akeean

+1 to that, it's amazing how most empires have turret factories (sometimes even up to 5 of them) but do not even have half the goods in store in their an their closest neighbour empires to build ANY turret. Plus the shitty inventory for cargo (you only see/control the first 10-15 goods in your hold etc) makes building turrets a PITA, while there are plenty of trash turrets available for recycling (and yeah, research is also little more than a shitty slot machine).

Hey fellow modders, so I'm trying to force Xsotans to ONLY (/mostly) use Lightning or tesla weapons, in order to make purpose built rock plated ships feasible against them. (Also I like to think Xsotan do not assimilate chainguns and other man made-ish weapon systems, given how they disregard station and shipwrecks with their containing technology and I think that Xsotan brought Lightning and Tesla weapons with them and factions just looted it from fighting Xsotans for 200ish years) So far I've tracked down ship generation and arming to lib\shipgenerator.lua and arming a ship with turrets to lib\shiputlity.lua question is, what would be the faction parameter for xsotans? Do they get a certain known ID, or can I somehow get a string name from a passed $faction variable so I can make a filter in the ship generator? Edit: I think I've almost worked it out. Key is the lib/story/xsotan.lua that calls turretgenerator, there i've copied the generateArmed function and changed the probabilities for the weapontypes allowed to be rolled. However my Xsotans at the guardian get spawned with 0 omicron firepower listed, so something is still wonky. Not sure what value I could give "weaponType" to pass on TurretGenerator.generate ... WeaponType.LightningGun for example does not work either. lib/story/xsotan.lua, line 52, look for "local turret = TurretGenerator.generateArmed(x, y)" and replace with local turret = TurretGenerator.generateXsotan(x, y) then add this to lib/turretgenerator.lua (just before the "return TurretGenerator" in the end function TurretGenerator.generateXsotan(x, y, offset_in, rarity_in, material_in) -- server local offset = offset_in or 0 local sector = math.floor(length(vec2(x, y))) + offset local types = Balancing_GetWeaponProbability(sector, 0) types[WeaponType.RepairBeam] = nil types[WeaponType.MiningLaser] = nil types[WeaponType.SalvagingLaser] = nil types[WeaponType.ForceGun] = nil types[WeaponType.ChainGun] = nil types[WeaponType.MiningLaser] = nil types[WeaponType.SalvagingLaser] = nil types[WeaponType.Bolter] = nil types[WeaponType.ForceGun] = nil types[WeaponType.PlasmaGun] = nil types[WeaponType.Laser] = nil types[WeaponType.Cannon] = nil types[WeaponType.RepairBeam] = nil types[WeaponType.RocketLauncher] = nil types[WeaponType.RailGun] = nil local weaponType = getValueFromDistribution(types) return TurretGenerator.generate(x, y, offset_in, rarity_in, weaponType, material_in) end

With unshielded fighters, they basically die from each others friendly fire, or by crossing your salvage & mining beams since their hitpints are so low (<4 hp), with the buffed ones with shields, they mostly die from colliding with stuff, since that damage ignores shields, also since cannons have a chance to punch through shields and its AOE damage, with the low health, cannon fighters usually just die from their own AOE effect when they attack something. I'd stick with tesla, lightning, chaingun or bolter fighters. Laser may have issues with the fighters jitter and speed, cannon is dangerous with AOE damage and missiles sucks unless you get a super lucky roll with high dps, non-burst and guided perk.

This seems to be a more elegant way to discourage AI from spamming carriers over my fighter size suggestion. Because it prevents from AI spawning helpless ships (What use is a carrier with just 1 or 2 fighters?) You can still increase the fighter sizes to discourage player-owned fighters, tho.

Server admin could just mod the volume of the generated fighters, thus limiting the quantity that players & npcs can carry at once. He can do so by tweaking the fightergenerator.lua. If you were to use my Better Fighter mod, just insert "template.diameter * 4" just before both "return template" lines in the that file to have 4 times bigger fighters. That file also discrimiates between combat and utility fighters, so admin could make combat fighters way bigger than salvage ones to cut down on use of combat fighters over just salvage/mining/repair ones to reduce lag. Keep in mind that the AI ships likely won't care about fighter types and will happily use whatever the RNG give them, just as salvage fighters will come to your defense if you use the carrier commands mod and have them salvage.

This looks interesting! Thanks for giving fighters some love! Hope the HP bug on Avorions side will be fixed soon.

Thanks! From my testing it it seems that as long as you don't send them against certain shape of ships (very long ones tend to start rapidly spinning when facing fighters, thus killing them quickly through collisions) they will now last a lot longer. I will probably revisit fighters after the next patch to see if the mod is still needed and which part of it (prices, quantity, stats of fighters). I might also consider tweaking the generation of pilot crew (sadly I haven't found prices of those exposed in my initial pass). However, I don't want touch too many files, to not make running multiple mods at once too difficult.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll check it out!

Sorry about that, grab v0.1a it's fighter prices have been fixed in that. Avg. cost about 2.000 for a bunch of 20dps plain iron chaingun fighters with 450m/s top speed to 350k for exceptional 140dps xanion tesla fighters with 750m/s top speed from what I've seen so far.

Move the merchants folder into the entity folder. Thats what i did anyway and they are a bit pricy but not THAT pricy. Thanks for setting this straight, fixed in 0.1a

Since the server "rolls" the shop contents, it will need to be installed there for sure. Better on both client & server to avoid any desyncs.

TL;DR: Makes fighters tougher, deal more dps (depending on weapon type, no more 2dps tritanium chaingun fighters), faster, more available and fairer priced. Goes well with "Carrier Commands"-Mod. Don't use against wildly rotating "stick" shaped ships or lose fighters QUICK. Update (0.1a): Looks like the HP of fighters is bugged on Avorions side, so for now this mod only gives you on average cheaper, faster, harder hitting, fighters with MUCH STRONGER SHIELDS that are easier to acquire. Can't do anything about the health till the engine bug is fixed :-/ A quick search for Avorion & Fighters results in many complaints about them being mostly annoying to acquire & use and a waste of money considering how quickly they die. What if... they would be a bit tougher, faster and the crappy RNG ones were cheaper than the good / high end ones? So I've played with fightergenerator.lua & fightermerchant.lua - buffed up fighters & changed how some of their stats were rolled. For now I've settled to fighters having around 1400hp in iron tier, better materials and size give a bonus to health, so Xanion Fighters will usually end up with 5-7k HP plus their shields, which are for some undocumented reason always equal to their hull points. *Due to engine bugs, they only get their shields beefed up for now. Avoid enemies with shield piercing weapons :) I've also beefed up the speed to 400-900m/s, so now they can keep up with most carriers and thus will dock quickly. Smaller fighters have less HP and may be a little cheaper (since you have space for replacements) other factors of price: Size, speed, hp/shield, maneuverability. If you still end up somehow wiping all your squads, carriers will usually find at least one type of cheap fighter at the equipment dock to have at least something to throw at the enemy. Turret vendors also have 12 different fighters in stock and more of each type, so you have a bit more selection and can fill up your carrier at a single equipment dock if you need to. Please leave feedback about this especially the scaling of fighter strength.. are they OP now? Note that you likely still lose fighters at times, especially with full squadrons as fighters seem to hit each other with friendly fire (I'm looking at you laser/tesla fighters!) Version History: 0.1a: folder nesting fix (no more insane fighter prices) 0.1: Initial release Installation: - Backup your Avorion/data/scripts folder - replace files in the folder with files from the zip, voila. Uninstallation: - You did take a backup of your scripts folder, right? - Replace modified files in your Avorion folder with your totally backed up originals. betterfighters-v0.1a.zip

Another good tip for shipbuilding is to have a big block made out of material with high HP per volume as anchor for your turrets, since if their mounting block gets destroyed, the turrets will float off into space, leaving you defenseless. I realized the hard way as I "laminated" my first ships front with a 0.05 layer of armor plating and mounted turrets on that. Needless to say in the first fight against Aliens, they shot off my offensive power and I had to grab my stuff and run to remake my ship :) Also avoid placing turrets on the same plane close to each other, since I think they block each others line of fire, so if you want to shoot frontal, make a downwards sloped block so all turrets can shoot what is in front of you. This is better than a flat front with turrets pointing "upwards" when firing forward, since they will spend a lot of time adjusting if you change your ships tilt ever so slightly.