Version 1.15 released.

This includes cleanup and coding on the Imperatus guns, small changes to the Imperatus sprites; Imperatus Combat Robot is harder to kill. Also their jetpack effects have been made cooler, but aren't quite done-done yet; I'm still learning how to do subtle stuff with this engine's approach to particles

Ronin female resprites / touchup.

Ronin Brain defined (but I'm not entirely done with her full code yet).

Need to finish the Imperatus delivery vehicle and special commander, and code them to not get healed by Medics, but get healed by something that can heal machines.

Still, they're closer to finally feeling like a complete faction and I'm sure they'll get there over the weekend

Built the first WIP of the Imperatus Loadouts, got the Insertion Pod coded up / animated to replace the placeholder Drop Crate II.


Three on one vs. the AI is now hard enough I'm only winning about half the time. Here I tried everything; troop drops, napalm dropped in boxes, the works. Ironically, it only made it a little easier for the AI to get in my nice comfy hole and blow me away


Still need to get the Imperatus Brain art done, then it's time for another release

Is everything going like super fast a feature? if so this mod makes the game go at a nice speed

One more thing, sometimes, I spawn in some troopers of other mods and when I try to jump or jet, they sink right into the floor, with heavy weaponry or not. Been bugging me, while the new movement is not really supported for mods, is there any fix? Thanks

This mod is a CC total conversion... it usually don't work with other mods.

There's a fix, it's just non-trivial; honestly, I didn't think about mods using non-custom jetpacks, sorry about that.

I'll get that done Sunday when I put out another point release

So is this mod performance enchanceing also? i noticed that jetpacks go faster and people walk faster and such

Yeah, noticed that too. Makes the original CC really great. Mod or not, I like to have my space marines and mercenaries walk normally and not trip over a piece of dust. I also appreciate xeno for taking his time for this great mod.

Have you noticed you joined the day after i joined? on topic this mod makes the AI a threat finaly

This mod WAS created to enhance Cortex Command.

Played with this mod quite a bit over the last week or so and I must say it has some good things going for it.

I love a lot about how the actors move around much easier, don't ragdoll everywhere, and don't get disarmed all the time. It makes the game much less annoying and Data should take note when it comes to improving these kind of things in vanilla. (Seriously, just getting up a ladder is a huge pain in the @$$ in vanilla.)

That being said, there are many balance changes I think the author here should really consider. As it stands, many elements of the the game such as jetpack strength and weapon fire rate have been amped up soo much it drastically changes the pacing of the game . This wouldn't be a huge problem except part of CC's gameplay mechanic is centered around strategy, thus making things move too fast severely limits what kind of tactics a human player can hope to implement during a typical combat scenario. Additionally, the way some units have been added/modified in certain factions makes them very overpowered against other factions.

Some examples:

- Firing rates and weapon power have been increased on so many weapons that it allows actors too cut thru base defenses like doors and barricades virtually instantaneously. I'd say a 15 - 25% reduction across the board is in order.

- Rocket packs are so powerful now that they can easily send an actor into orbit regardless how much they're carrying. This makes for interesting airborne firefights, but makes many ground based defences like pits or walls useless. As such, it allows all units to transverse terrain very quickly which really affects the games pacing again. While I would not wish to return to vanilla jet-packs, I feel there must be a better compromise when it comes to allowing heavily armed units to fly across the entire map.

- New Imperatus items seem very cheap considering how powerful they are.

- Acrabs like the Dreadnought have gone from very immobile to Hyper-mobile now. By adding super-powerful jumpjets, incredible running speed, and a Phalanx-like machine gun it makes them far too easy to use to simply rambo a base by themselves. Also note that the jump jets are so powerful now they can cause the Dreadnought to severely hurt itself when in tunnels. Perhaps lowering the movement speed and making the Acrabs able to jump instead of fly would be a more balanced solution?

- Dummy machine-gun turret seems to do more damage than the Gatling turret.

- Dummy unit-with-box-for-a-head (I forgot its real name) is impervious against things like Dreadnought fire and the units armed with a thumpers? (Is this intentional?)

- Units like Browncoats can regen over their maximum health. (Probably a bug but figured I'd list it anyway.)

There's probably other things I've forgot to mention, but the list above covers most of my major concerns so far.

Xeno, I do like your mod a lot which is why I'm criticizing it. I hope you consider the points I've made. I truely think if you toned certain aspects of it down you'd have a real winner here.

Version 1.16 released.

Had a few minutes, so here's a quick update.

Fixes: backwards compatibility with older mods using non-custom jetpacks. Gordon went missing in an edit (bad xeno, bad! no treat for u!) and is back. The MegaColt no longer does much terrain damage.

Enhances: All of the standard faction's jumpjet effects. Regard them all as temporary, however, this was a quickie edit to get them all in place. I'll visually differentiate them more when I get time.

Viper's script includes super-healing, per her description. She's the closest the Ronin get to an action hero now.

Adds: Insertion Pod, Light Insertion Pod; these are Imperatus-only techs that replace the Drop Crate II. The Light Insertion Pod will get a new sprite to differentiate it when I have some free time

[EDIT]Oh, and it adds the first rough-draft of the Imperatus Loadouts, too. Have fun [/EDIT]

@Fyllm:

Great points, thanks very much for the feedback. Sorry for not replying earlier, RL has been pretty busy today

Yeah. Y'know what made me decide that if there was ever a real Campaign, I'd make a mod for this engine? Maginot. It was, erm, an angry-gamer moment for me, when I was about to win, legit, on Nuts! and then lost because my fricking Brain couldn't get up the !#!@#!@#!@%% tunnel.

It's moments like those in CC that led me to believe that there was a need for this kind of mod

I think that you'll find that, with some practice and using the new engine features, you can deal with a lot of this. For example, we're allowed to make and save custom Presets; so if there's a specialist build you need a lot, you can set it up pretty easily. So if you need a "demo dude", set him up during a defense you're pretty sure you'll win.

The thing that's a bit irksome is that not only can we not save those custom Presets permanently without INI editing, the permanent-damage-to-bases and the engine not resetting the map means that the human player can use Customize to their advantage, hugely, on the defensive.

I never really thought of the doors as serious impediments in Vanilla, but I can see your point. Now that the pace has gone up, having a barrier that is actually useful as a barrier would be a good thing.

Probably the easiest solution there is to buff the doors, and in the case of weapons with rapid fire, tone them down a bit where it's necessary.

I'm inclined to nerf them in various ways that don't include lowering minigun ROF, if possible; the whole point of miniguns is ROF and I'd like to approach their balance with that in mind.

Heck, I might just put out an experimental release where doors aren't breachable with small arms short of something really nasty like an RPG or a placed explosive, and if that's a good thing or not. That said, one of the goals remains to make sure that the defensive side doesn't have such an absurd advantage, so that defending players will need to take an active part in the defense and the AI, if it manages to land in force and doesn't run out of money, can be a credible threat.

I agree, this is an area that needs more thought. I'm having severe problems getting around the engine's limitations here, though; we don't have direct control over jetpack "refuel" rates, time spent "empty", etc., and the one attempt I made at developing a cooldown timer had some severe drawbacks. I'll look at this again.

I haven't played enough with them to have an opinion, so I'd like some specific feedback on this point, going case by case. Gotta remember they're still just barely "finished" by my standards, and not very polished yet.

I'm perfectly willing to buff costs for their stuff by 50% in the next version if that'd give us a closer number and go from there.

Let's try that out, it's pretty easy to tone them down.

The bigger problem here is that, well, there is no controlling "tactical" AI that will buy anti-tank units (which certainly exist; for example, the Dummy's Impulse Cannon is an excellent tank-killer) and attack your tank (or tank-like thing).

Getting that done is going to take some thought.

This is on purpose; one of the big problems the Dummies have is that their power on defense is pretty low, and the Browncoats roll 'em up like cheap carpet if they don't have some tough static defenses. I've been considering re-arming the Coalition version to also handle heavy enemies a bit better, but I haven't gotten around to spriting it yet. The Imperatus one is already fine, imo.

Dreadnought fire, yes, Thumpers, no. The GPU's supposed to be a pretty heavy character, but Thumpers have effectively gotten nerfed by other changes and I have pretty much left them at Vanilla levels of damage. That can get fixed pretty easily.

It's an annoying bug, because it shouldn't be happening at all. There is some seriously-weird stuff happening with Lua on this engine.

Hi! This mod looks really cool, but i can't get it to work. I've unzipped and installed the latest version of the mod, with the b27 version of CC, but I get these error message...
"Failed to load palette from bitmap with following path:

Base.rte/palette.bmp"
and
"Failed to load datafile object with following path and name:

Base.rte/Effects/Glows/YellowTiny"
If anyone could help, I would appreciate it, because this mod looks really fun...
thanks!

Are you using the Humble Indie Bundle of CC? If so, then it won't work. You have to download the newest version from http://licensing.datarealms.com/licensing/ for it to work.