Wayleran

I've tried to do this as best I can in the past but the problem is the vanilla values don't scale up very well. For instance the ship's hulls and dps don't gradually scale on vanilla like you'd expect. They go up drastically around the "naonite" stages but plateau all throughout the "trinium/xanion" stages and don't go up noticeably until you're well into the core, ie. 100-50 distance from center. But something I realized is that we should just start the game (whether on vanilla or with my mods) on Normal or Veteran then MANUALLY increase the difficulty around midway in the server.ini and then once again MANUALLY increase the difficulty when you reach the core. This way you get noticeable changes both through my mods and the game's difficulty settings. As it is the game just isn't balanced well at all. Whether it's because it's just too easy, enemies are too squishy, we do too much dps, bosses are ridiculously too easy, system upgrades (in vanilla) are totally out-of-whack...etc. So I'd use my mods and stuff but also do that other manual adjustment. Maybe when you first get at least SOME shields go from normal to vet, than when you first get some trinium go from vet to difficult, than finally when you first cross the barrier increase it once more to hard or even insane. Oh and P.S. - I will be updating the mod again soon, but I'm waiting to see what (if any) positive changes are made to combat difficulty with the new patch coming out. I hope they REALLY adjust numbers so my mods will be mostly unneccessary. But I have a feeling it's just going to be "fluff" like torpedoes and stuff, IMHO, we don't need right now. We need balance and polish and they need to prep for release THEN and only then continue adding "content".

Question: does this affect Traders who come into Stations to buy goods, too? I have seen all my economy crippled to about 5-10% effectiveness in relation to previously - was this your mod, or the balance changes introduced by the Beta patch? My mod. Instead of a random amount between 50-500 they'll buy/sell only 10-50 which I now know is way too low. I've adjusted it in my own scripts but haven't updated this mod yet. Just go to shiputilty.lua line 288 and adjust those numbers but they are JUST for trading ships that are spawned for missions like distress signals or trader attacked by pirate events... line 288: entity:addCargo(g:good(), math.max(10, math.random() * 50)) -- MOD change the "10" and "50" to the min and max you want the ship to either buy or sell. 50 and 150 or something. But again this is only for mission trading ships not normal trading ships. Go to the next part for those. Go to tradingutility.lua line 206 and change: line 206: local amount = math.max(10, math.random() * 50) -- MOD change the 10 to something like 50 and the 50 to maybe 150-250. By default those values are 50 and 500. But these ships will always drop EXACTLY 50% of their cargo upon total destruction and salvaging wreckage. So if you select 50-200, you'll get 25-100 goods to drop.

Indeed it is so: destroyed Stations will never regenerate with the current build of the game. Sad! That's why I've only ever raided Pirate Stations and a Sector who was already pissed off at me for no reason at all way out in the Outer Rim. :P Just do what I do and attack the cargo haulers. They're a constant source of credits and easier to kill than holding down the left mouse button for 20 mins while you whittle down an entire station. LOL Plus, my Economy Mod is designed with only killing cargo ships in mind. It's one of the only self-imposed restrictions I put upon myself. And I ONLY attack pirate factions OR factions that are hostile towards me upon first encountering them. I mean if they hate me right from the get-go, than F 'em I say. ;)

Removed by Wayleran

You're welcome. Hope you enjoy it. The changes to the size and strength of some encounters along with the increase to the hull sizes of some enemies should make a nice difference. I went a bit too hard on nerfing them after the last couple versions. But I think this may be better. And the economy mod, like it states, is TOTALLY new so I'd recommend trying that out and tell me what you think. Keep in mind that ONLY trading ships are impacted by this but they are pretty consistent now in terms of the amount you'll get from destroying them. If you decide to take the time to destroy an entire station you'll potentially get a lot of goods, but I don't think it's worth the time to do that and also I like to restrict my raiding to ONLY the trading ships and killing defenders. I'm not sure if you destroy a station/factory if it'll ever be rebuilt (I don't think so) so essentially you're slaughtering a "cash cow" of a trading route. LOL

That's in the script but apparently only for what to spawn into the station initially. Right above that though is a line that restricts the maxValue to 300*1000*the "richness" of the sector (which ranges from 1 to 20 roughly as you go towards the center. And that appeared to be the cap on trades I believe but the 500k is supposed to just be the max upon the first initial spawn of the factory/station.

New Version Released! Update 1/26/2018: Version 0.15.7.5 - The Economy Mod has been re-integrated and COMPLETELY redesigned so it now only impacts raiding and has little to no negative impact of legitimate trading. - Trading ships will now carry less goods overall and therefore yield less profits, however players can still "farm" high value goods (like Mining Robots or Body Armors) by paying attention and finding good trade routes and simply waiting on more trade ships to enter the sector. - Pirates have had their hulls and dps slightly increased after the last version of the mod nerfed them a little too much. I'm fine-tuning things like this to find a balance between making enemies more challenging while also not adding "grind" to the game. - Both Pirate Attacks and Convoi/Fake Distress Signals have also had the number of enemies that spawn slightly modified. Some harder encounters may have 1 or 2 more enemies than before, while easier ones are still the same. - Alien Attack events have also been adjusted to have an extra ship in most cases and the sizes of the Xsotan Reavers, Dreadnoughts and Motherships have also been increased because they too were nerfed too much in the previous version of the mod.

Well that 500k cap is only on the initial amount of goods that are SPAWNED into the station upon the player's first time entering the sector. From then on the station can and will begin to either produce more or buy more from it's trading route partners. So I don't think that's worth messing with too much. If you see a factory is stuck at a certain amount and you want more you can go and buy the prerequisite goods it needs (indicated by the goods it's buying) and stock it up so production can continue. Otherwise you can wait and watch for trading ships that are entering the sector. Eventually there should be some carrying the goods it needs.

I wonder if it were possible to make a modification that would destroy a fair part of the goods when a ship/station blows up. Would make perfect sense too. That would nerf piracy without the needless punishing of player trading. I actually do think that is the case normally. I don't know for sure or what the percentage is, but I have been testing that out. I'll spawn some cargo ships and then look at their amount of goods and then destroy and completely salvage the wreckage and it seems to be maybe 10-50% of the goods "survive" normally. And I FOR SURE have figured out how to minimize spawned trading ships AMOUNT of goods from a fixed 500, to a randomly generated amount between 10 and 100. There's no need to have a fixed amount of 500 IMO. I am also reducing the maxStock on stations by 10 to see how that feels. What happens is on smaller stations small goods still have a lot of quantity but don't cap out at the max which is 25000, and on larger stations some still hit the cap of 25000 but bigger goods tend to have a small maxStock which may be nice but it needs more testing.

Yeah it's the mod but I not only renamed and resized the Xsotan ships, I also adjusted the number of them slightly to compensate for the increase in both enemy ship's hull and dps. However in the newest version I've adjusted the amount of ships that arrive for some events. It's still 4 for the "massive" attack but one of them is a "Dreadnought" that doesn't even exist in vanilla. And the "entire fleet" attack now has 5 ships including a "Xsotan Mothership" which also doesn't exist in vanilla. And if you pay close attention to the wording of that 2nd (of the 3) notifications, it will hint at what level of encounter is about to occur. They breakdown as: Level 1: 3 Xsotan Hunters (small) Level 2: 2 Xsotan Hunters and a Reaver (large) Level 3: 2 Xsotan Hunters, a Reaver and a Dreadnought (massive) Level 4: 2 Xsotan Hunters, a Reaver, a Dreadnought and a Mothership (entire fleet) Version 0.15.7.5 will slightly modify these and some other events because I felt some encounters were taking too long and were getting too "grindy". P.S. - I came up with an even better solution to my "Economy Mod". Instead of modifying the volumes of certain goods, I've discovered a way to make trading ships spawn with less than the fixed 500 amount which isn't even dependent on the volume or price of the goods, it's just a stable 500 which I think is silly. And also to reduce the maxCargoSpace of stations so they can't have an unreasonably high number of expensive goods and this change also impacts the ships that deliver/sell to them on their trading routes too. I have the mods done now but want to test them before release. And I'll be re-incorporating the Economy Mod back into this Modpack if I get this new approach working well.

Yeah but actually I'm also working on an even better solution and it's about ready to release. I am going to reduce the storage capacity on stations and freighters to naturally reduce the number of goods available to either buy or steal. This seems like a much nicer solution. I noticed that trading ships that spawn for things like "Trader Attacked by Pirates" missions or just "passing ships" that go through sectors had a set AMOUNT of goods they'd be loaded with of 500! Which I think is silly because it totally wasn't dependent upon the price OR volume of those goods. So it could easily be 500 Carbon or 500 Mining Robots, which are of course drastically different in both price and volume. Also stations have a rather large maxCargoSpace dependent somewhat on their individual size, but in general are just VERY large. And this impacts the amount of goods the trading ships deliver and/or sell to them that you see flying around in sectors. So whether you destroy only trading ships on raids (like I do) or even if you like to destroy everything including the stations, this created an issue that would result in a small trading ship dropping 50-500 very large, very EXPENSIVE goods like Vehicles or Mining Robots. So I am testing out reducing both the maxCargoSpace for stations, which should impact not only them but those trading ships on their "trade routes", and also I am making the other spawned traders for missions and passing-by ships have a RANDOMLY spawn amount of goods (instead of the fixed 500). And that amount will be roughly between 10-100 and not a fixed 500! (Still working on that number so it's both fair to the players and also helps make raiding/trading more fun and challenging) If these new approaches work well than I feel the need to modify the individual volumes of goods won't really be neccessary. Stay tuned here or even better on my Modpack page. I'm probably going to re-incorporate the new Economy Mod back into the Modpack download IF I get it to a place that seems fun and balanced. Modpack: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php?topic=4375.msg23108#msg23108

Because of my total change towards the "non-combat" upgrades in general. If it doesn't impact combat (Shields, Turrets and to a lesser extent Generator Upgrades) than I don't see the need to punish people for using "utility" upgrades like battery, radar, hyperspace, etc... My main philosophy is to somewhat limit a player's ability to just stack shield and turret upgrades with nearly zero downside and be overwhelming tanky AND have high dps. Now you can still have 2-3 shield upgrades but it'll cost you a lot of energy and you'll need more generator blocks to compensate and also you can have multiple high end turret upgrades but, again, it's a decision you'll have to make and sacrifice resources in your ship for more energy blocks. Thanks! I was starting to notice the grind, myself. You're quick on the draw! Yeah it still may need further tweaking because me and my buddy haven't gotten into the core yet on my unofficial "real world scenario" testing server. LOL Thanks bud but I think I need to just reverse the process. Start softer and slowly increase the mods, as opposed to the other way around. Because I don't want new people to try out the mods and be discouraged if I made them a bit on the difficult end. I can always buff mods as easily as nerf them. ;)

I also found in shiputility.lua that spawned trader ships (ie, trader attacks, etc) have a set 500 amount of goods, not VOLUME, total amount. So I wrote a mod to make that like math.random(100, 500) instead to make it randomly spawn between 100 to 500 instead...even that might be high but 500 if it has carbon OR like mining robots...is not a good idea.

I discovered that as far as freighter ships are concerned they spawn with 500 goods for events like trader attacks, etc... So I'm thinking of adjusting that number because it literally seems to have no relation to volumes. So it will spawn with 500 volume 1 items OR 500 volume 20 items. It's the last function in shiputility.lua. I'm going to test out changing it to 100 instead of 500. This is a better way to do it though for these ships at least because it doesn't involve changing individual goods' volumes which can get messy. I'll test it out and see, and if anyone else wants to test it out either change shiputility.lua: line 288: entity:addCargo(g:good(), 500) from 500 to whatever or just PM me and I'll send you the modded file, but it's easy to just play around with that 1 line to see for yourself.

Well, since I don't need to totally abandon it, I posted a standalone version of it in it's own post. This is a NEW version of it also that's much more reasonable. I only modified a selection of highly priced goods by 2x-3x max. This will curb some of the raiding profits you'll receive and make trading a bit more challenging but not really affect anything in a negative way I think. You can find that post here: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php?topic=4408.msg23351#msg23351 For instance, things like Body Armors went from about 1.5 to 4.5 and War Robots went from about 8 to 24 just as a couple of examples. But those things are also of lower importance too. If something was highly priced AND had high importance, I either left it alone or modified it very slightly (less than 2x). See how this feels and tell me what you think. I am however working on, what I feel, is an EVEN BETTER SOLUTION! I'm going to look into making ALL items that come from destroyed cargo vessels and stations be marked as "Stolen". This will mean you'll HAVE to either sell them to a Smuggler Hideout for 25% of their value OR debrand them for 50% of their value, essentially cutting the profits down by 50%... This I think may be a more elegant solution if I can do it. You'll still get all the goods you would have but you'll have to decide whether to sell them stolen for a substantial discount OR debrand them to use for yourself or resell to another station.

Hey bud. Welcome to the game and the forums and thanks for the kind words. I decided to abandon the economy mod because, as I stated earlier, the effect on the overall game wasn't that noticeable and/or positive. Also you really NEED those extra credits AND goods to get heavily into station and sector building, so ultimately I felt the changes were unwarranted. As far as the Xsotan, no my mods don't automatically turn them into enemies. They always appear first as "neutral" upon entering the sector than get hostile on their own. The dev felt like that reflects their mysterious, unknown nature but of course after you first run into them, they're no longer really "unknown", right?! LOL I did change their names to what I think are cooler sounding names like "Xsotan Hunter/Reaver/Dreadnought/Mothership" instead of the default "Small/Big Unknown Ship". That's just a cosmetic change however but I think it's cool. 8) My mod does make them BIGGER and STRONGER though. In vanilla Xsotan ships are meant to spawn as 0.5x the volume of an average ship and 0.75x the dps... I felt that they shouldn't be measly little ships with low dps, so I simply changed those calculations to both be essentially 1x to an average ship in the sector. Now during an "Alien Attack" the Hunters are 1x, the Reavers are 2x, the Dreadnought is 3x and the Mothership is 5x... but I'm still testing out those numbers because too small and you cut through them like butter and too BIG and the fights can drag on and become tedious. The newest version though is 0.15.7.4 that I just posted and is MUCH better IMHO than those older ones. Combat/Events and the Systems mainly are much more fun and balanced. So I'd recommend you update to that mod and check back often too. I'd do a full reinstall of Avorion so you're modding a "fresh" set of scripts to undo any old/obsolete mods that may still be in there. But let me know what you think and thanks for the feedback. P.S. - You won't lose your ships or galaxies by uninstalling and reinstalling Avorion but since I changed a lot of the systems mods and no longer have modded versions of the non-combat related systems, it's just a good idea to go back to vanilla first then re-mod.

Update 1/22/2018: Version 0.15.7.4 - Both shield upgrades have been reworked to offer DISTINCTLY different benefits so a player will likely want to have at least 1 of each equipped. - Shield Boosters now require less energy but also have less "Shield Durability" and always have "Shield Recharge Rate" with the possibility of the crucially important "Upon depletion: Recharges 25% of your shield." bonus! - Energy to Shield Converter upgrades are now THE way to get higher end "Shield Durability" benefits. In vanilla they offered little benefit over the Shield Boosters, but now both are different and work well together. - Turret upgrades have been reworked to require slightly less energy, but are still costly at higher rarities to balance out end game dps potential. - Alien Artifacts now have no energy costs, except for the turret and shield related ones. - Added "+2 unarmed" to Artifact IV so it's now +5 armed, +2 unarmed. This change was to keep it valuable even compared to a normal "+5 turret" counterpart. - Artifact V is now a +60%/-35% Energy to Shield Converter which is slightly more energy efficient than a normal legendary upgrade with that Shield Durability bonus. - Some Pirate and Xsotan ships seemed to be a bit TOO big and fights were slightly more tedious than they were fun. So some of those ship's volumes were modified slightly to still offer longer encounters and challenge while not being too "grindy". - Slightly increased the volume of spawned "traders" in the "Trader Attack" and "Convoi Distress Signal" events so they were able to survive a bit longer and give players time to "save" them. Also the spawned trader ship in the Trader Attack event will spawn more towards the center of the sector with the pirates usually trailing behind "on their tails" so it will be easier for players (and even alliance ships) to come to the rescue instead of having to fly too far out first.

Funny thing is, not sure if you've noticed, that not all Shield Booster SMUs have this recharge upon depletion trait. It seems to be random whether they do or not. Is there a way for you to balance all Shield Boosters with this in mind? Can you read whether a specific SMU has the recharge bonus, and penalise / balance out Energy Requirements based on that, or do you have to hit all Shield Boosters with a nerf? Mostly asking because I'm curious. In an older version I did just that, all "Booster" had both and a higher likelihood of having the "depletion" bonus... So I will do that. I'll ensure that ALL Shield Boosters have BOTH Durability (at around 75% less than normal) and Recharge at the normal levels but leave the "depletion" bonus as is in terms of RNG chances to spawn on an item, because it's pretty high with blues or above anyways... So a "great" purple Shield Booster would be roughly: Shield Durability +20-25% Shield Recharge Rate +40-50% Generated Energy -10-12.5% (half Shield Durability amount) "Upon depletion: Recharges 25% of your shield" chance to spawn on item based on higher rarity as it is in vanilla. 100% on purples, 75% on orange, etc... And a "great" purple Energy to Shield Converter would be roughly: Shield Durability +50-70% Generated Energy -25-35% (half Shield Durability amount) With these numbers a normal player can and should be able to equip one of each for a total of about 80% Shield Durability, 45% Shield Recharge Rate and get the "Upon depletion" bonus for a total of around -40% cost to Generated Energy... I think that's a great compromise and allows people to have 2 distinctly different shield upgrades equipped without getting +100%-500% to shields, like is capable in vanilla with multiple upgrades equipped. The Teleporter Key 5 I reworked will be adjusted to a 60%/-30% Energy to Shield Converter to compensate and is essentially a nearly perfect purple. I also reworked the Artifacts now to be REALLY useful even if you get a good purple "counterpart" to them, because of their new energy costs, or lack thereof, AND their unique "hybrid" stats. I'll keep you all posted but it's about done now, I just need to test out the changes first.

Thanks bud, the new version is up BUT I definitely need to tweak the systems a little. The Arbitrary AND Military Turret Upgrades are going to have their top end energy requirements reduced so their aren't as harsh a plenty but there's still a substantial "cost" to equip the TOP TIER ones (+4, +5, +6). But the numbers right now are a bit too much IMO. I'm also going to make the "Shield Booster" 75% less effective but with LESS energy cost and the "Energy to Shield Converter" the same at 50% and lower the energy cost a little bit... This is because the "Booster" upgrade also gives you shield recharge AND the crucial "upon depletion: recharge 25% of your shields once every 5 mins"... so I want that one to offer less shield durability and be more of the "recharge/upon depletion" upgrade AND the other one to be a straight up increase to total shields. This way the normal player should have 1 or EACH equipped for the 2 distinct bonus types... Also I'm going to remove ALL the energy requirements for my Artifacts EXCEPT the shield and turret related ones, but those are going to be cut dramatically too in order to reflect the changes to the normal upgrade counterparts. The other artifacts shouldn't have any cost because I've changed my philosophy on "non-combat", "utility" upgrades. I'll work on this today and post it asap. These small changes I think will keep almost all the fun and challenge but get rid of some "overkill" on my part. :) Thanks

Hi Amber. As Shroob said, what your describing is a aspect of the game and not a result of my mods. The percentage is taken from your initial, unaltered generated energy. Also the "Shield Booster" is slightly less effective compared to the "Energy to Shield Upgrade"(which no one used because of how imbalanced the Booster is in vanilla) I intentionally made both shield upgrades use %-based requirements specifically to restrict the use of these to no more than 1 or 2 max and I lowered their effective bonuses because as their are, shields are WAY too strong in this game. I think the changes to the shield upgrades are really well balanced now and only slightly affect the ludicrous amount of shields a player can achieve anyways. In vanilla it's so easy to get literally your shield to 3-5 million or more, and EVEN with my dps mods and other adjustments I've made, combat is still pretty casual on Normal and Veteran if you focus on taking your time and using as many shield generator blocks as possible. That was also the philosophy I had with the reduction to Generator Upgrades and the exponential increase in Turret Upgrades energy requirements. It should be "COSTLY" to use multiple shield or turret upgrades, IMHO. You need to make conscious decisions on either being defensively stronger or offensively stronger...not simply be both with little to no downside. It's all about balancing combat and I think my most recent iteration (going up RIGHT now) version 0.15.7.3 is the best balance I've found. Try the mods and see what you think but keep in mind you should START out on Normal or Veteran (or change your existing server.ini) because enemies are obviously a lot more dangerous and you should avoid combat or at least be super cautious until you get to the Naonite stages and get some shields... If you haven't used mods before I'd also recommend backing up your "/data/scripts" folder so you can easily undo any mods. The only files affected by mods reside in that folder and you can easily swap in the default scripts and/or mods. Lastly, I'm streamlining my mods to simply be 3 categories and I'm only having 1 download, "Galaxy Mods", which will have all the mods in different folders so you can pick and choose which you want to use, BUT all the mods work really well in conjunction with each other. Thanks, let me know if you have any other questions or feedback.

Well Shroob, actually I'm uploading a new version 0.15.7.3 soon and I am going to just have the 1 download. People will have to install the 3 mods seperately but that literally takes only seconds. Also I'm COMBINING the "Systems" and "Artifacts" mods into one AND I've removed the civil turret mod because that, like all the others I recently decided to leave alone, does not affect combat at all and shouldn't be punishing to equip. And I'm totally removing the "Economy" mods for 2 reasons. The first is because like you and others have stated you NEED a lot of credits if you decide to start "building sectors" and building stations, etc... And the second reason is that the "Shop" mod only reduced the already existing 75% reduction to sell prices on equipement by another 50%... So essentially the formula IS sell price = price * 0.25 and I was only making it sell price = price * 0.125. Trivial difference really. And the "Goods Index" mod I kept tweaking and tweaking but I eventually felt that most things are either at a good volume already, OR are too "important" to crafting/trading etc. to modify... So it's just not worth even messing with them IMO. Most people really didn't seem to like and/or care about the economy changes and I'd rather just focus on balancing and enhancing combat and events now. The other 3 mods are doing that and working really well so that's what I will continue to focus on too. I'm going to test out the new version and post it probably tomorrow but it's generally more streamlined and completely combat/balance focused. Oh and lastly I'm going to include in the new .zip folder a "No AI Fighters" optional mod for people like myself who just want to totally do away with AI fighters because all they do is cause issues and are nearly impossible and also very tedious to kill. Look for that update and I think after that I'll be done posting new versions for awhile because things are in a pretty stable state now.

I'm going to release version 0.15.7.3 tonight or tomorrow and I'll include in the "Galaxy Mods" folder a separate install file for "No AI Fighters" that will mod the xsotan, shipgenerator and asyncshipgenerator files to spawn "Carriers" with 0 hangars, meaning of course 0 fighters. That was the best and most stable way I found to do that. Also just a heads up I was thinking of ONLY releasing the "Galaxy Mods" folder with all the mods separately and not have the confusing "Modpack" one too because some people weren't quite sure the difference and a lot of people I know want to pick and choose what mods to use anyways. Ok thanks.

I've written a couple of small mods to remove AI fighters from the game because in my opinion all they do is add issues to the game AND are nearly impossible to kill. They can wipe out sectors because of the fact they'll persist after their carrier is gone and slowly widdle away at any stations/ships in the sector. So my question is whether you guys would like those mods too? Killing AI fighters is very tedious and they cause more problems than they're worth IMHO, so let me know. I'm thinking of either releasing a standalone mod for them or including a separate mod in the individual "Galaxy Mods" download and NOT putting them in the "Modpack" in case people really don't want that change. Ok, thanks guys. All feedback is welcomed.

No, thank YOU for pointing them out. Hehe. TBH, big oversight on my part about the prices only being changed in the GUI. Duh!!! :P Hope you enjoy the mods and please continue to leave feedback and look for new versions/updates/fixes.

UPDATE: Yeah that was a problem. It was only affecting the price shown in the GUI not the actually amount you received. I fixed it however in Version 0.15.7.2a so please download that and install over the other version from like a couple hours ago. LOL :) Version 0.15.7.2a is now available. I fixed a bug where only the shown price in the GUI was affected and not the amount you received. I also reduced the sell price reduction to 50% instead of 25%. I also drastically modified the volumes of goods to be either vanilla or maybe ~2x and in rare circumstances ~3x. I think a lot of people found the volume mod to be way too much and made getting credits for things like stations and stuff feel too grindy. So I went back down quite a bit and this should only SLIGHTLY reduce our insane raiding profits and balance out the economy a little.