One of the great things about CC is the great quantity and variety of mods. I just find it a shame that they rarely seem to be balanced in terms of price and power with the vanilla tech. I'll choose a tech to defend with and one to defend from, and either it will be ridiculously easy or ridiculously difficult, but not in the fun way. powerful stuff should cost an arm and a leg, and cheap stuff should be crap. I know some mods are meant to be overpowered and crazy and that's fine, and they are fun to use too, I'm not talking about those, however. in any case, this isn't an angry outcry at the modders, I'm more just curious why there isn't much adherence to the vanilla power/prices, and what people thoughts are?

At least when I created my first mod, I didn't took vanilla stuff as a standard or anything. Instead, my standards where usually modded things. For example, the first sniper rifle I created was intended to take down an Oni from DarkStorm in a couple of shots; againts vanilla, a single hit anywhere was an instant-kill.

In that first mod I made, stuff was kinda overpowered, so I decided to make it all very expensive, but in the end, it made everything boring, because on a regular skirmish with 6000 oz I could only place like five or six guards armed with sniper rifles and make a small bunker, spending around 4500 oz. And it didn't matter how tough they were, a random dropship engine still crushed them to death, along with their very expensive weaponry.

But that was in my old days of modding, now when I mod stuff I try to make it more "realistic", like, a handgun won't always damage armored actors and shotguns will have short range; but sometimes, modded stuff will be just plainly overpowered because that's it's nature. Like, the tesla tower I created could easily kill stuff on a single hit (at least on early stages) because it shot lightning. It would have been boring to shoot that and just make a couple of wounds. And just like my tesla tower, people like to mod things like that: nukes, sniper rifles with explosive bullets, autocannons that shoot uranium slugs, acid sprayers, orbital lasers, and the list goes on.

The predominate cause of this is that there isn't much to balance in Cortex Command as it is; gold just isn't that scarce of a resource as it stands, and most difficulty settings on most of the missions start you out with more than enough to send kamikaze dropships out to solve all your problems for you, and other such cheap tactics. Most of the fun (for me at least, I'm obviously not trying to adjudicate how you play the game) comes from setting out with self imposed limitations in mind and watching the game play out. So if you play the game in that way, as most people do, gold prices aren't really that relevant to you, and trying to make actors guns and craft balanced in terms of price is usually a low priority.

Also, the problem with gold is that most people use money cheats or, at least on B23 and before, they changed the starting funds of skirmishes.

I usually made a modded version of the heavy sniper rifle that cost -10,000 so that I could actually afford most of the things in mods. Especially when I was testing out how many bombs I would need to level the whole field. But that was long ago.

i think what we need for CC is a golden standard for munitions and
armor.


like how much a 7.62 FMJ bullet weighs and what its sharpness is. so
every mod would use that weight and sharpness for anything that fired a
7.62 FMJ round. cartridges vary alot so the bullet velocity can be nearly
anything really.


if we at least created a set of guidelines and consistency modding would be much easier and not that inhibited.

Reminds me of this thread.

Every modder in CC should read that so we could make some sort of "community standard".

and if needed we could do the same for more futuristic arms and armor.


but honestly i don't think it's to necessary, it's pretty well laid out that weapons that fire bullets are probably gonna be the most widespread because they're incredibly cheap, easy to make and maintain and are very user friendly.


you really think that laser guided RPG/missile system that plugs into your clone's head costs less just cause it's the future?


all the more exotic and futuristic weapons wouldn't really need a standard. in terms of balance they don't follow the standard but more use it as a reference for gameplay fairness and well.. balance reasons reasons.

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea for modders to get together and plan this stuff out. It is a little annoying when there are so many awesome mods and almost none of them play nice together, and most of them are 90x as powerful as vanilla.

I think I should reccomend something that I used to use as a bit of a creed when modding some other games.

Whenever modding something thing of 2 things:
1) how does this compare to the base game, does it compliment it or obsolete it? which one of these were you going for?
2) are the price scales consistent with the rates of vanilla? is this still fun?

these things are a bit hard in B26, but from the sounds of things it may be a bit easier in B27.

Just imagine playing with the Pelian Army in the metagame against Dummies or Ronins, it would be too easy and boring, if you order an heavy pelian soldier with the Hellfire and the Chopper (who has tried the mod will know of what I'm talking about).

Now that the metagame is playable, which brings mods and vanilla content together in a theoretically balanced environment, modders will probably move toward more balanced content. Until now, the only real merit to a mod has been how fun it is to blow things up with it, so balance hasn't been as much of an issue.

yeah, the best faction mods will be balanced in a good way.



there's less of a focus on skirmish (which was the only thing to really do up until now) and more on the metagame.


i'd say it wouldn't be unlikely if lots of developers of faction mods balanced their stuff in sync with vanilla stuff.