User:Shiver/Balance Mod

Objective

The goal of this project is to even out the effectiveness of Star Control II's ship line-up so that everything is worth using in competitive player-versus-player melee. The various ships have been strengthened or weakened accordingly. Additionally, many minor adjustments have been made for the sake of aesthetics or continuity. The changes are quite extensive, though I tried not to stray too far from vanilla gameplay. The Balance Mod is not intended for Star Control's main game, nor melee against the cyborg.

Recent Changes

[Arilou]

• Arilou will now rescue itself from teleporting inside solid matter 100% of the time as long as it has the energy to teleport again.

• Arilou rematerializes after teleportation the same way it dematerializes before. This exists in vanilla UQM and was not present in previous iterations of Balance Mod.

[Chenjesu]

• Fixed the crash bug which sometimes occurs when an AI Chenjesu wins a bout.

[Orz]

• Marine tracking instructions refined.

• AI will Deploy marines against Earthling.

[Thraddash]

• Repulsor knockback softened up. The difference is most noticeable on high mass ships.

• Repulsor thruster freeze increased very slightly.

• Afterburner puff duration decreased (once again!) from 120 to 108.

• Afterburner puff fade animation is extended.

[Ur-Quan]

• Fighters are more responsive to the enemy ship's facing angle.

• Fighters no longer whirl around immediately after catching a slow moving ship. They will instead reduce speed and match facing with a target if it is moving faster than a crawl. "Whirl around" instructions still persist when attacking a stationary or near-stationary ship.

• Fighters now fan out properly.

[Utwig]

• Guns given a velocity push of 1/2 ship of the ship's current speed toward the direction the ship is travelling.

• Reverted range of guns back from 9 to 10.

[Yehat]

• The velocity push of Yehat's guns increased from 1/2 to 3/4 of the ship's current speed.

Credit

I received extensive assistance while making this project. I wish to express my thanks to the following individuals:

• Elvish Pillager wrote a few bits of the most difficult code for this mod and gave significant design input. His Crazy Mod source code was a valuable reference when altering melee.

• UQM core team members Meep-eep, Fossil and McMartin provided coding and debugging assistance.

• Gekko was my primary beta test opponent during this mod's creation.

• Bleeding Star gave some useful design input which led to several necessary adjustments.

• Death 999 cooked up a nifty program which saved me hours of work when making a larger antimatter cone for Umgah.

Links

• Full List of Changes

• Installation Instructions