Mhmmm.... I was looking for something like Fight for Big Beef, but min-max forums are broken right now, so nearly all mods (which are posted there) are inaccessible.

And the true origin mod keeps crashing, so i can't rely on that.

I could actually inject the file instead of the image of an appropriate size, where palette colors don't matter. But depends on if it tries to optimize or change the number of colors or something then it breaks.

Anyways, future people.
filesize: 146,080
MD5sum: 058d65f87f6a930b7d5465c4f605a6b0

I started this mod, because I found Fight for Big Beef add interesting things, while it also broke balance. Tell me, if you need something changed, I will gladly tell you how to. :-)

Ofc, in best case, this game needs to be rewritten opensource. It has few bugs and limitations, that don't really allow modding to take off. You can add your own ships though and own weapons, but not much behind that.

But my mod makes all ship hulls pretty universal: for example, in unmodified game, first light fighter can only accept two guns/lasers in two slots. Now it can also accept missiles. In unmodified game, only few ships can lay mines. Now even Sunspot can become mine layer.

I'd forgotten how slow the game is. Fight for Big Beef was fairly quick paced. And if i remember right you couldn't collect Rez, you had to earn it all via missions. Or was that another mod, i forget.

Regardless, mining/acquiring rez is too slow , and the mining laser works seems 1 in 4 times. Not sure why. I'd say double or triple the output from asteroids being mined. Also double the max goons/rez reserve from the present values.

Not sure about the rest. I'll find out as i go.

Mhmm.. I remember i'd usually choose 2 ships from the appropriate categories. One for mining/carrying rez or men, and one for fighting and depending on how full my stores were i'd alternate.

A problem that showed more and more of itself in True Origin, was the defenses were crap. You'd have the best armor you could handle and a station would one shot your biggest/strongest ship in half a second. Makes playing it very difficult. Even harder to force your way in to befriend them so you can purchase their stock of stuff...

You started with mod, yes? Double checking, because its rez crystal values have been drastically increased. This also lead to interesting effect, larger crystal simply can't fit in smaller ship hull, for example, light-blue one needs small ship class and so on.. you will have to break it or wait until it breaks, or get larger hull.

Hull prices also are quite different, strong fighter hulls typically cost more. You can apply hit-and-run tactic of fast ship with missiles or do cloaking with mines if you don't want to go 1:1. The level up requirements also eased up, you don't have to pick between shields or cloak - you can do both. The spawner also starts cloaked, meaning that cloak tactics are actually offensive now.

You can't "clone" the goons, but you can open crates, play "cheap motel" mission or loot from ships (especially bounty hunters). The main base capacity has been seriously increased, so the scenario of ruining game by sudden destroying of main ship that you described should be nigh-impossible. You will have to get several large ships destroyed in a row... But even then you can get to your mining star of choice, then claim it for yourself.

Small mining laser is for mining smaller asteroid chunks only. Get a fixed turret mod and mount larger mining laser instead. At higher tiers, 4x huge mining laser possible on Mammoth, because I implemented huge version of fixed turret, it provides 2x huge slots.

As of bases, every faction has base of 3 sizes; the T1 size is manageable with conventional weaponry - alternative is do mission which will cause faction base downgrade. T3 base is manageable with dedicated weaponry, even T3 Bounty Hunter bases are manageable, especially with cloaked bombing or mining tactics. Then again, there is nothing wrong with negotiation, in this mod mining rez is quite faster than in stock.

I have only three issues with the game:
- huge hulls are set to appear on final zombie chapter. If I make them appear earlier, four huge hulls obliterate every base... If I keep their appearance as is, its pretty tough near end (not impossible though, tech helps a lot)

- the game has basically two firing buttons. This is too low for the weapon arsenal available. I assigned lasers, cannons to first; rest like bombs, mines, turrets to second. Rockets are assigned to both categories. This is done to make hulls much more universal - any ship can arm rockets in normal slot; and previously rocket-only ships are unrestricted like - 6x canon Volley! However, it makes guns and rockets synchronous. But if you need to only fire rockets, you can do it with RMB. Yet if you combine rockets with mines, bombers, drones - each RMB will not only cause mines to deploy/ bomb to launch, but also launch rockets - which may unmask the ship. And if I shove rockets into first-category only, there will be no dedicated control over them if combined with canons/lasers. Maybe I will do just that... need to test.

- the mine polling produces animation that is CPU bottlenecked and destroys fps. I don't seem to be able to make it poll without drawing the animation.. Not all necessary files exposed. In original game, its not much problem - because mines are really rare. In mod, any bomber/drone carrier can equip mines instead. Each sunspot can drop 3x mine layer.

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Just checked source, can confirm that resources on average are 5x fat, while sitting intact much longer before breaking by themselves.

Yes, alternated a bit between True Origin and yours.
(Appended rez part of 10x on bottom of post)

Wasn't having an issue really with those. Though no cloning i hadn't really noticed. I was just referring to the max you could store being a bit higher.

Later i'm sure i'll be swimming in rez, though early on i really don't want to rely on staying near a mining base and getting say 300 a minute...

Once sufficiently strong just doing warp gate attacks to explore gives plenty of data and rez and goons, though it takes a while.

Or you could do like the base game does and have perhaps the very first slot as a level higher than the rest allowing and forcing some diversifying. I agree too many huge hulls too quickly would make it way too easy (assuming you can even build them)

Odd, earlier i had lasers/rockets and i was only using the right mouse button and it keeps firing lasers. (Mostly too far away sometimes so use rockets that are longer range, and once they are within range use lasers)

i tried raising the levels to 10x normal in a different mod, and it ended up with FEWER crystals rather than more rez. The effect i think made it so if the value it calculated was too low, it was just being ignored and dropped. So just raising the values doesn't guarentee you are getting more crystals, just fewer that are of higher value. Likely it generates a new class of rez, starting from the largest and then goes up the chain until it matches the right one.

I know in a different mod (Fight for Big Beef) All rez were 0, so you'd see huge purple rez floating around with a 3-5 second life span, and if you picked them up nothing would happen, this makes me think that's how it works. Plus classes know their parents, not their children... So going up is easy.

Thanks, found the bastard! In $mod_dir / gameScripts / datablocks / asteroidDatablocks.cs
there is a var "resourceMaxValue" which is a hard limiter of maximum value the exploding asteroid can emit.

So if in pickupDatablocks.cs (in same directory), in PickupDatablock(ResourceRockGreen: ResourceRockBase), "value" is above 19 (resourceMaxValue in asteroidDatablocks->AsteroidBase_Small) then it will never spawn from small Asteroid. And small Asteroids often spawn on low-level mining planets.

Because the default for "green rez" is 1, I assume that hardlimit is performed on total value of items (each successfully rolled instance deducts the limit) - it can spawn up to 19x green rez if its value is 1 at 0.7 chance, or 1x green rez if I change it to 19 at 0.7 chance. It will never spawn crystal with higher than 19 value.

This explains the reason for Rez starvation: each "resourceMaxValue" of each Asteroid needs to be scaled according to the scale of var "value" of each of ResourceRockXXX classes in pickupDatablocks.

Taking from stock, a good multiplier for resourceMaxValue is 15x-20x of corresponding Rez class (ResourceRock(Green,Blue,Yellow,Red,Purple) etc).

I am releasing a fix for this and will add comment to pickupDatablock as well.



Possible, but defeats the message of the mod in "unblocking" stuff while still keeping it balanced.

Base game has an idea of first slot for Human pilot and two-three slots for friendly AI. Most of the time AI is dumb and engages larger enemy AI ships, which get its destroyed and slowly leaks Rez/Goons from player.

But in Base game the Human wrap gate is also uncloaked. Plus it spawns close to enemy bases (I have not yet found way to make it spawn at longer distance).

Which means Base game - enemy bases and ships will prioritize wrap gate - so Human is also forced into protecting it, which makes many missions PITA and destroys tactics of cloaking/mining/bombing completely in its roots.

Ok, but even in more positive events, if Human ship is destroyed, Human has to rely on presence of warp gate to get larger ship, because until act four Human has topmost one huge hull plus array of smaller useless (in base game) hulls.

There are basically three acts in game, as first act is intro and for tiny hulls only. Act two is game beginning and by default unlocks you into small hull tier, but also forces human to have tiny hulls (which fragment easily). Act four is zombie act and endgame, but huge hulls already present in Act three.


In my mod there are few key differences, which is my response to overpowered first slot:
- hulls are rebalanced by price, stats and hull protection. That means that at least half of the hulls within same size are warrior hulls, that weight more, turn around worse, cost more, have more weapon slots, and can be a formidable challenge for regular hulls of +1 size.

- weapon slots are unlocked to max extent possible. Possible to install missile in cannon/laser slot. Drone or mine into bomb slot. And vice versa. Other mods just add more unique hulls. But game already has enough hulls. New hulls then cause player to use them to have advantage over "classic" hulls. In my mod, all classic hulls are far more universal in weapon combinations, so there is no need for unique hulls at all.

- missiles, mines, bombs, drones are more fatal. They easily can replace beam/cannon trees. A group of cloaked miners are damn scary and offensive. In base game those weapons are secondary, which caused players to always decide what is better beam or cannon, usually picking cannon tree and having more PITA in start, then engaging into direct fight rather than tactics for 80% of time. Drones also were changed that the bomber drones really use missile tree, no longer cannon.


So, I think I will unlock all hulls at act one!..

Schematics are required to build all those ships. And they are bound to star-class. And high-value star-classes only appear near end of act three. I will just bump schematics number requirement (which is already bumped compared to base and balanced by weighted table), so that players can't easily hunt one big hull and "terrorize the game" to own pleasure.


A small update here - I am unsuccessful so far.

Turns out that somewhere in binary game code, code checks for LMB and presence of cannon or beam (not slots/launchers, actual weapon) or RMB and missiles/bombs/mines. If positive, it triggers their state (beams fire, mine field gets deployed or destroyed etc).

The "launchers" (each weapon has one, its weapon slot on ship hull) turned out to be merely LIMITERS of what you can install. So, in my mod there is really no difference between what used to be base shooter slot and missile slot.

I replaced all missile launcher slots with shooter slots in hull designs - as opposed to accepting same weapons; stripped missile launcher slot of all weapon capabilities; started new game - missiles still trigger on RMB while beams/cannons on LMB.

Granted, the same limitation exists in Base game; its just that in my mod player can combine far more weapons, that this problems of mouse-button conflict between missile weapons and other non-shooter weapons surfaces. I just want to have less limitations.

I sorta found this out earlier (yesterday or today) and already made adjustments. Also raised the numbers for the comet instances as well.

Think i found it, noted it while glancing at the files.

warpInDistance = 2000; //how far away we spawn from the root position when warping in.

Might make that 10000 and see what happens.

But glancing at them, there's between 2 and like 5 slots on most if not all ships. Makes it hard to optimize or want to use anything except the mining/cargo ships.

Sounds good. Or do 2 huge 2 large, and on act 4, 4 huge. (i'm in act 4 right now, but don't have any huge ships so i'm stuck with large ones trying to survive)

Either way, having the option to make use of what you actually can, might make someone play in the lower section longer til they get their first huge one, ready for act 4.

Just annoying using weapons that you don't want to be using yet... Mostly about timing.

Anyways, here's the changes i've done and been doing with it a bit.

https://pastebin.com/UtpaSARm

Well, I can see that you increased amount of crates in randomInstance which I can understand :-) but you also increased amount of wreckage doodads (decorations) in miningInstance ("AsteroidBreakage") :-)

Thanks a bunch! You will be credited for this. I set it to 6000, should be good enough to keep warp gate from space base explosion as well as its swarm/bomb weapons.

I don't quite understand what you mean here. Ships are pretty different - some have more utility slots, some have weapon slots at angle or in back, some have turrets etc. Problem in base game is - there is only one drone, one bomb and one mine ship for each of size categories starting with medium, also one "rocket barrage" ship for each size. In mod, one can use the hulls for far more weapons, can turn Volley into small variant of Crawler, or Right Hook into SRM carrier. The ship weight and cost are also different - faster ship with two rockets will have less defense than slower ship with two rockets. Tell me if some ship feels incorrect.

Agreed, but also huge ships take 10+ schematics to be available for production. I think in the end, if player shot the ship 10 times, its ok to reward him with ability to use it...

I did the changes, but it appears it makes the saved game not always compatible.
If some abnormalities surface (especially if xp shows negative or ship hull choice screen only shows few categories), throw away and use 3.1 version of "experience.cs" and "globalTuning.cs" to finish your gameplay.

I agree, but no idea how to fix it for now.

Release 3.2 (thanks to rtcvb32)

changelog:
unified comments in all modified files in headers of what exactly was changed
made experience progression 1.5x harder (still way easier than base game)
removed hangar size limits for ship sizes
slightly increased hull unlock schematics requirement for large and huge hulls
balanced two tiny ships
increased corrosive and ion bomb wasp damages
increased mine damage, reduced large combined minefield density, increased polling rate, increased large combined field size
drone damages of all three types is same now (doesn't affect weapon type inflicted strong/weak points)
(thanks to rtcvb32) greatly increased rez collection rate
(thanks to rtcvb32) warp gate appears at safer distance to enemies, while still acceptable for mining purposes
(thanks to rtcvb32) chance for a bit more crates and dump hazards

I'll start a new game, wanted to check the feel from the start anyways.

I'll give my thoughts on it after i play it a bit.

Release 3.3 (sorry, rtcvb32 :-) )
- weapons2: large mine radius and damage slightly reduced back, while amount increased back to 30, to create more effective field (field testing proved update too low efficiency)
- all items: improved descriptions and more spell checks
- shields: fortress shield regeneration rate slightly increased
- ships: consistency update - for huge hulls, made freighter appear first and starliner later, similar to how tug and yacht appear in smaller hull classes.


Ok :-)
3.3 is out, is more of cosmetic/slight balancing version. Been playing a bit... only few values changed.

Yeah, played the beginning, just got my first TINY ship... my fight against a medium ship (to go to my first starsystem) killed my rez supply. I'll have to go to Vulture mode for a while (entering fight zones but taking advantage of having 1 friend or just collecting xp/rez/blueprints until i'm strong enough to proceed)

Well here's an image to add in to the next update. Remembering i had GIMP i tried to make it more natural looking.

Glancing to try and find where the data when rez breaks into pieces, how many pieces you can do.

Found it for asteroids. So for fun tried putting subprop as 100 on everything. Then i got rings, large rings, small rings, all over the place, before bursting into rez. That was fun to witness :P