Mostly, I want to let myself hit the "random ship" button and never have to reroll.
the complete set as a single mod is here
If you want all of the individual mods in one easy folder, you can get that here.
You can grab either of those right now if you don't feel like reading a wall of text. Otherwise, I'll try to talk through every change. FTL is a subtle game, these are tiny little changes that should make a lot of difference.
Instructions:
Use Slipstream Mod Manager; I've tested it on 1.4 and I can't see it interfering with any mod that doesn't affect the vanilla ships. Theoretically, it should play nice with most mods as long as you load the tweaks before your other mods in the load order. Let me know if you get any conflicts.
There'll be an individual mod for each tweak, and one mod that applies them all at once. Do not use both; I'm keeping them separate if anyone disagrees with any of my changes or wants to use just a single tweak.
On to the changes!
Engi B - The Vortex
+Plus one drone slot, up to four
+Added a boarding drone
+Starts with 10 drones
-Lost one reactor power
The Vortex is widely considered one of the worst ships in the game. It's starting compliment of drones is a penalty, not a feature, and it's the only ship to be completely unable to break through level two shields. The dominant strategy seems to be to sell everything that made the ship unique at the first store and hope you could get something usable.
The biggest change here is the addition of a fourth drone slot. This makes the Vortex completely unique among ships as one possessing unrivaled drone potential. You can go into the late game with four attack drones, and can hold on to your system repair drones/anti-personnel drones a lot longer when they're not taking up as much space.
The boarding drone is to smooth over the early/mid a bit. This gives you a small hope against level 2 shields or missile ships (although if they have a med/clone bay you're not going to do much) and can even secure a little more scrap via crew kills. It's balanced by a low drone count, meaning you can only spam boarding drones against a few ships before you run out.
I've pulled away one reactor power to make up for the total scrap available. If you go down the sell everything path, you have 35 more scrap to play with that will let you secure early items, but only 15 more total after you factor in the reactor upgrade. Consider it a loan.
As a bonus, they fourth drone slot used to break the UI; but this was fixed in AE. Huzzah!
Get just the Engi B tweak here.
Slug B - The Stormwalker
+Explosive Replicator
-15 missile start
+Stun Bombs
-No slug repair gel
The Stormwalker had a great name and nothing else. It was a boarding ship without strong boarders or a medibay and it's only offensive weapon consumed the missiles required to keep the boarders alive. It worked against itself as a ship.
The Stormwalker gets a few new toys from AE. I've cut the starting missiles to outfit it with an explosive replicator - this should keep your heal bombs kicking away while also freeing up some of the stress associated with using the Artemis. To go with the explosive replicator, the Stormwalker gets another new toy in the form of a stun bomb. I really want slug boarding to feel different from mantis boarding, and there's a lot of potential for fun micro here.
Get just the Slug B tweak here.
Rock A - The Bulwark
+New Loadout
+Breach Missile (3 power)
+Heavy Laser 2 (3 power)
-Only enough power for one
This used to be my least favorite ship by far. It was slow and boring and exceedingly RNG dependent - either you found a decent weapon by sector 4 or you ran out of missiles and died. This was made even worse by being the A variant - the default ship for the rock, and it sucked horribly. The new bulwark should be the "slow, purposeful rock" and not the "rockheaded rock" kind of ship.
It gets an entirely new loadout in the form of a breach missile and a heavy laser II. These are both slow charging, powerful weapons that belong on a rock cruiser. Against level 1 shield foes, you can slowly bring them down with the heavy laser II; against tougher enemies you can hammer them with missiles. At three power each, you won't get both weapons online very soon, but they're both feel very useful on their own and it's a very interesting game to switch modes based on the enemy and situation.
And it still maintains the rock tradition of tanking hits with your face while your weapons charge.
Get just the Rock A tweak here.
Federation B - The Nissos
+3 Artillery Beam Power
+Artemis Missiles instead of Leto launcher
-Hull laser instead of dual laser
-1 engine power
While not as bad as the rest of the ships on this list, the Nissos was simply underwhelming. It trades a single laser shot for a weak missile launcher and a worse layout. I've tried to differentiate it from it's sister ship by giving it a bit more missile power at the cost of a worse laser weapon. The point is to make a ship that relies on its artillery system to deal damage - the launcher locks down dangerous weapons but the hull laser is much more powerful against damaged ships and is less useful on its own.
Get just the Federation B tweak here
Minor Changes
Stealth B - The DA-SR-12
+FTL booster
The SR-12 is a hard ship to balance: it was given it the most powerful weapon in the game and they had to figure out how to keep it fair. The result is a ship that tears apart a lot of foes while getting absolutely eaten by a certain few classes of enemy. It already comes with a long range scanner to keep it out of some trouble, but I've taken the liberty of giving it an FTL booster to get it out of trouble when it inevitably runs into it.
Crystal B - The Carnelian
-20 hull maximum
This ship had everything you needed to beat the flagship from the moment it sets sail in the first sector. It was usually given its own tier at the very top of tier lists. Not having weapons was not enough of a downside. Unlike every other change I've made, the Carnelian gets a nerf. It's complex red crystal lattice is very fragile, and thus can only have 20 max hull. If you want the power that comes with this ship, you better get good at avoiding damage.
The display is slightly weird - it still shows thirty "blocks" on its hull bar, but each hit takes away one and a half.
To Do:
First I need to get together a proper slipstream mod description for each of these.
I'm planning on tackling the bad C variations once I get some more time to play with them and let my thoughts settle:
The Fregatidae (Fed C)
Cerenkov (Zoltan C)
The Swallow (Kestrel C)
Simo-h (Stealth C)
But in the meantime, I'd really like feedback! Tell me if you think I've overshot/undershot any of them, if you have any questions/comments/concerns/critisms, I'd love to hear it.
Pre-Emptive FAQ
You might say, "Hey! Some ships are stronger than others; the point is to make the game harder/easier by picking harder/easier ships! Some people like a challenge!"
This is a valid point; especially in vanilla FTL when we only had easy and normal. Now we have a hard mode that's quite challenging on any ship; we don't need to do it by intentionally flying a weaker ship. A lot of the ships I'm touching aren't just weak, they're weak in a random way or just unfun to play. It's really awful to get to sector four with the vortex only to never find any weapons because the RNG hates you. That's not a test of skill, it's just frustrating.
You might also say, "Every ship is different, you can't compare ships because they all have different playstyles."
This is also somewhat true, but when we were talking ship tiers there are certainly trends people notice, and there's nothing wrong with trying to correct them. The federation A and federation B are really similar ships, but the Nisos feels differently in only worse ways. I like to think I can do better.
