Happy New Year everyone!
I've just updated my modded Database with some fun changes to Mesons, Railguns, and Beam Firecons.
With the heated discussion on Meson changes raging on, I took a shot at rebalancing the mesons within the VB6 game.
The biggest issue we found was that starting tech mesons were just far superior to any possible advancement in caliber or even range, since you can bold one to a fighter and pew pew from point blank range all day.
Steve is taking the path of penetration power v armor depth, but since I don't have the source code to add tech lines and modify core mechanics, I decided to simply reverse the progression on mesons.
You start with giant, cumbersome, energy-hungry monstrosities; and work towards sleek, efficient guns - but at the cost of meson stabilization, resulting in reduced maximum range.
I've also increased firecon max range for low-tech firecons: this will make early firecons a little smaller, and also allow mesons to take better advantage of this range bonus.
PS. No, I don't know how this will affect Swarm. This may break them, since a basic meson cannon is now 20HS, and is untested at this time due to lack of testing time, so please report what happens to our poor buggy friends.
UPDATE: Swarm broke so badly they blocked game creation. A fix has been applied - if you downloaded between initial release and now, redownload the new copy using the same link.I've also rebalanced railguns to swing them away from being comparable to gauss for PD purposes with starting tech, by increasing per-shot damage and decreasing shot count. this will help them punch through armor better at low tech, while reducing their effectiveness as PD. This definitively brings Gauss into the premier PD role.
Finally, I've added two levels of a "Superweapon" at the end of the Railgun tree: Magnetically Accelerated Gun - A single-shot, extreme-damage railgun. For when you really need that target to just not exist anymore. Let me know how you find it.
Google Drive Download Link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G9nD4VkK4l2RrOpluD9axqiXkA9l16xD/view?usp=sharingChangelog:
SerBeardian's DB changes:
Railguns rebalanced - scaling shot count with caliber tech
Mass Driver Cannon added - high tech single-shot Railguns
Mesons rebalanced - trade range for miniaturization. Decreased caliber RP cost, increased Focusing RP cost.
Increased base firecon range and smoothed progression to compensate
Advanced Lasers fixed and rebalanced
Huge Cargo Hold added (5x Standard)
Gauss Fire Rate tech expanded to 12 shots max and reduced in cost
Fighter Fuel Storage (1KL) added
Fixed Compressed Fuel Storage tanks (V.Small, Small, regular are now researchable)
Laser Warhead damage increased to 4/9/16 to reward RP investment in an otherwise broken tech.
2 levels of Rapid-Fire ship-board launchers.
Certain Interrupts disabled (details lost, but mainly civ-based ones)
Missile Tracking Time Bonus tech removed as it doesn't work and can't be easily fixed.
Several other modifications lost to time and bad memory
Bob's Exe changes:
[Game] Fighter box missile launchers are now properly affected by the carrier commanders Fighter Operations bonus (instead of making reload times worse).
[Game] 0 Armor strength can now be selected in the ship designer, for lighter ships particularly in the non-tn era.
[Game] Colonies <25m population can select stable population to prevent unwanted colonists from arriving (may not be effective yet).
[Game] Event log now defaults to colored by race.
[Game] The combat overview no longer reports errors.
[Game] Clicking display escorts in the map display when there are no escorts no longer causes a permanent error loop.
[Game] Added 30 gas giants, 45 B-Class, 50 A-Class, 28 O-Class, 63 M-Class, 15 H-Class variants to the galaxy generation for more graphical variety in play. (Does not require a new game, but will only affect newly explored systems)
[Game] Small Cargo (5000 ton) are now able to load PDC components as originally intended