Wayleran

I never engage in combat until I have at least some shields. Early game combat, modded or vanilla, is a bit too imbalanced without shields. Then of course once you start getting more shields THEY become imbalanced. LOL The dev really just needs to add diminishing returns on Shield Generator blocks like he has on Hyperspace Core. So the more you use and the bigger the ship the less advantage you get. That's the main thing I am trying to fix with all these mods really...how OP shields are. Shields should roughly cap at maybe 1x or 2x of your ship's hull size. That would be nice. A 500k hull ship should realistically only be able to support maybe 750k to 1m shields TOPS with an upgrade in too... Anyways I'm going to make another pass at the goods index and maybe even make equipment sell prices 50% instead of 25%. Oh and of course, don't forget to claim and sell "claimable asteroids" that's the best way to make money early on.

Well the Economy Mod, in particular the volume of goods, needs MAJOR fine tuning. I just thought that raiding with the vanilla volumes and getting 5k Body Armors then selling them and making 100's of millions in ONE SHOT was way too easy and broke the economy. If you think those values are still too high let me know. I want to curtail making billions easily but I do see the need now for making vast amounts of credits for station/sector building and maintenance. So I'll take a run through that mod tonight and possibly adjust the volumes by just a little bit instead of the values they're at now. BTW, in the default script for the goods index it clearly is stated by the dev that... "-- This file was generated automatically with a tool." So they are WAY WAY out of balance due to that "tool" just spitting out numbers for the volumes and prices of goods. There's no real logic to it and no balance to profits you can acquire... So I do think it needs to be balanced through a mod, but yeah it's more than likely overkill on my part for this rough pass...so please give me as much feedback as you can, but keep in mind you can and will still see VAST profits even with those changes. But I will tweak them as the community sees fit. Thanks, bud. I'm going to LITERALLY update those values NOW and post a new version of the Economy Mod and the entire Modpack shortly. Check back in like an hour or two.

Well that's the thing. It's hardly used at all by players because of how easy it is (was before my mods! :) ) to meet your required energy needs. But with my changes I feel that players will be much closer to the MAX of their produced energy and therefore when they need to use extra energy for boosting, using energy weapons, hyperspace cooldown, etc... than they'll "dip" into their battery reserves. So having some energy container blocks on your ship now has a practical purpose and using a powerful battery upgrade to get 100%-160%+ more battery storage means you have that emergency reserve WHEN you need it and then replenish it when you don't. For the most part even with my system upgrade mods you'll still probably rarely go over your max energy, but it's still a possibility and therefore at least brings batteries somewhat into play. So for LONG boosting and LONG battles while using energy weapons it's a backup reserve is all.

Yeah I rethought the entire Systems Mod philosophy. I felt that the 2 shield upgrades were totally imbalanced. Shield Booster being OP with nearly no downside while the Energy to Shield Converter was much more balanced with the -% to generated energy, pretty much restricting players to using 1 GOOD one max. So I balanced them out and made them less effective (I mean shields are still OP OP but this helps a little). The Generator Upgrades offered easily 80-100% increase of your produced energy totally NEGATING the battery systems AND making it far too easy to build a ship with very little Energy Generator blocks...so they were nerfed and I feel a MAX 50-60% increase per upgrade is still a healthy amount. And finally, the Turret Upgrades (along with the totally FREE Artifact +5 upgrades) made it far too easy to get your ship a large amount of turrets and in effect crazy firepower with again, literally NO downside... So I made the low tier ones still pretty cheap for starting out the game in smaller ships, BUT made the +3-6 turret upgrades cost exponentially more so if you want to do A LOT of damage, it'll cost you energy and therefore area in your ship and also it'll cost you multiple upgrade slots too so you can't just have tons of firepower AND shields AND generator upgrades, while still having a lot more room for other things. This feels really good I think and balances out what I felt was really affecting combat. And like you said, I felt after considering it that other upgrades were more or less for convenience and don't really affect combat so much, so therefore shouldn't really be a concern energy-wise. If you are willing to use up a valuable upgrade slot for Trading, Hyperspace, Radar, etc... than you shouldn't really be restricted by energy requirements. Note that the Artifacts Mod works hand-in-hand with this one and they really should always be installed together. I may in the future just combine them tbh because of how much more balanced it is with the changes I made to them AND I have to say I am really happy with the work I put into those in particular. Hehe... Humble brag, sorry. :)

NEW VERSION 0.15.7.2 released! This is by far the best iteration of my mods/modpack to date! I really feel most things are in a stable, balanced place. I may need to tweak some things based on community feedback, but all-in-all, this version plays great! I've improved some mods, reduced the harshness of some that were overkill and balanced out the rest. And mainly I removed a massive bug that was scaling turret dps/size...that's GONE!!! Your DPS will be pure vanilla while enemies will be 2x larger and 4x stronger. Normal feels relaxed with a healthy challenge and Veteran onwards should be pretty intense. Try it out and let me know what you think. I would recommend installing these mods to a "fresh" install of the client or simply replace your /data/scripts folder with a "vanilla" backup if you made one. Or you can uninstall and reinstall in Steam. You won't lose your saved galaxies but you'll get a fresh client to mod. Thanks! Hope you guys enjoy it.

Thanks bud! Hope you enjoy them. New version is going up NOW (0.15.7.2). Pretty stable now and balanced I think fairly well. But will always tweak it as needed or requested by the community. And btw, the "Combat Update" like the other "updates" probably (unfortunately) won't address any of the imbalanced elements in the game or bugged features that have persisted for a long, long time now... So I think these mods will be needed to really make the game feel somewhat challenging and to add a little more variety to the gameplay. Thanks.

No I didn't take into account station costs, however if you give me feedback I can possibly tweak the economy mods. I still think it's far too easy to accumulate vast amounts of credits in the game as it is from raiding and selling unneeded equipment. But I'm not quite sure without enough feedback from the community on what a "healthy" nerf to raiding and selling equipment profits would be. P.S. - I just did a MAJOR revamp/fix to the main "Enemies" mod and it's working SOOOO much better now. Before the size and dps of turrets were scaling WITH enemy hull sizes and now that's fixed so you'll still have vanilla dps but enemies will be "bigger and badder"!!! :) And as we speak I'm uploading a new version of the "Systems" mod that's a little less harsh and I think more balanced than before. Mainly Generator, Shield and Turret upgrades are FAR more balanced and you really have to devote a lot of energy to using high end shields and turret upgrades, so it's a natural reduction to the ludicrous shields and firepower you can normally achieve. I'm leaving most other upgrades alone though and they'll be at the extremely LOW energy requirements because I don't really see them being "game-breaking" really.

New version released: Version: 0.15.7.1g: Rebalanced and reworked the Artifacts Mod. They are now much more interesting and useful with "hybrid" stats. Version: 0.15.7.1f: Normalized the volume of Pirate Motherships in the Events mod because they were CRAZY BIG and I thought a bit too big and annoying to kill, since that mod also generates motherships more often than vanilla.

The idea now is that I don't NEED to increase enemy hull sizes like I anticipated before to 10x...2x is MORE than enough now that the bug with our turrets getting ludicrous dps is fixed. You'll need to ditch ALL your current turrets though because they'll remain the bugged OP versions and your firepower will drop to a normal amount (literally a fraction of the bugged amount). I went from nearly 200k firepower to 10k!!! And the 10k IS the normal amount. So with the normalized turrets 2x hull size enemies are definitely tough to kill now and their dps is at 4x which makes them a bit more formidable than vanilla. So normal and veteran are harder but still casual, and the other difficulties you'll really feel it. I'm also working on balancing the systems like you asked to be less harsh...EXCEPT SHIELD AND GENERATOR AND TURRET UPGRADES!!! They NEED to be very high cost in order to balance out our shield and dps potential a bit. The others though I'll probably hit with a much small increase to energy usage. Stay tuned. UPDATE: I posted a small update to this mod to just reduce Pirate Motherships from 30x(normal vanilla) to only 15x because WITH the 2x inherent in my mod was making them 30x x 2 = 60x! They were annoyingly massive I felt then. So now they're 15x x 2 = 30x... I did this mainly because with my "Galaxy Mod - Events" I have Pirate Motherships appearing more often than vanilla so I didn't want them to be a pain to kill, just "boss like".

I've totally solved the turret size and damage scaling issue. I just need to tweak the numbers but as of now I have hull size at only 2x and dps at 4x. And the turrets and your dps will no longer EXPLODE. It's really funny and I can't believe I never realized this but on my first play through with my buddy something must have happened because we were literally 1-shotting nearly ALL the mobs in the game. I thought it was just because of the OP turret factories, but I think it was another mod I had installed and didn't realize that the turrets size/dps scaled with enemy ships hull sizes, so I thought that 60k-200k Omicrons for a player ship was NORMAL!!! I have learned it absolutely is not! LOL I've only TESTED vanilla for modding purposes and never actually did a "real world" play through of vanilla since we first started that galaxy. So ever since then I've been under the misconception that those ludicrous DPS numbers were standard, and not totally out-of-whack due to that initial mod and what it did... So now I have the original galaxy.lua mod in a stable, but conservative place at 2x hull size and 4x dps with no corruption of the turrets that drop and it seems fine and actually it takes a pretty good while to kill even smaller pirate/alien ships and their dps on "NORMAL" is still pretty low compared to our OP shields but on Veteran or higher it should feel a bit more dangerous. So if you are using this mod or my modpack, please wait for the update and do a totally reinstall and you may want to get rid of all those "broken" turrets that you've been using to balance it back out. Update to Galaxy Mod - Enemies 0.15.7.2 should be up today. Thanks.

Thanks for the pep talk Shroob! :)

Yeah Pasukaru, this completely negates the mod. The line you first referenced is only the hull size mod to progressively increase enemies size from 2x to 10x. While this line is the mod to progressively increase enemy damage from 1x to 5x... Line 142: return Balancing_GetSectorTurretsUnrounded(x, y) * ((1 + Balancing_GetSectorRichnessFactor(x, y)) / 5) -- 1-5x enemy dps What you did was just negate the modded damage almost all the way. And the main problem isn't just that enemy ships are FAR too small and weak and can be one shot or killed in a few seconds, it's that the incoming DPS to players is SOOOO small it's trivial and combat has NO threat to it with our ridiculously out-of-balance shields. I'm going to try to increase enemy DPS without having turrets that come off their ships be larger and stronger. I'll look into it. BTW get the new mod I just posted too. I made a small adjustment because as Shroob pointed out it was causing errors. I fixed those. Thanks for the feedback though bud.

Actually I do think that should read as (x, y) not (Sector().... I'll fix it and post an update now. UPDATE: FIXED. Yeah during my last iteration that got messed up. It should be (x,y). Good catch thanks. I updated the mod here and will do so on the modpack page too. Also I'm looking into the other guys suggestion too about the turret sizes. I still don't think that's affecting the broken turret factory stuff but it is causing larger stronger turrets to drop and making player ships stronger and negating slightly the purpose of this mod. But without the mod at all the vanilla hull sizes and firepower is WAY too low and pointless.

No dude it's all good. I appreciate the feedback. I just want to actually play the game a bit too at this point and it doesn't seem like many other people are even really interested in these mods much either. I thought I'd get more responses but aside from you and a couple others there's not that much interest. I honestly think the game is not getting much interest either at this point and I'm fearing the worst. Very little news from the devs and these things I'm trying to mod are also VERY simple things that should have been balanced and addressed months and months ago. So I'm not sure what the future for this game holds but I hope things start to progress more positively. I'll keep working on my mods as best I can but you should definitely keep giving feedback and maybe even try to make your own mods as well bud. Thanks.

That's the line that effectively increases enemy DPS. If you can come up with a better solution I'd definitely be interested. I'll look into increasing enemy DPS WITHOUT increasing turret sizes or dps but for now that's all I found that would consistently increase enemy DPS.

I appreciate the work there and input but the problem with vanilla is mainly how ridiculously low the enemy damage is to players. It's trivial. There is literally no threat because of how large your ship and shields can be even with my other mods limiting system upgrades, shields are still massively OP. So having ships just be larger (which helps not being able to one-shot them) is nice of course but if you have no threat from their omicrons, combat remains pointless. Normal, like I listed is only "10%-20%" damage to players, and Insane only puts that to a stable 100%. This still is meaningless with vanilla damage. You need to have larger enemies AND at least 5x damage from them to even feel it. Does this address incoming damage? If not, there's no point using this fix. If you simply want bigger ships than yes, just apply the volume part, otherwise the game is still imbalanced and offers no challenge. And also I have a the DPS modded also seperately from the shipVolume. That's why the DPS is larger. Turret Factories also are OP on their own. Finally if you're ONLY using this mod, the difference is minimal to overall gameplay. You need to incorporate ALL my mods to get somewhere near balanced. The system mods I have along with this AND the Events and Economy mods all work in conjunction to fix the game. While the game itself is great there was nearly no work done yet towards balancing it. You can even tell by looking through the vanilla scripts that they are mostly placeholders slapped together. And many of the calculations to ships, turrets, goods, equipment, etc...were just put in with no thought to their impact to the gameplay yet. It's very much in a BETA state of course, but the game needs a massive balance overhaul that we, as mere modders, can't really address fully yet. Until then though, try my whole modpack to see how all the mods make the game feel. Not just this one in particular. Limiting systems, in particular, has a dramatic affect on your shields and DPS. You can't simply have 25+ turrets for FREE and use mulitple shield upgrades for nearly no energy costs. Modpack: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php?topic=4375.msg23108#msg23108 UPDATE: I'm going to test your fix and see if I can solve the issue of players getting larger stronger turrets while still keeping enemy firepower raised to a reasonable degree. This all needs to be done by the devs though, not through mods. And I haven't seen any info recently that gives me confidence their working on it. These issues have been around for over a year...I'm hoping something changes but I fear the worst here too with this wonderful early-access game.

New Version: 0.15.7.01c Updated Economy Mod and Modpack - Lowered the volume of goods back down to a more reasonable level. They're still much higher than normal to stop economy-breaking profits from raiding, but I definitely went overboard in the first iteration. ;)

Thanks but check back often. A lot of my numbers on stuff need fine-tuning so I'll post new versions often as I find problems or due to other player's feedback. For instance, goods in the economy mod were a bit overkill in how high I made their volumes. I've drastically adjusted them, while still making profits from raiding much less game-breaking. And I fixed a couple systems mod issues with imbalances and more to come. OH AND P.S. - Check out the MODPACK I have available...this is merely 1 small part of my totally changes...the modpack has all 5 of my mods that will transform the difficulty in the game dramatically. Thanks! Modpack: http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,4375.0.html

Yeah I adjusted everything so you wouldn't get a lot of "useless" stuff, but I went way overboard because I was also trying to compensate for the 2-10x increase in ship hull sizes too from my other mod... This new version is MUCH MUCH lower in all respects while still adding about 10 times the volumes in general. But again the volumes and prices for goods were "generated randomly by a program" according to the original script so they were WAY off, balance-wise. These new volumes should be a lot more reasonable but also will only affect NEW locations/sectors unless you delete your sectors folder in your galaxy which will refresh them all but can cause some other small inconsistencies. But definitely try this version instead. Carbon will be like 10 instead of 100 and mainly the REALLY expensive stuff like Mining Golems will be about 100 instead of I think 1500+...

Yeah sorry Shroob. ;D I'm just trying to keep up on it but the balancing is so complicated that I'm going to update as often as I can. And btw, anyone who sees this thread and not my main MODPACK thread, please visit that. This is only 1 of 5 mods to balance the game out and add difficulty. They all work in conjunction with each other. Thanks. Galaxy Modpack

Fixed! Thanks. I added the other part of the tooltip description and just copied those all but forgot to update them all. Hehe. BTW, it just reflects the roman numeral of the artifact so "XSTN-K III" has 3 scratches, etc...

I appreciate ALL of the other feedback, criticism and support from the rest of the members I've spoken to either here or in PM's. But you can clearly see he's been negative and offered nothing but distraction and short, misleading statements and also COMPLETELY misunderstands the purpose or effect of these mods. And as far as not needing to have "2 threads"... I don't. Look closely and you'll see I have 6!!! Hehe. Really though I currently have 5 seperate mod threads for all 5 mods I've released AND a "modpack" thread where you can find them all and the compiled modpack for one simple, single installation if you want. BTW, that's probably the best thread for us to all use. These are simply for me to update the individual downloads for anyone who only wants individual mods. And lastly, yeah I was probably wrong about the "authentication" thing, but if you read the other posts they were very "demanding" and I didn't appreciate that at all. So I probably read too much into that. Otherwise, thanks a lot for all the feedback guys and please check out the NEW modpack. I just updated the economy portion to be quite a bit less harse on the raiding profits. Otherwise I need input to help balance out the systems mod too so it's balanced but not overkill. Thanks guys. EDIT: Oh yeah and "I can't handle it"??... hehe I clearly appreciate all the critcism from others, constructive or otherwise, and he didn't bother me. It was just that all my threads were getting filled with his POORLY worded, nearly UNINTELLIGIBLE little 'quips'...not "constructive criticism". He's a troll and a whiner looking to act "tough" and smarter than the rest of us. THEN when he's called out by numerous people, he plays the victim. And BTW, just because he was asking for a refund (possibly another troll move) doesn't mean he actually DID buy the game. Could just be looking to spread negative sentiment about the game for whatever unknown motive drives him.

If you notice the Hyperspace Upgrades WITH cooldown are very costly, the others aren't. I intended that to be the case and again I want people to have to sacrifice shield generator blocks and others for more energy generators in their ship. But I will look into lowering it a bit. However I'm also thinking of slightly raising the high tier military and arbitrary turret upgrades even more. I want you to be restricted to only using a certain amount unless you have a big ship. The orange and purple ones with +4-6 turrets should be very costly IMO.

Well I forgot to mention a couple things. You should try these mods out on Normal or Veteran, because remember Veteran will literally be much harder than vanilla Insane. Also in regards to the system upgrade mods, yeah the nerfs are harse but intentional. I'm trying to counteract the over-powered shield, generator and turret upgrades but not only nerfing their effectiveness BUT also making their energy requirements higher so that you DO NEED TO DEVOTE MORE SHIP SPACE TO GENERATORS AND ENERGY STORAGE!!! Convert some blocks into more generators (which naturally reduces your ability to have a gazillion shields) and also I intend for you to be at or near the max required energy and then dip into your batteries when you're boosting or fighting. Then during "downtimes" you'll be recharging your abundant energy stores. As it is now, I don't think most people if any even use energy storage blocks or battery upgrades because the vanilla upgrade energy requirements are way WAY too low and trivial...like .45 GW for a legendary upgrade?!?! Nahhh. And BOTH shield upgrades now use a harse PERCENT-BASED system because my intent is for players to only be able to equip 1 to 2 MAX shield upgrades. And the high turret energy requirements and Artifacts mod, again is an attempt to limit the ridiculously high amount of turrets you can equip with essentially 0 downside. The artifacts alone on vanilla were +5 x 8 turrets for ZERO energy...that's just totally imbalanced. So, yeah, I'd say you should devote a lot more ship blocks to energy generators and storage and get accustomed to using batteries on a more regular basis and not as an emergency only. LASTLY, if you're on an existing galaxy (change the difficulty in the server.ini btw) then any sectors that you've been too will still have been generated with the pre-modded alliance ships/stations size but pirates/xsotan will be the new harder versions. If you want the one thing that works to do a full "refresh" of your galaxy is to... FIRST BACKUP YOUR GALAXY IN .../AppData/Roaming/Avorion/galaxies... Just copy and/or zip a copy of the galaxy as it is. THEN delete the "sectors" folder inside the galaxy folder. This will delete all the generated sectors. They'll still show up on your map and if you go back they'll still generate exactly like before, just with the higher hull sizes/dps and trade goods volumes etc.... The only small bug is a few of your wormholes you've found MAY disappear when you go back to them but it's usually a small amount of them. Thanks for the feedback. Try my ideas about more generator blocks and batteries and see what you think. Maybe use a lower tier turret upgrade until you get a bigger ship. But I can always tweak these...Shield upgrades though are the KEY change. They will and should remain % based to stop you stacking multiple upgrades to get 5-10 million shields easily. Thanks.

If you want to play hard like that. Just edit enemy ship have a 1 million omnicron then. System nerf are unworthy if no special effect, or changes to comply with the nerf (like adding energy req for turret, but actually giving additional firepower). This mod nothing more than tampering the system. Hellatze, please stop using and commenting on my mods. I've been patient with you and your negativity and DEMANDS but a lot of other people have PM'd me about you and told me to just ignore you because you do this all the time. And you clearly are either just jealous of the work I'm TRYING to do to help out the community OR you simply want to try to ruin other people's experiences with the game. If you've used my modpack and still don't see a difference then you're either lying or intentionally trying to mislead people. I'm not saying my mods are perfect, but I'm trying to make a more balanced, challenging version of the game for people. And if you've played with my mods on Veteran at least then it's a lot more difficult. And again, the DEMANDS, are really getting old too. And you've clearly indicated you're using an illegal version of the game because you can't do "Steam authentication", so that's just another reason to dismiss your comments. Please move on.