I'm making good progress with the sprites for the ships. I'm very tired right now, but I'll give a quick list of all ships that are currently in the mod:
Task Force Omicron
- Battleship (Mako)
- Battlecruiser (Bullhead)
- Cruiser (Thresher)
- Gunboat Wing (Pleco)
- Bomber Wing (New Core Bomber)
- Fighter Wing (New Core VHF)
I'm progressing a bit faster than expected, which is good! I also think that the quality of the sprites is improving the more I progress, so I guess once I have the first batch of sprites done, I can rework the less detailed ones and keep the old sprites as "old" skin.
Most ships turn out to be rather mediocre if not even bad in the hands of the AI. I've noticed that with the Aquilon, which is very fragile. In player hands, the Aquilon is absolutely deadly, because it comes with the Phase Teleport System, so it can jump right into battle but not out of it. This makes this otherwise slow ship very useful against small, fast ships as it can basically teleport ontop of the enemy, or even exploit the lack of turret coverage on ships like the Onslaught by teleporting behind it.
The Nephilim on the other hand is less of a battleship and more of a giant logistics ship. It can defend itself and is rather tanky, but her offensive capabilities are very limited. For some reason, she can carry 50.000 marines, though.
So far I think I have managed to keep some sort of balance with vanilla going. I think the biggest and most blatant balance breaker so far are the fighters and bombers, since vanilla LPCs are really rather producing quick, easy-to-replace, rather weak fighters and bombers. There are a few that stand out, like the Piranha, which can deal huge amounts of damage with those bombs, but compared to the wings of this mod, they are weak. All mod fighters and bombers and gunboats come with shields to a certain degree and while most vanilla wings have only one weapon and only 2-4 fighters, the modded wings are a bit bigger in numbers. Once the mod is in a more presentable stage, I will see whether it'd be better to reduce the fighter-per-wing count or just make them cost more OPs, or whether just to increase the refit time. The gunboats, since they are once-per-engagement wings, seem to be fine so far. Even the Defiant, despite it firing a Gauss Cannon with a long range hull mod.