Adamant Mod 0.16.00 Released

[Atrocities]

I want to see a pacifistic race. You know a race that doesn't believe in killing at all. A race that is uber powerful but only uses non-leathal weapons. A trading powerhouse, with heavily shielded worlds and cultural influence that inspires other races to love them.

[Arralen]

Imperator Fyron said:
Arralen said:
I'm not sure if I like them (any more) - looks to me they don't really work out...

It seems to work as intended in the mods I've tried with leaky armor. ... Generally, leaky armor components have a lot more hp/kt than normal components (usually at least an order of magnitude). The component selection function is further biased towards hitting high hp components, disproportionate to the component's percent of total hp.

The size of leaky armor isn't so important; larger pieces actually generally work better due to having more hp/component. For example, in leaky armor setups like B5 Mod and Adamant, ships with heavy armor tend to defeat ships with (the same total tonnage of) light armor, despite the light armored ship having a ton more total hp. The lower hp/kt heavy armors tend to take more hits from the "internals" than the higher hp/kt light armors.

My testing suggests otherwise:
Using the Titanium Armor I (light: 1/10 kt medium 3/23kt heavy 10/50kt) and the Rail gun I (DAM 20),
a mix of 3:1 medium/light armor defeated all-heavy armor with the same "armor weight" every time.
Obviously, damage-"spillover" on the low-number-heavy-armor design and high amount of armor components on the other one outweights the tendency to target heavier components.
All-light armor seems to suck, though, but that's easily explained by spillover damage - which is sufficient to kill 2 full armor components in the test case.

This gets rediculous if some armor types stay 'hit first' .. 1 piece providing 100% protection ..

If you are refering to Adamant, the "dense armor" components come at the end of the tech tree, after all leaky armors.

Strangely, MONSTER SKIN and CRYSTALLINE ARMOR are "dense armors", yet they are not that far from the lower end of the tech tree ...
Especially MONSTER SKIN does not make sense as "dense armor" .. neither balancewise nor rationally: Monster seem to have very few internal systemsm, but lots of armor. Having to peel that completely off to even hurt them (and its regenerating!) is not only incredibly difficult, but illogical as well.
CRYSTALLINE ARMOR could need some changes anyway: It looks pretty much unchanged with non-leaky 30/100kt and a 2nd ability whose description reads "not depleted by weapon fire" but means "channels hits into shields"; obviously the same
ability is used to build the leaky shields, but somehow the armors' abilities description got changed to that of the shield - without need, as they are seperate entries.
Btw., its plain wrong anyway: A) it's not true for the shields and B) does not apply for the Armor
Only thing that really changed about the Crystalline Armor is the price: with 500/0/25 it's horribly expensive : to make the player use only 1 component per ship?

As troop armor, it does not work out that good, though:
- Titanium uses Troop Mount (results in "Troop Titanium Armor I" with 1/30kt, 20/0/0 cost)
- Crystalline doesn't (results in "Crystalline Armor I" with 1/6 kt and 5/0/3 cost)

I wonder why "dense" armor doesn't use a mount that scales it to the size of the vessel?


The MEDICAL BAY is problematical as well:
- to big for lots of ships (300kt,needs Frigate at least, what is a long way to go if you start with low tech)
- too expensive to be put on bases over every colony (5K/11K/3K ressources!)
=> plagues are guaranteed disaster; makes plague bomb 1 a very 'attractive' weapon


And last, but not least - the Puntherrain Empires RACE DESCRIPTION seems to come straight from Altavistas Babelfish ...

[Theonlystd]

Imperator Fyron said:
Do you have any requests for things you'd like to see?

haha lots of things. But with Se5 out and this being rather old mod i was just curius if we could expect many more updates.

I was reading the old thread for this Mod. And well i liked alot of your ideas. The Weapons bewteen the Races do seem to be a bit alike just different names. And Energy and Machine Dudes bit more fleshed out?

[Kraftwerk]

Imperator Fyron said:
Do you have any requests for things you'd like to see?

Itd be nice if pirates could colonize planets but not move any population there or build anything, just use the cargo space, and prevent other races from colonizing..

If the engine allowed it, being able to use any planets cargo space regardless of the owner would be nice...

Also its a little hard to capture ships with the swashbucklers since the AI tends to use Bridges (3 defense) and Luxury Crew (5 defense) and the Swashbucklers are only an attack 5..

And boarding ships with no weapons flee...kind of frustrating, since I build boarding ships so I dont have to build ships with guns...

The first mining sats could do with 500 output a turn instead of 450...since the swashbucklers cant capture anything but neutrals ships, and it takes quite a while to get better boarding crews with the painfully slow research point growth, you need the extra minerals to build actual combat ships, since stealing them is nigh impossible...

Maybe the ability to convert resources on a higher ratio that default? Since pirates would be naturally better at trading and getting the best price..

Maybe a little easier to get along with diplomatically, since pirates are a bit more charismatic than the average bloke...

[Fyron]

If all enemy ships have shield points, boarding ships will flee. They only approach once all shields are down on at least one target. If the enemy has no shields, you might want to check that the strategy is set to board/capture ships for your boarding ship designs.

Note that civilian cruisers, though small and not too strong individually, get an 80% maintenance reduction. It's a lot easier to make an initial raiding force with them than normal ships.

Theonlystd said:
haha lots of things. But with Se5 out and this being rather old mod i was just curius if we could expect many more updates.

SE5 has a lot of issues that need working out...

The Weapons bewteen the Races do seem to be a bit alike just different names.

There is, I think, a fair bit of variety in weapon styles between the original 3 paradigms (physical, magic, organic). Part of what held up 0.16 so long was complete lack of inspiration for machine and energy weapons. I copped out on the machines, just giving them copies of the physical race weapons. Energy has the main bases covered, but not too much variety. Alas...

And Energy and Machine Dudes bit more fleshed out?

Other than in the area of weapons, what else needs more fleshing out?