Bastard Sword 4.0.2 [New!]

[alphacentauri]

Bastard Sword of the Stars 4.0.2:

• Advanced CNC available in fusion age
• AI techs require fusion
• Dual mounted weapons should work as they used to (allowed in strafe mounts, better tracking properties)
• Normalized all turrets health & speed

Bastard Sword of the Stars 4.0.1:

• Fixed
  • missing Disruptor Torpedo icon
  • missing Advanced Drone model for all races (missing in 4.0 only)

• Removed fusion requirement for fission-era dual weapon techs:
  • Disruptor cannon
  • Gauss cannon
  • Mass driver
  • Shotgun PD
  • UV lasers (pulsed & beam)
  • Neutron Beams

• Strafe sections & drones no longer allow:
  • dual weapons
  • autocannons
  • stormers
  • dumbfires

• Ballistics weapons
  • Most ballistic weapon techs no longer require fusion tech
  • The triple barreled weapon is once again a large mount special for the ballistics heavy races
    • reasoning: energy heavy races have TONs of options - but ballistics just don't (and this is just more fun!)

• Drones
  • Updated the minelayer drone to use the Assault Shuttle model (no guns, just bombs, on these puppies)

• Disruptors
  • Disruptor Whip is now free (Zuul only)
  • Added dual disruptor cannons to tech tree
  • Removed "Heavy Disruptor" -- since there is already a Heavy Disruptor Cannon
  • Rearranged tech tree for these elements
  • All disruptor techs are now fission age

• Dreadnoughts
  • Rearranged weapons - mainly restored medium & small mounts, but left all huge mounts alone

• Drones
  • NO LONGER using any of ACM's gunship, gunboat, and drone models - they were too buggy

• Emitters
  • Advanced Emitters now has a tech box!
  • Emitter projectors are now free with fusion + cruisers + large emitters (reused its tech box for advanced emitters - something had to give)

• Tracking Torpedos
  • Require Predictive Targeting

• Mines
  • Added link to nuclear mines from fusion warheads (allows you another shot to get onto the mine tech-tree)

• Sheild Bursters
  • Removed from game - they were too buggy

• Smart Nanites
  • Removed link from elemental nanites (now they're enabled from any nanite weapon tech, including nanite virus)

• Tech Costs
  • Reduced the number of techs that are free
  • Scaled the upper techs more evenly across the spectrum - increasing much of the early AM era tech costs by about 50%
    • Rationale: My games have been well paced up until AM, where everything suddenly becomes cheap and there's little tech to research after AM
    • My hope is that this will push back AM, and will make acquiring AM techs more of a wish-items in late game, instead of a quick stop in Fusion before shooting on to AM shortly thereafter.
  • Scaled a few of the earlier techs to require 25% more research time as well (polarized plasma, light emitter, direct fire missiles, ... and a number of other early strong weapons)

• Tech Chances
  • Reduced the number of techs that are guaranteed - restoring the whims of the fates

The link to download it:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/naccf1jis ... .2.7z/file

The instructions for installing it remain the same as always - see the older thread's first entry:
http://kerberos-productions.com/forums/ ... 16&t=55175

[alphacentauri]

You can see a fairly detailed guide for this on steam, here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =932584001

[solops]

As I have said elsewhere: WooHoo!!!!!!

[balti knights]

Nice. I now have reason to load up the old girl onto my current build.... Do you ever play multi ?

[illPosedProblem]

Played for half a day, looks amazing. Got my butt kicked when the friendly neighbouring Liir rushed their AI research and The Singularity started nomming my empire

Edit: happened the second time, in two games. Same map, but otherwise different opponent configuration, happened to neighbour a Liir again, they went AI rebellion by turn 245.

I found a small typo: Plasma Energy Cannon Tech: 'dmanage'

Edit 2: Playing with some 14 Advanced Antimatter Torpedo Hiver CRs/CAs (so, 14x4 torpedoes), versus some missile-heavy Liir/AI Rebellion DNs. Lots of stuff flying around, and the game crashes rather often, perhaps 1 in 5 fights. Oh, and there are some planet and skybox missing textures (purple placeholders).

I have SOTS 1.8.1 from GOG, BSOTS 4.0.1 as mount1, no other mods nor other changes. Every setting max, but Particle distance, which is at 3.7.

Edit 3: I encountered a battle that would always crash SOTS on load. 96 ships, many sats, 24 DNs, the works. I applied the Large Address Aware .exe patch, and it seems to have solved the crashing.

[rytram]

im unsure about something. there doesnt seem to be any Dreadnaught command sections capable of "Deepscan" functions or cloaking detection.

while i am on the topic of cloaking. may i suggest adding a cloaking option to drones? that has been something that has consistently pissed me off about late game. Drones become absolutely useless due to phaser point defense and the like. additionally. whats the difference between phaser PD and pulsed phaser PD?

[Red_Hellion]

Minor note: defence platforms seem to spin too quickly for their Large mounts on top and bottom to be able to track anything and fire at it successfully with anything other than missiles (tested with Hiver DE and CR defence platforms using various medium and large weaponry). Not sure yet if the projector mounts on DN defence platforms have the same issue.

Not sure if a single mount can be given a rotation speed bonus, but I "fixed" this in my own game by decreasing shipsection.netforcelimits.rotspeed to 10 for all defence platform sizes for all races so that the Large mount has enough tracking speed to counteract the platform's rotation speed. The previous values were 40, 30, and 20 for DE, CR, and DN respectively.

[rytram]

copy pasta from steam community page.

is it possible to fix the perma dead tech tree issue. if i discover or am taught a tech i was permanently missing. it should revive the entire tree for new reroll. i always HATED how failing one tech kills the rest of the tree. after all salvage techs are essentially reverse engineering.

[rytram]

Minor note: defence platforms seem to spin too quickly for their Large mounts on top and bottom to be able to track anything and fire at it successfully with anything other than missiles (tested with Hiver DE and CR defence platforms using various medium and large weaponry). Not sure yet if the projector mounts on DN defence platforms have the same issue.

Not sure if a single mount can be given a rotation speed bonus, but I "fixed" this in my own game by decreasing shipsection.netforcelimits.rotspeed to 10 for all defence platform sizes for all races so that the Large mount has enough tracking speed to counteract the platform's rotation speed. The previous values were 40, 30, and 20 for DE, CR, and DN respectively.

what file and how. i never actually paid attention to this but if my sats are not being effective id like to fix that.

[Red_Hellion]

Minor note: defence platforms seem to spin too quickly for their Large mounts on top and bottom to be able to track anything and fire at it successfully with anything other than missiles (tested with Hiver DE and CR defence platforms using various medium and large weaponry). Not sure yet if the projector mounts on DN defence platforms have the same issue.

Not sure if a single mount can be given a rotation speed bonus, but I "fixed" this in my own game by decreasing shipsection.netforcelimits.rotspeed to 10 for all defence platform sizes for all races so that the Large mount has enough tracking speed to counteract the platform's rotation speed. The previous values were 40, 30, and 20 for DE, CR, and DN respectively.

what file and how. i never actually paid attention to this but if my sats are not being effective id like to fix that.

If you're auto-resolving planetary combat it won't affect you so that might be why you never noticed, since I don't think platform and turret rotation speeds are part of the simulation. Or if you only ever equip your platform "primary" mounts (the ones right at the top and bottom) with missiles, since they don't need to be aimed at the target to fire.

Otherwise, just open up all the platform files for each race (there's too many to list, they're in Species/<RACE>/sections for each race not counting the _NPC race and they all end in "Platform.shipsection" or "Satellite.shipsection"; it's easiest to find them if you open up the entire mod folder in a code editor like Sublime Text and do a file search using regex for rotspeed[\ ]*(40|30|20) across all *.shipsection files) and change shipsection.netforcelimits.rotspeed for each one that is a non-NPC satellite/platform to 10 (that seems to be the highest speed that a Large turret can still counter with its own rotational tracking speed).

I would rather increase the tracking/rotation speed for that specific Large turret mount (or Projector mount for the DN platforms) on each of those platforms, but I couldn't find a way to do so.

[Red_Hellion]

Also, question about drones in BSotS:

They zip around too fast for non-beam point defense (gauss, gauss shotgun, laser) to hit at all, the mod files say 350 max speed for Hiver and 400 max speed for other races for basic drones (base game max speed for basic drones is around 200-250). Is this intended, and drones are just much more powerful now and the only counter is either beamer PD or destroying the host ship (and PD is essentially useless except against missile spam)? Am I not understanding this mod's drone meta/tactics?

For now for myself I've decreased their max speed back to roughly vanilla levels so that PD is actually effective against them (otherwise there's just no way to win against a player or AI that decides to mainly use drones: you can't hit the drones at all with PD and you can't get close enough to their host ships to kill them before dying without spamming drones yourself).

[rytram]

lol. i was droned up in a game against humans. i would have 2 drone DN's with torp drones using Gluonic Torps. the moment they surrounded a ship they just all blew up. im not sure what the humans had but it happened EVERY BATTLE. they would all pop like knats on an electric lantern. every one of em at exactly the same time.. so, there is definitely a defense against them. i just dont know what it was. maybe emitter projector or something.

[Red_Hellion]

lol. i was droned up in a game against humans. i would have 2 drone DN's with torp drones using Gluonic Torps. the moment they surrounded a ship they just all blew up. im not sure what the humans had but it happened EVERY BATTLE. they would all pop like knats on an electric lantern. every one of em at exactly the same time.. so, there is definitely a defense against them. i just dont know what it was. maybe emitter projector or something.

Unfortunately the emitter projector and its associated PD type is even more RNG than beamers etc. Playing as Hiver against both a Morrigi and Human AI who seem to have gone entirely with drones, and where I only have access to gauss PD, I can barely kill a few drones before my ships melt even fielding 2-4 all-up CR-class escorts to cover my fleets. Gauss PD is also just really bad against drones in general (mostly only good against missiles even in vanilla), but holy hell if you get locked out of the laser/emitter PD due to tech tree RNG and an opponent decides to go with a drone-heavy fleet you might as well just concede the game and start over.

[Red_Hellion]

Also, I noticed that none of the Huge triple-barrel turrets on my dreadnoughts are firing at all during combat. They track and trigger their reloading cycles as if they are firing, but there is no projectile/laser animation or damage dealt to enemy ships. Tested and confirmed with triple-barrel particle/neutron/positron beams, and triple-barrel plasma/fusion/antimatter cannons. Only the Huge dual heavy missile turrets seem to fire properly.

I'm going to see if editing the files to downgrade all the Huge turrets to Larges helps; my guess would be either it's an issue with having 3 barrels on a single turret, or it's an issue with Huge direct-fire turrets in general.

EDIT: I found the issue with the triple-barrel Huge mounts. There's some kind of bug with barrel_L3_HeavyDriver.x (at least the Hiver one, maybe the other races as well) causing the muzzles not to be recognized and thus not fire any actual projectiles. Changing the model1 to any other barrel while making no other changes allowed them to fire again.

To fix it for myself, I changed them to use a single barrel model but fire a volley of 3 rounds with a very small volley_period (to keep it balanced as a weapon that fires 3 shots), and for triple-barrel beam weapons I just gave them a single barrel but tripled their damage/force.

[Red_Hellion]

For anyone curious, this is my current list of personal changes that I'm playing with on top of BSotS 4.0.2 (I'll update it as I make more tweaks):

Bug Fixes (fixes for issues that I found would break gameplay or were non-trivial balancing issues)

• Defense Satellite/Platform rotation speed ("netforcelimits.rotspeed") reduced to 10 to facilitate Large turret tracking (it looks like Large turrets by default have a max rotation/tracking speed of around 12, so any platform rotation higher than that means that the Large/Huge turrets on top/bottom are effectively useless)
• Drone speeds reduced to vanilla-ish (might change this back if I find drone swarms get killed too quickly even without the defender using dedicated Escorts) (this was to make it so that even players who only get access to Gauss PD have a chance vs drones)
• There is a bug in "barrel_L3_HeavyDriver.x" causing muzzles to be unrecognized and thus not actually fire any projectiles. Tested extensively using Hiver, but probably an issue for the other races as well assuming the same file was copied into all of them. Fixed by using a single-barrel model instead (e.g. "barrel_l1_gatling.x") and changing the weapons to fire 3-round bursts (or deal 3x the damage and force, for beam weapons). To further differentiate them power-level-wise from Large mounts and put them closer to on-par with Huge Missiles or Projectors, I might upgrade them to 4-round-bursts or 5-round-bursts. This was probably the worst gameplay-affecting bug I noticed, since it made Huge mounts effectively useless unless you happened to use projectors/heavy missiles/huge stormers because all of the others used the faulty barrel model
• Huge (projector) mounts on DNs mostly changed back to Large mounts (except for Dominator/Projector section mounts and DN Defence Platform mounts). As much as the Huge weapons are cool, it feels really weird to not be able to mount any Large weapons at all on DNs. Also, I found that the new Huge weapons offered no real distinction from the existing Large weapons other than Huge Stormers. For example, the (Huge) Triple Antimatter Cannon has about a 25% range increase vs the (Large) Heavy Antimatter Cannon, but worse accuracy, slightly worse reload time, and the same damage. Personally I would suggest, instead of Triple turrets for Huge mounts, maybe making them Quad or Quintuple turrets to clearly differentiate their power level from Large mounts and make them more on-par with Projectors but longer-ranged and focused firepower.
• Stormers, autocannons, and dumbfire missiles rolled back to use proper "standard" turretclass (better to be forced to allow them in strafe mounts than make them completely useless by restricting their azimuth and tracking speed so much by forcing them to use "missile" turretclass)

Tweaks (minor changes that don't have a major effect on gameplay but were either inconsistent or felt wrong)

• Kinetic Kill missile speed reduced, ttl increased, dumbfire period reduced (should make them less likely to just fly off the map and never come back once all missile engine upgrades are researched)
• Beam PD tracking speed modifier slightly increased (not sure why beam PD had a "trackspeed_mod" of 0.5, seems they would almost be useless as PD)
• Huge Stormer "trackspeed_mod" updated to match other stormers
• Dumbfire missile "weaponfamily" changed from "gauss" to "missile" (not sure why it was part of "gauss")
• Heavy and regular Stormers damage increased slightly to match individual projectiles from next-level-down ballistic weapons (e.g. each Heavy Stormer bullet does as much damage as a single Mass Driver shot)
• Fixed impact sounds of plasma cannons (were using "Sounds/Weapons/mis_kinetic_impact.wav" instead of "Sounds/Weapons/can_plasma_impact.wav")
• Fixed impact sounds of all Polarized Heavy Cannons ("impact_sound_minrange" was inconsistent, and some were using the normal cannon impact sounds rather than the disc impact sounds)
• Fixed thrust sounds of all Polarized Cannons (some had no thrust sounds)
• Fixed planet impact effects of all Polarized Cannons (some were missing the laser impact effect used by polarized cannons)
• Fixed projectiles used by Fusion & Antimatter Polarized Heavy Cannons (was confusing because they were using the non-polarized projectile effects)
• AP Drivers/Stormers updated to actually have better accuracy (as per lore), although not as good as Sniper Cannons
• Sniper Cannons updated to be more accurate at longest ranges and decreased ricochet chance (half as good as AP, simply due to the fact that they're designed for precision targeting as per lore + vanilla)
• Railcannon ricochet chance decreased to the same as AP Heavy Drivers
• Polarized Cannons ricochet chance increased slightly (AM Polarized would never ricochet even against the best coatings at the worst angle, which seemed excessive considering even Heavy AP Drivers have a 10% ricochet chance under the same conditions)
• Shieldbreaker ricochet chance decreased to -2.0
• Heavy/Huge Triple Drivers ricochet chance matched to Heavy Drivers (firing the same rounds, the ricochet chance should be the same)
• Stormers ricochet chance matched to the rounds they fire (one size down, e.g. Heavy Stormer ricochet chance matches Mass Driver ricochet chance)