Prerelease/Expans 2.001ZA (2 New Mines, Remains Rebuilder, Cleanup Drone, Perf+)

[x4000]

wreckage and forcefields seems to be a tad messed up - in one case, wreckage seemed to randomly pick shielded or not shielded (when attacked with a raid starship.. Might have a save, but I dont think I got it before the wreckage was made.. )

Oh good point, remains need to be immune to force fields so that they don't get bumped around -- that definitely needs to be fixed in the next release.  Is that what you're referring to?  I am not sure quite what you mean by "wreckage seemed to randomly pick shielded or not shielded," if you are referring to the above issue or something else.  Thanks for the note!

[eRe4s3r]

x4000, i think he means that the shielded or not shielded indicator flashes on/off for them

Mhh you are perfectly right, stuff that lives longer and dies harder is what amasses in the stats after all Its a balance thing mostly but in case of revive trains and booster trains i hope you still consider a.. severe limitation galaxy wide for them. As in that balance thread i too think that a single revive train is a x10 multiplier (meaning 30 ships get the power of a 300 ship attack and if its acid sprayers its more like 500 ^^) and thats too extreme for my lowly skills!

But all this i already spammed   in the respective balance threads so that made this post kinda moot.. but i couldn't really delete it anymore ;p

Anyhow, don't mind me i am just majorly bored over the holidays so i am pestering around here with a lot of posts lately.. ;p

[x4000]

x4000, i think he means that the shielded or not shielded indicator flashes on/off for them

Ohhhh, okay -- I have not seen that, but I'll look into it.  Really they shouldn't be interacting with forcefields at all.

Mhh you are perfectly right, stuff that lives longer and dies harder is what amasses in the stats after all Its a balance thing mostly but in case of revive trains and booster trains i hope you still consider a.. severe limitation galaxy wide for them. As in that balance thread i too think that a single revive train is a x10 multiplier (meaning 30 ships get the power of a 300 ship attack and if its acid sprayers its more like 500 ^^) and thats too extreme for my lowly skills!

Well, this is actually a really good point for the new astro train variants.  They are more powerful, and are intended to be so -- I don't think those are out of balance, it's the space dock ships that are more the concern.  But, right now having equal numbers of all the astro train variants is not a good idea, for those specifically I'll definitely make an update to make the regenerators far more rare and the speed boosters a bit more rare.  Then the main ones will be turret trains and the vanilla astro trains, with the other kinds more occasionally.

But all this i already spammed   in the respective balance threads so that made this post kinda moot.. but i couldn't really delete it anymore ;p

Anyhow, don't mind me i am just majorly bored over the holidays so i am pestering around here with a lot of posts lately.. ;p

No problem -- thanks for all the feedback!

[Lancefighter]

I meant that when i attacked turrets under a forcefield with a raid starship, the wreckage under the forcefield sometimes chose to be shielded, and sometimes chose unshielded. The shield/not shield status seems to be random... and doesnt matter if the forcefield is there or not there (when the forcefield was destroyed, it seemed like the wreckage remained shielded.)


Also, minor (major) issue

When pressing the f1 button to show all of any given mk, there are some 'missing localization' stuff. Extended use of this and mousing over these causes the game to crash.

[FFLaguna]

I'm not sure what is awkward about them.

It's a nice idea, conceptually, but the way it seems to work now doesn't gel all that well.  Lasers can't be lured or confused, it's not like EW is being employed to muddle guided munitions (such as missiles).  Having all shots divert to a Deflector is just... odd.  If I were coming up with some sort of counter-Laser ship type I'd more likely have a small drone that ablates a cloud of tiny reflective particles that simply reduces the amount of damage that the weapon does to anything within its radius by way of accumulative energy reflection (but the shot, what's left of it, still hits the intended target).  The effect is the same but you don't have an awkward-feeling shot redirection mechanic.

I didn't notice that Laser-firing ships will automatically target something outside of a Deflector's radius of effect.  Maybe that's enough. 

Well, I actually do really like the idea of having the deflector drones simply reduce damage instead of drawing them all to themselves.  That is perhaps more thematically consistent, and makes it so that they are not a "hard stop" counter, but more of a drawback.  The decoy drones I still maintain I like the way they are, and they're a moderately rare experimental ship anyway, but for deflector drones I think that simply having them reduce damage in their area is superior to the current model.  Nice idea!

I'm not averse to making changes to things when a better idea is presented, and I'm not too proud to change my mind, but I simply won't do it if I'm not convinced.  Until this suggestion of yours, the current mechanic for deflector drones was the best of what I'd seen -- now I like yours better for a variety of reasons, so we'll go with that one.  Hopefully should quell any remaining reservations with that specific feature, but I suppose we'll see!

Great idea! Now I can still do gate raids with 400+ Raptors (when I said "Raiders", that was a mistake), they don't all get tied up attacking just a couple deflector drones. It made gate raids with Raptors impossible, and I had to warp in my regular fleet and group-move them at a speed of 12 or 26 or whatever.

We may want to bump up the "targeting" level of these laser deflectors for non-laser ships, so they automatically take them out to help out nearby ships... I'll leave that up to you.

I hope this is a fast and easy change. Thanks!!

[RCIX]

and they're a moderately rare experimental ship anyway

Tell that to the 3 MkIII decoys i found in each system in one of my games!

[I-KP]

I'm not sure what is awkward about them.

It's a nice idea, conceptually, but the way it seems to work now doesn't gel all that well.  Lasers can't be lured or confused, it's not like EW is being employed to muddle guided munitions (such as missiles).  Having all shots divert to a Deflector is just... odd.  If I were coming up with some sort of counter-Laser ship type I'd more likely have a small drone that ablates a cloud of tiny reflective particles that simply reduces the amount of damage that the weapon does to anything within its radius by way of accumulative energy reflection (but the shot, what's left of it, still hits the intended target).  The effect is the same but you don't have an awkward-feeling shot redirection mechanic.

I didn't notice that Laser-firing ships will automatically target something outside of a Deflector's radius of effect.  Maybe that's enough. 

Well, I actually do really like the idea of having the deflector drones simply reduce damage instead of drawing them all to themselves.  That is perhaps more thematically consistent, and makes it so that they are not a "hard stop" counter, but more of a drawback.  The decoy drones I still maintain I like the way they are, and they're a moderately rare experimental ship anyway, but for deflector drones I think that simply having them reduce damage in their area is superior to the current model.  Nice idea!

I'm not averse to making changes to things when a better idea is presented, and I'm not too proud to change my mind, but I simply won't do it if I'm not convinced.  Until this suggestion of yours, the current mechanic for deflector drones was the best of what I'd seen -- now I like yours better for a variety of reasons, so we'll go with that one.  Hopefully should quell any remaining reservations with that specific feature, but I suppose we'll see!

Sounds like a good excuse to make an overlay for Deflector Drones to move with a subtle, gently twinkling cloud of reflective particles around them to illustrate their radius of effect.  I'll whip the pixel-pushing monkeys into action shortly!
 

[FFLaguna]

Sounds like a good excuse to make an overlay for Deflector Drones to move with a subtle, gently twinkling cloud of reflective particles around them to illustrate their radius of effect.  I'll whip the pixel-pushing monkeys into action shortly!
 

Very nice, I'm looking forward to this! Will multiple deflector drones next to each other stack their gameplay effects? What about their graphical effects?

[I-KP]

Graphically speaking the cloud of glittering particles would be subtle enough to not look ugly when multiple instances of the graphic overlap.  The game mechanics of overlapping particles is for someone else to define (but logically speaking a denser particle cloud equals greater reflective potential).

[FFLaguna]

x4000, when will we get researchable teleport rebuilders? Then I can build less per planet and still have decent, high-speed coverage. I always research T2 engineers for the same reasons.

Also, what are your thoughts on turning on friendly-fire damage for all or some mine types? Turn it into a real-life no-man's land, turrets included. Perhaps both smart mines and dumb mines are on the table?

[Strider]

Has anyone had trouble with multi-player with this (Z) version?  A buddy and I tried to play a saved game (2 or 3 times), and then a new game, and all games froze up within 4 minutes of gametime.  We went back to the X version and had no trouble playing for hours.

[I-KP]

Alternate Deflector scheme, magnetically confined reflective particle cloud...



The PNGs are here.  Animation: Bright twinkles within the particle cloud.

[FFLaguna]

WOW! That looks gorgeous! What do you think about the color scheme? When you first mentioned you were working on it, I was imagining something green like this:

[FFLaguna]

Is there a way for me to add these effects into my current install before waiting for them to be included in the official builds?

[I-KP]

Doubtless the colour tint will be procedurally cycled slowly by the game anyway so I wouldn't worry about it too much.