psychoak

Brace for Impact and Sacrifice are not a shield restore, they're damage reduction and retargeting. They shouldn't have been the same trigger design to start with?

702 Shield restores work.

considerBeingDamagedTime 150.0 OnlyWhenTakingDamage is a useless stricture when you have a two and a half minute status hold. Regardless of what you set it at, this will never work. They will always chase after the first target to reach the trigger condition, as opposed to using it on themselves. I tried it originally before doing it the "old" way. Regardless, the obvious occurred to me, belatedly, they'll be fixed in a few minutes.

Yeah... SOA2 work progressed from designing suggested abilities to pretty much all of the entity work.

Certain old ability designs I did three years ago, namely slave circuits, fighter tracking, and the passive turret upgrades, were stupid. Really, really stupid. Much grumbling at my stupidity has occurred. Ironclad kinda hosed the planetary shield ability, it's a passive that prioritizes new applications, so all of the passive upgrades I did starting with that file were the same. What they do is continually reapply, racking up hundreds of thousands of entity creates over the course of a game, and taking about as much processing power as a large fleet in the process. In the case if Ironclads oversight, it's a one per planet thing. The downside is minimal. In the case of the turret upgrades, it was catastrophic. The others were just a problem I thought my way around. A ship specific application was not in mind when the ability system was designed. The way I got around it was simple enough, but the method for controlling gain and loss properly was vastly inferior. Some of the more recent moments of brilliance I've had while thinking around more complicated problems for SOA2 yielded major performance gains over my previous stupidity. They keep files in residence, and use combinations of finish conditions to achieve the same results as the old method of short term repeated applications. You can't do OutOfRange as normal, because setting up the trigger to only apply to a specific subset requires a container file to make the target ship itself be last spawner. Once it's not the buff file being applied by the spawning file, OutOfRange no longer works. Once you're stacking multiple copies from multiple sources, you can't cancel it in two stages by using OutOfRange for the container either, because you'll have two ships in range and one of them leaves, but the second ship still holds the conditions true for both end products. Doing both spawner conditions never occured to me when I initially wrote them, so now they cancel out from FirstSpawnerNoLongerHasBuff as well and the problem of duplicates being held is solved. They both behave more accurately to design goals, and more efficiently resource wise.

697-700 Performance degrading ability designs fixed.

Eville wanted em clumsy, with the effect being negated by capital variants. I've got new versions of some stuff locally that I'll eventually upload when I'm feeling less lazy and finish it. They'll actually negate instead of just applying a general buff.

Eh, this was intended function. They're supposed to be clumsy.

Tagging caps is easy. Just add a buff to roid fields that pegs them with the effects. Tagging cruisers and not frigates would be... complicated. The only way to do it is to make something you can select by a unique feature they all share, like having phase missiles or strike craft. As there isn't any such trait, they would need to be modified to be so. Having every cruiser use phase missiles or carry strike craft, and nuking any capabilities in the frigate line up would be fairly damaging to the composition of the sides. The other method of singling out a particular group of ships is by giving them all a passive buff. Then you can use the loss of that buff as a finish condition and make an overly complicated string of buffs accomplish your task. Chewing up a buff slot on every cruiser would prove problematic, I already ran into that. I'd need six to make DCS efficiently work on just the droid ships, bloody carrier already has all five...

5 could be done by making every planet a wormhole, it's just a TRUE/FALSE toggle in the planet files. While it would make for more realistic travel, it would also butcher anything resembling front lines, defensive positions, trivial things like that. Not a good idea. 1 can be done lame by just changing names in the galaxy constants files, but unless you actually add all the assets that would make the unique minor races actually be those minor races, it would be pointless. That's a lot of assets that wouldn't be available somewhere else. 4 can be done with abilities. It's a simple ownership switch as long as the building doesn't have research locked functions. This one might even be a good idea, but there would have to be care taken in setting it up. Being able to flip ownership willy nilly would really hose things. A planet based buff might could be used to trigger an interrupt on ship based takeover abilities, flipping them on planet acquisition would probably work too. In any case, I could pull it off in a reasonable fashion. By the time you're playing conquest it's the work of a moment to replace them though. Would require quite the structure overhaul to really make it worthwhile. Capacity is your limiting factor by the time you're in a position to conquer fortified planets, not cost. If a factory were a long and arduous thing to aquire, capturing one would be a real good idea, but they build just as fast as they blow up, and cost next to nothing when you're blowing up ten times their resources in ships every time you turn around.

Don't bother with balancing the abilities, they're mostly placeholder duplicates from other ships. When I stop being a lazy bastard, I'll start working on them.

At 10 megs a planet you're looking at 300 megs in textures for thirty planet types if you're not using duplicates for some of the types. That's an awful heavy load for a game that keeps everything in memory.

That's just AI versus a player though. An ISDI with level 3 ion blast can disable the alliance ship for 20 seconds a pop, and pull off three in succession. Level 3 backup shields will replenish 15000 shield points and has a two minute cooldown. Ion blast becomes vastly superior to backup shields when the dps exceeds the requirements to make a kill before it wears off. It's not a good match 1vs1, but the ISDI is a fleet command ship, not a solo tank. Use oppression to draw fire to them, disable the main threats, and polish them off while they're disabled with your relatively safe supporting fleet. I recommend Broadsides and Loronars early on.

I feel so lazy...

They're unlocks for some clone and droid based abilities. Clone Corps unlocks Clone Cohesion and Clone Fleet. Droid Foundaries unlocks Droid Control Signal. As they aren't research leveled abilities, they don't show up as an unlock under the description. Adding notification to the description is necessitated. Commentary on your back story job I'll leave to Eville, I'm just a tasteless lacky.

Less than obvious features. Buzz droids for CIS have three weapon effects for missiles, disable regeneration, disable engines, disable weapons. All three effects trigger a 5 damage dot for 10 seconds, 20/10/5% respectively. The Jedi Venator has some new strike craft, they're rather tough, but undervalued. The Jedi Squadrons ability, which could use a renaming, adds a 12% chance of doing 1000 shield bypassing damage, again to the missiles. The Independance has a horrific buff of insane power, that applies to one fighter. At level 3 it's a guaranteed thousand damage shot on the hull, a 20 point repair rait, 300% fire rate, and 50 extra hull points for 60 seconds. Basically, an invincible, cruiser killing fighter from hell. I'm not real worried about the last being exploited, but the other two carry significant concern. I need to know how abusive they can be. I also need feedback on the strike craft counter abilities, some of them can be quite devastating, cluster warheads might be insane. I'm less concerned about the other abilities, but they all need testing. The numbers are fairly reasonable, but I haven't got the reflexes to test the geek factor myself at this point, and some of them are random enough to require a huge level of output.

Oppression is a work in progress that isn't real likely to progress. The hope was to be able to negate that specific debuff with the command effects of a capital star destroyer, this may not come about. The main effect of it is a short range taunt though, it's a bit of a drawback for the cruiser itself, but a bonus for any ships around it. You can partially control your enemy by how you position them.

Presumed to be unbroked. I don't have them set with stacking limits yet, so you can do an ungodly amount of debuffing on individual targets.

Limitations in design are appearing, bear with it for a while longer and they'll either get overhauled into a different design that can apply different effects to different types of targets, or they'll get nerfed so the frigates can't constantly disable super capitals.

Huh?

All, or nearly all ships can attack fighters. I think it's all, but there might be one or two hiding in the morass that can't. If you go digging around through the ship files, there's a hell of a lot of useful information you can glean from them. Those multiple laser weapon entries on all the ships aren't for looks, they're different kinds. Squadron counts are so low because the game will break with thousands of fighters in theater.

Yeah... that one is a bit of a problem. The idea was to have an allegiance neutralizing ability. Such a thing doesn't appear to exist. It's up to Eville whether he wants to axe it, have it be the ultimate culture spreader, or have it be reasonable, but not particularly effective at changing the course of battle results. Right now it's just barely fast enough to drop allegiance within combat and breaks the shit out of the culture system entirely.

It's needed, lots of it. I may be roughing them in, but I'm not even attempting to balance them out as I go. Ships that are finished, as in no dummy explore abilities left on them, are the most important. I'm after both individual ability efficiency and the ship as a whole with all abilities considered, as well as the side as a whole with abilities taken into account. I'd also like specific commentary on leveling problems. If cheeseball ability isn't cheeseball at level 1 and just turns cheeseball as it increases, it's important to say so. They aren't even going to be vaguely balanced as I've put them in. To say I'm eyeballing the numbers is an understatement. Ignore all the wrong strings, missing effects and such. All I'm after is feedback on balance here, I'll compile a list of every missing visual and audio component when I'm finished putting them in.

You can do either, both buff and ability were hosed over sheer idiocy, so make sure you update both if you go that route.

Fixed. I screwed the pooch and committed without checking a correction.