psychoak

I was finding even the beefy frigates to be completely worthless under the old damage system. Anything under a few thousand in shields was something that usually popped before it did anything in large combats. They could be used taking on neutrals, but not for something serious. Having a role wont help if they blow up instantly because of scaling issues. Translating Star Wars ships to the Sins combat engine is difficult if you want the small ones to be useful, the scale is a hundred times standard. A sacrifice somewhere is all but guaranteed. He can play with the damage types and get accuracy to work towards the goal most likely, using the armor class and damage types as indicators for tracking and size. The Executor can't be a godlike ship that kills thousands of frigates though, your computer wont be able to handle the combat even if having thousands of frigates to kill one is still a reasonable choice of action.

That may be true, there are a lot of cruisers with 43 bombing damage that don't take up many fleet points. The bum rush tactic will work. Of course, you could also be playing wrong. Those cruisers get absolutely butchered by the defenses. Vanilla Sins static defenses are delay devices, not a killing force. Moving from one site to another within the required time is easy. The static defenses in this mod are the exact opposite of delay devices. They slaughter enemy fleets of far superior cost just fine. Based on the inordinate time requirements for defending from another site, your defenses must be present. You can't warp in like with vanilla, the battle will be over and done with. Any site that can be hit must be fortified if you are going to consider hanging onto it without leaving your main battle fleet there. The Gauss turret replacement(if it's working as intended) is dishing 600 dps in anti-capital ship damage. It has a target limit of 0 in the left and right banks though, so it may be at one third of intended power. In either case, it has massive range to go with it. Ships get hit more than once before they even get in range. It also has the flak ability for popping strike craft, it's the most powerful thing you can buy. These guys will pop those irritatingly effective bombing cruisers like they aren't even there. You have to act, not react, preparation beats response when the static defenses are so superior to off site reinforcements.

Every ship can't bomb. Almost all of the ships that can bomb are capital variants in the cruiser slots. This is a necessary change in dynamics from Sins vanilla due to the simple fact that Star Wars is a capital ship universe. Small destroyers in Sins are actually small, with crews around a hundred. In Star Wars they're carrying a thousand crew and fifteen thousand ground troops with accompanying armaments and vehicles. Compare the Acclamator to any capital ship in Sins and see how far short they come in versatility, that's a medium sized frigate in Star Wars. You're not even going to resemble canon if you try to make it play the same way. There can't just be a siege frigate.

Posted the fix in the onslaught bug report. The problem is the lack of experience requirements. You'll also need to change the ultimate ability tags or only the first level is accessible. Frigates and cruisers still get the first level of the ability even when using the Intrinsic value.

Yeah, you can't put leveled abilities on a ship that doesn't gain levels.

More thoughts on the adaptive shield abilities. The damage reducer is godlike, any ship with it is infinitely more valuable than ships without it unless they have utterly massive shielding. The thousand antimatter cruisers with a few thousand shield points will last exceedingly long against overwhelming firepower. They even regenerate their shields in a reasonable period of time. The larger cruisers with tens of thousands of points in shielding on the other hand are slowly whittled down, taking forever to regenerate. They do last an ungodly duration though. The ones that have shield regeneration instead are far less durable against large amounts of damage, but have a longer lifespan if under frequent attack by survivable opponents. Once you get the ability set up for autocasting, it will be a supremely useful thing on the massively shielded super capitals. Ships with neither are basically worthless by comparison. The reducer in particular is like hitting the entire enemy fleet with ion weapons almost continually. A ship with both is all but indestructible until it runs out of antimatter. If you're looking to carve radical differences in gameplay into the sides, these abilities are a hell of a way to get it accomplished, but the sheer power difference leaves you a huge gap in performance over the ships without them. I'd value a 500 antimatter ship at least 5 times that of an identical vessel just with the addition of the damage reducer.

Lots of buffs with leveling errors in them. The two adaptive shield buffs, double front and backup, are both set as fixed level 0, instead of intrinsic. The levels are there on these abilities, but you can't access them. You also have them set as ultimate abilities at the same time, I don't know what effect that has on them, if any. The standard Sins setup is that ultimate abilities are the one level, five experience level requirement ones, fixed level 0 abilities are for frigates and cruisers, and then the normal, intrinsic abilities are the multi-level capship abilities. You need two separate entities for the same ability shared between capital ships and frigates if you want it to level properly. You should be able to use the same buffs between them.

The ability to rapidly defend one gravity well with ships from another is one of the things I don't particularly like in Sins. I consider it a plus that you can wipe a place out with a small fleet in the time it takes to move two wells. Positioning and proper defense is actually important. It's kinda boring watching them coast across the well to get to the next place at the start, but you did buy a 4X. They're usually much worse.

One thing to do is look into hull versus shield damage. I noticed you have the now 1000 per second shield regeneration ability set to trigger after it takes hull damage. With such an obscene value, it's more logical to set it to trigger right when shields are depleted. Under more normal circumstances where it's replenishing a less than cataclysmic damage amount, you'd want it to trigger at the latest, when it would almost replenish the shields entirely if not still taking damage. This should be the most effective means of doing a shield restore: aiUseTime "Anytime" aiUseTargetCondition "ShieldDamageExceedsAmount" onlyAutoCastWhenTargetShieldDamageExceedsAmount Level:0 ###.000000 Level:1 ###.000000 Level:2 ###.000000 The other one I'm not real sure how to do, haven't played around with the ability system nearly enough.

Pirate raids, ouch! Maybe a wee bit smaller? It's pretty hard to keep the planets alive. The fleet sizes aren't terribly lethal, but when you've got 20 capship level bombardment vessels... Flak, the defense structures feel about right, but the 500 antimatter frigates with a 12 second delay basically remove the fighters from combat, indefinitely. Defense structures, 600 damage for turrets, 540 for Golan3? Two fighter wings aren't that good. Not for what it costs in comparison. The hangar feels about right though. In regards the Alliance Adaptive force field abilities, both of them. The regenerating one is rather weak, although it is good for restoring them inbetween battles aside from the failure to auto-cast. The massively powerful 100% damage nullification from the other is an obscenity, until you get up against a ship with damage increases you're invincible. Of course, onslaught just rapes the Alliance when using that particular tactic. The light weight ships that have it pop like they're not even there, even the MC30c is an easy kill. It's a little extreme, going from invincibility to completely nullified like that. Fleet usage balance is rather odd as well. Assault frigates are 4, Nebulon B's are 3 with a small fraction of the hull and shielding. Maurader corvettes are nearly as powerful as the Nebulon for only one point. They're by far the best bang for their buck in the weak ships. Will post more as I play.

Checked.

Go ahead and sign me up if you want, I may not test much though, move in progress.