Tryptic's Mod version 3.2c...I mean 3.2d

posted on February 1st, 2019, 6:34 pm

It's here, and it's a big one. In this version of Tryptic's Mod, I've gone back over every ship cost in the game and tuned them. Below is a short list of changes. I have highlighted some of the most important things for people to know

-All ships now have a Tritanium cost between 33% and 67% of their Dilithium cost. Ships that were outside this range have usually had their Tri cost increased.
-All ships have had their build time adjusted to more closely match their cost. For example if one ship costs 600 Dilithium and takes 60 seconds, another ship from the same yard that costs 800 Dilithium will take 80 seconds. There are exceptions, but in general the build times are more stable than before.
-All special abilities have been reworked, most deal more damage and have longer disable durations. Special weapons no longer miss. Most races have new abilities specifically for weakening/disabling turrets and starbases.
-Command ships added, which grant 25% bonus damage to nearby ships. Command ships cannot receive this bonus themselves, and some Command ships can only buff smaller ships.
-RADE passive added and each race gets it on one or more ships. RADE deals extra damage to miners and constructors but reduces the ship's vision. This is designed to make early raiding much more effective.
-All Starbase upgrades reworked. Starbase upgrades now require time to complete but are generally better. Each Starbase receives an economic upgrade. A starbase can have both its Defense and Economy upgrades.
-Mixed Tech reworked. There are now fewer variants, but ships can be refitted into their MT variant once the technology has been obtained. Other races' technology can be researched even if there are no players of that race in the game.
-All ship tooltips have been modified to show helpful hints about the ship's strengths and weaknesses.

Borg
-Collective Connections removed and replaced by Vinculums
-Vinculums allow Borg ships to be built and come in Small, Medium, and Large
-When a ship is destroyed, its Vinculum is recovered. Therefore Vinculums act more like a cap that can be raised over time
-All Borg vessel costs reworked
-Starbase Economy Upgrade: Logisical Matrix (allows 4 miners to upgrade to Perfect Logistics)
-Starbase Defensive Upgrade: Fortification Matrix (All nearby Borg stations gain a Torpedo weapon with 20 Offense)
-Command Ship: Diamond
-RADE Ship: Probe

Dominion
-Prototypes are no longer required to build ships, replaced by shipyard upgrades
-Shipyards begin at level 1 and can only produce basic ships and Prototypes
-Once upgraded, Shipyards produce the normal versions of their ships
-Prototypes cost the same as regular ships but move slower, have no special abilities, and cannot rank up
-Starbase Economy Upgrade: Ketracel Synthesizer (convert minerals to Supply or Supply to minerals)
-Starbase Defense Upgrade: Fighter Hangars
-Command Ships: C-11 Interception Destroyer, B-5 Battlecruiser, V-15 Dreadnought (Federation tech)
-RADE Ship: S-2 Escort Cruiser

Federation
-Warp-ins are capped based on Chassis Level Research
-Each warp-in takes up 4 slots, each Chassis Level adds 4 slots
-Avalon is now built at the Experimental Yard for both avatars, Miranda II is built at Antares Yard for both avatars
-Most build times reduced, including major reductions to Defiant, Sovereign, and Phalanx build times
-Starbase Economy Upgrade: Industrial Replicators (convert minerals to Supply efficiently)
-Starbase Defense Upgrade: currently still under construction
-Command Ships: Central Warp-ins (Galaxy, Ambassador, Nebula T, Nebula E, Rhode Island), Sovereign, Norway (Mayson only)
-RADE Ship: Saber

Klingon
-Yard costs tweaked
-Qawduj and BortaS special abilities improved
-Starbase Economy Upgrade: Heavy Industry (can build Shuvak heavy miners, +25% mining speed)
-Starbase Defense Upgrade: Heavy Weaponry (just more guns, cheaper than other races)
-Command Ships: Edjen, Vutpa Refit, Neghvar
-RADE Ships: B'rel with special active, Susa with special active

Romulan
-Warbird combat stats improved, supply cost increased
-Refit costs reduced, and cost of building refitted ships directly from the Yard reduced even more
-Turrets improved and granted weapon/engine disabling effects
-Harmonic Implosion ability fixed and greatly improved (Generix Singularity Refit)
-Starbase Economy Upgrade: Supply Depot (greatly reduces ship Supply costs)
-Starbase Defense Upgrade: Star Fortress (contains Cloaking Generator allowing all stations and civilian ships to cloak)
-Command Ships: D'Deridex, Tavara
-RADE Ship: Rhienn

Link:
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/5mz9mack4fsba/

posted on July 31st, 2019, 9:14 pm

Hey Tryptic,

A few quick things for 3.2f -
Borg Optimize logistics upgrades on the freighters - button is clickable but doesn't "go"
Dominion shipyards cannot use the blueprint upgrades during a ceasefire (fixable with overrideCeaseFire = 1 in the 12 yard "*R.odf" files - see attached)
And it would be really awesome for those techs depending on Tryptic's coding to go live

Great work! My family and I consistently use your mod for LAN parties and have for years. Know that your efforts are enjoyed and appreciated!

Attachments

DomPatch.zip

(4.91 KiB) Downloaded 329 times

posted on August 4th, 2019, 3:01 am

Hey, thanks for the heads up! When you say Cease Fire, you mean the 5 or 10 minute cease fire options right? I might need to check through a lot of refit-related replaceweapons and make sure they have that line.

posted on August 4th, 2019, 4:16 am

Yes, the 5 or 10 minute options.

posted on August 24th, 2019, 1:33 am

Is it normal, that i only can play as Dominion and Borg?
v. 3.2d

posted on August 28th, 2019, 1:37 pm

Right, I've answered my own query - and to the post above (Zimpi), you probably made the same mistake as me - and downloaded a different version 3.2E!

Stick to 3.2D and that should work fine - you probably thought to download the 'latest' version when it is a different project!

posted on August 31st, 2019, 10:39 pm

I've been updating on Discord for a while, so I forgot to mention it here. I've started a new set of releases where the goal is to complete a single race at a time without anything missing or bugged:

V3.3 contains Borg only
V3.4 contains Borg and Dominion only
V3.5 will contain Borg, Dominion, and Federation but isn't complete yet

...and so on. V3.7 should have everything complete, although I'm going to do a bunch of balance tweaks after that.

posted on September 1st, 2019, 10:23 am

Thanks for the confirmation - and for the continued updates - I've just come back to Fleet Ops after a break and realise how addictive it is!

But I really would suggest you abandon the 1 vinculum per ship for the Borg (if that is your intention ultimately) - that will be unplayable - it takes too long and leads to being overrun when playing on hard AI levels with teamed AI opposition.

One thing I'm trying to resolve is the 'scratchy graphics' on some models and the mouse cursor. I'm running this with an ATI Radeon 4Gb R9 270X card so should be well able to handle the distorted graphics - so am trying to look at various options to resolve this - and of course the loading of saved games is crashing 100% - which is infuriating as it means abandoning a game now, knowing it won't load!

posted on September 1st, 2019, 4:15 pm

Ahhh, I really need to take the time and copy some of my updates from Discord to here on the forums.

The reason I felt comfortable switching to 1 Small Vinculum at a time is that, starting in V3.3, every research station in the game has a build queue. Unfortunately because of the Armada 2 code, every time you click on a research it kicks you out of the build menu, but all of the techs are hotkeyed so you can hit "S" to add a Small Vinculum to the queue, and you can queue up as many as you want.

In addition, the cost of the Conduction Matrix has been changed to be more like a yard, with the idea being if you want to continue small ship production you will want to build a second Conduction Matrix. However I'll be looking closely at the build times of Vinculums and shortening them if they really need it. Feedback is always appreciated.

I will look into the crash when loading saved games. Does this happen regardless of what race you are playing?

posted on December 22nd, 2019, 8:01 pm

Hey Tryptic, The new 3.7 release is great. My friends and I are addicted to Armada again!

I was always a big fan of playing as Romulans so I like that they are back!

I did notice one bug when I tried to "refit" the Tavara Warbird it crashed the network game for all players.

Also, Romulans being limited to one starbase really makes it hard to play defensively. The usual strategy of building a wall of starbases is essentially "prohibited" so turrets are the only option.

We also found something strange with the Borg AI. We tried a game with two human players on a team against two hard AIs, and all four players were Borg. The Borg AI would not attack with weapons, they would instead just transport drones from their ships to ours. And for some reason, this prevented our ships from "shooting back." The game was essentially unplayable because if we tried to attack with ships they would "neutralize" our ships into a transporter stalemate.

One other thought: what about allowing a refit where the Defiant class ships can cloak?

Thanks again for all your hard work on this great mod! What's left on the Romulan side? I saw there was one more upgrade that "requires Tryptic to finish building it."

posted on December 27th, 2019, 3:48 am

Glad to hear that you like it! I'm in a bit of a busy period, so further updates will take a while to come out but I'll still be saving feedback for when I complete them.

The Romulan Starbase being limited is a holdover from the previous iteration of Starbases I had in my head, where each faction had very unique ways of handling them. I'll be removing the restriction at some point, although neither the Cloaking Generator nor the Supply Depot upgrades stack so the benefit of having multiple starbases will be somewhat less than the other races.

The upgrade that is missing is the Ultimate Starbase. Ultimate Starbases in TM have extra guns, are immune to subsystem disables, and double your veteran cap to 50 slots. They're finished for the other 4 races but the Romulan one needs more work. In addition there will be 3 different Tavara upgrades, each with a powerful special ability, but right now I only implemented the Bastion refit which restores energy and shields to nearby ships.

Regarding the Tavara, do you happen to remember which Avatar you were and what rank the ship was when it caused a crash?

That sounds like a very strange bug with the Borg, are you sure the game wasn't set with a no-rush ceasefire?

As for the Defiant, there actually is a refit with a cloaking device. Mixed Tech in TM works in a new way: Each constructor has a "transfer technology" ability which can only be used on Starbases. In order to transfer the tech, either a friendly constructor or one that you've captured needs to use this ability on your Starbase, or you can also research it at the Experimental yard for a relatively high cost. Each technology combo only unlocks a single variant ship, but in addition to building them at the Experimental Yard you can refit your existing ships into the variant. Refitting costs 20% more than just building them, and they're vulnerable for 20 seconds while they upgrade. And it just so happens that the Federation ship with Romulan tech is the cloaking Defiant.

posted on December 30th, 2019, 4:25 am

Awesome, I can't wait to try the cloaking Defiants.

That's why the Tryptic mod is the best. It stays true to canon and has everything balanced well. I also like how the speed of Romulan ships can be upgraded!

When the Tavara bug popped up, I was running the avatar that could have TWO Tavara warbirds, and it's rank was very low, I had just built it.

posted on January 9th, 2020, 3:06 pm

Hello Tryptic,

first of all, thank you for your amazing mod. In my opinion it puts so many things right which always bothered me in vanilla fleet ops. One thing I noticed when playing as the federation is that there seems to be no way to alter the standard ai behaviour of warp-ins. With normal yards, a ship will just copy the setting of the yard which built it. Maybe the engine handles warp-ins differently?

Anyway I am looking forward to future iterations

posted on February 18th, 2020, 11:57 pm

Hi Tryptic,

Thank you for re-engaging my interest in this game! (new account) After waiting a long time for another update about the team's current status of NX my attention from this game drifted for a few years.

I'm having a blast with your mod! but I was hoping you would be able to add something in the next update. In the stock armada game(s) one of my past times was to disable life support and engines and watch the ship slowly become faction neutral for me to be able to assemble a cross klingon-romulan cloak fleet.

This is quite hard to do on this mod as subsystems are quite hard to damage from weapons fire. Would it be possible to modify the values to make it more common that a ship will lose a system while under attack?

Thanks again for getting me hooked up again!

posted on February 19th, 2020, 7:22 pm

Hi Fisher,

I love stealing enemy ships, too. But there's a much easier way.

Take your fleet and begin attacking an enemy ship. then click the "transport" button and hover it over the enemy ship. As soon as his shields are down, begin transporting your crew aboard. This way, you won't have to worry about disabling life support and letting the enemy crew die that way. You can just keep transporting crew aboard until the ship is yours, then send it back to your shipyard for repair / recrew.