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I am thinking of creating a mod that will completely change the bounty mode, spice things up a bit, but since the new bounty mode is going to see your ship traversing large star systems with upwards of 20 planets each, we need a new starting ship design (the model one is great, but it is not suited for the mod)

so i need your help to design a new starting ship (or ships)
there will be a few criteria that need to be met

The ship must be lightly armed (no ion beams or heavy cannons)
Example. 1x cannon 2x lasers or 4x lasers
It cannot have shields
It should have room for expansion
It should probably have an FTL drive (i say probably because it doesn't need one for you to start out with, there will be more than enough money in the starting zone)

Here is my basic summed up list of changes (its more of a rant)

you now have about 8 ships per sector, that combined with at least 25 sectors in the starting solar system, will make for a somewhat different experience, though i do want to ramp up the difficulty when you leave the starting system, there will be no galaxy, just a bunch of systems separated by massive distances, somewhere around 300 DU (distance units) between systems, therefore you need a LOT more fuel, and as such fuel now costs 100 and you can carry at minimum 500 fuel with each ftl drive giving you 200 fuel units.

image https://i.imgur.com/Psux4Ss.png

image https://i.imgur.com/HK6R1Gr.png
two red-white contributions

    Not sure exactly what you want with spicing up: more fireworks or harder survival mode.
    You didn't provide specifications other than part constraints. Besides there's not much that can be done about starting ships.

    Marauder I Mk. 0

    image https://i.imgur.com/CxxElS2.png

    Mass: 83.3 t
    Crew: 8
    Cost: 57,600
    At the same cost as Model-1 the Marauder-I offers far greater versatility through myriads of possible modifications. Designed to take the fight to the next level. It can be armed to the teeth and the crew can be expanded to 18 or more. Upgrading with a warp drive is no problem. Want more armor or propulsion? No problem. Rule space as the next best man.

      okay, in short, with the mod, you now have about 8 ships per sector, that combined with at least 25 sectors in the starting solar system, will make for a somewhat different experience, though i do want to ramp up the difficulty when you leave the starting system, there will be no galaxy, just a bunch of systems separated by massive distances, somewhere around 300 DU (distance units) between systems, therefore you need a LOT more fuel, and as such fuel now costs 100 and you can carry at minimum 500 fuel with each ftl drive giving you 200 fuel units.

        okay, so i set the marauder as the starting ship, this is what i ended up with after killing about 4 ships, yes, this will do very well...

        image https://i.imgur.com/SC0f7VD.png

        image https://i.imgur.com/4KC4S15.png
        this shows off the large amounts of fuel you will need just to cross a system

        (note: after amassing a fleet, the fuel costs ramps up to around 3k fuel per jump, and the fuel capacity is around 4k, these are in system jumps)

        Fuel isn't so much a problem up to level II ships imho. Level III and above ships have efficiency matching problems as well as other efficiency problems. I guess most players will go for a fleet at this point. The bounty should be plenty by then. And if someone is hard pressed they can still sell off their ships and use only one for the trip. And then rebuild at destination. It's risky but that's the life of poor souls.

          yeah, the problem is that the difficulty "curve" is a wall, once you leave your starting sector (or system in the case of gas giant) every planet is veteren.
          (in the picture above i had not changed the difficulty yet)

            Can't be helped. You can only make sure there's enough bounty in the starting system so players are set when going to the next sector. It's up to players to build a good enough ship. This isn't a campaign where you could assign a starting ship for each mission. It's not like the game has these feature yet either. And frankly, it's difficult to offer level III+ designs that are universal open or versatile at this stage. At least nothing that would be to everyone's taste since they are very much fixed-shaped & complex designs as well as mission specific designs.

              i know that, the problem was that veteran and vanguard planets only had about 4-5 ships, which is not enough if you want to go galactic distances

                OK, I got it.
                The attrition lost is higher than the bounty.
                But the main problem is that the game doesn't spawn enough ships. And changing MinBountyBaseValue and MaxBountyBasevalue won't do any good because the game would only spawn stronger ships instead of more ships.
                Correct?
                If so it's hopeless from what I see in the script. I thought about overlapping the bountyBasevalues but this would only lower the difficulty which you do not want.
                The game needs more scripting options which would allow to vary e.g. number of ships spawned. It's up to Walt.

                  it is my understanding that this

                  ThreatLevelClustering = 2;
                  ThreatLevels
                  [
                  // 0
                  : ~/BaseThreatLevel
                  {
                  NameKey = "BountyMode/ThreatLevels/0";

                  	TiersToSpawn = [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2];
                  
                  	ThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_1.png";
                  		Size = [.2, .2];
                  	}
                  	FlyOutThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_1.png";
                  		Size = [32, 32];
                  	}
                  }
                  
                  // 1
                  : ~/BaseThreatLevel
                  {
                  	NameKey = "BountyMode/ThreatLevels/1";
                  
                  	TiersToSpawn = [0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3];
                  
                  	ThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_2.png";
                  		Size = [.2, .2];
                  	}
                  	FlyOutThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_2.png";
                  		Size = [32, 32];
                  	}
                  }
                  
                  // 2
                  : ~/BaseThreatLevel
                  {
                  	NameKey = "BountyMode/ThreatLevels/2";
                  
                  	TiersToSpawn = [0, 0, 0, 1, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5];
                  
                  	ThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_3.png";
                  		Size = [.2, .2];
                  	}
                  	FlyOutThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_3.png";
                  		Size = [32, 32];
                  	}
                  }
                  
                  // 3
                  : ~/BaseThreatLevel
                  {
                  	NameKey = "BountyMode/ThreatLevels/3";
                  
                  	TiersToSpawn = [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 5, 5, 6, 7];
                  
                  	ThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_4.png";
                  		Size = [.2, .2];
                  	}
                  	FlyOutThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_4.png";
                  		Size = [32, 32];
                  	}
                  }
                  
                  // 4
                  : ~/BaseThreatLevel
                  {
                  	NameKey = "BountyMode/ThreatLevels/4";
                  
                  	TiersToSpawn = [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 7, 7, 8, 9];
                  
                  	ThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_5.png";
                  		Size = [.2, .2];
                  	}
                  	FlyOutThreatLevelSprite
                  	{
                  		Texture = "rank_5.png";
                  		Size = [32, 32];
                  	}
                  }

                  ]

                  is the code which decides what what type of ships to spawn, obviously i have changed it so you will always get many low level vessels (for grinding i guess)

                    Yes, but from what I've seen in bounty mode and I believe it still is so
                    the game spawns ships closest to your ship's rating as the lower end.
                    So for example if your ship is rated as high or higher than the max rating the game spawns only the highest rated ships defined.
                    Maybe I don't quite understand the decision process completely and I don't see any way to set or change the number of ships other than changing the MinBountyBaseValue and MaxBountyBasevalue defined for the threat levels, hence, changing difficulty level from what is actually intended.

                      Lafiel That's the way it used to work, but since I added FTL drives, the sizes of enemy ships are based entirely on the "rank" of the sector you jump to -- the size/strength of your own fleet no longer has any influence on what enemies spawn.

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