Topic: X-ships in OP

[Tulwar]

Has anyone made a substantial rewrite of the shiplist to balance the X-ships?  I still can't get GameSpy to work through my router, but I can play on the Dynaverse.  Once a campaign goes into the advanced era, the game's balance is destroyed.

Some years ago, I had a great deal of fun modding my shiplist to try and even out the X-ships.  Not being able to play on-line, I could do single player, so I modded my game, and the types of X-ships grew and grew.  I don't think my XCB's were powerful enough to bust an XSB by themselves, but XDN's definitely could with care.  It was fun playing the game with all new ships, even if they were my own mods.  It's much more fun when somebody else does it, but then when you do it yourself, it exactly matches your requirements.

I basically made all cruisers comparable to the Federation XCA, and gave various weapons to races that did not use them in the stock list.  It really became fun when I weakened destroyers and added light cruisers.  I came to the limits of the game when I added X-dreadnaughts.

I started with Firesoul's OP+.  I needed models, and Firesoul didn't use a lot of the stock models so I could resize them to fit various roles.  It worked well on my computer, but was hideously complicated.  I experimented with many models and found I could not add them to the ship size file.  I had to discard many models I found due to size alone.

I turned my game into a mess, but hey, it's my game.  I don't play as much as I used to, but I miss that shiplist.  If anyone were interested I would be willing to remake it, but it would be so much easier if I could download something somebody else put in a nice, convenient package.

[Don Karnage]

you want what?

someone to fix the specs for the ship list so the X-ships will not be too more powerful that ordinary ship?

or is it the mod?

[Tulwar]

The X-ships are not balanced.  A fully equipped Z-XCA can kill anything.  An L-XCA should have enough defenses to have a chance against it.  Instead, it has less ESGs than a L-BCH, and the ESG Lance can hardly be used outside tractor range.  Only the Fed and Hydran XCAs have nearly enough defensive firepower to come close to standing up to the Mirak.  The Federation Hvy Photon turns out to be the most potent weapon after the MRV.  The Hvy Disruptor is a joke by comparison.  I just wanted to know if there was a common mod that made the X-ships comparible to each other in firepower an defenses.

[Roychipoqua_Mace]

You said earlier in your post that you were trying to play on Gamespy (Yeah, it's a witch to get working). In GSA, droners can stock up on 4 reloads of slow drones for no added bpv cost. The medium drones, though, cost a bunch more, and fast drones are hideously expensive. Especially if you want more than 1 reload.

Because of this, most fights involving X-ships use speed 16.0 drones, unless the bpv is really up there. Personally, I think it's a little unfair to drone users because the drones don't really catch up to their targets. Maybe in advanced era on Gamespy, medium speed drones should be free.

[FPF-DieHard]

For the Slave Girls D2 mod, I find the X-ships to be incredibly balanced.   PH-X are replaced with PH1, Direct-fire wepons that could fast-load in SFB get a 50% increase, no second generation ships at all.   They play nice with the rest of the late era ships with the fleeting rules in place.

Then again, I'm biased as I made the mod

[Age]

For the Slave Girls D2 mod, I find the X-ships to be incredibly balanced.   PH-X are replaced with PH1, Direct-fire wepons that could fast-load in SFB get a 50% increase, no second generation ships at all.   They play nice with the rest of the late era ships with the fleeting rules in place.

Then again, I'm biased as I made the mod

The only thing is I don't like the way you do the photons on the F-CX as I would do 2x3 instead of 3x3.It is what is like on your BCH.I would have 2 tubes fire three photons each not 3 tubes.

X Phasers in single player game can be fun but in a multilayer game kind of imba.

[Tulwar]

What really got me was the lack of weapondry on the Romulan ships, and the lack of anti-missle defences on every race but the Federation and maybe the Hydrans.  What is 2 Plas X's, 2 Plas G's, and 2 Plas F's againt 6 Hvy Photons, then 8 PX's vs. 12 PX's?  I've gone ahead and started remaking my own shiplist.  At least, I don't have to test so many models for size.  It turns out pretty easy with ship edit, once you've calculated a measure for weapon weights.  Of course, the Romulans have to have weaker ships to make up for the cloak, but not that weak!

It seems Taldren wanted to get the new weapons into the game, and let us figure out how to make them work.  Never could figure out what great advantage the ESGL has over the regular ESG.  It just doesn't seem right the Lyran Navy being so suseptable to missle fire.

[Age]

What really got me was the lack of weapondry on the Romulan ships, and the lack of anti-missle defences on every race but the Federation and maybe the Hydrans.  What is 2 Plas X's, 2 Plas G's, and 2 Plas F's againt 6 Hvy Photons, then 8 PX's vs. 12 PX's?  I've gone ahead and started remaking my own shiplist.  At least, I don't have to test so many models for size.  It turns out pretty easy with ship edit, once you've calculated a measure for weapon weights.  Of course, the Romulans have to have weaker ships to make up for the cloak, but not that weak!

It seems Taldren wanted to get the new weapons into the game, and let us figure out how to make them work.  Never could figure out what great advantage the ESGL has over the regular ESG.  It just doesn't seem right the Lyran Navy being so suseptable to missle fire.

I forget what all the Romulan advanced era does but they don't have the weaker hulls the Klingons do for speed and maneuverability.The Federation is fine when it come to anti missile defence as the drone racks are the amd racks as well or add anti drone defence.When the Federation runs out of adds and you can turn it off the phasers are enough to cover you.You should or close to it finished off your target.   

[Tulwar]

After getting my buttocks kicked on the Dyna flying X-ships, I really was dismayed that I was so easily defeated by Federation and Mirak ships.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to compete.  I managed to do some internals to a Mirak while flying Klingon, but one can do little on a phaser boat against a missile boat that delivers 22 targets a turn. That's 28 with an SP!  The MRVs do not lose track when a Romulan cloaks, and 8 phaser X plus 2 PGs could only take out 16.  Plas D launchers are exhausted very quickly.  No chance, unless the Mirak player falls asleep.  At least a Federation player can count on doing 24 points to a shield at long range with hvy photons.

Except for the Klingon, all the 2nd gen coalition X-ships are pretty weak.  The Klingon is just a little light on the AMD vs Mirak, but otherwise fairly good.  Unlike a hvy photon, which can be held for a small energy cost, disruptors and hvy disruptors must be fed contiguously.  The energy advantage enjoyed by disruptor races becomes a disadvantage when scaled up.  The reason that the Klingon's do not receive six hvy disruptors compaired to the Federation's six hvy photons is that there is no way to maintain that energy output.  The adaption made to Firesoul's shiplist  for my shiplist is as follows:

Fed CA, simply change PG arcs to LS and RS

Klingon CA, add 1 ADD, 1 PG; Change PG arc to ALL

These are the only two ships that do need a radical make-over.

This still gives the federation a small  advantage in hvy weapons, but, at least, a Mirak captain would have to approach the Klingon much more carefully.  As far as the Romulans go, their ship needed a complete weapons over-haul just to be in the same ball-park with the other races.

What surprises me is how quickly I've completed the make-over for my shipslist.  Being snowed in for a week-end gave me a lot of time with little to do.  I only have 3 2nd gen X dreadnaughts to do before I can actually play with this shiplist.  I'll probably get back to it Sunday.

[Corbomite]

I may give it a go someday when I get some time. I re-did some of the Mirak X Frigates and Destroyers when Dave Ferrell was doing his last patching efforts for Taldren and they turned out pretty well (so if you hate them, you have me to thank).

[Roychipoqua_Mace]

I think most of us passionately hate the X-ships. I don't see why a lot of people always host the "300 advanced" battles, they get old so quickly, but to each his own.

Speaking of MIRV's, have you noticed the "Mirv shadows?" Whenever someone shoots a MIRV at me, it seems to shoot a sort of blank missile that is invisible. It doesn't do any damage, but it does trigger point defence, and is automatically targeted with the [space] key, and sort of stays on top of your ship unless you shoot it down. So when you have about 22 missiles flying toward you, there's this little annoying shadow that distracts you while the other missiles hit. I think it's what's left of the MIRV missile before it popped. Very annoying.

[marstone]

I think most of us passionately hate the X-ships. I don't see why a lot of people always host the "300 advanced" battles, they get old so quickly, but to each his own.

Speaking of MIRV's, have you noticed the "Mirv shadows?" Whenever someone shoots a MIRV at me, it seems to shoot a sort of blank missile that is invisible. It doesn't do any damage, but it does trigger point defence, and is automatically targeted with the [space] key, and sort of stays on top of your ship unless you shoot it down. So when you have about 22 missiles flying toward you, there's this little annoying shadow that distracts you while the other missiles hit. I think it's what's left of the MIRV missile before it popped. Very annoying.

In SFB the carrier drone that barfs out the little  one can continue on toward the target and impact (does no damage, but would help suck down damage from an ESG).  Not sure what they are doing with it in SFC.  A fun tactic in SFB was to have  two space Mirv with only a single space Mirv pack in the front and a normal explosive in second.  It would launch the three little ones and continue on also, if not identified, it might be mistaken for just an empty hull until, blam, it explodes on you.

[Age]

After getting my buttocks kicked on the Dyna flying X-ships, I really was dismayed that I was so easily defeated by Federation and Mirak ships.  There was absolutely nothing I could do to compete.  I managed to do some internals to a Mirak while flying Klingon, but one can do little on a phaser boat against a missile boat that delivers 22 targets a turn. That's 28 with an SP!  The MRVs do not lose track when a Romulan cloaks, and 8 phaser X plus 2 PGs could only take out 16.  Plas D launchers are exhausted very quickly.  No chance, unless the Mirak player falls asleep.  At least a Federation player can count on doing 24 points to a shield at long range with hvy photons.

Except for the Klingon, all the 2nd gen coalition X-ships are pretty weak.  The Klingon is just a little light on the AMD vs Mirak, but otherwise fairly good.  Unlike a hvy photon, which can be held for a small energy cost, disruptors and hvy disruptors must be fed contiguously.  The energy advantage enjoyed by disruptor races becomes a disadvantage when scaled up.  The reason that the Klingon's do not receive six hvy disruptors compaired to the Federation's six hvy photons is that there is no way to maintain that energy output.  The adaption made to Firesoul's shiplist  for my shiplist is as follows:

Fed CA, simply change PG arcs to LS and RS

Klingon CA, add 1 ADD, 1 PG; Change PG arc to ALL

These are the only two ships that do need a radical make-over.

This still gives the federation a small  advantage in hvy weapons, but, at least, a Mirak captain would have to approach the Klingon much more carefully.  As far as the Romulans go, their ship needed a complete weapons over-haul just to be in the same ball-park with the other races.

What surprises me is how quickly I've completed the make-over for my shipslist.  Being snowed in for a week-end gave me a lot of time with little to do.  I only have 3 2nd gen X dreadnaughts to do before I can actually play with this shiplist.  I'll probably get back to it Sunday.

FireSoul does not make changes as to to what the community wants unless there are corrections that need to be made.

[Tulwar]

Firesoul introduced a lot of SFB ships to the game.  People hate X ship because they are not SFB.  These alone were good reasons for Firesoul to avoid altering them in OP+.  The fact that so many people hate the X-ships is probably a good reason to simply take them out of the shiplist all together.

When OP came out, I was quite excited about flying an X-ship.  At the time, I was flying Lyran and Romulan.  I was so disappointed.  There's no point in repeating what I said in earlier posts.

Corbomite takes credit (or blame) for the Mirak frigates and destroyers.  Those ships look pretty reasonable.  I'd like to know the culprit responsible for the Hvy Cruisers!

I still want to drive a really nasty, evil, mean, and destructive Romulan XCA.  I was hoping that someone had already rewritten the shiplist for the X-Ships, but as soon as I started the topic, it became apparent that nobody has, or at least nothing worth hosting.  I decided that I'm on my own.

I've gone ahead and rewritten my shiplist.  Deciding on a mathematical relationship between weapons made the whole thing easy.  Of course, one has to remember to not allow Ship Edit to put a fraction in the crew total.  To make it interesting enough for single player, I added a lot of ships.

[Corbomite]

Corbomite takes credit (or blame) for the Mirak frigates and destroyers.  Those ships look pretty reasonable.  I'd like to know the culprit responsible for the Hvy Cruisers!

Taldren all the way... sort of.

At the time when Dave was doing us a huge favor by working on OP patching when his company officially had to abandon the job, many players were complaining about just what you are now; X Ships are not even balanced with each other let alone the rest of the game.

Dave didn't have the time (or inclination I suspect) to rework and test a bunch of new designs, so he left it to the player base to come out with their estimations of a balanced X shiplist. He would choose the ones that looked best.

At that time X Ships were removed from play on the Dyna, so that crowd couldn't have cared less about it, and most people hadn't discovered the uber nature of the G2 abomination yet (we hadn't gotten the weapons charts for X weapons at that point), so the main thrust of ire was towards the uber Mirak MIRV X Frigates and Destroyers that cost a pittance and were able to overwhelm a Dred (or just about anything else for that matter) with fast missiles at 300 - 350 points on GSA. One of the frigates I reworked had 4 MIRV racks! 

The heavy cruisers were left alone because at 300 - 350 on GSA you can't even afford a full load of medium speed missiles, let alone fast ones, and it was felt that reworking wasn't needed for them as they had less power and less improved DF weapons than the other races got in the upgrades. GSA games at 1000 points rarely happen so the chances of a Mirak X Heavy getting better load outs was almost zero. They would have been fighting fully loaded BB's at that point so it wasn't really any advantage. If they did manage to catch and tractor another X heavy perpetually running at speed 31 with power to charge enough weapons to slowly cripple the Mirak, they would need all that missile fire to win.

My instincts seemed to be correct as no one has ever complained about the Mirak X Ships, either for or against, again until now and it has been about six years. Most players, myself included, have realized that the G2 phaser is the cheesiest thing ever designed for this game and restrictions on ships using more than two of them are still used I believe.

[marstone]

People hate X ship because they are not SFB.

By this do you mean people hate X ships because they are not the ones in SFB?  I have never looked at  the stats of the dynaverse X ships, I never like to fly X ships when I played SFB, so that carried over.  But from what I have seen of the way X ships are done, it would need a reworking from the ground up to make them work right.

Sad part is I own darn near everything of the SFB universe, but I sadly lack the X-ship parts.  Maybe I will have to acquire those publications so I can look at it closer.

[Tulwar]

Since SFB X-weapons are not available in SFC OP, trying to make SFB X-ships is just not possible.  I haven't played X-ships online much at all.  In fact, I haven't played SFC much in the past three years, at all.  Once I loaded SFC OP on this computer and figured out how to get through my router, I got on the Dyna.  I knew the X-ship weren't right a long time ago, but when I started going PvP, one on one, I could barely scratch a fully loaded Mirak XCA with my Klink XCA, and flying Romulan....  Well, I might as well have been flying a freighter.  The cloak has no effect on MRVs, except, maybe to deny the enemy the pleasure of watching you die.

Taldren did not have time to straighten out the X-ships.  I am convinced the only reason they made SFC OP was because they wanted to release all the material they created for GAW when Activision acquired the licenses Taldren needed to continue.  I don't blame Taldren in the least for problems with OP.  I'm just glad they made it at all.

As far as the X-ships go, there is material to make new, more powerful ships for SFC.  Of course, they shouldn't appeal to an SFB purist, but they do add more possiblities to the game.

[marstone]

As far as the X-ships go, there is material to make new, more powerful ships for SFC.  Of course, they shouldn't appeal to an SFB purist, but they do add more possiblities to the game.

Well, as one of those SFB purists, I don't mind ships made in "the spirit of the game" style.  In other words, don't just slap as much as you can on a hull and call it a ship.  I think you can sit down and design many ships that even a "purist" like myself would like.  The harder part about designing new ships is to have them balance point wise with the rest of the ships in the game.  I like to lean back on the tried and true SFB ships as they have had 30 years of balancing built into them.

[Corbomite]

...The cloak has no effect on MRVs...

The cloak is ineffective against the MIRV submunitions (a bug), but it does work against the parent vehicle. So if you can cloak before they blossom you can get rid of them.

If I do feel like re-doing the shiplist I will not stop at the X-Ships. There are many issues with balance due to the fact ships were ported from SFB and the systems/game structure that they were created under were not. Many ships only work well in a fleet environment that we just can't enjoy in SFC. Some races are very dependent on it for some ship classes, i.e. those ships "wallow like a garbage scow against a warp driven starship" to quote Scotty.

My approach would be one of logical progression of technology, using the SFB timeline for reference, but not as a bible. The ships that are "fish out of water" would be dropped if not feasible and modified to operate more on their own if they are feasible, without making them too strong or making them into a clone of another ship. I think I still have a list of things that players have pointed out over the years. I'll have to look for it.

[Age]

What ships do you have in Mind Corbomite for this.

The ships that are "fish out of water" would be dropped if not feasible and modified to operate more on their own if they are feasible,

I wouldn't mind seeing some Fed CAs 2 more points in power and BCHs with 1 to 3 more points in power.