Energy weapons don’t require ordnance, but they can be a tad trickier to design ships for.īlack Box now calculates ship maintenance costs based on the ship’s production cost, so efficiency is more important than ever. However, since the Opteris don’t have the trait to reduce ship maintenance costs, or the trait to help them make more money, those larger ships typically result in fewer ships in the fleet.įor this guide, I intend to focus on energy weapons, but I sprinkle in some other weapon types. This often results in lower speeds, especially if not taken into consideration with ship designs, but it also allows them to create designs that most other factions simply can’t. In addition, the Opteris have some of the largest ship hulls in the game. It arguably might make them the faction that requires the least micromanagement, at least when it comes to colonizing. This makes colonizing as the Opteris very simple. This is great because they prefer Barren planets. In game-play terms, not needing food means that the Opteris can completely ignore the Fertility of planets. You can roleplay that the Opteris in Stardrive 1 got rid of all of their organic parts if you like. In StarDrive 2, they more logically consume 50% food and 50% production (they’re cyborgs, not robots), but StarDrive 1 was never changed to match. In StarDrive 1, this means they do not eat food. The Opteris are cybernetic organisms, part machine and part organic. I’m sure there’s a lot that I didn’t notice.Even when I take into account that they don’t have to worry about ordnance. All of the weapons with the word “laser” in the name still seem quite underpowered in one way or another though, at least to me.The Prototype Beam weapon seems to have been buffed, which is great. In the past these would reflect the Solar Armor as well, with the bonus shields divided between each shield generator. However, I later also noticed that when you add something like Solar Armor, the Shield Power stat on the right goes up, but the Shld Str stat for each shield generator on the ship remains the same. I asked about this on the forums and was told that it’s probably a bug and we should expect it to get changed back. Before, each shield circle’s HP was independent from the others. Ships now seem to combine all of their shield HP into a single pool.I just don’t know if “Attack Runs” is still a good description for it. My biggest complaint with Attack Runs before was they would fly past the target and right into the middle of the enemy fleet, where they would get annihilated. They now seem to approach to point-black range and remain facing the target while slowly strafing left or right. The behavior of the “Attack Runs” order seems to have been changed so that ships don’t fly past the target and then turn around anymore.I’m not sure if weapons across the board were made less accurate or if the meaning of 1.0 accuracy was changed, but the numbers are higher.Using a Small Warp Engine and a Small Combat Engine is no longer better than two Small Engines.The space background and dust clouds look better, including in the Shipyard.Hopefully they’ll take a look at doing something to help the Vulfar out. I was able to work with it as the Opteris, but I worry that this seems like a massive nerf to the Vulfar, who already had a hard time. In this version at least, fighter shields are very expensive. This is a big change and required me to rethink some things. Ship maintenance has changed from being a flat cost based on the number of hull squares a ship has to being based on the Production cost.If this is your first time playing, you can skip to the Intro section. I don’t have any patch notes, so this is only from observation. Here is a quick rundown of the changes I noticed while working on this. The developers for these two mods have been working hard non-stop. This one was written using version 1.30 of Black Box and Combined Arms 7.6F. That said, there have been a lot of changes since the last one in this series. This one primarily focuses on designs that use energy weapons. The Humans and the Ralyeh were up first, but now it’s time for the Opteris! Some concepts are covered in all of them so they can be read in any order. This is the third in a “Starting Out As” series for StarDrive with the Black Box and Combined Arms mods. So you’ve dusted off your old copy of StarDrive 1, downloaded the eXemplary Black Box and Combined Arms mods for it, and are in need of some help? Fear not, our friend Trifler has come up with this starter guide to help you out.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |