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 II's campaign, nor melee against the cyborg.

Recent Changes

v1.32

[Shofixti]

• Glory Device readjusted to inflict half the damage of its vanilla counterpart. Any object caught within the explosion graphic will sustain 8 damage flat rather than 6/7/8/9 depending on distance.

• Ship price decreased from 8 to 6.

[Syreen]

• Siren Song potency decreased from 8 to 6.

• Ship price decreased from 14 to 12.

[Thraddash]

• Many afterburner characteristics reverted back to default values; afterburner stutter removed, hitpoints 4 -> 1, thrust increment 18 -> 12, energy cost 0.5 -> 1.

v1.31

• Fixed a defect introduced in v1.29 or v1.30 which caused Orz marines to withdraw anytime Arilou would teleport.

• Orz marine acceleration and topspeed reverted back to their original levels as seen in vanilla UQM.

• Partial projectile relativity implemented for the following weapons: Druuge Mass Driver, Melnorme Blaster, Melnorme Confuser, Orz Howitzer, Shofixti Dart Gun, Spathi Front Gun, Supox Gob Launcher, Syreen Particle Blaster, Zoq-Fot-Pik Scattergun.

v1.30

[Ilwrath]

• Revised the triple flame spout. Diagonal spouts no longer activate if energy is at 4 or less.

• Battery regeneration decreased very slightly.

[Orz]

• Marine tracking instructions refined once again. They are less amazing than 1.29's marines.

[Thraddash]

• Repulsor knockback speed cap increased from 72 to 80. For reference, maximum gravity whip speed is 72 and Druuge's knockback speed cap is 96.

[Ur-Quan]

• Fusion bolt homing capability removed.

• Jumbo fusion bolt graphic reverted back to the smaller vanilla graphic.

• Fusion bolt initial velocity, duration, hitpoints and cooldown reverted to vanilla UQM characteristics.

• Fusion bolts now launch in an alternating pattern between the front, left arm and right arm of the Dreadnought. The pattern loops like this: Center-Left-Center-Right. The pattern will reset back to center if the Dreadnought's battery is full or empty.

• Fusion bolt energy cost set to 5, which is lower than vanilla UQM's 6 or homing fusion's 8.

• Fusion bolt given a velocity push of the ship's current speed toward the direction the ship is traveling.

• Fighter laser has been given its own collision graphic. Generic "scored a hit" sound effect no longer triggers for this weapon.

• Autoturret added! This weapon periodically fires a single damage, super accurate homing projectile at nearby threats if they are close enough. The effective range of this weapon is quite short. Small enemy projectiles are high priority targets while large projectiles such as Kohr-Ah buzzsaws are ignored. The enemy ship is a low priority target. Autoturret cooldown is 22 frames. This weapon consumes one point of energy per shot.

v1.29

[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 a cyborg 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.

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

• Afterburner puff fade animation 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