I better effect can be achieved by doing the following: (Not sure you can in CC) Take a picture of the stuff behind your object, make said picture slightly smaller, (90%) and apply the picture to the actor. Makes it look like this thing's cloaking. (just in 2D) I'm not sure this is possible because (I think) actor sprites are read only, and I don't know if you can make a pic of the bg.

This mod is great, I love every part of it, but can you please make the necks a little stronger. It's fairly noticeable when in skirmish mode when you get shot in the neck and your whole torso and head rip apart.

The mod is almost as sexy as crobotech, but with more military settings(which is cool).

I hope this mod will get a major update by B23. I love it.

yeah.


personally i think it's a bit clunky but that's just me. crobo feels better with the way bubs balances it, he always gets offsets right too.



there aren't many perfect mods out there, hopefully this one will become one of them.

Crobos aren't balanced. At all. This is.

Honestly, Crobotech is what initially inspired me to really balance my stuff. Then at some point I realized they weren't that balanced either, so I went beyond it.

not that balance, just the general feel of the crobos is right

This mod is acually very well balanced. each unit costs just right. and even though they die fairly easily compared to some of the other mods out there, the guns they have back that up.

True. This mod is really more like real life units than invincible kill-everything-without-getting-hurt stuff.

Sweet mods though :D

Dying easily compared to other mods means jack. A Tengu is hard as nails when compared to a vanilla unit. Fortunately, they're still soft enough that you can't just go charging headlong in. I say that Darlos did a much better job than most keeping his mod's power level reasonable.

Glad everybody finds this mod balanced in a cost-to-effectiveness sort of way.

I realized at one point that very VERY minor changes to an actor actually make them much stronger than vanilla actors. The thing that really makes my tengus tougher than coalition heavies? The fact that you HAVE to destroy their helmet to get at their head. Besides that, the tengus actually take the same number of hits on their helmet, head, torso, and torso armor as a coalition heavy does. The only parts of their bodies where they take more hits are on the arms and legs, and not by much.

Between that, a slight increase in resistance to impacts, and less bleeding, we have something that clearly outranks the strongest vanilla units, though is still killable by them. And the changes in values aren't really that drastically different. Mods that give their actors even double the amounts of more than one of the health/defense/resistance values of the strongest vanilla units are wildly overdoing it, unless its supposed to be an intentional super-unit. Sadly, based off of this, many mods have nothing but super units.

While I won't argue that these other modders should stop whatever they're doing because of this, since they are their own mods, it would be nice to see more modders REALLY try to make something that plays nice with the vanilla stuff, so a player doesn't have to blatantly choose between using a new mod faction or using the vanilla ones, as what commonly occurs.

EDIT: oh, and tengus are faster too. That, too, is actually a big deal. Though it can be circumvented by the enemy with certain base setups.

Listen to this man. Balance is not only important for facing vanilla content, but other mods as well. If all mods were balanced with vanilla, they would all be balanced with each other. It would be nice if strong units against vanilla would be strong against other mods, and vice versa.

My most recent experience with this issue was Snake vs. Crobos. While Snake is very strong against vanilla, being able to strike at range with moderately powered weapons, his rifle shots literally bounce off of crobos armor. Now, I realize the ridiculity of trying to balance mods against every other mod, but come on, it's Snake! still I think every modder overdoes it at least once in a while.

Even better would be if a general strength guide were made:

Armor--
Light: Low GWL, Wounded by SMG
Medium: Medium GWL, Wounded by SMG
Heavy: Medium GWL, SMG glances off, wounded by AK-47

And so, for practical values like speed, body integrity, jetpack, guns, etc.

Actually, from my experiences, no actor should ever fully resist even weak bullets. The effect of suddenly eliminating an entire tier of weapons from being effective against an actor means that that actor will be instant win against any cheaply outfitted unit. While a powerful unit should probably stand a very good chance of beating that cheap actor, there still needs to be some kind of gradual "wear down" in any kind of RTS game in order for powerful units to not be completely invincible in any circumstance. Even if the cheap actor only gets a hit or two on the strong actor's armor, thats still two less hits later opposing actors will have to land in order to destory the strong actor's armor. This is absolutely necessary for balance, trust me.

Not saying there should never be any kind of invincibility. But it should only ever be temporary.

Also, there doesn't need to be any kind of standardization set up because the vanilla actor script basically already provides it. Look at the differences between skeletons, zombies, dummies, ronin, and coalition in their various endurance values (GibImpulseLimit, GibWoundLimit, JointStrength, JointStiffness, ImpulseDamageThreshold) and the various wound emitter attributes) and then use those differences as factors. So if you want a unit that can take more hits to its head (not including helmet), find the vanilla unit that has the highest GibWoundLimit to its head, find the units with GibWoundLimits just below that, and then use that difference as a factor for making your unit's head's GibWoundLimit higher. So if the difference is 2, make your strong unit take 2 more hits than the toughest vanilla unit. Its that simple.

Here's a comparison between the dummy and the heavy coalition:
Dummy Head:
JointStrength: 45
JointStiffness: 0.1
GibWoundLimit: 4

Coalition Head:
JointStrength: 25
JointStiffness: 0.1
GibWoundLimit: 6

Dummy Arm:
JointStrength: 85
JointStiffness: 0.5
GibWoundLimit: 3

Coalition Heavy Arm:
JointStrength: 100
JointStiffness: 0.5
GibWoundLimit: 3

Dummy Torso:
ImpulseDamageThreshold: 1700
GibImpulseLimit: 1900
GibWoundLimit: 8

Coalition Heavy Torso:
ImpulseDamageThreshold: 1600
GibImpulseLimit: 2500
GibWoundLimit: 25

Beyond the tradeoff between their heads, the coalition heavy clearly has the better numbers. There's a particularly large discrepency between the torsos, though that's to be expected when one is a lithe skeletal robot and the other is a big fleshy kevlar-covered humanoid. Plus, with the way this game is set up, head and limb stats tend to be more important than torso stats anyway. But anyway, we could possibly use the differences in numbers here to make a new, tougher unit that isn't TOO much tougher. Like, perhaps something that'd warrant a cost of about 20-30 more gold than the coalition heavy. You could take the few places where the dummy is better than the soldier and make your new unit either equivalent or slightly better than the dummy in those places. This right away would make your unit clearly better than all other vanilla units, even though it wouldn't have that huge of an effect on its performance. Then you could enhance all GibWoundLimits by just 1 or 2, or increase joint strengths by 40, or so on and so forth. And this isn't even considering wounds (the dummy doesn't really bleed, which is an advantage) or material attributes. Just do all of these minor things, and you have a unit that is relatively much stronger than any vanilla unit, but still "plays nicely" with them.

Basically, as long as you keep referencing back to the vanilla actors, weapons, etc, you can keep your own mod "grounded in reality" enough to where it will be balanced. Heck, you might even want to make something that is stat-wise weaker than most vanilla units, but gives some other kind of advantage (very fast, very small, special effects, etc). "More power," despite Tim Taylor's insistence, isn't always the answer.

About weapon tier effectiveness: consider a tank, shooting it with a pistol just doesn't work. I guess this is mostly considering AHumans, but that's what I had in mind. Though I guess with sufficient wear... Considering the style of the game, You're probably right.

Yeah I guess its mostly principle. Vanilla actors are more or less the standard, and that's what I meant. The point is to not overdo it unless that's the purpose of the mod (nukes, lolwtfsuperheroactors, etc.)



Anyway, what all different kinds of weapons are you planning on having multiple ammo types with? Shotguns, I think, would be an excellent choice because they do in real life. Also rubber bullets. Are you going to have tracers, incendiary, and AP ammo all selectable? Or not quite so in depth?

Well, in reality, if you shot a tank, it would leave some kind of mark. But no, it wouldn't ever get you anywhere, either.

But also in real life, anti-tank weapons are weapons that, rather than destroying the armor by damaging it a lot, attempt to completely bypass the armor by plowing through it and damaging sensitive internals. Ideally in CC, you'd set it up so something had a layer of armor that, though it could be damaged, would take an insane number of hits. But if you hit it with something that was strong enough to cause both an entrance and an exit wound on the armor, it would get through and damage the internal body. This can't be simulated in CC though, so right now a "tank" is just something that takes a lot of hits to destroy its armor before you can damage the internals. Perhaps someone could design a workaround with lua, but Data told me long ago he'd consider the issue as well. Not sure what that will result in.


I'll have it as in-depth as I can possibly get it. So yes, everything that fires rife-type bullets will have regular rounds, incendiary rounds, and armor-piercing rounds. The shotgun will have different ammo as well. Regular buckshot, slugs, and even small grenade-like rounds. The shotgun actually has two magazines, and each one will be able to be loaded with a different type of ammo, giving it versatility. Rifles will be able to be given underslung shotguns, which can load one ammo type at a time and probably hold about 4 rounds. Rifles will also be able to be given underslung grenade launchers, which can be loaded with one grenade at a time. As I said earlier, there will be HE grenades, incendiary grenades, chaff grenades, ice grenades, and electric grenades. The anti-material rifle will probably get different rounds, with the crazy explosive one it has now being the most expensive. The mortar launcher will become an all-purpose launcher, with various things that can be loaded into it, probably mirroring the regular grenade types. The rocket launcher will probably follow the same logic, though with the addition of anti-armor rounds. Hand grenades will follow the same grenade pattern, and probably sit somewhere between launched grenades and mortars in power. Other weapons, both for shoguns and turrets, will follow similar logic as described above, in the case of things that fire bullets or explosives. The flamethrower is a specific case, where you get to choose between high-yield jet fuel (what it uses now) or lower-yield napalm, which flies further and sticks to things for a while, but doesn't burn as hotly. Actually, the shogun might come equipped with tanks of both, and you just press either primary or alternate fire to spray one or the other. Now that I think about it, perhaps an interesting mechanic would be to have it so a shogun equipped with a heavy weapon can only hold two different ammo types (assuming it has different ammo types), and they're both loaded already and you just fire one or the other in the same way. With normal weapons, you can just carry as many ammo types as you can afford.

And in talking about my previous rant, I remembered something: regenerating armor and wounds. An idea I had a while back was for my units to gradually repair damage to their armor and body, losing wounds and regaining health. Set them back somewhere for a while and they're good as new. If I did this, I'd probably actually make the shinobi armor take LESS hits than the coalition helmet and breastplate... perhaps only by one hit though (4 instead of 5). It is supposed to be a stealth suit after all, not combat armor.