Spire Railgun Shop

[Lord Of Nothing]

This post updated 26/11/2020

Now included automatically with current version of the game, disabled by default.

So, since Chris has kindly made the Spire Neural nets moddable, and since I was missing my railguns from AI War classic, I did something about it.
This is intended to be balanced without the need to run different settings to a normal fallen spire game.

It contains:
Spire RailFrigates.
Spire Raildestroyers.
Spire Riot Control Cruisers.
Spire Interdictors. (Light and Regular.)
And their neural nets, of course. (Which does start to clutter the city build menu a bit, unfortunately.)

To elaborate: RailFrigates and Raildestroyers are what their names suggest. I’ve tried to retain the what I feel is the original flavour of the two types – Railfrigates are a bit of a crowd brawler, while Raildestroyers are more focused on killing big stuff, but also have a utility role, since their railguns are somewhat… Arachnid.
The Riot control cruiser is named after the starship from the original game, but is more of a fusion between the original game's spire tractor platform and the spire gravity drain. It's designed to keep things at range to give your railguns time to use their range.
The two Interdictor variants are designed to further enable a slightly more control-based, long range playstyle, through the use of very powerful gravity effects, since I felt this went well with railguns. They are big. They are not cheap.

If you want to try it, you can just enable it in-game. Please note that once you have saved a game with it, you will need it enabled to play with that savegame. However, since it only adds things to your side, you can simply choose to stop using them mid-game if you want to.

Further balance notes:
Railfrigates and destroyers give up some DPS for range, since the Spire already push glass cannon status and I felt pushing them further that way was unwise. They also innately apply their DPS slightly less efficiently than the coilbeam.
The Interdictors: They’re seriously expensive and fairly deep into the techtree, but mobile planetwide gravity has a lot of potential, so… Enjoy.

Further notes:

If you've previously installed the mod prior to it's inclusion and have it under a different name, it's probably easiest to keep using that one until you finish your current game.
If that's not reasonable, you can add that name to the mod's ModAlternateNames.txt following the guidance here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Building_Multiplayer#Mod_Capability_Improvements
Note however that this will be reset by things like steam file validation. This is my fault for not originally giving this out under a standardised folder name.

If for some reason you're on an older version of the game that is still recent enough to include The Spire Rises, follow the instructions here with the 1.0 XML file: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Basic_Stat_Modding#Where_To_Make_Your_Own_Files

[-NR-SirLimbo]

I like the idea. I always considered Spire having too little diversity of weapons.

2 Tips to improve though:

1.) It's much better making the mod without having to alter vanilla files. I suggest creating a mod in the XML Mods folder of the AI War 2 game folder (refer to https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Basic_Stat_Modding)

2.) There is a way to make "point beams", which is much more like the old AIWC Spire Railcannons (beams that hit a single target instantly). The following would be an example for one (The weapon type being HeavyBeamInvisible, but the beam_length_multiplier="1" is required to make the game understand it's a point beam):


      <system name="PointBeam" display_name="Point Beam"
               category="Weapon" firing_timing="OnlyInRange"
               damage_per_shot="1000" range="High1" shot_speed="Normal" rate_of_fire="Low"
               shot_type_data="HeavyBeamInvisible"
               beam_length_multiplier="1"
               >
      </system>

[Lord Of Nothing]

I like the idea. I always considered Spire having too little diversity of weapons.

2 Tips to improve though:

1.) It's much better making the mod without having to alter vanilla files. I suggest creating a mod in the XML Mods folder of the AI War 2 game folder (refer to https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Basic_Stat_Modding)

2.) There is a way to make "point beams", which is much more like the old AIWC Spire Railcannons (beams that hit a single target instantly). The following would be an example for one (The weapon type being HeavyBeamInvisible, but the beam_length_multiplier="1" is required to make the game understand it's a point beam):


      <system name="PointBeam" display_name="Point Beam"
               category="Weapon" firing_timing="OnlyInRange"
               damage_per_shot="1000" range="High1" shot_speed="Normal" rate_of_fire="Low"
               shot_type_data="HeavyBeamInvisible"
               beam_length_multiplier="1"
               >
      </system>

Hi -
1. A fair point - That's the way I did it, and I did include the link to that in the opening post, but at the bottom of the list of ways - I've changed it to be the first way listed, since that's probably better.
2. Interesting, thank you - I shall have to play around with that!

[-NR-SirLimbo]

It'd be best to not make the raw .xml file the downloaded object, but a folder that is named after your mod so people can simply extract into the XML Mods folder.

Otherwise you're always limited to only having a single file. If you ever decide to give Spire-Scourge some more Spire-y weapons too.

[Lord Of Nothing]

I finally got time to play around with the point-beams. It's a really cool visual effect, thanks for pointing me at it - see me messing around here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwyWTzdTX10

Still trying to decide which one I prefer for larger ship fights - my intended test game got derailed by me finding a lone wolf spire frigate near my homeworld and wanting to try the new FRS, so not done that yet.

I did however fill in the size gap with the unholy spawn of a Cruiser, and Classic's Spire Tractor Platforms and Spire Gravity Drain...

[-NR-SirLimbo]

Looking good.

Though to finish up the visual on the multi-shooting point beams I like to add fires_salvos_sequentially="true" so that the beams are fired one by one instead of all at once. Really looks nice in my opinion.

[Lord Of Nothing]

Alright, finally finished my balance test game. Updated the main post with where I finished up - I'm more or less happy with everything now, with the exception of the Light Interdictor, but I can't think of good solution so will probably just leave it. (As far as I can see, it's either not useful, too powerful for when you get it, or too expensive to be worth it, and I cannot find a sweet spot. Finally ended up leaving it leaning toward the latter.)

I'm happy with this more generally now, it does what I wanted it to, it all seems to work fine, and nothing seems to cause any particular extra performance issues, so I think I'll leave it as is.
(I did investigate the sequential fire, but I slightly prefer the simultaneous fire aesthetically.)

[x4000]

This will be the first mod included in the game by default, but off until it is enabled.  Big thanks to Lord of Nothing for permission to do this.  This will be live starting in version 2.078

[ArnaudB]

This will be the first mod included in the game by default, but off until it is enabled.  Big thanks to Lord of Nothing for permission to do this.  This will be live starting in version 2.078

How do you turn it on in the game? I am in the beta but loading an old save, I didn't see the Neutral Nets.

[x4000]

Under the settings window on the main menu, in the game tab, you can turn on and off mods and expansions now.  It will currently require a restart of the program, but later will not require that.

This is a mod that should appear immediately in old savegames, to my knowledge, once it is turned on.

[Lord Of Nothing]

You're right that it will appear in old savegames once turned on, that's how I did my first tests.

However, the option to turn it on doesn't currently appear in the menu. For me, the option for my copy does, but not this one under it's proper name and with a description. I poked around the files, and I'm guessing it should be in with the other XML mods? It isn't, only my original copy is.

[ArnaudB]

I don't have the option either (and had an issue with my profile and settings getting reset, but that seemed to be mod interference).

I did a notepad "Search in files" for "Riot Control" as that's one of the units in the Spire Railgun Shop mod, but nothing showed up. There isn't a Spire Railgun Shop mod in the setting tab either, though we do have the Spire expansion, some mods that are in the XML and the Zenith (not installed) being mentionned.

[Lord Of Nothing]

Nothing to see here.
(Game now has a fully up to date version as of patch 1.01)