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

[Pasukaru]

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.

 

As far as I can tell, using Guns Guns Guns from the dev menu is affected by the change I made, as well as the isolated change of your mod regarding the volume - you can try it yourself by applying 1000x volume instead of 10x and check the DPS of guns with and without that change. The DPS of a turret will also be roughly 1000x (be sure to be close to the core when generating the guns, though!). If you don't trust the dev tools, building a turret factory at 0,1 will yield the same results.

 

As stated in my previous post: Please note that player turret DPS scales based on the HP of enemies (so that it takes ~15 secs to kill a ship), which scales based on the volume, which IS the thing you increase by 10x.

 

The DPS of enemies still scales 1-5x, I did not change that. Apparently, they are not affected by the weapon DPS function.

So, using your mod with my change results in exactly the behaviour you describe in the original post.

 

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.

 

That is exactly what I tried to tackle with my change :).

 

Without my change, the problem is that player weapons (drops, turret factories) scale to the max hp of ships at 0,0 - since this mod increases that by 10x, so do weapons (not the ones mounted on ai ships, though!).

Which results in enemies not getting tougher HP wise. Their HP scales to 10x, but so do players turrets.

 

To mitigate this, I printed the max hp at 0,0 without any mods to the logs and hardcoded it into the turret DPS function so that the player DPS does not scale towards 10x.

To sum up:

Without my change: Enemies have up to 5x DPS, 10x health. Players have up to 10x DPS, 1x health.

With my change: Enemies have up to 5x DPS, 10x health. Players have up to 1x DPS, 1x health.

 

I hope I did well in explaining :)

 

 

 

 

[Shrooblord]

That's a good catch, Pasukaru. Wayleran, is there a way to introduce a fractional multiplier i.e. a division in code so this 15 seconds to kill something DPS thing gets mitigated? As much as I like Pasukaru's approach, I'm opposed to hardcoding, since that's not update-or-other-mods'-meddling-proof, whereas a fractional multiplier (divider) would always scale with whatever other damage multipliers and bonuses are being applied.

[Pasukaru]

That's a good catch, Pasukaru. Wayleran, is there a way to introduce a fractional multiplier i.e. a division in code so this 15 seconds to kill something DPS thing gets mitigated? As much as I like Pasukaru's approach, I'm opposed to hardcoding, since that's not update-or-other-mods'-meddling-proof, whereas a fractional multiplier (divider) would always scale with whatever other damage multipliers and bonuses are being applied.

 

Technically, it's also hardcoded without any change, since it would always retrieve the max HP at 0,0 (which never changes). It then scales towards that value. So what I do is simply scale towards the max HP at 0,0 (vanilla) instead of max hp at 0,0 (vanilla x10). But yes, It's easy to change my hardcoded value to the original thing and divide by 10. That should yield the same result, but I'd have to test that first. Will do so later.

 

Not sure if that is a good idea, though. Because if you want to change the enemy hp modifier to something else, you'll have to do so in two spots: The volume function and also the player dps function to fix it. If the player dps function remains hardcoded to vanilla, you wouldn't have to change it there.

 

I also don't think you can make this modding-proof easily:

If another mod also modifies the enemy ship HP (which is a conflicting change in itself) - they'll need to account for the DPS change as well.

If another mod only modifies player dps (using the same function), then yes - we also have a conflict. But it would still be a conflict if we change it to a division, since it still is the same line of code and thus the same function modified by two different mods.

 

All this said - whatever you change in a mod at the moment is likely to have conflicts that need to be solved manually when merging (similar) mods.

...Until there is a proper mod managment that does not rely on overwriting source code files. ;)

(I hope for a factorio-like modding experience)

[Shrooblord]

All this talk about hull-related damage really confuses me. Why did the devs decide on that path? So they could always change the enemy hull amounts and they wouldn't have to rebalance weapons? That doesn't make any sense; like you said, increase hull but also dps by the same factor and it's like nothing changed.

 

Maybe you're right and hard-coding it is the better way to go. Have a static value you can change in one place, and have modifiers to offset that value elsewhere in the galaxy.

 

And yes, the modding workflow in Avorion is very poor right now. I'm hoping to improve that with some nice tools, in the future.

[Wayleran]

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.

 

[Shrooblord]

Wait, I'm confused. I thought the idea was to scale DPS less than hull size? Or am I getting my wires crossed? Anyhemlock, I'm looking forward to the update!

[Wayleran]

Wait, I'm confused. I thought the idea was to scale DPS less than hull size? Or am I getting my wires crossed? Anyhemlock, I'm looking forward to the update!

 

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".

[Shrooblord]

Sounds like some healthy changes!

 

It'll be a shame I'll have to dispose of the Fighters I basically did an Escort mission for to get them safely back to base while under heavy fire from hostiles all the way home. It was an epic adventure, but in the end, it'll be no fun if it means they just shred the new enemies' hulls like paper. So sorry friends, time to get replaced.