[MOD] Twinge's Balance Mod (Current Version: 6.3.1) (Old)

[Porkchop]

Love the Mod, Twinge!

so far in 6.3 I have noticed one odd thing, on startup, very first beacon after the intro before you make your first jump there is always an encounter with an auto scout guarding a sensor station. every time for me, with any ship. is this intentional? one time on startup i got a missile seller on the very first beacon, i immediately went to hanger and tried restarting a bunch of times and got the same auto scout encounter every time.

also, i do miss enemies having ion bombs, what do you think about reduction in chance vs complete removal?

[Twinge]

Oh bloody hell, sorry about that - and thanks for saying something. I could've sworn I remembered to take that out before uploading - that was a test event trying to pin down the odd nebula exit LSD glitch. My apologies, uploaded a new version.


As for Ion Bombs - they just seem so weak on enemy ships that it feels a bit silly to have them, but I suppose a reduction could be an option too. Anyone else have opinions on this?

[Vhati]

I just noticed your old releases are preserved here.
Thanks for that btw. I'm making their hashes known to the new mod manager.

The current version, back through 0.5.3 (says google's cache of this thread), is for FTL 1.03.3.
Was that always the case?
Or were some of those older releases only for 1.03.1?

I'm attaching warnings to each.

[Twinge]

All versions are for 1.03.3 - though it was a beta patch when I first released the mod publicly, not an official release. AFAIK nothing ended up changing between the beta and full release that would affect anything, though.

[aaaaaa50]

So I know there was discussion here about removing the ion bomb from enemies, and I had a thought. In early sectors, getting hit by an ion bomb in the wrong system can be a big "oh, S***" moment because it can completely disable your weapons, shields, engines, etc. In later sectors, though, its damage has lesser effect because systems have more power in them and dodge chances are higher. Why not simply increase the ion damage for enemy's ion bombs? It won't have any extra power against players in early sectors because the ion timer has a cap for 25 seconds, and in later sectors it would still make the player shuffle their strategy the same way getting hit by a breach or fire bomb makes players need to react to it.

[Twinge]

That's a possibility, but I don't like making the AI cheats so obvious - even if it's a reasonable weapon considering the random aiming, it still feels unfair if their Ion Bombs do 5 ion damage and yours only do 3 ion damage.

[Porkchop]

I agree with twinge about ai cheats, i mostly would like it back in with a smaller chance to make the game feel more consistent, ie. you and the enemy both have access to the same tech. Good point by aaaaaa50 though.

What is the base chance that an enemy gets ion bomb currently?

[Twinge]

What is the base chance that an enemy gets ion bomb currently?

In the Balance Mod now - 0%. In the base game, depends on the ship; same chance as any other 1 power weapon AFAIK.

[dragonsumbra]

Hey, I love the mod. I saw that you were considering nerfing boarding slightly by either making enemy medbays occur more often or doors 2 occur more often. If you do follow through with this idea, I would suggest the doors 2 option. It would make boarding considerably riskier due to the time it takes to get through them, without adding the frustration of trying to deal with a medbay with poor weapons (e.g. when using the Basilisk).

Also, if you want to decrease the number of crew you get over all, and make letting them surrender as viable an option as killing their crew under equal circumstances, perhaps make it only possible for a captive to join you if there is at least (or perhaps only) one left alive and you reduce their hull to the point where they would surrender. That way boarding ships are not just getting free crew randomly, and ships meant to be purely destructive, like the Fed ships, would have a chance at getting crew without having to re-purpose their ship into a boarding ship (and not get to use the artillery beam).

The exception to this should, of course, be the slave ships, where you could still get a slave by killing the crew, as they are presumably kept separate from the crew. They already give up a slave upon surrendering, so no real reason to change them.

Anyway, thanks for hearing me out

[agigabyte]

if you work on this again, I will twinge with excitement.