Ever got annoyed by this pesky AI Bomber named Phi-34 in Discovery? With the Phi-Series now being part of the mod, you'll be able to give it some payback!
The Phi-Series comes with a Destroyer, a Cruiser (the one we know) and a Dreadnought with a built-in Phi-34 Fighter. Ideally, the plan for the Phi-Series is to be a faction for Nexerelin, but also a Remnant-like NPC in regular games. The faction comes with three weapons matching the aesthetics of the ship hulls, and each ship has the Salvage Gantry hull mod, the Automated Ship hull mod and the Expanded Cargo Hold hull mod, so they do not rely on transport ships for extensive salvaging operations.
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.
I've written a mission that generates two randomized fleets from the mod's ships. Very fun and very helpful to test the balancing!
The Corsairs, which become part of the regular pirates, are really a big threat. Their ships don't have shields but very strong armor - both the Murmillo and the Legate will tank a very large amount of fire, while the Legate also churns out Gladiators. They are very slow bombers but if left ignored, they will fire 4x Reaper Torpedoes at you.
I've also added some Freelancer starsphere backdrops for the battles. They fit into the atmosphere quite well!
Nomads are in! I've also finished the sprites for the Bretonian and Gaian ships!
To emulate the tentacles, I've given the Nomad ships some external engines. Looks a bit weird, but they react to accelleration and to the Plasma Engine ability (everything turns green). The Nomads don't use shields (like in vanilla) but have long range beams. Their first wave of hangar pets is devastating, but once you're through, you should immediately take care of the capital ships.
Combat testing indicates that the Nomads will be just as pesky to fight against as the [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] in vanilla: They have a higher range and due to how Starsector handles combat, they will always try to keep the best possible distance. They will also surround the player very quickly, which is bad news to anything with small shield arcs.
Ideally, you can counter the Nomads with carriers, tanky battleships (like in this video the Temeraire) or ships with the teleporter ability (Tokugawa, Aquilon). Missile spam works very well, too (Overlord, Willow Grove LABC).
The Ishtar is an absolute pain in the ass and you will likely never see more than one or two on the battlefield. In this scripted mission, the AI decided to hold all three of them back as reinforcements, and the moment they appear, things go downhill very quickly.
This is beyond cool. I love the ported artstyles, and Starsector is a ton of fun with just its vanilla ships -- with nostalgia like this packed in, I'm going to sink even more time into it.
At the beginning of most bigger battles, there is a high chance of lag. The mod is heavily focused on ships ranging from destroyers to capital ships (there is literally not a single frigate), so most capital ships have one (turret-heavy battleships) to eight hangars (dreadnoughts), most usually between 4 and 6. This is both because I think vanilla Starsector has rather weak hangar ships (unless you spam Drovers). If you let five Astrals fight five Onslaughts, the Onslaughts win every time, despite the Astral using more resources.
In Starsector Discovery, it's a bit different:
Fighters: 2-5 per wing
Bombers: 1-3 per wing
Gunboats: 1-2 per wing
All of them are significantly more expensive in terms of OP in the mod, with fighters and bombers usually costing flat 20 points while gunboats use up 50 points. The gunboats are also only powerful support craft that don't actually go for the enemy, and they spawn only once per battle except for the Nomad gunboat. To reduce some lag, most battleships have their gunboats built-in, basically as escort, not as hangar pet. This means you can't go for 8x5 wings.
Fighters and bombers are extremely dangerous to any ship - just like in Discovery. If you play any ship yourself, always focus those first. Gunboats are more of a defensive extension of battleships since they usually provide separate shield bubbles and catch snipe shots. The Liberty and Core gunboats also act as long range suppression with their FWGs (Gauss Cannons).
Anyway, at the beginning of a battle, all capital ships release their fighter wings and it slows the game down for a few seconds because of all the engine effects and AI scripts. It's very noticeable during fights with Ishtars. If it had too much of an impact, I'd reduce the amount of effects/engines later.
Ship-wise, I'm making good progress. Yesterday I did the Jormungand, the Vidar and the Hel, although I might need to redo the Vidar because I accidentally added something that looks like a BNUUY to it. A few days ago I also added the Megalodon to the Core's shipline as Dreadnought, quite on par with the Gallic Dreadnought Temeraire, the Bretonian Warwick Juggernaut and somewhat on par with the Ishtar, although the Ishtar really outranges everything.
I've also added a carrier and a battlecruiser to the AI shipline, for a bit more variety.
For the next days, I plan to put all the factions in the game - right now you can get the ships only by spawning them in with commands or getting their rare blueprints through exploration. I've read up a bit about how Nexerelin works, and I think I can make all factions work without making the mod depending on Nexerelin, but as far as I know, the faction perk picker would require a dependency if I added the faction blueprints to them, so I guess that would be a separate mini-mod to make after the main mod is done.
The biggest trouble will be to make Nomads spawn. I want them to behave similar to the Remnant, but without stations to spawn from but instead have them spawn in hyperspace and in random systems. That will likely require some custom coding, or at least browsing through other mods that may have done something similar to copy their coding.
![[Image: 1042526055711379476.webp?size=96&quality=lossless]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/emojis/1042526055711379476.webp?size=96&quality=lossless){kind=small}
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