Well, yeah, the multiplier on each module is calculated separately in combat. You can test this yourself by having 2 armor, 1 normal, another with a super high stack bonus. You put them on and start taking damage, you will see the normal one will die a lot sooner, indicating it is working properly in combat.
Ignoring the positive stacking armor for a moment.
Hull bonus wise, except for armor, all others are somewhat interchangeable. Cost obviously replaces everything, and majority of the time you can reinterpret all other boost as a cost reduction. Power boost literally means less/cheaper power, and is identical to a weak cost reduction. Hull and shield boost acts like a semi cost reduction because I can cut down other forms of defense. As for speed boost, it means I can cut down on my engine to pay for something else.
One exception is if you have really big numbers (ex. -100 speed), in which case it becomes impossible to replace.
Armor is also an exception because the difference between > 73 or < 73, or > 55 and < 55, is night and day. The way armor resistance is calculated makes “just add more ultraheavy” impossible.
Frigate speed boost is a semi irreplaceable stat. Frigates are much less flexible in general, and engines makes up a huge chunk of their cost. So speed boost tend to be the sole determiner of frigate hull unless you have something else REALLY high (ex. Tribe’s 100% hull).
With most the hull bonus in the teens, it means they are all pretty much the same, except for their size. Small ships are significantly better than large ones. Their benefits includes fighter resist, bonus dodge, much better scrambler coverage, and focus firepower. So aside from tanking, the Windreaper is the only ship I want. Personally I will give up a 100% shield boost 250 size ship for a no bonus 120 size ship.
This is consistent with every other stock race, where the only hull that ever gets used are the smallest one (Fed Panther, Rebel Fenrir, Alliance Alligator, Order Crusader, Tribe Utopia, Swarm Sekhmet, and Nomad Hajara). The exception is armor tanking, which uses whichever hull that can push armor past 73 the cheapest. Anything else are relatively unusable. You can see this by look at the 4 and 5 stars challenges online.
You can read about what others think here. Keep in mind this is a old thread, and size is view as even more important now because stacking was fixed/banned.
you’re right…I tested it myself already with shields. The display menu said I only had like 30 something shield strength, in the actual game it was clear I had considerably more.
so that’s a huge relief…all I have to do is include a disclaimer now that says “disregard the ship display menu pertaining to shield and armor strength…they are NOT that high”
All I have to do now is re balance the shields, armor and a few weapons…better get to it!
OK…After lots of work, tweaking and dealing with life getting in the way I have finally re-balanced the Union defenses. They’re still quite high but they’re not impossibly broken anymore
with luck this will make everyone’s experience with this mod more enjoyable.
Sorry for being a post nut…but I’d also like people to download this one because not ONLY does it have a few weapons watered down and balance over all is much better
BUT there’s an interesting new cosmetic effect added to the Resolute’s engines…once again Darkstar deserves most of the credit for it but I added a few of my own touches.
Interesting…now this I have to experience for myself. Thank you for rebalancing and updating the mod! Don’t apologize for posting about these issues & etc. – people need to know these things. Thanks.
Cen2050, the balance in version 1.003 is indeed noticeably better. I’m still slowly poring over Union bit-by-bit when I have time, but I think that the recent nerfs were well-chosen. It’s possible that more might be needed once these latest changes are fully played & understood.
Distinguishing between the exact changes across different versions of Union isn’t a quick task on account of the great number of weapons & defenses which ship with this mod. Have you considered keeping a continuous changelog of all the ongoing tweaks as they’re made, and adding it into one of your Page 1 posts of this thread? That would help let folks know about the precise nature of the improvements – much like the way that Cliffski kept a public changelog in the Support Forum for the many patches of GSB. It’s just a thought.
Oh and I enjoy the high-horsepower visual buff that the Resolute’s main engines received. Everything’s definitely in “ORDER” now.
Thanks for posting Archduke…to answer your question I HAVE been keeping a running tab on what I’ve changed on my end. There’s still a few changes I need to make to a couple of the weapons but unless some glaring oversight comes to light I’m more or less satisfied. I can assume it shows that I did a LOT of balancing stuff before I released Union 1.0
The next step is to attempt a couple more ships and modules to release for Union 2.0 (to be displayed in the stories before hand)
ideas I’m thinking of include:
The giant frigate laser displayed on the Unity vs Union thread
So with super armor gone, we no longer have invincibility. And this is a good thing.
Windreaper is still OP. That thing really needs to be 140m. The scrambler coverage/fighter resistance is just too good atm.
Some of the long range weapons are still OP though, which allows easy 100% win against the most competitive fleets online. The 2 most obvious are the Implosion and Rail Gun.
Implosion deals huge DPS (38.1) with high accuracy and 1020 range. Power is just too easy to come by with Binary Quantum Dynamo.
Rail Gun only has average DPS (26.67), what is so good is it’s 860 range, 2.6 tracking, 20 shield penetration, and 60 armor penetration. It becomes a beam laser + pulse laser alternative and is easily the ultimate utility gun with long range.
So you end up with this ordinary ship that kills everything in stock.
The long range easily outclass the pathetic 9 DPS from cruiser plasma. It’s scrambler coverage makes MWM useless. It easily kills Tribe CL rush before it can fire a single shot, and the rail guns easily destroys frigates spams.
I appreciate the advice about the rail run and Implosion Cannon. I’m in the process of adjusting them, along with the Firestorm and CRUISER Positron cannons right now.
As far as the Windreaper though I’m content with the size as it is. given it’s -18% hull integrity, and the cost to field it. It’s only real defenses ARE it’s size, shield boost and speed. Once it’s shields and any armor on it falls…it’s finished off REAL fast.
Quite frankly What you stated was, in essense, exactly what I had intended from the start with the Windreaper. A fast and fragile little ship that is hard to it and serves the role of an anti-fighter/MWM spam ideally. These same qualities also make it ideal in the fast attack/hit and run role as well.
What I never really considered however, was the benefits of such a hull when used in conjunction with REALLY long range weapons in the Union arsenal…and I’m greatful for your input.
The only things I may consider doing to the Windreaper hull in and of itselfare raising the cost farther and reducing the integrity even more…maybe in conjunction with a small armor boost.
Well I guess you can do that. Raising cost always make things bad. Eventually it will reach the point where the Jackalop is better for long range spamming. But right now, let’s just say that the windreaper survives better than the Tribe Utopia even if I don’t use any custom weapons. You got to consider all the custom armor/shields/power/engine you added are all twice as good as your stock parts. Just 1 superconcentrated shield + 19% shield boost already past that -18% hull penalty.
Now this isn’t to say the defense modules are OP, because your other hull are so enormous they needed the boost just to be average.
I don’t know why you need to nerf firestorm, it sucks hard as is. Low tracking + shield penetration under 27 + low armor penetration means it can’t hit anything.
Instead of armor boost, do consider more speed. So it is more appealing for rush but not for long range spam. Cuz right now I can easily push it past 53 armor as is. We don’t need 73 armor windreapers now do we?
Speaking of armor, it is still too powerful with the cruiser_component replicator.
Also, the frigate shield still have 130% stack. Though with the enormous size of 120 (for frigates anyway), this is not exactly abusable.
I mean, I can make a few challenges for union if you want, sorta like what I did with Unity. You can see for yourself how unkillable those windreapers are.
yeah the component replicator is on the list of things I need to water down as well To be honest it’s a module I pretty much never use BUT on the windreaper…I find, at least with the weapons loadouts I tend to use it like 6 frigates armed with RF lasers, Phasor Cannon’s and Ion Cannon’s can chew apart a Windreaper. And Fighter Swarms still overwhelm the fighter defense weaponry and fighter escorts pretty handily.
I’ll certinly consider the speed boost instead of armor boost to balance the further any further decrease I may give it in hull integrity in the future.
and certinly…send a few private challenges my way with the Windreaper please be aware I have already toned down the rail cannon and Implosion beam in the following ways
Rail Cannon: Shield Penetration reduced to 12, Tracking Speed down to 1.6 and Damage is 20
Implosion Cannon: Armor Penetration: down to 17, Damage: down to 115, Fire Interval, up to 3900
Minimum range: 510, Shield Penetration: down to 37
Just making sure you know this to help explain any discrepencies in performance.
You do realize pushing the armor to 53 with that advance repair makes them completely immune to frigates right? Even if I don’t abuse the armor it still shouldn’t have problem with frigate spams.
That said, I was going to use the proton/particle combo anyway. I mean you already know the problems with implosion and rail so I don’t need to be a broken record and do that again.
Edit: I just send you an armored version online. It easily crushed Tribe CL and Swarm Frigate with 100%. Let me know if you can access it, and if you can kill it with any stock fleets.
Edit2: Send an unarmored version. This one should be significantly easier.
I dont think 53 armour is enough. Yup, is a high number, but not enough to make the ships invincible. Even with 70+ armour the ships are not invincible. Of course, if u manage to have a ship with 70 armour, it is supossed that tha ship is weakened in other ways, if not that is just absurd lol.
It kills existing competitive fleets online with 100%. I define that as overpowered.
Sure you can pigeon hole and rush it with 100% beams, you pigeon hole enough you can beat 1.44 ISSB as well. Then again considering how ridiculous powerful the Union weapons are, I can probably squeeze in a reflective shield in this build and make it completely invulnerable to any stock builds.
Edit: Lol nm I got 76 armor on the windreaper with 5 guns. Even 100% beam with Tribe lose completely. So I guess that’s that. I posted it as a public challenge
Union Mod Test (4751352).
So anyone who feels it’s beatable with a stock race can prove me wrong.
123stw DOES have a valid point everynoe. I labored very meticulously over Union for a VERY long time, specifically balancing and re-balancing weapons, modules and ships.
And forgive me if I’m applauding too soon. But considering the relatively FEW modules that have slipped through the proverbail cracks I like to think my efforts were pretty sucessful
My ultimate objective was to basically make everything a class above what they were: Fighters with armamants that made each squadron effectively a fast attack frigate. Frigates that, with Union modules and weaponry, were on par with some light cruisers. Cruisrers that were more or less akin to light dreadnaughts but even faster. And finally dreadnaughts that were TRULY in a league of their own in terms of firepower.
The trouble with this design is the cost inherent. That’s the major balancing factor to all my ships and what I tried to emphasize both in the game and in the story arc. The Union, by galactic standards is TINY in terms of territory, resources scope.
However I spend far too much time focusing on the 2 biggest and baddest ships: the Starburst and Resolute…and it would seem far too little time on the Windreaper Assault Frigate, an oversight I’m correcting now.
In the standard game, and ESPECIALLY the campaign setting, Union ships perform evenly against any of the vanilla races or expansions. In the online challenges however, I’ve noticed something interesting in my own tests; The small the challenge, the better Union fares. The higher the fleet size goes, the less well Union does.
Cen, pardon me for the length of this post. I’m going to ramble around and look at things from multiple angles as I go. Hopefully this will be of use to you.
No modder-created race is perfect when it first goes public. Fortunately there is a player community that’s pleased to offer other points of view to help you troubleshoot the mod. Advice that’s worth every dollar you paid for it, right? (lol)
How closely is that design plan meshed with Union’s clearly-stated objective to exist primarily to rid the known galaxy of the Uni-T menace? What’s needed when specifically dealing with Uni-T’s creatively-armed but fragile ships is going to be a bit awkward or sometimes just pure overkill when going against, say, Order or Alliance. Absent any inside info you’d care to share, I wonder if the absolute base requirement to balance Union against the 8 vanilla races and also balance Union against Uni-T might be one hidden source of friction. I’m not sure how to advise you here.
The biggest “smoking gun” at present to blame at least some of the present difficulties on is those same economics. What works tactically - incredibly expensive superships able to compete well outside of their own class - appears to crack and then shatter on the strategic level, when the sheer mass of incoming threat forces argues in favor of numerous cheaper warships instead.
A possible countermeasure would be if the Union player was to deliberately under-equip his ships: don’t fill all possible weapons bays or module slots, using the financial savings in order to purchase more hulls instead. Under-equipping also has a very favorable effect on improving a ship’s armor resistance, as well as lightening the hull and therefore improving your speed. More speed also means you take less hits; the larger the fleet battle, the more that’s going to matter. This sharp increase in the number of units you have shooting at the enemy also makes them harder to kill, due to their multiplicity. Beyond a certain point, that’s going to equal and then clearly exceed the worth of the opposite (present) tactic of massive high-tech firepower on a few units.
[-shrug-] “Real boats rock,” after all. We all have mental blind-spots here and there. The important thing is that the oversight’s been caught and a tightly-targeted revision’s being planned. I applaud your attitude!
A very intriguing pojnt! The Union’s clear design emphasis on quality (over-emphasis at times) to compensate for low quantity gets you a navy that is often individually superior but collectively inferior. How does this occur? Those traits are an absolute godsend when in a one-on-one duel or a clash between small squadrons. I’m interested in how those same traits degrade as force sizes scale upwards.
Refer again to my economic “smoking gun” point above. It causes this unpleasant trap to take form, generally in the following order of progression:
If the Union hulls are expensive, you are forced to use fewer of them.
If you have to field fewer of them, you make it easy for an enemy to outnumber you.
If an enemy outnumbers you, that’s many more sets of his shields and armor you have to melt through to get at the crunchy sweet weapons and hull integrity within them in order for you to win. Conversely:
If an enemy outnumbers you, that’s many fewer sets of your shields and armor for him to melt through to get at the crunchy sweet weapons and hull integrity within them in order for him to win.
Taking damage on your small number of high-value ships is a greater danger to you than what the enemy faces when you inflict damage on a signifigantly larger number of his low-value ships. He’s averaged his ability to kill you out among many different platforms; you’ve got something very close to the classic “all the eggs in one basket” problem.
The very capable but ruinously pricey, noticeably lesser number of ships you can put into the battlezone is going to have increasing trouble competing evenly as the number of credits & available pilots goes up for a given mission. That’s pretty much how any race in GSB should function in such circumstances.
If #6 is to be avoided, the cost of the Union ships and equipment has to come down.
If #7 is put into effect, the capabilities of the ships and their equipment also has to come down.
Balancing the price, combat strength, availability & meta-game story background of all Union tech against the above reality at the strategic level (campaign game) is most difficult when also balancing Union ships & items within the almost Taoist, no past/no future realm of purely tactical missions. Something has to give somewhere; the present arrangement is not stable.
Inequalities in weapons performance between Union and an enemy race will tend to warp the above progression in strange directions. 123stw’s found some good examples of excessive tracking, very long optimum range, fast reload time, high penetration & high damage; let alone game-smashing combinations of excessive hull bonuses. But in spite of Union’s generous spaceborne firepower it sounds like the online challenges have managed to construct at least part of the trap I described above, and exploit it accordingly. HHhmmmmmm.
So there’s the trap. The way out of it is, on paper, pretty easy to implement. As a mod designer who I know has a nontrivial attachment to the content in question…not always quite so easy. But necessary, if you desire full interoperability against the various official races as well as against Uni-T. Only you can choose how much re-balance you’re willing to execute in trade for altering and reducing the functionality of various things that I’m sure you’re very fond of. Believe me, I understand that part all too well. [-deep sigh-]
To rewind a bit and also change topic a bit…
Am I to correctly understand that you meant to say that Union fared well when you used it in all of the missions that ship with a copy of GSB and the 4 DLC expansions, but poorly against online challenges against larger and larger threat forces? Please clarify if I somehow read that wrong; you phrased it a bit ambiguously. But if I did understand you correctly, I suppose that the only thing I find surprising about that is that you’re surprised by it. Allow me to explain…
To put it kindly, the danger level and tactical sophistication of the game’s built-in missions are mostly going to lag far, far behind that of the challenges you’d find online against players who have a much sharper “minimaxing” understanding of GSB’s intricacies than Cliff and his playtesters did during this same time two years ago. The built-in missions for the DLC races are somewhat newer, yes, but not that much harder than those in the basic GSB game itself.
Therefore, I’m not entirely certain about the point you were striving to make when you shared that Union did well in the rather dated battles that’re bundled with the game, but got shot down much more often when opposed online against players who have a much wider range of tactics than the AI ever will. Those tactics include, but are far from limited to, the following:
freakishly high levels of tanking, courtesy of Cliff’s dodgy armor dynamics;
weapon spam, which is especially fun with cruiser laser / MWM / plasma;
rushes of all kinds, with guest appearances by renowned superstars Rebel and Swarm;
intentionally under-equipping ships (as detailed way above);
baiting and counter-baiting with cunning use of combat orders;
total avoidance of useless deadwood systems such as Point Defense / Camouflage Field / Cruiser Missile;
using rocket-armed fighters to utterly slaughter typical frigates with ease;
consistently choosing the smallest possible cruiser hulls in order to evade enemy fire control lock-on;
…etc. etc. etc. None of the missions that ship with GSB make use of these much newer and very destructive tactical concepts.
When combined with challenge players’ fine eye for subtle detail and natural “go for the throat” determination, it’s no wonder that Union’s run into a spot of trouble. Whether it’s mainly due to the online missions’ human enemies being much better players than the AI, the noticeable drop in collective fleet efficiency that you mentioned – or both – remains to be determined.
All of the above commentary is intended in a spirit of genuine friendship. Feel free to do what you will with it.
^You left out Tribe, the single most broken thing to exist in the unmodded game. The only reason they stop appearing in competitive play is because we banned them. And perhaps the reason why Armor tank got popular is because I used it as the only advantage other race has over Tribe. This is why the SAC 5 and NEC era spawn what many see as abuse. Even with all those a mediocre Tribe fleet still walks all over them.
Sometimes I wonder if I overemphasize on balance too much, given that I am the only person left from the “challenge and tournament” part of the forum. So even if I list all the things that the SAC guys would do, it is still unlikely that the next person downloading the mod will do any of those things (unless they actually spend the time to read my huge guide). Single player is just not an environment that encourages armor abuse or super slow long range with lures.
Ah yes, Tribe: the bulbous emerald menace. I agree with you fully. If their cursed hullboost value was limited to 0.70, I’d be less unhappy with them. Sometimes I think even your proposed nerf down to 0.8 was still a touch too high. The official value of 1.0 is just too game-smashing; the other penalties don’t make up for that. As for tanking, well…the genie’s out of the bottle – there’s no way it’s going back inside at this late date.
Yes, comrade, at times you do gaze through that particular lens much too deeply. Please take your audience’s perspective & intentions into account – sometimes a more nuanced response is what’s needed.
Now that GSB is done official development, the modders are essentially the sole force pushing things forward these days. We don’t always do it with a sense of restraint or proportion. I attribute that to youthful exuberance and enthusiasm for the subject matter. Certainly no one wants to create a mod with damage in it. Sure, we goof up on occasion; we’re human. More to the point, we’re creative game-modders rather than hardcore competitive game-players. At least when we do err, we do have a fairly tight-knit community that tries not just to shine a bright light upon errors, but to also suggest alternatives and illustrate them with examples from actual gameplay.
As for your huge game guide, it is still a valuable resource and I want to thank you for having poured so very much of your effort into it. I mean that. The principles you espoused in the guide are still true today, regardless of how the player community has contracted. Frankly I think that more modders should read it.
I look forward with great interest to see how Union will continue to sharpen its sword-edge as Cen2050 guides it towards a bright future. After all, that’s why you and I are posting here tonight.
Lol even Ancient vs Microbe took a few revisions to get it “balance enough”, which I define simply as “beatable by a stock race”. So that kinna said something.
See I think modders just have this vision of making every part of their mods really good. Like all the planned strategy is suppose to work but somehow it wouldn’t push something else over the edge. But a lot of times things just don’t work that way. Some things just need to be forgo to prevent it from being abused elsewhere. But it’s hard to just nerf your own mod sometimes even if you know a problem existed. Too much physical, intellectual, and emotional effort has been placed on it. Only after making microbe did I get the will to make the necessary nerf for Ancient.
We all have mental blind-spots here and there. The 
Allow me to explain…
The built-in missions for the DLC races are somewhat