Fight Stations: No engines/piloting?

[Sleeper Service]

I started spriting for an variety/event mod that will increase enemy variety mainly by letting you fight small space stations of the different factions.

I got some insight into the games structure but didn't code stuff for ships yet. I just want to verify:
Is it possible to have enemy ships that have neither piloting nor engine systems?
Any possible bugs connected to that?
The ships will exist within their own custom events, so i'm only concerned about the ship code for now.


Small Federation station beta image

[kartoFlane]

Enemy ships should work without piloting or engines, since they don't jump to beacons like players do, though keep in mind that they will not be able to dodge missiles or anything.

I've had a similar idea, for an enemy variety mod, that is... Though what I wanted to do was to make more ship layouts for existing graphics

[BrenTenkage]

thats a pretty good idea, I like that

[Sleeper Service]

Also I started to ask myself to which extend the values İ can define in the various ship editors affect the enemy generation ingame. Do they at all? Will enemy ships always start with this values? How are the progressively randomized?

[DryEagle]

sectordata defines what you get in each sector; enemy ships have their own blueprints. that and certain events can call specific ships. look through the xml files!

[Sleeper Service]

So the basic designes for the stations of the different factions are finished now, but with gibs and implementation there is still a lot to do.

I wanted to ask if anyone has tested how a missing piloting system affects crew spawning on enemy ships. (Because normally crew is spawned as close as possible to the piloting system. Not a big Issue of course as stations simply could have a dummy piloting system if its absence causes bugs).

Also, i'm getting a little mixed signals concerning original event overrides, checking the new subliminal guide:

It is highly recommended that you take advantage of this as much as possible. As a rule of thumb, if you're editing an event xml file, you're going to want to append your changes rather then flat out replace the file. Keep in mind that you can override vanilla events to your pleasure by having the same event name, and using .append helps prevent mod conflict.

So what up with duplicated events? I was told that before by leycec that events with original names in .appends don't override the vanilla events, instead just create duplicated events. He wrote that just eventlists do override.


Rock station beta sneaky peak.

[kartoFlane]

I did a test regarding the missing piloting system and how the crew behaves - the room with the lowest ID acted as piloting, i.e. crew spawned as close to it as possible.

As for duplicated events, I don't know. I recall seeing somewhere around here that FTL spewed out an error message regarding duplicated events (along the lines of "warning: duplicate event name found!")... But that might've been GMM's validate function.

As for station graphics, they're awesome

[Sleeper Service]

Thanks for testing that, looks like most things are going to work smoothly during implementation then. Nice gibs with loads of warped metal are kind of time consuming to make so this still is going to take while.


pirate station beta

[speedoflight]

I like the idea, the only problem i see here is -> a station really should have more weapon slots than 5 or 6. If not, i only see space stations like harder enemies (i assume u will increase the hull points a lot) but at the same time, easier ones, since they cant avoid shots.

U could make 4 drone slots for em, and put 3 defense drones or something (well, that will be really op, but it is an space station..), thats the only way it will look like an space station..

[Sleeper Service]

Yes more hull and increased use of augmentations was planned for balancing the stations. Depending on faction some of them will have good boarding equipment and drone system. Most of them will have four weapons slots anyway but I'm not sure what exactly happens balance wise if we go further with that. That might make no difference as long as you don't increase system strength as well (more weapons not equal better weapons). I don’t know if enemies can have more than level 10 weapon system.

@ kartoFlane:
Are you planning to realise this Type B Layout enemies idea of yours in the near future? Because I started to think about that to get used to ship editing and really would like to try out making some B Layouts as a side project. I guess some other people already came up with that, but well I guess I'm asking permission to use your Idea here. Possible?