[MOD PACK] Galaxy Mods: Balance & Difficulty Mods

[Wayleran]

New version released:

Version: 0.15.7.1g: Rebalanced and reworked the Artifacts Mod. They are now much more interesting and useful with "hybrid" stats.

Version: 0.15.7.1f: Normalized the volume of Pirate Motherships in the Events mod because they were CRAZY BIG and I thought a bit too big and annoying to kill, since that mod also generates motherships more often than vanilla.

[SivCorp]

Just finished the vanilla game, time to hit the mod circuit.  One question, with the economy changes, has the station costs gone down to compensate?  If not, I'm probably gonna skip that part, For if it is a difficult as I hope, money will still be in short supply... 

[Wayleran]

Just finished the vanilla game, time to hit the mod circuit.  One question, with the economy changes, has the station costs gone down to compensate?  If not, I'm probably gonna skip that part, For if it is a difficult as I hope, money will still be in short supply... 

No I didn't take into account station costs, however if you give me feedback I can possibly tweak the economy mods.

I still think it's far too easy to accumulate vast amounts of credits in the game as it is from raiding and selling unneeded equipment. But I'm not quite sure without enough feedback from the community on what a "healthy" nerf to raiding and selling equipment profits would be.

P.S. - I just did a MAJOR revamp/fix to the main "Enemies" mod and it's working SOOOO much better now. Before the size and dps of turrets were scaling WITH enemy hull sizes and now that's fixed so you'll still have vanilla dps but enemies will be "bigger and badder"!!!

And as we speak I'm uploading a new version of the "Systems" mod that's a little less harsh and I think more balanced than before. Mainly Generator, Shield and Turret upgrades are FAR more balanced and you really have to devote a lot of energy to using high end shields and turret upgrades, so it's a natural reduction to the ludicrous shields and firepower you can normally achieve. I'm leaving most other upgrades alone though and they'll be at the extremely LOW energy requirements because I don't really see them being "game-breaking" really.

[Ravien]

Really looking forward to trying this all out! I've been waiting for the combat updates to hit before starting a new game but your mods and Shrooblord's commentary are making me want to play again right now.

Here's the thing: you're not just making enemies more difficult by increasing their health and damage, you're putting thought into things to try to shake up the normal game while keeping it balanced. The fact that you made enemies progressively harder as you get closer to the core makes me excited to try it out.

[Wayleran]

Really looking forward to trying this all out! I've been waiting for the combat updates to hit before starting a new game but your mods and Shrooblord's commentary are making me want to play again right now.

Here's the thing: you're not just making enemies more difficult by increasing their health and damage, you're putting thought into things to try to shake up the normal game while keeping it balanced. The fact that you made enemies progressively harder as you get closer to the core makes me excited to try it out.

Thanks bud! Hope you enjoy them. New version is going up NOW (0.15.7.2). Pretty stable now and balanced I think fairly well. But will always tweak it as needed or requested by the community.

And btw, the "Combat Update" like the other "updates" probably (unfortunately) won't address any of the imbalanced elements in the game or bugged features that have persisted for a long, long time now...

So I think these mods will be needed to really make the game feel somewhat challenging and to add a little more variety to the gameplay.

Thanks.

[Wayleran]

NEW VERSION 0.15.7.2 released!

This is by far the best iteration of my mods/modpack to date!

I really feel most things are in a stable, balanced place. I may need to tweak some things based on community feedback, but all-in-all, this version plays great! I've improved some mods, reduced the harshness of some that were overkill and balanced out the rest. And mainly I removed a massive bug that was scaling turret dps/size...that's GONE!!! Your DPS will be pure vanilla while enemies will be 2x larger and 4x stronger. Normal feels relaxed with a healthy challenge and Veteran onwards should be pretty intense.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

I would recommend installing these mods to a "fresh" install of the client or simply replace your /data/scripts folder with a "vanilla" backup if you made one. Or you can uninstall and reinstall in Steam. You won't lose your saved galaxies but you'll get a fresh client to mod.

Thanks! Hope you guys enjoy it.

[Shrooblord]

And as we speak I'm uploading a new version of the "Systems" mod that's a little less harsh and I think more balanced than before. Mainly Generator, Shield and Turret upgrades are FAR more balanced and you really have to devote a lot of energy to using high end shields and turret upgrades, so it's a natural reduction to the ludicrous shields and firepower you can normally achieve. I'm leaving most other upgrades alone though and they'll be at the extremely LOW energy requirements because I don't really see them being "game-breaking" really.

Thank you! I've always agreed with the shield business, but I've had to resort to stocking up every tiny ship I happened to be piloting with Xsotan Artefacts instead of anything higher than Common SMUs due to the massive penalty incursion on anything even remotely useful. Even the Sector-wide Object Detector eats 80 GW of power... why? It's an Object Detector. You're not gonna beat the crap out of enemies with it, nor break the game. It's literally only there for your convenience, so it was rather inconvenient not to be able to use it properly.
I digress. Like I've said, thanks for balancing that out more!

yey, updates! me likey your fast iteration times

[Wayleran]

Thank you! I've always agreed with the shield business, but I've had to resort to stocking up every tiny ship I happened to be piloting with Xsotan Artefacts instead of anything higher than Common SMUs due to the massive penalty incursion on anything even remotely useful. Even the Sector-wide Object Detector eats 80 GW of power... why? It's an Object Detector. You're not gonna beat the crap out of enemies with it, nor break the game. It's literally only there for your convenience, so it was rather inconvenient not to be able to use it properly.
I digress. Like I've said, thanks for balancing that out more!

yey, updates! me likey your fast iteration times

Yeah I rethought the entire Systems Mod philosophy.

I felt that the 2 shield upgrades were totally imbalanced. Shield Booster being OP with nearly no downside while the Energy to Shield Converter was much more balanced with the -% to generated energy, pretty much restricting players to using 1 GOOD one max. So I balanced them out and made them less effective (I mean shields are still OP OP but this helps a little).

The Generator Upgrades offered easily 80-100% increase of your produced energy totally NEGATING the battery systems AND making it far too easy to build a ship with very little Energy Generator blocks...so they were nerfed and I feel a MAX 50-60% increase per upgrade is still a healthy amount.

And finally, the Turret Upgrades (along with the totally FREE Artifact +5 upgrades) made it far too easy to get your ship a large amount of turrets and in effect crazy firepower with again, literally NO downside... So I made the low tier ones still pretty cheap for starting out the game in smaller ships, BUT made the +3-6 turret upgrades cost exponentially more so if you want to do A LOT of damage, it'll cost you energy and therefore area in your ship and also it'll cost you multiple upgrade slots too so you can't just have tons of firepower AND shields AND generator upgrades, while still having a lot more room for other things.

This feels really good I think and balances out what I felt was really affecting combat.

And like you said, I felt after considering it that other upgrades were more or less for convenience and don't really affect combat so much, so therefore shouldn't really be a concern energy-wise. If you are willing to use up a valuable upgrade slot for Trading, Hyperspace, Radar, etc... than you shouldn't really be restricted by energy requirements.

Note that the Artifacts Mod works hand-in-hand with this one and they really should always be installed together. I may in the future just combine them tbh because of how much more balanced it is with the changes I made to them AND I have to say I am really happy with the work I put into those in particular. Hehe... Humble brag, sorry.

[Shrooblord]

And like you said, I felt after considering it that other upgrades were more or less for convenience and don't really affect combat so much, so therefore shouldn't really be a concern energy-wise. If you are willing to use up a valuable upgrade slot, than Trading, Hyperspace, Radar, etc... shouldn't really be restricted by energy requirements.

Exactly. Not using that precious slot for weapons, energy or shields should be more than costly enough to warrant not incurring further penalty for using the other SMUs.

Out of interest, what do you think the Battery SMU is for, exactly? The only thing I can think of is so you can boost away for longer, or fire your plasma weapons for longer. After all, it doesn't help you if you're consuming too much power, since it doesn't add generated energy, nor does it help with hyperspace cooldown in anyway, as that is not governed by how much energy you have, but rather how many blocks your ship is built up out of and also how much hyperspace cooldown reduction in the way of other SMUs you currently have in place.

So I've never used a battery SMU. What do you use it for, or what do you think it should be used for?

[Wayleran]

Out of interest, what do you think the Battery SMU is for, exactly? ...

Well that's the thing. It's hardly used at all by players because of how easy it is (was before my mods! ) to meet your required energy needs.

But with my changes I feel that players will be much closer to the MAX of their produced energy and therefore when they need to use extra energy for boosting, using energy weapons, hyperspace cooldown, etc... than they'll "dip" into their battery reserves. So having some energy container blocks on your ship now has a practical purpose and using a powerful battery upgrade to get 100%-160%+ more battery storage means you have that emergency reserve WHEN you need it and then replenish it when you don't.

For the most part even with my system upgrade mods you'll still probably rarely go over your max energy, but it's still a possibility and therefore at least brings batteries somewhat into play. So for LONG boosting and LONG battles while using energy weapons it's a backup reserve is all.

[SivCorp]

Found what I think is a bug...

The volume of space that cargo takes up has been WAY overblown.  A single unit of cloths, that only sell for pennies, takes up 10 unit spaces.  The range of the expanded ships also seems much higher than the weapons they are using. 

So how are we to make any income here?  Can't salvage, for modules are dirt cheap now, can't trade, there is no way to fund a large enough ship to make a profit, and cant fight, for we cannot pay a large enough crew to make a big enough ship to withstand the larger ships now.  Something seems off in the balance.  I like the challenge, but I am NOT a fan of grinding games.... and the only option seems to be hit and run mining. 

[Wayleran]

Found what I think is a bug...

The volume of space that cargo takes up has been WAY overblown.  A single unit of cloths, that only sell for pennies, takes up 10 unit spaces.  The range of the expanded ships also seems much higher than the weapons they are using. 

So how are we to make any income here?  Can't salvage, for modules are dirt cheap now, can't trade, there is no way to fund a large enough ship to make a profit, and cant fight, for we cannot pay a large enough crew to make a big enough ship to withstand the larger ships now.  Something seems off in the balance.  I like the challenge, but I am NOT a fan of grinding games.... and the only option seems to be hit and run mining.

Well the Economy Mod, in particular the volume of goods, needs MAJOR fine tuning. I just thought that raiding with the vanilla volumes and getting 5k Body Armors then selling them and making 100's of millions in ONE SHOT was way too easy and broke the economy.

If you think those values are still too high let me know. I want to curtail making billions easily but I do see the need now for making vast amounts of credits for station/sector building and maintenance.

So I'll take a run through that mod tonight and possibly adjust the volumes by just a little bit instead of the values they're at now.

BTW, in the default script for the goods index it clearly is stated by the dev that...

"-- This file was generated automatically with a tool."

So they are WAY WAY out of balance due to that "tool" just spitting out numbers for the volumes and prices of goods. There's no real logic to it and no balance to profits you can acquire... So I do think it needs to be balanced through a mod, but yeah it's more than likely overkill on my part for this rough pass...so please give me as much feedback as you can, but keep in mind you can and will still see VAST profits even with those changes. But I will tweak them as the community sees fit.

Thanks, bud.

I'm going to LITERALLY update those values NOW and post a new version of the Economy Mod and the entire Modpack shortly. Check back in like an hour or two.

[SivCorp]

Thanks, from playing around with it, probably a 1/2 value in volume would be sufficient.  Or, change all the level 1,2,3 items back to default, and just have the higher stuff take up more space. 

Though with as punishing as the early game is, keeping money around has become near impossible.  Every battle has high repair costs.... and little benefit.  It feels like it's become a race to get as large as possible, but for no other reason then to keep up. 

My play style is more nimble and guerrilla warfare styled.... so I love the fact that I have to hit and run on these tough enemies.  I just feel the reward for spending so much time working these baddies down has been neutralized.  System cards are all very power hungry, make no cash, and turrets of any good quality are hard to come by, for I can't make them with no money or cargo space to carry around the parts.   
Keep up the tweeks, I do like the direction of some of it... just need to reel back that nerf bat

[Wayleran]

I never engage in combat until I have at least some shields. Early game combat, modded or vanilla, is a bit too imbalanced without shields. Then of course once you start getting more shields THEY become imbalanced. LOL

The dev really just needs to add diminishing returns on Shield Generator blocks like he has on Hyperspace Core. So the more you use and the bigger the ship the less advantage you get. That's the main thing I am trying to fix with all these mods really...how OP shields are. Shields should roughly cap at maybe 1x or 2x of your ship's hull size. That would be nice. A 500k hull ship should realistically only be able to support maybe 750k to 1m shields TOPS with an upgrade in too...

Anyways I'm going to make another pass at the goods index and maybe even make equipment sell prices 50% instead of 25%.

Oh and of course, don't forget to claim and sell "claimable asteroids" that's the best way to make money early on.

[Ravien]

Something I noticed is that the listed sell value of system upgrades is different than how much you actually get from selling them. I found a high end upgrade that said it sold for about 90k but I got over 300k for selling it, for example.