v3.5 ideas/recommendations

Arr, you´re cross-posting, I already replied to that in the other thread, heh. Anyway... while I do agree with you that the ship´s default powerplant should be able to handle cruising indefinitely -- an underpowered powerplant has no business being in the manufacturer specs -- I don´t see your other point. If you´re in the middle of a fight, your energy usage is all taken by the guns. The engine does not use any energy in that time. You can´t cruise and fight at the same time, because cruising locks the guns. Let´s suppose you have a ship which has a regular powerplant, one that doesn´t bottom out when you start cruising. You get into a fight, jam on those guns, and watch your energy drop. Then when you start cruising, it´ll go back up. So... I don´t see where the problem is. The only problem is the one you mentioned with a default powerplant that is TOO WEAK for the ship. I agree with you on that, and that should be fixed -- not by decoupling the energy usage BUT by giving the ship a better default powerplant. Manufacturers shouldn´t release underpowered ships, that doesn´t quite make sense. But if they do... then why are you buying them? That´s one question I want to ask you. I´ve only noticed this problem in a few ships. Most of the ships I´ve bought have decent regular powerplants. The engine gets power from somewhere, we don´t have to refuel our ships, do we? Drawing from the powerplant is a reasonable idea. Otherwise, what... we´d have to refuel regularly, and I don´t think players would like that. I do understand your frustration, I´ve also been suckered into buying crap ships with an underpowered default system, but let´s not discuss what we can´t change, or advocate a scrapping something that apparently works fine with most other ships. It´s not like a solution doesn´t exist either, in fact there are TWO: buy another ship instead, or if you just absolutely must buy that one, buy a better powerplant. It´s as important an investment as your ship. When you´ve got a good enough one, you´ll be transferring it among all your later ship purchases, whereas you´ll keep changing your guns and shields to fit the situation. You know, at the mission you were talking about (ice, that would be Williard station right?), you can still use the starting ship, the Starblazer. In fact I flew that ship until I was almost near the Kusari part of the campaign. They´ve souped up that baby a lot. 4 guns, class 4-5, that beats most other LFs. Of course, you won´t do any one-man-army heroics in it, those Rhineland gunboats hurt pretty bad, but that ship is way better than most of the other limited crap you can buy at that stage.

I personnaly like underpowered ships, because you can upgrade them. It is a funny thing for me. And the lot of powerplants in the Mod are here for that i guess. Having to decrease my normal speed to 60 when i have first flyed with the Fedex in order to conserve energy has been a great experience! Without talking of the cruise drain. Lol. Perhaps the police control the manufacturer and does not like to see all these rookies freelancers cruising around in their system! And, the starting Starblazer ship has a very good powerplant we can transfer on the new ship if we do not have the money to buy a better on. But i must tell that one thing embarass me : the fact you can mount a LF engine on an other type of ship. A liberty fighter engine can be mounted on a Rhino to reach a speed of 110... In spite of the mass difference...

Underpowered powerplants are okay, it achieves the effect of making you be conservative in your gun usage... but cruise imo shouldn´t be affected. Btw I didn´t notice that flying regularly would drain power depending on what speed you were flying at, I only thought the drain appeared when you started cruise -- in the engine specs it also states "cruise drain". Either we increase the default powerplant´s output (not a very good idea, it will "help" the guns also) OR we decrease that particular engine´s cruise drain. I think the latter is the best option. That way you still need to be careful how you use your guns, but you don´t have to worry about being drained when you cruise. Besides... when you cruise you can´t shoot, the guns won´t be using any energy. It´s not like we have to balance them both, choose where we want our energy to be used: we CAN´T use the guns even if we wanted to during cruise... so making you lose power while cruising, well, that seems a bit pointless. Plus later on, with multi-engined ships you probably won´t see this problem. The whole thing is kinda buggy imo. Since I, as a player, can´t fix your problems with underpowered ships, I can only repeat my earlier suggestions: either (1) get another ship that hasn´t got power problems, or (2) get a better powerplant.

i only read the beginning and the end to this, so i dont know if most of this is already posted. so sorry if it is, but i personly like the laser torpedos and dragons breath cannons, and any weapon that has a speed of 1000mps or so like them. ive tryed the beam cannons but they dont seem to track to weel unless the target is directly infront of you. also i think the shockwave missles should be put back in (even though i didnt have much luck wiht them), more cap ship designs to. also were you can work out of the border woulds agian instead of getting a freken more advanced pilot crap. also ya the wing over wing and spin deal should be in, also on the cap ships that is now in the rebalance mod. they could be tweaked some more i think, lest manoverably for when your dogfighting 5 cap ships at once so that you dont go flyin past and end up 50k away from your target before you can get stoped. but the border worlds is basicly the only place you got room to fly cap ships and you cant get money, well for me that is i think right now. however i have tryed reinstalling and all that, ended up with a GB lost and no way to figer out were it went. also i think for figters and cap ships there should be a phase clok deal like on star trek that alows you to go through astroide feilds and stuf (YES I KNOW THERE IS ALOT OF FIGHITNG GOING ON OVER THAT STUFF, but i had to say that). but going navagateing astroyeds and junk piles isnt fun in a capship getting to malta and corsars home world bites without the efa system. well i got alot more that i think should be done but i think i should stop, sorry on the leanths but i thought id just say all this also kinda got carried away. by the way i think the rebalance mod is alsome so far and keep up the great work.

If you look at engine_equip.ini, I believe, all engines drain energy both when flying at sublight/dogfighting speed and at Cruise Speed. Flying at sublight uses a lot less (i.e. 40) whereas some engines can suck up an atrocious amount in Cruise (I think the Corsair engine or some VHF/Freighter/capship engines can drain up to 950 or over 1000 per second! ouch). I´d agree that the energy use during Cruise either should be reduced or eliminated, just b/c of the reasons mentioned in some of these previous posts. Or, here´s an unlikely-but-interesting-to-think-about idea: Every ship does use fuel -- H-fuel -- and after x amount of time/use, you would need to buy (or tractor in as loot <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> ) some more at a basein order to continue flying. The bigger the ship (VHF/Freighters/Capships) and the more engines your ship has, the more H-fuel you need and use up. Since there IS a pilot in the ship, having a constant supply of Oxygen (again, either bought, looted, and/or mined) on your ship would also be needed. Maybe even some Food Rations, in case you get the munchies <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> Like I said, this is more than likely impossible to add to the game, but it would add a much more realistic aspect to it.

Well, Well, lots of interesting ideas here(looks like a brain-storming conference, LOL), but also some not very wise ones: For all of those who are wondering, the engines DO consume power during normal flight, but at reduced rates, while in the cruise mode they suck up al ot of power, and that isn´t gonna change. Most of respectable space sims such as Freespace or XWA made the engines consume power as well as the recharging and weapons. Cruise is a demanding mode for the engine and it has to consume something, since reactor power is the only one available...it consumes that. If you run out of energy during a cruise just stop it and use your burners to travel to allow the energy to recharge. I agree that the LF´s should strafe the most, but stop asking unmakeable things from me, i can´t spread the engines in classes since all ships will be able to mount those anyway. One thing that i can do is make the default engines unmountable so if you dismount them you´ll not be able to put them back again. This way i´ll be able to somehow limit their spreading amount different classes of ships. I made all the capital ships to have a mass greater than any fighter, is in the shiparch.ini file for each one of these. They also have limited maneuvrability by great angular drags. I don´t agree that mines suck Alex, they´re much beefed up compared to orignal FL, the Drone makes 1500 hull damage(it was arround 400 original), and the most powerfull mine does 6000 hull damage! If this suck, how about the original ones? Also their speed is increased, an i got myself several times owned by the very smart combinations that the pirates made in dropping them(he does a head on run, drops 2 mines and turns his tail running!), also when i´m behind one pirate he drops mine constantly and some of them will probably hit since i´m concentrated on hitting him. I played all kinds of space sims including WC 1 to 5 and i can tell FL mines are way more effective that the one in Wing Commander(the Porcupine). Trucidation, a VHF is still a fighter, not a greighter or bombber, so it must still be able to maneuver in a dogfight...and most VHF´s have their manuevrability decreased compared to the original FL ones, also in 3.4 i decreased the maneuvrability of HF´s too. I left the LF´s untouched. The Hawkeye was made by Augur and he put some wild stats on almost all his ships, which I of course changed, but it seems I overlooked the Hawkeye and that´s why it still got 3 shield slots and 600 cargo space. 3 shields slots are too much even for a Capship. Edited by - Michael Dan on 4/26/2004 4:27:58 AM

From my point of view, making the default engine unmountable is not a good idea to solve this problem. i still prefer to let the choice to mount or not to mount an engine to the player in last solution. I agree with MD, 3 shields slots are too much. All those slots for shield capacitor and powercell are too much in a general way. After that leveling up, most players ask to figth better AI or well equiped foes to retrieve a good challenging leveI. I think it could be reduced in all ships. But again, the player can do that himself... I usually just use one shield capacitor 1 coupled with a powercell 1 without a shield when i come back to liberty.

I think one shield is plenty, maby and stress maby some of the realy big fraighters could have two but even then class nine only. I just got to say i love rebalance and keep it up. but again i stress 1 shield is plenty, and leave the adon slots for more power and shields as is it is one of the reason rebalance is so good, options and more options, veriaty is the spice of life affter all. having a 6500 EXTRA shield is nothing like an additinol 50,000 cap shield or two, looking foward to the next version as always. Edited by - Sun_Fang_One on 4/26/2004 12:25:57 PM

Cheers for the responses to some of our dreams, e-hem I mean ideas. Thanks again for giveing us such a fun MOD! Can´t wait for the next installment... Edited by - Perfecto on 4/26/2004 3:44:24 PM

I suppose that explanation about cruise makes sense -- although during some SP missions you´ll be in cruise for quite some time, enough for some weak powerplants to be completely drained, in which case your ship will be vibrating horribly as it drops to regular speed and then bursts forward at cruise speed as the energy gets renewed and the re-drained (most visible in an X-Wing while flying on the way to find the Transports to escort in mission 3), and it repeats this circle of slowing down then jumping forward at approximately 3-4 times a second, and if you´re using the default out-of-cockpit view you can see your ship literally shaking back and forth. Yes I know there are limits to how much you can mod Dan <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> I just wanted to point out that since most of the later ships have multiple engines -- for the warping side effect, which btw is considered by many players a big reason not a side effect -- there´s not much point in making engines interchangeable. Let´s say for example I buy a HF that has 2 corsair (or whatever) engines. The point is, I can get warp from this setup, and there´s no way in hell I will upgrade the engines because once I start unmounting, I can only ever remount 1 engine max. This alone has made me ignore engine upgrades once I start flying multiengined (i.e. warp capable) ships. Which is kinda sad, because this means we´re back to where Freelancer was (i.e. no changing engines). Sure, simple solution, you can make all ships use only 1 engine so that the upgrades become desireable again, but that takes away warp, and that isn´t a good idea because warp is fairly essential in exploring systems. The only viable solution I can see here is if we can figure a way to make warp workable with only one engine. Back to mines. I guess my perspective was skewed by the fact that I was flying in a fairly meaty ship. I do remember getting hammered pretty hard by ordnance while flying smaller ships. But one small point I do agree with Alex, there is way too much variety <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> . I mean, one look at the list and my head spins. It´s like every faction has several missile/mine/rocket classes of its own. Technically there´s no problem with that... it´s just that I find the sheer variety overwhelming because I normally don´t use ammo-based weapons. I guess somebody who uses them likes to be able to choose which one to use. I haven´t tried flying a capship through a debris field; I suppose you could say that is one reason NOT to buy a capship. I mean, what the heck, you can´t have it ALL. Even a souped-up Hawkeye MkII can´t match the firepower a capship can bring to bear. At least you guys can still dock, imagine if we didn´t have the dock fix and capships could only ever dock on planets or something. I did fly one of those balistners, omg the inertia was killing me. I´m definitely a fighter pilot, not a starship captain. Ro9ue´s idea is nice, but I don´t think that is possible. And besides, it´s difficult to get that balance right -- how many units consumed per amount of time. Plus you´d have problems with ships that have small cargo holds. I´ve seen this in quite a few other games (e.g. food in rpgs), and most of the time players want it taken out. Making it optional is nice, making it mandatory is another thing. You know what, if we could tie a certain consumeable to warping that would solve both this problem AND the engine problem. All ships can go back to having one engine, which players can then happily upgrade as they like, and those who want warp capability have to purchase something else, that decreases with usage, eliminating the abuse problem. Excellent, if I may say so myself <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> &quot; In Defeat, Malice; In Victory, Revenge! &quot;

I think your meant to get wasted if you take a cap ship into a debries field.... Kind of makes sense a smaller object like a fighter can navigate easily through that a huge Cap ship.

Here´s a thought early in the game I like using the Cylon HV with 6 repair turrents... big hitting @ no cost to your power supply Very nasty at 400 plus each damage possibble the repiar turrents need a little tweecking or at least made more expensive? Just a thought.

Hey there, I did say that I was pretty sure that some of my suggestions were not gonna be possible. Anyway, the gundam mod didn´t work with Reb 3.4 when I tried it, FL threw a tantarum and refused to let me play again until I reinstalled. Oh, well, I don´t use missiles anyway. -Ok, I admit that I avoided all mines like the plague (Old WC habit) and wasn´t hit by one until WAY into the game, so I´ll have to concede that maybe they are powerful enough, especially since the AI does like to spam the battlefield with them. -How about the anti-cap-ship mine though? Way too slow moving to catch a fighter, even a blind crippled one, but devastatingly powerful. Since most of the cap ships don´t have mine slots, it would be a weapon that would let fighters at least nick those multi-milion armor hulls. -Speaking of cap ships. . .I don´t think that the ´phase engine´ Warrior was talking about would be a good idea. In a cap ship, you are god of the battlefield, with hundreds of thousands of shield points, sometimes millions of armor points (16 million in a Leviathan with DU armor), and enough firepower to vaporize a planet. The price you pay for this power is hopelessly poor maneuverability and having a serious problem navigating tight spaces. ´Phasing out´ in star trek works because nearly all the ships are capitol class, and fighters don´t play a significant part. I´d say, leave the cap ships as-is. MD has done a good job with them, and they definitely don´t need any more perks. BTW, anything smaller than the Torpedo destroyer CAN maneuver through an asteroid field decently, even at cruise speed, you just have to get the hang of it. And I´d suggest using external view, so you can see where an asteroid is going to hit you. Great! I´m a million miles from nowhere with a gung-ho iguana! -Alex Rogan, The Last Starfighter

ok.......wonder why it posted my reply in the middle of everything. well read half way down the 2nd page to see what i thought of if you would. i like the mod and enjoy blowing stuff up tho. also i heard there was a freelancer 2 out. tryed finding it at a few stors but didnt have it. keep up the good work on the mods, wish i could learn how to make a few ships. sorry on the mishap if i posted something rong i dont normaly use these. thanks

Freelancer 2 isn´t out, and there isn´t even a mention on it on Digital Anvil :p Just pray MS thinks it was successful enough to warrant a sequel. &quot; In Defeat, Malice; In Victory, Revenge! &quot;

things I would like 2 see in 3.4 as a SO capships need to cost mutch more esp the battle ships 300-500 mil these ships r server killers fix the vip/pris trasde run had a player make max cash in 1 hr 6 min bought a damacaliese trick it out and crash server 20 mim later frieghtors the big ones should cost as mutch as the cap ships traders make cash way 2 fast with these large cargo holds vips should b droped as loot shield gen/cap/and fusion inj should b droped as loot shields should b droped as loot the military bases should sell all house shields/weapons &amp; up grades loose some of the ships there r way 2 many all ships should b able 2 mount all weapons/shields make the super shields cost 100 mill get the pirats out of places they dont belong fix the battleship npc encounters so only 1 fraction spawns at a time so they dont overlap [like in TnG your other mod add more missions esp higher paying 1s allong with better ai missions against cap ships ,the cap ships should b moving and able to return fire weapon platforms should drop loot if u r going 2 continue 2 let the bases be destroyed (another server crashing prob) then fill them up with loot afterall it u r going 2 blow up a base and crash the server u should get paid 4 it right???? fix all info cards/tradelanes MD ushould make a starter ship that only ur mod has I would like it 2 be configured like this 4 guns up 2 lv 10 1 turrent /missle mount 2 torp/Cd mounts cargo of 100 this should b default cargo of all lf/ hvf 150/vhf 200 1 shield mount 3 addon mounts provide a data file 2 put in the ironcross that even a a noob can use this will help with the error/missing hash code prob that causes an overflow error in the ironcross and server crashes fill up the bab5 systems with bases &amp; planets like the ea add there own fractions get the old FL fractions out of there u have shadow ships there should b a shadow world dockable/populated/with missions/trade goods/weapons/ships and there should b missions against them same with the nomads and they should b every were in fl because u r selling SW ships there should b a system/or bases that repesents those fractions/with all the missions/trade goods/weapons/ships leave the engins the way they r all my players know how 2 deal with it and its no big any more whack the warp its not necessary esp if u fill up the empty systems and it causes probs besides thats what the tradelanes r 4 the LSF should have its own base with all the stuff same with the order would like 2 see a client side option that allowes u 2 chose ur fraction/personal look/voice I know that there is a bolt on mod that allowes u 2 do this but it would b nice it it was included I would like the SOs to have a lot of options so they can configure the mod 2 fit the style of play they want on their servers after all we r the ones spending the money 2 put the mod on the net MD U dont know if u will read this or if u even care what the SOs who have been trying 2 run your mod in mp have been going through .but if u do then check out the global servers that run your mod and u will notice that most r empty and that u can only find arround 30 or so players total this is not good esp 4 a mod that so many people like I had nearly 700 mp accounts when ur mod came out now I have 106 and I am sure that ater the ironcross does its auto main thing it will continue 2 decline The name of your mod is reballence but it not it is totally out of ballance and is refered 2 as crashballance by the mp community this also is not good ! with all the new modding teams that seem to b foascing on making there mods mp friendly intrest in your mods will completly dissapear execpt in sp .I dont know if this is acceptable 2 you or not but if I had your skills and had put this mutch time and effort into sutch a basicly killer mod I would find this trend alarming !!! as always I will continue 2 run your mod on my server until all intrest is gone hopefully u will take my sugestions 2 hart Have A Great Day

damn, well i dont think u cud tell me how i switch off the wep ower drain, just to use for my use on SP, cos i cant stand it, i use cruise all the time, and (using chips addon thingys) i bought the best powerplant i could for one of those starflyers, on the mish to save the prison ship, i had to stop 2 times cos my energy drained so fast i couldnt go into cruise, i loaded previous unmodded game wer i hav a good bit of creds, and i cant find any powerplant which will sustain cruise for long. so aslong as switching of the drain for my use only is allowed, and isnt very difficult, then could sum1 tell me how to? thx for ur time + help Forb All You Touch and All You See Is All your Life Will Ever Be

Can´t reply much to DrKrEaper cause I rarely play MP. I guess it´s easy to earn too much, but instead of raising the bar, we should drop some other things instead. Like the cargo space things, yep, some ships have way too large holds. I realize equipment is meant to take space, but it seems with a regular loadout you can still haul mucho moolah. Thing is, powerplants don´t have classes, if they had we could restrict what a ship could mount, and not have that mess with the cargo space. I.e., we could let a HF carry up to a certain level of powerplant without needing to increase cargo space to accomodate it, otherwise some players might just mount a much smaller powerplant and fill the rest of the cargo hold with goodies. But... this approach also opens another can of worms... the current setup isn´t too bad. Btw you suggested trimming down the cargo ships and all that, but you want to give the starting ship level 10 gun slots? I think that´s even worse, makes it easier to earn money for a better ship to start doing those trade runs. Everything is already overpriced... to compensate for the trade runs; on the other hand, strictly combat pilots (like myself) are hosed when it comes to saving up -- I have to fly like dozens of missions just to get a million, and not counting repairs. Yeah I know I chose to do it the hard way, but the easy way (trade) shouldn´t <b>be </b> too easy. It´s easy to pare down the trade aspect... (1) lessen the profit margin, (2) make profitable runs cross more systems (having a central hub type of system which leads to all over the sector doesn´t help, either), (3) reduce the frickin´ huge cargo holds. I have to work for my money, why shouldn´t traders work for theirs? If you can load your cargo holds with goodies, take one trade lane to the next base, crash boom bang get one gazillion bucks, then what´s the bloody point? Game over in 5 minutes, time to fly to the next server. You don´t even need to make friends, wth play MP for? Removing warp... well that´s kinda iffy cause traders are addicted to large holds and profitable runs, while we fighters are addicted to warp. Saved my ass a couple times... but I admit, it makes me lazy and fighting too easy. You know what, I bet traders abuse this too. I can see it already, &quot;tradelane disrupted eh? *warp*&quot; :p Stick to a one-engine model, and we make engine upgrades attractive again. Something to think about, no? I dunno Forbidon, in your case I´d just buy me a better powerplant / ship. &quot; In Defeat, Malice; In Victory, Revenge! &quot;

true I just want the hardpoints 2 be able 2 mount lv 10 guns/missels ect not 2 actually have the guns allready U need 2 play Mp find a server either mine oregon usa or kd play r always up and some times u actually can find other player on the reason I want cap ships to b so costly is to keep player from bying them 2 soon befor they become acoustome 2 the mod its usually the noobs that exploit the lame trade runs by bigger cargo ships then bang they have a damacliese then ite server crash time I have always been a fighter/freighter type player with 1 account and I think the traders have it way 2 easy if I have 2 spend 5 mil 4 a ravens claw with a cargo of 150 then a freightor with 1500 cargo should b 50 mil have a great day

H fuel - on the cargo hold, couldnt you split them say have two for one ship. BUT ONE, hold be for say H fuel and decresses as time goes by so that you have to eather buy, loot or mine more. then it gets put in THAT hold until it gets filld. woudlnt that work? shields - on the shields i normaly use one power cell and one compasiter linked with one lvl 10 shield if iam going into the borders were there is hostle cap ships. other wise i just leave it at an lower lvl with the same set up. also i use one injecter since iam useing majer drain weapons to. so id say four slots 1, one for shield mount, 1 for compasiter 1 for powercell and 1 for injector. warp - wouldnt say one upgrade that has that selection on it work but still have the upgrades that are in the mod? but i dont like the warp effect because i use the engine killed when iam dog fighting, and i dart back and forth. but it is still good to have when your traveling long distences when your exploreing that part may have already been said but i just wanted to ask though.