[MOD PACK] Galaxy Mods: Balance & Difficulty Mods

[Wayleran]

That is excellent news! Thanks for all the updates!

 

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

[Wayleran]

Removed by Wayleran

[Shrooblord]

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

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

[Wayleran]

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

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.  ;)

[Shrooblord]

Wayleran, I've been playing with a friend on a server and I've noticed the Deposits system is a bit broken. On a delivery for $20k of goods, you'll need more than $20k deposit for some reason. How was this meant to work? Also it doesn't say anywhere what the deposit amount you need actually is, so you can't know how much money you need to make the deposit, which is silly.

 

Is this something your mod has altered? Or is this the new beta functionality?

[Ravien]

Wayleran, I've been playing with a friend on a server and I've noticed the Deposits system is a bit broken. On a delivery for $20k of goods, you'll need more than $20k deposit for some reason. How was this meant to work? Also it doesn't say anywhere what the deposit amount you need actually is, so you can't know how much money you need to make the deposit, which is silly.

 

Is this something your mod has altered? Or is this the new beta functionality?

 

I can't speak for how it worked in the past in Avorion, but a deposit is typically supposed to be worth equal to or more than the goods you are transporting. It's meant as an insurance policy that helps protect the customer from having their cargo stolen by the person doing the transport and that only works if the deposit is at least equal to the value of the cargo being transported.

 

Source: my time playing EVE Online. Both games have an economy (EVE's run by players, Avorion's simulated). in EVE, if you want to do cargo hauling, you typically need to pay a deposit worth more than whatever you're hauling so the client is covered in case you steal their cargo. So it would make sense from a lore and maybe game balance perspective.

 

Not saying that it's intended though.

[Shrooblord]

I guess it makes sense now I stop to think about it. It was just surprising to see I needed more than the amount of money I was aiming to gain from completing the mission to even take it first. This is coming from a new playthrough in a fresh galaxy where I have no assets at all to play around with, so getting the start-up is hard when even missions that earn you some decent cash can't be accessed because of a hard "you need at least $80k to take this" paywall. The rich get richer I guess!

[Ravien]

Things definitely feel better with the extra ships in pirate and alien attacks.

[Shrooblord]

I've been thinking about this mod. A friend of mine and myself have recently started a server, which means we begun from scratch. We've been having an extremely hard time getting to the first "leg-up" you need, that first capital investment to get rolling. This is because the enemies around us are always stronger, we're always considered "very weak for this Sector" and we get ambushed so often (I notice events at least every 5 minutes), it's hard to stick around and mine in peace, most of the time. I got a lucky break and found a wreckage worth 300,000 Trinium and 3 million Credits once I'd sold it all in Build Mode, so we got there in the end, but this was after maybe 15 hours of server playtime. In all this time, we have destroyed 3 ships, and never gotten into a serious fight. I haven't not heard combat music that long since... well, ever.

 

Although I like the idea of a dangerous universe that you need to make a name for yourself in, the sheer amount of ass-kicking these enemies are giving us is a bit... intense.

 

Maybe we could tweak the balancing of this to help facilitate an easier and speedier early game? Since I believe the purview of this mod is to help tone done the crazy mid- and late game balancing, it feels a bit unfair to also punish the already weak early game.

 

Is there something you could do to make the difficulty curve feel more exponential, or maybe follow a sigmoid in nature? I feel like ramping up quickly at the start is more fun than slowly grinding your way towards a bit of a foothold.

If you're familiar with how the levelling curves of player characters in Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition work, I'd say that's a great inspiration. Quickly power through the first few levels, have a stable and linear mid game, and quickly accelerate to the last level again at the end. Like I said: sigmoid curve.

[Ravien]

I agree. If there's a way to make the early game enemies easier while keeping the mid and especially end game enemies hard, that would be perfect. Enemies near the core should be very very difficult but combat should still be a viable option in the early game.

[Wayleran]

I agree. If there's a way to make the early game enemies easier while keeping the mid and especially end game enemies hard, that would be perfect. Enemies near the core should be very very difficult but combat should still be a viable option in the early game.

 

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".

[Ravien]

I know they talked about adding specialized ships for the ai like long range, anti shield, anti fighter, etc. Hopefully that helps increase difficulty and fun.

[Shrooblord]

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.

Is there a way you can integrate the behaviour of the manual difficulty change into your mod? Manually adjusting the server INI every time I jump from "belt to belt" sounds both a little cumbersome and immersion-breaking. Mostly just asking, since you say you've found how to do it manually, whether that's a change that can be made in-code as well.

[Ravien]

I don't know if mods can modify the server config file.

[Shrooblord]

Well, no, I didn't mean that.

 

If you modify the server INI file, surely you aren't writing code like "scale enemy DPS from 100 to 500 from 0 to 500 Sectors from the Core", right? You're writing "difficulty = 1" or "difficulty = 3". That doesn't actually mean anything at all, until it gets interpreted in code.

 

So what I'm saying is: is there a way to affect the scaling automatically, by emulating how scaling differs between the different difficulty levels, to simulate the effect that Wayleran is getting in his games by editing the difficulty setting manually?

 

I.e. can we make dynamic difficulty based on location in the galaxy a bit more well-balanced?

[Cyka]

That is excellent news! Thanks for all the updates!

 

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

 

i think the economy mod at is current state is too much of a grind if you limiting ALL COMMODIES to have 10-50 trade every time. This would be good for trade posts but terrible for a fully upgraded mine. It'd be better if 10-50 is applied to tradeposts or higher end commdies ONLY and implement a big range on other commodities perhaps 50-2500. This way you still get a decent steady income with investments.

[Shrooblord]

Having looked a tiny bit at how Wayleran modified the original code, it seems like the amount of goods Traders pick up is not currently dependent on which type of goods that is. That is to say, unlike players, the AI ships don't transaction with money of their own, so they have no limits on what to buy. Therefore: they buy a random amount every time, and that random amount is set-in-stone for the whole operation, rather than based on which type of goods it is. That's a little shoddy, I agree, but it works very well for simulation and you don't super notice at first until you start paying attention.

 

Anyway, I modified Wayleran's Economy code to better suit my needs. I nerfed the maximum down 30%, which is still pretty decent, but not as extreme as the original modification. I'll leave these two forum posts here for reference:

 

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.

 

Thanks. I changed both to range from 25 at minimum to 350 at maximum. You may think that's got a high variance, which is true, but I felt like it more accurately represented trading behaviour: sometimes they'll want a little shipment, sometimes they'll want lots and lots. Meanwhile, it's still nerfed the maximum from vanilla down 30%, which I felt was fair without impacting my income too, too much.

[Azerik]

Is there any way to change the percentage of cargo that will drop from the destroyed ships?  Is there a place in there that I could specify that the cargo ships are heavily armed?

 

I've got a group of people that spend their entire playtime destroying the economy by hunting cargo ships, nd then complaining their stations don't get stock from npcs.  I'd kinda like hunting cargo ships to be routinely fatal for the players.

[Shrooblord]

For the first question, yes, absolutely. That's what we were discussing just above your post. I don't remember which of the two lines it is that controls this, but the two lines Wayleran mentions you need to edit drive the amount of goods dropped by killed traders, exactly as you request.

 

I don't know about defining how well-armed trader vessels are. Look at some of the trader scripts and the plan generators in the vanilla script library. I'm pretty sure there should be something in there that matches what you're looking for.

[Azerik]

Do those only cover the stuff that is dropped or what the ship is carrying?  My users seemed to think that it was the latter.  While reducing the amount of stuff that they carry could deal with piracy, if it is also killing the amount that is being delivered to stations if the cargo ships are unmolested, then it's more of a problem.

 

Really the end-game of Avorion isn't killing the Guardian, it's setting up your commercial empire (IMO at least), so I'm trying to walk a line that discourages piracy by my players, but still allows stations to be supplied.  I'm hoping they come to realize that stations were meant to be mostly supplied by players, but until they do they are expecting npc traders to help out.

 

If I could leave the amount the ships are carrying reasonably high, but kill the percentage they drop when killed, it would solve the problem.  If I could ridiculously OP arm the traders, then the risk of death would also help deter piracy.  I'm pretty sure that is in the ship generation somewhere, but my coding skills are 30 years out of date.  I don't do bad with what I've done, but if someone with a better understanding of current coding and that has spent more time crawling through the code could aim me in the right direction...

[Shrooblord]

Do those only cover the stuff that is dropped or what the ship is carrying?  My users seemed to think that it was the latter.  While reducing the amount of stuff that they carry could deal with piracy, if it is also killing the amount that is being delivered to stations if the cargo ships are unmolested, then it's more of a problem.

Let's see what Wayleran has to say about it:

 

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.

OK, so when it comes to "event Trader vessels" like the distress call Traders, this is the line to modify, in shiputility.lua, line 288.

 

Meanwhile, he says the following about actual Traders that buy and sell cargo to Stations:

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.

So change tradingutility.lua, line 206, to change the amount that cargo ships that go to Stations to buy/sell goods carry on each trip.

 

According to him, these vessels always drop 50% of what they were carrying when they die, no changing it. So it would seem there is no way to modify how much they drop when killed without inherently modifying how much they buy/sell (or rather: the relationship is inverse to that - how much they buy/sell directly influences how much they'll drop).

 

Where did you learn this, Wayleran? Was it from experimentation? I'd love to find out.

 

EDIT:

Just to follow up on this, take a look at this code from civilship.lua. It details what happens if the Cargo Hauler decides to indeed dump their cargo when the player threatens to raid them:

 

function CivilShip.dumpCargo()
    if onClient() then
        invokeServerFunction("dumpCargo")
        return
    end

    local ship = Entity()
    local cargos = ship:getCargos()

    for good, amount in pairs(cargos) do
        for i = 1, amount, 2 do
            Sector():dropCargo(ship.translationf, Faction(callingPlayer), Faction(ship.factionIndex), good, ship.factionIndex, 2)
        end

        ship:removeCargo(good, amount)
    end
end

 

The part where it reads

for i = 1, amount, 2 do
    Sector():dropCargo(ship.translationf, Faction(callingPlayer), Faction(ship.factionIndex), good, ship.factionIndex, 2)
end

highly intrigues me.

 

What you can see happening there is that the for loop iterates from 1 up to the amount of goods the Cargo Hauler has, and drops that item of cargo on an individual basis, but does this for every second item of cargo in their cargo bays. This means they'll also always drop half even if you threaten to destroy them, and they tell you they'll give you everything they've got! And then the script just plain deletes the rest, simulating that the ship did indeed drop all their cargo, when in fact they dropped half and crammed the rest into their Fusion Generators for fuel. Hahaha, what?? It would seem the devs want us to only ever raid 50% of what Cargo Haulers carry, no change to be made. I guess there's a lesson here: piracy doesn't pay! ;D

 

Interesting. I will continue to investigate.

[Azerik]

Yeah, I had found those lines when you guys were discussing it and I modified them already.  The question, you just cleared up for me, was if there was any way to drop that 50% down to something else.

 

I wonder if that line you found, you could either replace the amount with an actual number or adjust that 2 after the "amount" to b say, 4 so they only drop every 4th good or 25%?

 

[Shrooblord]

I wonder if that line you found, you could either replace the amount with an actual number or adjust that 2 after the "amount" to b say, 4 so they only drop every 4th good or 25%?

Yup, totally. I wouldn't hard-code what is now in-code called amount, though. You could still keep the abstraction of using the variable amount, but do some Math to it. For example, replace amount with amount/2 to only process half the amount of cargo.

 

Alternatively, if you modify the 2 in that for loop, you'll make it skip more items of cargo than currently.

 

Basically, the for loop can be read as follows:

• start the loop at index 1;
  
• keep looping until the index equals the value of amount (say 500 for 500 cargo currently being carried);
  
• after each iteration of the loop, increase the index by 2.
  

 

So basically, if you would change 2 into 3, it will process (i.e. drop, in this case) every third item of cargo.

[Azerik]

I think that is going to be my solution, I will run the max cargo back up a bit so unmolested npcs will help supply things, and then make it so it only drops a smidgen of the available cargo when killed/robbed.

 

Unless someone finds a way to arm these guys and make them shoot back....that'd be the best punishment for pirates IMO.

[Shrooblord]

I think that is going to be my solution, I will run the max cargo back up a bit so unmolested npcs will help supply things, and then make it so it only drops a smidgen of the available cargo when killed/robbed.

Well, note that this code is specifically for when the player uses the Interaction "Give me all your cargo!"

 

I never found the code where it states how much a trader ship drops when blown up, and Wayleran's messages seem to suggest that he found out they always drop 50% of their cargo, no matter what you do.