[MOD] Galaxy Mod - Enemies: Balance and Difficulty Mods

[Wayleran]

Please visit my Galaxy Modpack page to download this OR any of my other mods or to ask questions and leave feedback. I will no longer be updating this page but the mod and any new versions will be available there.

 

Thanks,

Wayleran

 

 

Galaxy Mod - Enemies

 

All Enemies:

    - Enemy ship volume is increased by 2x

    - Enemy ship DPS is increased by 4x

 

Pirates:

    - Modified all individual pirate ship stats

 

Xsotan:

    - Normalized the volume of all Xsotan ships to other normal ships (from .5 to 1x)

    - Normalized the DPS of all Xsotan ships to other normal ships (from .75 to 1x)

 

Click here to download!

[Wayleran]

Remember if you already have a galaxy created I'd recommend backing it up and changing the server difficulty to perhaps normal or veteran at first until you get accustomed to it.

 

To do that go to your Avorion settings folder which you can find at:

 

C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Avorion\galaxies...

 

AppData is hidden by default of course so you won't see it under your User folder until you un-hide it.

 

Then in the galaxy folder open the server.ini file in notepad and change the difficulty to normal (-1)

 

Server Difficult Settings in server.ini:

 

Beginner: -3

Easy: -2

Normal: -1

Veteran: 0

Difficult: 1

Hard: 2

Insane: 3

 

Let me know if you have any questions.

[wewewewe]

can you make sure that the pirates were certain ships from the folder? that there is a number corresponding to the complexity, and if the vessel matches it, then it can appear

[Wayleran]

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean, but I am writing a "Pirate Attack Mod" that will have 10 different types of encounters with Threat Level 1-10 and scaling rewards (money/rep/items) to correspond to the difficulty. And I also did the same for the boring "Distress Signal" and "Trader Attacked by Pirates" events that aren't worth doing. I added variation and scaling rewards along with fixing the bug where the mission didn't show as "accomplished" upon completion of the distess signals.

 

They'll all be up soon.

[wewewewe]

in the game a script is written that the DPS of the turret is equal to dividing the strength of the ship in the sector by a constant. as the comment in the code indicated: "15 seconds to destroy an equal ship." collecting such turrets can be killed with the same ease as before. and dismantling the enemies can compensate for the lack of resources. balance changes if you continue the game, if you start all over again. google translate

[Hellatze]

If you make game harder. You should tweak How AI think and adding hyberspace blockers.

 

I imagine that we must sit and press LMB until the enemy destroyed. Enemy have more dps ?

 

Add shield and shield system.

 

Enemy have more health ? Just sit and fire your weapon. Since enemy are slow and unable to move fast.

 

More like annoyance.

[Wayleran]

I updated the mod. Instead of a flat DPS multiplier, it will go progressively from 1x in the outer rim to about 2.5 in the middle and then around 4x in the very center!

 

Much better now because before in the early stages it was too hard and then in the later stages it got too easy. This is a perfect balance now I think.

[behemelo]

Thanks for the mod!

 

But there seems to be a problem with Starting Game Prices of Combat Turrets. For example, in a vanilla new game, starting white chaingun turrets are around 5,000 -10,000$ doing 15-20 DPS.

 

With the mod in the first starting zone, turrets now cost around 50-100k and are doing 100-200 DPS. Basically 10x DPS = 10x cost of turret.  At this price point, it is hard to purchase turrets as a new player selling Iron ore.

 

Is this price point intended in the early game?

[wewewewe]

Thanks for the mod!

 

But there seems to be a problem with Starting Game Prices of Combat Turrets. For example, in a vanilla new game, starting white chaingun turrets are around 5,000 -10,000$ doing 15-20 DPS.

 

With the mod in the first starting zone, turrets now cost around 50-100k and are doing 100-200 DPS. Basically 10x DPS = 10x cost of turret.  At this price point, it is hard to purchase turrets as a new player selling Iron ore.

 

Is this price point intended in the early game?

 

this is what I was talking about. From the strength of the hull of ships in the sector depends DPS turrets. because of what complexity is only in finance

 

[Hammelpilaw]

Thanks for the mod!

 

But there seems to be a problem with Starting Game Prices of Combat Turrets. For example, in a vanilla new game, starting white chaingun turrets are around 5,000 -10,000$ doing 15-20 DPS.

 

With the mod in the first starting zone, turrets now cost around 50-100k and are doing 100-200 DPS. Basically 10x DPS = 10x cost of turret.  At this price point, it is hard to purchase turrets as a new player selling Iron ore.

 

Is this price point intended in the early game?

 

this is what I was talking about. From the strength of the hull of ships in the sector depends DPS turrets. because of what complexity is only in finance

 

This mod will currently result in overpowered weapon factories. I just installed this mod on client side only to watch the weapons at my turret factory on our server (installing client side only will display the values, as it would be with mod installed on server side). One laser would have more then 100k (yes, more then 0.1 million) dps. You could exclude modded ship size from the dps calculations (this is what Im currently planning on our server) to solve this.

 

Also stations in the center will be 10 times bigger, this will also affect station wreckages wich gives you an overpowered resource income. In a testgalaxy I just had a station with more then 2 billions hp and shields. Stations could also be excluded from this calculation.

 

Sadly there is no balancing function to add damage multipliers to generated ships, this would help a lot to increase difficulty, and thats why I prefer to increase the damage by modifying specific generator files. Just adding more turrets will not increase damage very well, but increase server load. By modding entities you can pull its damage to whatever you want.

 

But at all its a great idea to do this via galaxy.lua, I never thought about editing this file (shame on me).

[Wayleran]

Just an FYI, the new version no longer simply increases shipVolumeInCenter and turretsInCenter anymore it's more progressive as you get from the edges to the center.

 

I'm working on ways to fix these issues you've all brought up currently.

 

I haven't even needed to use the equipment vendors because I've gotten more than enough turrets as drops thanks to the increased rewards in my other mods and also I've written a new version that scales DPS 1x at the edge to 5x in the center AND hull size from 1x at the edge to 10x in the center so BOTH are progressive.

 

Also raiding/(making billions killing other factions for goods) has always been a problem that breaks the economy....

 

To counter this I've found a semi-decent solution by simply increasing the volumes of all goods to more appropriate levels. This way when things drop they have a more reasonable volume restriction for not only stations and cargo ships, but also for you. So for instance a station/ship will no longer be able to carry 1000's of " war robots" that were only size 8 yet sold for around 100k EACH!!! One raid would yield 10's of 1000's of high priced items that could easily net you 100's of MILLIONS... It was game-breaking IMHO...

 

Now a "war robot" still has approx the same value of around 100k, but the size is now 185 instead of 8 so neither you nor the cargo ship or station can carry 1000's so you'll still make some good money, but in a fun way not a ridiculously broken way.

[Wayleran]

I have an entire mod pack available now with this and many other mods.

 

Please come check it out!

 

Galaxy Modpack

[tchavre]

hello

Great Great mod, it s now good to fight more strong enemy .

the joke i met a sealer wih 210 000 omicron, i have to fly away for my shield , and pirate destroy 1ship and 1 station at my base because to small.

 

Do you think it s possible to make this mode more insane? with ships realy strong and heavy , 500 000 omicron or more? and is it possible to make something for the boss , they are too easy.

 

good work , i enjoy playing with this mod

 

tchave

[Wayleran]

hello

Great Great mod, it s now good to fight more strong enemy .

the joke i met a sealer wih 210 000 omicron, i have to fly away for my shield , and pirate destroy 1ship and 1 station at my base because to small.

 

Do you think it s possible to make this mode more insane? with ships realy strong and heavy , 500 000 omicron or more? and is it possible to make something for the boss , they are too easy.

 

good work , i enjoy playing with this mod

 

tchave

 

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

[Pasukaru]

Is this mod supposed to also modify the turrets that are dropped from enemies/built in Turret Factories?

I noticed that I get insanely strong turrets with mod enabled (for example iron salvaging turret with 10k+ dps) - they are also physically larger when attaching them to a ship.

I've only added this mod and Better Turret Tooltips and generated a few galaxies with and without this mod to verify that it is coming from this one.

The same behaviour can be observed when using the dev tools to generate turrets.

 

Edit:

Seems like the issue comes from the galaxy.lua file. I added this mod but excluded this file and new turrets are normal again.

[Shrooblord]

Well, yes, galaxy.lua is the whole key to most of the balancing in this modpack, especially turret damage and hull amount increases. If you exclude it, you'll exclude a large part of the balancing Wayleran has done. To each their own, of course, but just so you know.

 

Larger turrets are generated by higher tech values. At certain tech values (I believe 10, 20 and 40), the size of the turret gets a bump up. Because this mod tweaks balancing in a lot of areas, this means higher tech turrets are showing up sooner than before. That's why you're seeing larger ones pop up.

 

10k DPS sounds a bit extreme! What did you do to produce this turret? Or was this a random drop?

 

As for your mentioning of "iron"; I don't think the system in the vanilla code cares about material type, either. I have some iron chaingun turrets that are a lot better than some xanion ones, for example. The material is only a rough indication of turret ability and stats, not a be-all-end-all defining trait.

[Pasukaru]

It was a randomly generated turret from the dev tools 'Guns Guns Guns', while being at sector (0,1).

I have found the issue to be in line 78:

return shipVolume * ((linFactor * 8) + 2.0)

If I leave the whole mod as-is and only change that line to (the original code without mod)

return shipVolume

, turrets are normal. I have no idea what the game is doing here, but apparently Balancing_GetSectorShipVolume has some effect on every single turret of the game (that is generated, not already existing ones).

 

-Edit-

As a side note: With the modded line, pirates have 2.21 mill hull, and 6k firepower. With the original line it is 200k hull and also 6k firepower.

So it seems to only affect dropped turrets and turret factories (maybe merchants, haven't tested),  but not the turrets mounted on pirates.

 

-Edit 2-

I figured out why!

The problem is that generated turrets rely on Balancing_GetSectorWeaponDPS, which in turn uses Balancing_GetSectorShipHP which in turn uses Balancing_GetSectorShipVolume. Hence, the increase in weapon dps:

The game calculates weapon dps based on the time it takes to destroy a ship within 15 seconds (See Balancing_GetSectorWeaponDPS).

So with the mod, enemies have 10x more HP, but the guns will also be 10x stronger.

 

- Edit 3-

Fixed it by applying this diff to the mod: https://www.diffchecker.com/gn7e5iiD.

Now it works like a charm - so now I can use it. Thanks for the mod :)

[Shrooblord]

Cool. So now your ships have massive Hull life but not crazy powerful turrets?

[Pasukaru]

Not player ships, but the enemies (xsotan, pirates). Turret damage stays vanilla, but enemy ships will have up to 10x health the closer you get to the core. As intended by the mod.

[Wayleran]

Not player ships, but the enemies (xsotan, pirates). Turret damage stays vanilla, but enemy ships will have up to 10x health the closer you get to the core. As intended by the mod.

 

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.

[Shrooblord]

Actually, I just noticed there's a bug in your code, Wayleran.

 

Look, my console is spitting errors; see attachment.

 

The error in question is in galaxy.lua's line 142:

return Balancing_GetSectorTurretsUnrounded(x, y) * (1 + Balancing_GetSectorRichnessFactor(Sector():getCoordinates()) / 5)	-- 1-5x enemy dps

 

Seems like Sector is undefined; was it not included as "required" somewhere it should have been?

[Wayleran]

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.

[Wayleran]

Actually, I just noticed there's a bug in your code, Wayleran.

 

Look, my console is spitting errors; see attachment.

 

The error in question is in galaxy.lua's line 142:

return Balancing_GetSectorTurretsUnrounded(x, y) * (1 + Balancing_GetSectorRichnessFactor(Sector():getCoordinates()) / 5)	-- 1-5x enemy dps

 

Seems like Sector is undefined; was it not included as "required" somewhere it should have been?

 

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.

[Shrooblord]

No need to defend yourself; I get why you wanted to increase the hull sizes, and I agree with you! It makes it a lot tougher.

 

Although I gotta admit it's starting to get a little annoying that I can't get an edge on my enemies now that even the tiniest Xsotan fleet spawning in completely decimates me just as I was getting back into the game, constantly hampering my progress.

It added tension for a while, but now it's getting a little obnoxious, so I'd say a little tweak to enemy turret damage values would be welcome. :)

 

EDIT:

A word of advice: I've always loved changelogs. Especially looking back on past projects and when referring to updates you've pushed out, changelogs are your friend. I suggest you try using one; see how you like it.

[Wayleran]

It was a randomly generated turret from the dev tools 'Guns Guns Guns', while being at sector (0,1)...

 

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.