weapon artwork tied to attack strength

[bvanevery]

Details chaos becomes a missile launcher

chaos becomes a missile launcher

Weapon artwork doesn't change based on the name or slot position of the weapon.  It changes according to attack strength.  This has undesirable properties for modding.  My 1st cut of rebalancing weapons and armor in a mostly Fission engine game, doesn't look right.  Chaos guns with lower strength, end up looking like missile launchers.  I will have to change various weapons back to find out what their thresholds are, then probably strengthen armor a lot.

Armor doesn't have this problem.  The armor's appearance is tied to the order it appears in the list, not its stats.

[Anon Zytose]

I had noticed this in mods of my own. If the attack strength of a certain weapon is in the range of that of an unmodded weapon strength and one less than the next unmodded weapon strength up, the weapon will look like whatever weapon normally has the strength of the first unmodded weapon strength. For example, if I give a weapon a strength of 15, it will look like a 13-strength plasma shard. But if I raise that strength to 16, it'll look like the 16-strength quantum laser.

In my own mods, I tend to insist that the strengths of the weakest weapons and armor that require technology are greater than those of the no-tech weapons and no armor but lass than double those strengths. This means I must give hand weapons and no-armor defense strength scores of at least two. Currently, I just allow hand weapons and lasers to look the same, giving them strength scores of 2 and 3, respectively. Generally, I set the strengths of the normal weapons as follows: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 23, 28.

I may want to see how the Alien Crossfire weapons work with this. I can see that your resonance bolt now looks like a chaos gun with an extra item, as opposed to a tachyon bolt with an extra item. Would a singularity laser with strength 30 look like a string disruptor? Would a string disruptor of strength 23 look like a graviton gun? What if the Resonance Laser gets a very different strength? If the answers to the first two questions are both yes, I may modify that previous list to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 19, 24, 30 with the string disruptor at 23r. Do you go with the very best conventional attack strength or take an extra psi attack bonus along with a weapon that conventionally is still pretty excellent?

By the way, I had found in my mods that armor appearance does not depend on its strength.

[bvanevery]

Anything 25 or higher looks like a string disruptor.  Normal guns look like whatever their attack number is.  Resonance guns look like a normal gun except they have the resonance bridge thingy put across them.

I think resonance weapons aren't worth crap in the real world, and grossly overpriced for what they offer.  In my mod they cost only a nominal fee above the regular weapon of the same strength.  I'm also finding in my current game that my PLANET rating utterly dominates my psi combat.  Well having The Dream Twister doesn't hurt either, but even before then, I was kicking the snot out of mindworms using unarmed units.  A 25% attack bonus for psi is a solution looking for a problem.  I really don't get the mishmash of Empath Song, Psi Attack weapons, and Resonance weapons.  It's like they were putting story gewgaws in there, "the Aliens have to have something different".  I think Psi weapons are my most underutilized weapon of the game.  I'm not sure I've ever gotten around to using them in anger.

[Geo]

Details chaos becomes a missile launcher

chaos becomes a missile launcher

Weapon artwork doesn't change based on the name or slot position of the weapon.  It changes according to attack strength.  This has undesirable properties for modding.  My 1st cut of rebalancing weapons and armor in a mostly Fission engine game, doesn't look right.  Chaos guns with lower strength, end up looking like missile launchers.  I will have to change various weapons back to find out what their thresholds are, then probably strengthen armor a lot.

Armor doesn't have this problem.  The armor's appearance is tied to the order it appears in the list, not its stats.

A workaround is switching the .cvr file.

[bvanevery]

A workaround is switching the .cvr file.

Noted, but in practice for deploying a mod to many other people, I don't think this is worth it.  Currently I only change alphax.txt, the 14 faction .txt files, and I add a readme.  This has better hygeine than changing lots more files in the game.

I've put the weapons back to the attack values of the original game.  I've changed the names of a few weapons, because I don't have Fusion Power or Quantum Power at the same points in the tech tree.   To fill holes, I've got "Phasers" and "Chronoton Guns".  I've always hated "Fusion Laser" anyways, because "Fusion" is an engine descriptor.  My inner Captain Kirk says we're going with Phasers.

I'm now recalibrating armor strength, since it is flexible without affecting the appearance of art assets.  I've repurposed Stasis Generators.  They are now called "Singularity Shields" and have strength 30, to match the "Singularity Laser" that looks like a string disruptor.  I didn't want to waste an entire tech on just another weapon at the very end of the teche tree.  Players will be flying through techs by then.  I repurposed String Resonance to be the tech that gives you Tachyon weapons, and separated the getting of weapons from Unified Field Theory.  A lot of my mod is aimed at preserving separations between Explore, Discover, Build, and Conquer categories.

I'm fiddling all the costs too.  Pretty much everything needs to be cheaper in a mostly Fission game.  Presently, even Fusion Power isn't discovered until the endgame.  I think my new regime works for Fission and factories up to the Robotic Assembly Plant level, but once the player finally hits Fusion, stuff's awfully darned cheap.  Maybe that's ok because I could easily win the game now, without even using a single military unit.  I'm irritated that I can't fine tune the jump between Fission and Fusion though.  It's a huge cost change.

[ars_belli]

Armor doesn't have this problem.  The armor's appearance is tied to the order it appears in the list, not its stats.

Do you mean the slot order (which, I assume, is fixed)?  I've tried changing the list order in alpha.txt (along with the stats and tech. prerequisites), which has no effect.

There is an option to change some armor at the bottom of system.txt, which recolours well:

#ARMORCOLORING
95, PLASMA STEEL
233, SILK STEEL
63, NEUTRONIUM
70, ANTIMATTER PLATE

#ARMORCOLORING_TRANS
34, 20, 80, PROBABILITY SHEATH--color, beginning percent, ending percent

[bvanevery]

Do you mean the slot order (which, I assume, is fixed)?  I've tried changing the list order in alpha.txt (along with the stats and tech. prerequisites), which has no effect.

I am inclined to use the terms "list order" and "slot order" interchangeably.  Here is what I'm calling list / slot order in alphax.txt:

Code: [Select]

#DEFENSES
No Armor,            Scout,       1, 0, 1, None,
Synthmetal Armor,    Synthmetal,  2, 0, 2, Chemist,
Plasma Steel Armor,  Plasma,      3, 2, 3, Subat,
Silksteel Armor,     Silksteel,   5, 1, 8, Alloys,
Photon Wall,         Photon,      6, 1, 12, Photon,
Probability Sheath,  Probability, 8, 2, 16, ProbMec,
Neutronium Armor,    Neutronium,  12, 1, 24, Tachyon,
Antimatter Plate,    Antimatter, 20, 2, 40, AGrav,
Inertial Damper,    Damper,     30, 2, 60, Inert,
Psi Defense,         Psi,        -1, 2, 6, WillPow,
Pulse 3 Armor,       3-Pulse,     3, 1, 4, Surface,
Resonance 3 Armor,   3-Res,       3, 1, 4, Bioadap,
Pulse 12 Armor,       12-Pulse,     12, 1, 28, MatComp,
Resonance 12 Armor,   12-Res,       12, 1, 28, SentRes,

[ars_belli]

Thanks, I see what you mean now -- the CVR files are locked to that particular line in the alpha(x).txt file. 

Previously I thought that the design workshop slots were controlled by the armor rating, but it doesn't rearrange itself that way.

[ars_belli]

Oddly, the first weapon slot appears to be locked to that artwork regardless of rating: giving Hand Weapons a rating of 8 or 9 doesn't turn it into a Chaos Gun.

That aside, here are the ratings by artwork:

Graphics	Power
Hand	1
Laser	2 - 3
Particle	4
Gatling	5
Missile	6 - 7
Chaos Gun	8 - 9
Fusion laser	10 - 11
Tachyon Bolt	12
Plasma Shard	13 - 15
Quantum Laser	16 - 19
Graviton gun	20 - 23
Singularity laser	24
String disruptor	>=25

[bvanevery]

Interesting discovery about hand guns.  As for the others, my mod has strength 3 lasers, strength 3 R-lasers, and strength 14 Plasma Shards.