it overall.
that way i cant buy everything at the store at sector 1. or have 3 shields and 40% evade.

make hull repairs more expensive as you go up in sectors, like 50%. ie: sector 1 = $2 per hull bar. sector 2 = $3, sector 3=$4, sector 4 =$6, sector 5 = $9, etc

w/the .33 mod, i fought my 1st elite ship (mantis). holy.. a bunch of mantis boarding plus 2 boarding drones.
luckily i only found 2 zoltans, so i had like 4 mantis onboard. one hell of a fight. lost a mantis.
how the hell did they teleport a 2nd wave so quickly?! or you can program enemy ships to not follow the same rules?

so this makes me rethink about having 7 zoltans + 1 engi as my crew. this forces me to not ramp up in power thus cant max everything. ie: with 7 zoltans, I maxxed shields, evade, weapons, and had 2 anti-personal drones.
THX!!

as for your weapons list, whats a +Burst Missile? in the game where I had $15000 cash, i never ran into those.


edit:
faced zoltan elite. where the hell are the zoltan shields?! hell, they should have the super zoltan shields that regen since they are elite.

[3.14]

after i max out, start giving all enemy ships +weapons, and/or +drones.

boss ships having mostly flagship weapons, +weapons, and/or +drones. all crew = 1 star.
elite ships having ONLY flagship weapons, +weapons, and +drones. all crew = 2 stars. also, max shields and evade. if there's not enough power for all of that, then forget the last 3 bars of evade.

hell, if you go deep enough, start adding flagships with different weapon combinations
or how about a ship thats a clone of my ship!


edit:
nevermind, got killed by elite pirate battleship.
crystal people locked my crew in room, then my medibay got ion blasted so engi medibots didnt work.
nice strat,, unfortunately

[c0ldsh0w3r]

Love your mod! I just wanna point a few problems I'm having with balance.

1) Sometimes in the beginning couple of sectors the enemies are ungodly difficult to battle. On your first or second jump you shouldn't be battling a double shield enemy equipped with missiles and Mark 2 Burst Lasers and an Anti-ship drone. Yes that has really happened to me several times.

2) Likewise with sector 2. On my very first jump in sector 2 I encountered a giant Rock ship and it had quad shields, 2 missile launchers and a bomb teleporter. Also some sort of laser weapon but I don't recall.

It's just ungodly frustrating to have to restart 10 times in 15 minutes because I keep getting raped right out the gate.

Also just a spelling error, on one of your slug dialog screens it displays the word "wreak" when it ought to read "wreck."

Great mod though! I was up until almost 3AM playing it last night. The Osprey is a BEAST if you can get it kitted out wuickly enough.

Thanks!
c0ldsh0w3r

*EDIT* The entire quote is, "You arrive at the jump beacon, and your sensors pick up a destroyed starship. Your crew reports no signs of life. You can take the time to salvage it, but whoever did this might still be around.
1. Spend time salvaging the wreak.
2. Leave the wreak alone."
Hope that helps!

[alextfish]

faced zoltan elite. where the hell are the zoltan shields?! hell, they should have the super zoltan shields that regen since they are elite.

This should probably have the zoltan shield, but he can't add the super regenerating zoltan shield as that's hard-coded to only happen as stage 3 of the boss. Nothing we modders can do about that, sadly. :/ I also don't think anyone's found a way to make enemy crew have experience bonuses either.

If people are reporting spelling errors here, I ran across one saying "We've taking your lives", I think. I haven't had time to play FTL at all since then, but I'm definitely looking forward to giving Infinite Space another go. I love the space-station with all crew-specific options.

[DrkTemplar]

@kieve,
For me to get the endless sectors I had to hook into the end beacon event. Unfortunately this event is shared with ALL sectors. So basically I can only 2 total sectors. The starting one, and the secret one. I first tried to utilize the 7 sectors prior to the Last Stand, but in the end the only way to trigger that is to use a requirement. With requirements its possible for a player to circumvent them in some way, and "break" the mod.

@3.14,
I don't want to reduce the starting scrap because others are still saying the initial build up is tough. You will run into ships with shields of 2 in the first sector, so the starting scrap is to represent having gone through a sector already. If anything I might even increase this to compensate for the steep building curve in the beginning. I can however, reduce the scrap payout in other areas.

I cannot scale the repair cost, or enemy ships based on the player. This is very unfortunate, but it's due to the limitations of modding this game, at this time. I can provide "random" weapons for the Cruisers and Elite Cruisers. I had left them static so I had more control over their strength.

The Zoltan Cruiser, and Elite Cruiser should both have the Zoltan shield, so I will look into that. The +Burst Missile is the Adv. Tech version of the Burst Missile, and only drops from defeating the Stealth ship, the Pirate Battleship, an Elite Cruiser or from searching the planet. All quest events obtained from defeating a Cruiser ship.

@c0ldsh0w3r,
Make sure you clear the entire first sector, and it's important to know when to run in this mod. If you run into a level 4 shield early, immediately prepare to FTL away. However, as mentioned above, you aren't the only one who's commented on the start of the mod being hard. I will look at ways to make the starting sector easier, however once you hit Deep Space your best strategy early on is to run when you see a Rock or Crystal ship. This "experience" is a product of the limitations we modders have with this game, it was not my desire to have the scaling work in this way.

I will fix the spelling error in "wreak", thanks!

@alextfish,
I've had to move the Civilian space station event to random list of events, so it doesn't always appear. When I introduced the sector boss fights I had to move this one out. I could make it guarantee spawn once per sector, but that's the best I can do. I will also fix the spelling error you pointed out, thanks!

[Kieve]

@kieve,
For me to get the endless sectors I had to hook into the end beacon event. Unfortunately this event is shared with ALL sectors. So basically I can only 2 total sectors. The starting one, and the secret one. I first tried to utilize the 7 sectors prior to the Last Stand, but in the end the only way to trigger that is to use a requirement. With requirements its possible for a player to circumvent them in some way, and "break" the mod.

This is just a theory, since I haven't tried it yet, but what if the FINISH_BEACON event were erased from events.xml entirely, and moved to each sector's event XML instead? Would that break the game somehow, or would it result in each sector having unique finish events?
Since in the default game, each sector has different things happen at the end (sometimes a trader, sometimes a fight, once even a quest beacon), I know it's possible for the nodes to have different events per sector. The question is more, how can I.S. make use of that to your benefit?

[DrkTemplar]

This is just a theory, since I haven't tried it yet, but what if the FINISH_BEACON event were erased from events.xml entirely, and moved to each sector's event XML instead? Would that break the game somehow, or would it result in each sector having unique finish events?
Since in the default game, each sector has different things happen at the end (sometimes a trader, sometimes a fight, once even a quest beacon), I know it's possible for the nodes to have different events per sector. The question is more, how can I.S. make use of that to your benefit?

Here is the End Beacon before I updated it.

Code: Select all

<event name="FINISH_BEACON">
	<text>You've arrived at the Long-Range Beacon. When the FTL Drive is charged you can jump to the next Sector.</text>
	<choice hidden="true">
		<text>Continue...</text>
		<event load="NON_HOSTILE"/>
	</choice>
</event>

So you can see it just loads an event from the NON_HOSTILE eventList.

There is a FINISH_BEACON_NEBULA but appears to have had it's load event commented out.

Code: Select all

<event name="FINISH_BEACON_NEBULA">
	<text>This Long-Range Beacon is almost hidden within a nebula. When the FTL Drive is charged you can jump to the next Sector.</text>
<!--	<choice hidden="true">
		<text>Continue...</text>   There has been two sightings of odd events at the end of the nebula sectors. Simplifying just as a random precaution.
		<event load="NEBULA"/>
	</choice>-->
</event>

I remember trying to make other end beacon events when I first starting working on the mod, however I don't recall exactly what I tried. I will give it a shot, but I think the call to those events is hard coded.

[newguy142]

I like the mod but sometimes the game just spikes in difficulty out of nowhere which normally is ok because I also have the beginning scrap advantage mod so I can handle the first few zones without too much headache. My issue with the mod is that you don't seem to take the plasma storm into consideration when you put us against ships.

I've run into a ship in a plasma storm that was somehow maintaining a teleporter/4 layer shield/TONS of missiles and bombs and lasers/ crazy engines for dodging/ other nicknacks. When you're in a plasma storm you shouldn't be running into ships like that because the AI doesn't seem to be affected by the power loss. (this was in zone 2)

[dr_eastman]

None of the minibosses engage me even when my ship is incredibly powerful. Am I doing something wrong?

[DrkTemplar]

@newguy142,
My mod actually uses the START_BEACON event, so depending on the order the mods are installed you will not see my event, or you will not get the starting scrap advantage mod. In any case, I don't recommend using it with Infinite Space. As for the plasma environment, I haven't done anything different than the base game in that regards. In other words, the base game itself doesn't reduce the enemy ships power (at least not to my knowledge) when in a plasma storm. I do however change the ships to be static, and so they may seem more powerful than the base game. The only way for me to simulate the plasma storm weakening an enemy ship would be to create ship specific to those events, and load only them. I'm not against this idea, however reducing both ships reactor in my opinion almost negates the negative effect of a plasma storm to begin with. I'll look into this, I may be wrong in how the game handles the plasma storm and enemy ships. If anyone has any more information about how this works in the base game, that would be helpful. Thank you for your feedback!

@dr_eastman,
Raise your engine, and shield levels. They don't have to be powered.