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[MOD PACK] Galaxy Mods: Balance & Difficulty Mods


Wayleran

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Galaxy Modpack 0.15.7.5

(download at the bottom of this post)


 

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.

 

 

 

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.

 


 

 

To install mods:

 

1. Backup your "...\Avorion\data\scripts" folder. These files are the ONLY ones affected by mods so you can easily

    revert back to vanilla at any point by replacing your scripts folder with your own backup. You can also simply

    uninstall then reinstall Avorion through Steam to revert back to vanilla. Your saved ships and galaxies will not be

    affected.

2. Copy the "data" folder(s) from the mod packages into your "...\Steam\steamapps\common\Avorion" folder and

    overwrite the default files when prompted.

 


 

 

Mods included in this Modpack

 

 

Galaxy Mod - Enemies

 

All enemies in the game have been reworked to be bigger and stronger. Normal will feel more intense and higher difficulties will ramp up dramatically!

- Enemy hull size is increased by 2x

- Enemy DPS is increased by 4x

- Modified all individual pirate ship stats to make them more formidable

- 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)

 

 

Galaxy Mod - Events

 

Alien Attack

- Increased the variety and severity of the events

- Renamed and added additional Xsotan ships (Hunter, Reaver, Dreadnought and Mothership)

- Reworded the warning messages for each of the 4 encounters to give the player a "clue" on what's about to arrive

 

Convoi Distress Signal

- Fixed the missing "Mission Complete" message

- Mission will now properly be removed from your mission log upon completion

- Scaled rewards to correspond to the difficulty of each encounter

- Increased the variety and severity of the events

 

Event Scheduler

- Slightly increased the pause time between events to compensate for the harder encounters

 

Fake Distress Signal

- Increased the variety and severity of the events

 

Pirate Attack

- Increased the variety and severity of the events

- Added "Threat Levels" to encounters to indicate not only their difficulty, but also their rewards

- Scaled rewards to correspond to the difficulty of each encounter

 

Trader Attacked by Pirates

- Increased the trader's headstart so players have a chance to arrive in time

- Increased the volume of the trader so it has a chance to survive until help arrives

- Increased the variety and severity of events

- Scaled rewards to correspond to the difficulty of each encounter

 

 

Galaxy Mod - Economy

 

- Modifies the amount of goods that cargo ships are carrying to a randomized amount between 10-50 back and forth from enemy stations

- Roughly 50% of the goods being carried will "drop" from destroyed ships so players can still have fun and profit from raiding but also need to be patient and find good trade routes to "farm"

- This will limit raiding profits while not negatively impacting legitimate trading

- You can still however destroy stations but once you do they won't respawn, so I'd recommend restricting yourself to only raiding cargo ships

 

 

Galaxy Mod - Systems

 

System upgrades have been balanced to be less over-powered and require a more reasonable amount of energy. These changes DRASTICALLY improve the overall challenge of the game by requiring players to be smarter with their upgrades and use more of the game mechanics, such as batteries, etc... The three main adjustments were to the Generator, Shield and Turret upgrades.

 

Arbitrary & Military Turrets

- Increased the energy requirements of these systems exponentially to balance out end game player DPS potential

- Low tier upgrades still require a small amount of energy while high tier upgrades require increasingly more

 

Generator Upgrade

- Reduced the effectiveness of these systems by 50%

- Players will be forced to use more generator and energy storage blocks in their ships to compensate

 

Energy to Shield Converter

- Reduced the effectiveness of these systems by 50%

- These systems are more powerful than Shield Boosters but lack the other bonuses

- Increased the energy requirements of these systems

 

Shield Booster

- Reduced the effectiveness of these systems by 80% due to the other bonuses of they provide

- Increased the energy requirements of these systems

- Converted the energy usage to a % based format to balance this with the other shield upgrade

 

Alien Artifacts

- I've reworked all 8 alien artifacts to be more interesting and much more balanced, instead of all being a generic +5

  turret upgrade with ZERO energy cost. They're now all a different type of "legendary" tier upgrade (with some

  unique twists). I intend for them to be very powerful, but very costly to use and not a best-in-slot legendary.

 

44D3CA176A6D69F81DF75B80B8D99F5561DE35D29810C54CF4E4CE12C141515D33E1370D893FD53E028EA8F340101C7B61CC559A6EC0E4A2F4E2C271ABFBB4B1275166C1B6E7664E280C6C31A56354F6CABAB3EB85E25D25E0A2C6B747331BFBB5CA41E2C17361C7771FAD9D9F02964E0B71242FA7DEBD0E598E1B373CF3EBD3E25880FA45D3F46560EBD43CA651543E48101ABC2807AB236F3F9C04F2475443

 

 


 

 

Version History

 

Update 1/21/2018: Version 0.15.7.3a

 

- I've streamlined and fine-tuned my mods and I think they're in a pretty good state now.

- In addition I've removed the "Economy Mods" from the package because I felt the impact of them was minimal and

  a lot of people were either not using them or had legitimate concerns about them making the game and acquiring

  credits feel a bit too "grindy" and I agreed. So now I'm focused on balancing combat and improving events, etc...

- I'm also only releasing 1 download package with the individual mods for separate installation.

- I've also added an "optional" mod to remove all AI fighters because they are buggy and cause a lot of problems.

- Install the "No AI Fighters" mod last so it overwrites the "Xsotan" mod correctly.

 

-- Old Versions --

 

 

Version 0.15.7.3

- Removed the "Economy Mod" entirely because I felt, as well as others, it really didn't have a positive impact on the

  game and made things feel too "grindy".

- Combined the "Artifacts Mod" and the "Systems Mod" into one folder because they really work in conjunction with

  one another.

- Removed and/or softened the effect of some of the "Systems Mods".

- The only upgrades now affected are the Generator, Shield, Arbitrary and Military Turret Upgrades.

- I felt these were the only ones that had any impact on combat anyways and were in need of balancing.

- All other upgrades are more "utility" than anything and shouldn't really be punishing to use.

 

Galaxy_Mods_0.15.7.5.zip

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Really? If you're serious then all you need to do is right click on Avorion in your Steam games list and uninstall then reinstall and the default game files in the "scripts" folder will automatically be updated.

 

I've also attached a recovery of the completely vanilla/default "scripts" to replace all of the ones I've modded in the description below. These are the scripts as they currently are as of today. I literally just did a quick uninstall/reinstall through steam (which only takes a few seconds since this is a small game install).

 

I'd recommend in the future though to ALWAYS backup your "scripts" folder in the...

 

...\Steam\steamapps\common\Avorion\data\...  folder.

 

That's all you need to do. No other game files are affected by mods.

 

Hope this helps.

Recovery_Scripts.zip

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This seems like a great mod! Looks like you really put some thought into balancing it (for example, making random attacks harder but also make them happen less frequently)

 

Hellatze, he does not know which mods you had installed and so there's no way for him to make a recovery file for you in this situation. The best thing to do would be to reinstall the default files like he suggested, and then install the mods you want again.

 

In the future, ALWAYS back up your saves and files before modding and expect things to break. :)

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I dont want my other mod  get removed by vertify integrity on steam.

 

Thats why i asked recov file.

 

Like I said I put a recovery up but it occurred to me that there's probably only ONE reason you're concerned about steam authentication... We all know what that is... but anyways please just ask politely and I'll do my best to accommodate anyone's requests.

 

 

 

This seems like a great mod! Looks like you really put some thought into balancing it (for example, making random attacks harder but also make them happen less frequently)

 

Hellatze, he does not know which mods you had installed and so there's no way for him to make a recovery file for you in this situation. The best thing to do would be to reinstall the default files like he suggested, and then install the mods you want again.

 

In the future, ALWAYS back up your saves and files before modding and expect things to break. :)

 

Thanks bud but I have done TONS of work on the "new" Systems Mod going up later today and I also reworked ALL the Artifacts too so not only are they balanced but they all do different things and are, what I'm calling, "Parasitic Upgrades". This just means they're energy use "leeches" all the energy it can while still keeping the "host" alive. :)

 

Check later today for more!!!

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This sounds awesome.  Much stronger enemies in the center also gets rid of the need for a stupid "rift ring" story hack to keep people from burning through the game too quickly.  Perhaps you could also add an option to remove the rift for a true "sandbox" mode.  I got rid of it by editing the /lib/passagemap.lua so that "PassageMap:passable" and "PassageMap:insideRing" only returned true.

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Hellatze, he does not know which mods you had installed and so there's no way for him to make a recovery file for you in this situation. The best thing to do would be to reinstall the default files like he suggested, and then install the mods you want again.

 

In the future, ALWAYS back up your saves and files before modding and expect things to break. :)

This is why we need a mod loader. I should get back to work on that again. I'll try and scratch up on my java / visual basic. Programming in batch was giving me unnecessary headaches trying to work around some of the stupidly simply things batch cannot do properly. xD

 

----

 

Nice, Wayleran. Is there a way you could restructure this mod so it uses the "Dirtyredz approach" of incorporating the scripts in a separate /mods folder rather than replacing the vanilla scripts? Going back after a patch and re-applying all the mods is... tedious... and this 'new' system of separating scripts is rather elegant, plus, not touched by patches. I'm not sure if it's compatible with what you want though, considering you're tweaking balance values rather than adding functionality, but I'd say check it out anyway: it's a neat system.

 

As for the mod itself, super cool, I'm gonna play around in a galaxy that kicks my ass like games ought to. ^^

 

Like the "real" convoi attack events, these are now much more challenging and always include a pirate mothership.
OoooOOOooooo... me likey

 

I also reworked ALL the Artifacts too so not only are they balanced but they all do different things and are, what I'm calling, "Parasitic Upgrades".
Heh, sweet. I like that nomenclature.
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Actually I've included 2 downloads now...

 

The Modpack is the one that's already compiled for a single installation.

 

The other "compilation" is all the mods individually so you can pick and choose if you'd like. But you'll need to install them each.

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And by "each" you mean each mod included in the modpack, correct? You don't mean I need to install both the modpack and the compilation in order for your changes to work?

 

Thanks for these balance changes by the way! I'm super excited to play a more diverse and interesting game with drawbacks and challenges. Good thinking!

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Yeah the modpack download is already compiled. Just unzip it and copy the "data" folder into your Avorion folder and you're good to go.

 

The other "compilation" is just all the mods individually if you'd rather pick and choose, but TBH, I think they work best if you use them all. ;)

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OH MY GOD ALL MY CREW ON ALL MY SHIPS ARE DYING BECAUSE I HAVE INSUFFICIENT ENERGY TO SUPPLY TO THE LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS

hahahaha thanks dude, loving this so far

 

EDIT:

Oh, ho ho, yeah, it's kicking my ass alright. Tiny three-ship Xsotan invasion force. Wiped out all my defenders in my home sector with ease. Couldn't even outdamage the healing of their shields. This is brutal. I love it!

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Hehe, I'm glad. Remember to lower the difficulty on your galaxy to AT LEAST Veteran or Normal.

 

Normal should feel harder than vanilla "Insane". So don't play on Insane WITH these mods until you get used to it.

 

I've found Veteran to be challenging and hard but not "scary". My intent is make normal feel "normal" and challenging but still relaxed and Veteran to really start kicking your ass...

 

Beyond that it should get INSANE!!! ;)

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Yeah, after some more playing, battles now definitely feel more intense. Also, I'm gonna have to chuck away ALL my fighters because they're now basically useless, but what I get in return will be much, much more fun fighters. ;)

 

Also... the sizes of these guns! Sheesh! Bigger than the bridge of my Flagship...!

 

I will say though that because of the larger hull sizes, ships like the Xsotan now are very blocky, and they look less menacing in physique than before. Not sure how much you could do about that; that's just what Avorion does when you tell it to "up the blockage".

 

EDIT:

This is sweet. I have to run away again and boost to safety on the brink of destruction. It's just like I'm playing the early game again with a fragile ship, even though I'm playing an all-out epic space battle with 50 fighters in on the action as well. I like the new Xsotan ship names too.  Pretty cool.

 

EDIT II:

Oh hell! One of those Xsotan scumbags just gave my capital ship a wicked tail slap like a whale; exploded me on the spot! Jeebus!! D:

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Glad you like it dude.

 

Yeah as far as the scaled up gun sizes (which do look awesome though) there's nothing I can do about that now because it comes with the increased volumes on ships. Also the ships are all randomly generated and again I can't do anything about that but in a way it's cool to see Pirate Motherships and Xsotan ships that are menacingly large. LOL

 

I need to tweak quite a few things, especially the economy mod. I want the amount of goods you receive from raiding to be a fun amount but not economy-breaking. I may have gone overboard with the volumes for some really expensive things, but that's because I need to see how many goods drop and then adjust it down.

 

I want it to be where you receive maybe 1-50 large/expensive goods, like Mining Robots, but not 1000-5000... Because then after 1 raid you have 100's of millions of credits and the economy in the game is meaningless.

 

Let me know if you find anything to be TOO intense or overkill OR if there's anything that's not nerfed enough. Balance is a hard thing to get to without player feedback.

 

Thanks.

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I want it to be where you receive maybe 1-50 large/expensive goods, like Mining Robots, but not 1000-5000... Because then after 1 raid you have 100's of millions of credits and the economy in the game is meaningless.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that's a healthy trade. And sure, let me get back to you on how evil the nerf is once I find something with a valuable commodity and blow it up.

 

Let me know if you find anything to be TOO intense or overkill OR if there's anything that's not nerfed enough. Balance is a hard thing to get to without player feedback.
Well actually I've been playing a bit and trying to match up my ships to the new strength of the Xsotan and Pirates who are constantly raiding my base, but I find it very hard to fill my ships' System Module slots with anything meaningful. I'm having to throw in five energy upgrades just so I can support one shield and one turret upgrade, for example. Definitely a game changer. But maybe that just means I need to incorporate more energy cores into my design: I'll get back to you on that, too.

In the meantime, maybe consider buffing the nerfs to System Modules back up by a tiny amount, say 5%, and see how that is. I do like that the game is now harder to, er, "game", but I have a tiny gut feeling it's just a little too overboard. What do you think?

 

Also I think you mentioned that with respect to the enemies now being much, much more powerful, there'd be less frequent attacks, right? I've noticed that they're still dropping in on me around every five to ten, fifteen minutes (hard to gague solely from memory: I'll check a clock next time), even though it now takes me a solid five to fifteen minutes just to deal with two of them. It's good no monstrous fleet has shown up yet 'cause I'm already starting to stockpile a couple of baddies from previous waves and I think a splurge of goons would mean curtains for my lovely built-from-scratch home Sector.

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Well actually I've been playing a bit and trying to match up my ships to the new strength of the Xsotan and Pirates who are constantly raiding my base, but I find it very hard to fill my ships' System Module slots with anything meaningful. I'm having to throw in five energy upgrades just so I can support one shield and one turret upgrade, for example. Definitely a game changer. But maybe that just means I need to incorporate more energy cores into my design: I'll get back to you on that, too.

In the meantime, maybe consider buffing the nerfs to System Modules back up by a tiny amount, say 5%, and see how that is. I do like that the game is now harder to, er, "game", but I have a tiny gut feeling it's just a little too overboard. What do you think?

 

Also I think you mentioned that with respect to the enemies now being much, much more powerful, there'd be less frequent attacks, right? I've noticed that they're still dropping in on me around every five to ten, fifteen minutes (hard to gague solely from memory: I'll check a clock next time), even though it now takes me a solid five to fifteen minutes just to deal with two of them. It's good no monstrous fleet has shown up yet 'cause I'm already starting to stockpile a couple of baddies from previous waves and I think a splurge of goons would mean curtains for my lovely built-from-scratch home Sector.

 

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.

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Oh, yeah, I noticed most of the things you've mentioned. I was just wondering whether a 80% nerf (not sure how much you nerfed) is a little excessive when 75% nerf would do, but that's just my two cents.

 

Moreover, the Legendary +5 all turrets System Module Slot now requires 78 GW or something like that, which is 60% of what I already currently produce, while the "parasitic" and "harsh" shield upgrades require a percentage of what I already produce, which ends up being more favourable in my case.

 

So while I haven't yet upgraded my ship with Generators (and now, can't do for a long time still until I rebuild because of the aforementioned Xsotan "whale slap" wrecking my capital ship lol), using the "vanilla approach" still with my ship, the % Sytem Modules are actually in my favour rather than the flat 78 GW-costing ones.

 

If that's how you wanted it balanced, that's cool. This is simply a situation report. ;)

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Just played around some more. I think the Hyperspace System Modules are too costly in energy now. It takes 40 GW of energy for a simple green Hyperspace System Module upgrade. 40 GW isn't hard to produce if all you fly is a capital ship, but in the wake of mine being destroyed, I've been zooming around the galaxy in a tiddly little ferrari-like ship that is mostly just fast, agile and small. However, this means I can never produce the kind of power requirements to install even a basic Hyperspace System Module that isn't trash tier, which means I have to wait 20 seconds after each hyperspace jump.

 

I suggest making the Hyperspace System Module less costly in energy requirements than it is currently. Strike a balance between disallowing OP carrier dreadnoughts but also allow smaller ships to use the System Modules effectively.

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Just played around some more. I think the Hyperspace System Modules are too costly in energy now. It takes 40 GW of energy for a simple green Hyperspace System Module upgrade. 40 GW isn't hard to produce if all you fly is a capital ship, but in the wake of mine being destroyed, I've been zooming around the galaxy in a tiddly little ferrari-like ship that is mostly just fast, agile and small. However, this means I can never produce the kind of power requirements to install even a basic Hyperspace System Module that isn't trash tier, which means I have to wait 20 seconds after each hyperspace jump.

 

I suggest making the Hyperspace System Module less costly in energy requirements than it is currently. Strike a balance between disallowing OP carrier dreadnoughts but also allow smaller ships to use the System Modules effectively.

 

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.

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I agree to the Turrets part, but I think the Hyperspace Engine System Module is one that all ships of all sizes should be able to benefit from, large or small. I understand the concerns about wanting players to put in more energy blocks, but we're talking energy modules here the size of twice my ship's size to be able to support an upgrade with even a 10% cooldown. That's a little intense :P

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