a1. Why do you needed these 3 variants of the ships? Is there a story related reason for them?

a2. Why must MK3 this kind of absolutely OP? Is there some mod related need for these values?

a3. Why have you classified in standard faction shipyards buyable MK1 as battleship, but the only at a new factions shipyard available variants as carrier? They are basically the same.

a4. Fits the mod and the values to the unmodded universe ships? Or are they there also massively stronger?

a5. Have you thought about a immersive life of this mod next to other (ship) mods?


Without knowledge of your mods story line and/or your own mechanics and without your answers to above questions.

As XR ship mod + VRO user don't want to miss the ships from XR ship pack, they give XL freighter/ miner, more faction based destroyers and battleships, who work pretty well with VROs Titan as highest class. Actually the most ships with their stats break the immersion to live side by side with XR ship pack and also VRO.

This is just a basic idea, to fit them to the VRO universe and other mods. I most likely do only translate mods and tweak some values in mods to fit smooth in a specific environment, but i absolutely know, how time consuming modding is. I don't want to harm you.

Explanation:
I use the old X2-X3 classification to make it more clear, this L/ XL is garbage and too long.
M1 = Carrier
M2 = was destroyer class, what was there often battle ships
+ shows the strenght above the standard power
shield+hull = MJ

With that in mind, i would say in general:

s1. Standard MK1
For old factions available MK 1 carrier/ battleships, i would like to see them on par with actual carrier/ battleships:

- classified as Carrier (with their many docks+capacity/ m-dock)
- stripped down fire power to a level around 2.5-3.2k
- MJ around 650-850k
- heavy loadout cost 70-90M

That makes them M1/2 hybrid.Carriers, who can defend itself and give, compared to standard carrier class, over average front support, but don't have full hull+shield integrity of dedicated carriers. You already have some ships at the 3k weapon power mark, what is great.

s2. Protector MK1
- stripped down fire power to a level around 3.8-4.5k
- MJ combined around 1400-1900k
- heavy loadout cost 120-140M (or adequate ress costs)

This is the region, where Titan lives, what i call M2+. Because they are hybrid, they should have less firepower or hull+shield as dedicated Titan battleship. They are M1/M2+ then. As a exception also Egosofts Raptor lives here, but this guy has not best turret coverage and has horrible shield strength (10k weapon power @ 1100k MJ, <200k shield).

Xenon K is not completely lost against this level and Xenon "i" has also enough power to live here comfortably in a 1on1 AI fight. "i" has 8.3k weapon power @ 2700k hull+shield, what i would call M2++.

s.3 Protector MK3
- stripped down fire power to max 8-10k
- MJ combined around 2500k-3000k
- heavy loadout cost 200M-250M (or adequate ress costs)

This is where Xenon "i" lives, more or less. M1/2++ The doubled firepower over M1/2+ should be more than enough. You go through a single M2 in no time, but 2 of them might be more challenging.


Conclusion:
Without changing in a more sophisticated way, there is no real need to change anything substiancially. I also couldn't check all ships, Zyrth don't like me.

Even if you lower the speed/ agility of the protector MK1/MK3, they remain (completely) op. You turned many values up, especially the turrets, what makes it hard to change something with the given setup.

If you can think about a balanced version, i would offer my help with that.

Ty for your detailed post. I will answer when i am back at home in 2 days.

I agree with most things mentioned by Leon: I gave your mod a try once you made the VRO patch, especially because I fancied to switch for my fleet from my XR ship pack's Arawns and Taranis' to yours, as yours can have paintmods applied (they are overall a better dedicated model port). But the stats are completely unbalanced and incredibly OP, so I soon uninstalled and reverted the save.

This while XR ship pack's ships already are slightly OP compared to base VRO balance (the Xenon have a much harder time when you have those ships installed: because they are just about fine IS, but OOS having more turrets than the average tends to influence the outcome way too much, which is an inherent engine issue with how borked OOS combat is). In a "vanilla" VRO galaxy every non ROR ship would be even more completely useless.

I get the idea of having a "special" pool of ships available to the player that the AI doesn't use (except for ROR specific areas and depending on how you set the mod options, which is a great feature), so indeed I wouldn't mind them being a bit "special", with some further advantages compared to the rest, but this goes way, way too far, to the point of completely breaking any game balance: with ROR everything else in the galaxy becomes completely obsolete and only ROR specific engagements can still be challenging and, as such, fun. Basically, this means that ROR instead of expanding the game, unintentionally shrinks it, as 99% of what's in it becomes virtually unviable.

I would pretty much peek at the Ship Pack's balance and more or less mirror it, with slight bonuses at best from MK1 to MK3 variants focusing on a certain aspect. I'm talking in the range of 5-10% in firepower/defense, or some more S/M storage for dedicated carriers, or again some more specialized ships (more firepower at the cost of less shielding or the opposite, stronger all around but even slower than usual making them almost static fortresses, this kind of rationale). Enough to make you desire those ships for yourself for being among the best ones in a specific role, while not as much as making them virtually invulnerable and in a completely different class of ships that are the best at everything.
If the player wants to have really OP ships, anyway, the game already offers you this chance via ship/equipment mods: no point in making a base ship - before applying mods - already this OP.

The Is are a good point of reference for superships whose power stats should be around the top tier, being matched at best, or they'd lose all their significance. Even when they are, as stated, because of how OOS combat works, a VRO Titan (or a Ship Pack Arawn/Starcatcher etc) can already engage with even two of them and often still win (which shouldn't happen on paper), if you go even further than that then there's little fun to have against no challenge.

X3 balance would be another good conceptual inspiration: the Terran ships were indeed usually the best in their class, with a couple of unique outliers, but not so much as to make every other race ship pointless. Even the Valhalla, which was exceptionally OP compared to everything else, was so slow that its only use was as a dedicated static fortress. This is a concept that could go well with your protectors: stronger and exceptional at defending their sector, as they are meant to do, but useless for anything else.

Originally posted by Kadatherion:

This while XR ship pack's ships already are slightly OP compared to base VRO balance (the Xenon have a much harder time...

I get the idea of having a "special" pool of ships ...wouldn't mind them being a bit "special", with some further advantages compared to the rest, ...

I would pretty much peek at the Ship Pack's balance...

The Is are a good point of reference for superships ...

X3 balance....

I can only agree to all those parts.

X3 balance was very well made, imo. Especially to use a speed nerf for these freaking valhalla fortresses or the battleship sized destroyers generally.

Sadly with X4 they shrinked the world to a third of X3 size and at same time they added stupid super highways and travel mode, so ships, even slow ships can be everywhere in a relatively short amount of time.

True, XR ships are already on top of the food chain, i think only rattlesnake and raptor from Egosoft can be competive to some of them. Rattle with 4 front guns + 4 xl-turrets, raptor with it's 10k MW combined weapon power. Perhaps they made that for the free splits, they are a bit isolated and in my actual game they struggle badly.
It would have been fair/balanced, to give splits and teladi a own mothership with XR ships or at least set the makerace to split/teladi too. But at same time that would've been unfair to Xenon. ^^

Originally posted by Le Leon:

True, XR ships are already on top of the food chain, i think only rattlesnake and raptor from Egosoft can be competive to some of them. Rattle with 4 front guns + 4 xl-turrets, raptor with it's 10k MW combined weapon power. Perhaps they made that for the free splits, they are a bit isolated and in my actual game they struggle badly.
It would have been fair/balanced, to give splits and teladi a own mothership with XR ships or at least set the makerace to split/teladi too. But at same time that would've been unfair to Xenon. ^^

The issue with the Split is twofold:

1) Their wharves are bugged. They don't have piers, so L/XL ships can't dock there. This means only M traders can supply them, which leads to them getting short on resources pretty fast. This creates a loop that quickly halts their economy: when they do begin to struggle they can't build M ships anymore, which are the only ones able to supply them, so everything - and I mean everything - stops, as the Shipyards themselves soon follow buckling under the now widespread shortage.

2) FRF fare even worse because they don't have a military. Their jobs file pretty much only builds civilians and a few semi-pirates. And they never expand building defense platform in other sectors. This is intended, as they are supposed to be under Patriarchy rule, but this also means a single faction has to defend the territory of two. They'd be spread too thin even if everything was working fine, but with the wharves bug? The FRF end up being not only passive as intended, but pretty much dead in a matter of a few dozens hours, and the Patriarchy itself usually soon follows.

Apart from this, while it's true XR ships are indeed better than most vanilla equivalents, they also are spread around most factions, so the balance is still there: they pretty much become a new top tier to work towards, but as everyone has access to some of them the balance is pretty much preserved. The only ones that suffer are those faction that don't have (or have very few) of them, either because the Split are a new entry to the game and as such the mod has still to catch up with a couple new ships for them, or because the Xenon didn't get new toys to play with. Luckily VRO Xenons are a bit beefed up already, plus there's other mods (FOCW especially) that can give them the push they need to even the field.

This is pretty much the problem with ROR balance: that it's aimed only at the player - or anyway at its own little new corner of the galaxy - while everything else stays the same. But when the player is given almost exclusive access to "I win button" ships, then he has no use for anything else, and things get boring quick. Which is why, like you, I'm all for a rebalance: it's ok for them to be special and unique in some way, and a chance to build a player faction with ships nobody else uses so that you feel more like a separate entity in the galaxy, but this should still come with advantages AND disadvantages. Pretty much like it was in X3 when you happened to stick with OTAS ships for your fleet because there were very few of them in the hands of the AI, thus they felt "yours".

Originally posted by Kadatherion:

The issue with the Split is twofold:

1) Their wharves are bugged.

2) FRF

1. Zyarth hates me, so i can't see their economy in a good term.

2. I don't think, it was the best design idea. Especially when they don't try to defend and reclaim sectors. So they are on same level as green scale, waiting to die. Even Zyarth has taken over a sector from FRF by building a second defense station. Crazy.
But to add battleships/destroyers won't fix the problem, when their AI logic stays the same and they act as toothless puppies.

3. Actually Xenon are wealthy (until now without FOCW). They took Iana from Argon, took 3 sectors from FRF, one they lost to Teladi after (i think, because i cleared sector and FRF built nothing). They also claimed 2 sectors without factions.

Originally posted by Le Leon:

2. I don't think, it was the best design idea. Especially when they don't try to defend and reclaim sectors. So they are on same level as green scale, waiting to die. Even Zyarth has taken over a sector from FRF by building a second defense station. Crazy.
But to add battleships/destroyers won't fix the problem, when their AI logic stays the same and they act as toothless puppies.

3. Actually Xenon are wealthy (until now without FOCW). They took Iana from Argon, took 3 sectors from FRF, one they lost to Teladi after (i think, because i cleared sector and FRF built nothing). They also claimed 2 sectors without factions.

2) No doubt, but as with the ship pack the Split are put even more at a disadvantage by having a weaker fleet overall (remember they get pressured by the Argon as well), then their inevitabile doom can only come even quicker. Their unique vanilla ships - even with VRO rebalancing them - are great in the player's hands, but for the AI they are way too frail to survive long in OOS combat, ship pack ones eat them for breakfast.

If they were to also get a couple of those megatransporters the ship pack adds, that might help their economy a bit too (granted, they wouldn't be able to dock at wharves, so the underlying issue would still be there, but at least the shipyards would have some better ware gatherers for them).

3) VRO has recently reverted some nerfs to its beefed up Xenon so they fare better, but long term if you have the ship pack (not to mention the Faction Enhancer) they can still tend to lose ground as the game advances and factions get their economies running better (in no short part thanks to the player, that sustains the holes in the economy with his own traders and stations, but GOD also makes the AI build many stations as the game progresses).
This is because Xenon invasions can hardly deal much damage as their Ks and Vs lose against them OOS pretty quickly before being able to deal much lasting damage, and only the few Is can put up a fight. So while the Xenon have to keep trying again and again wasting their resources, the Commonwealth factions usually win in the long term thanks to much less war weariness. Split territory however is free for the taking, for the reasons mentioned above.

But, again, that's not much of an issue: if your galaxy is going fine then nothing you have to do, if you begin to see the Xenon lose too much ground too quickly for your tastes, FOCW can be used to give them a few more miners and capitals for their invasions, so that they can catch up in quantity what they've lost to the ship pack in actual quality.

We've gone a bit OT though, all this is quite unrelated to ROR balancing, sorry Sco81 :P

I edited my first post with my intention of the mod.

Yeah, mk3 ships are op, but no one must buy these, it is your choice.
So if you dont want it, dont buy it.
The mk1 variants shouldnt be way better then the VRO battleships, but even then, the ROR ships are bigger and shall be fill the hole of M0 ships.

Forget about protector ships, these are for the AI only to defend their core sectors. So no player is able to get one of these.

And to answer your questions:

a1. Why do you needed these 3 variants of the ships? Is there a story related reason for them?

I wrote anything in the first post i think.

a2. Why must MK3 this kind of absolutely OP? Is there some mod related need for these values?

I started with XRebirth in mind, where all ships got a lot of guns. My first ships were Taranis, Arawn and Sucellus with nearly equal numbers of turrets like the XR variants.

a3. Why have you classified in standard faction shipyards buyable MK1 as battleship, but the only at a new factions shipyard available variants as carrier? They are basically the same.

This must be a bug i think, every ship which is buyable for the player should be a "battleship" but the Arawn.
Protector ships (not buyable) should be carriers.

a4. Fits the mod and the values to the unmodded universe ships? Or are they there also massively stronger?

They are stronger, but like i already said, the purpose was to create a M0 class.

a5. Have you thought about a immersive life of this mod next to other (ship) mods?

Not yet.


Ofc i can reduce the turret count or the hull size of mk3 variants, but where is the point to satisfy everyone?
Many people use the mod to get strong M0 class ships and if you dont like the mk3 variants, it is up to you to buy these.
You have always the choice to not buy them and use the mk1 variants.
This was my plan in the past to bring both (mk1 and mk3) in one mod and let the player choose.

Thanks for your answers. Now i better understand your intension.

Adding that mod will give me much more to do, not only are many ships like destroyer class obsolete, so i have to buy M0 here and there to compensate the now almost useless destroyers.

Also the commonwealth factions have to do this, if they have this in their script with the mod. Even if they can buy them, they normally don't spawn that many battleships and so, same perhaps with M0.
But AI is not that clever, so i have to buy a s..tload more ROR MK1 for all the commonwealth sectors i need to trade with, to get money for more M0 ships to counter the new faction, who tries to get rid of the whole universe economy, if i don't stop them.

Xenon, who are already not the best in OOS combat can't compete and are in my hand of will. Let i stay them a needle in my ass or just do i rush them out of their remaining sectors with 1-2 M0 MK1. Only the "i" were some threat, with ROR ships this is gone.

ROR seems to try to be a god level content mod, not necessary/ recommened for a healthy game. I really would have seen the new faction, but not at cost of the whole economy life.

Be fair, there was no gap to fill with M0. M0 try to be on top of all, they don't integrate themself into the game economy, they bulldozer it at some point. Something like Phoenix was the top class, but M0 MK1/MK3 go far beyond that. MK3 is the cheat class of ships. ^^

But it's all a matter of taste. What i ask myself is, could have the raiders faction worked without these new power level ships, but with ships that are battleship level.

Did you test the mk1 variant ships? I had the assumption that the mk1 variants should be on a nearly equal level of the VRO battleships, maybe 1-2 turrets more, but thats it.

I know VRO is all about balance and i am rethinking the whole mk3 concept.
In VRO, most capital battles are over in 30 seconds, even 4 destroyer can kill a mk1 ship, but i like long lasting XL ship battles. So my idea is to reduce the mk3 turret count to mk1 levels and just keep the hull value for longer battles.
What do you think?

Originally posted by Sco81:

Did you test the mk1 variant ships? I had the assumption that the mk1 variants should be on a nearly equal level of the VRO battleships, maybe 1-2 turrets more, but thats it.

I know VRO is all about balance and i am rethinking the whole mk3 concept.
In VRO, most capital battles are over in 30 seconds, even 4 destroyer can kill a mk1 ship, but i like long lasting XL ship battles. So my idea is to reduce the mk3 turret count to mk1 levels and just keep the hull value for longer battles.
What do you think?

I will have a detailed look into the MK1 and will give you feedback about. If i remind correctly there was at least one ship with 6k MW weapon power, 1,5k more than Titan and all other stats over Titan. Some of yours had better balanced (lower MW) weapon loadout and can be easily tweaked to a level, where other modded ships live in harmony.

But generally, to think about advanced survivability is good, with more hull you automatically sum up the damage meter, without the need of the direct way over turret amount. I like longer lasting battles, too.

If M0 stands for Super Carrier class, it should have better hull/shield, but less/max same firepower as a battleship. They are more kind of mobile fortresses, but with the lack of weapon power to engage more than one M2+ battleship directly. They also can send tons of corvettes and fighters for help. With that they can kill a second M2+, maybe a third. For a single M2+ (Titan) they don't need fleet, their defensive MJ should be enough to keep up with a dedicated solo M2+.

Yesterday i had a VRO OOS battle with 1 oddy+3 phoenix attacker on energy lances vs. K and V. It took at least 4 min and it was thin on 2 of my ships. 6%,14%, 30%, 61% hulls left.

The biggest problem is and will be balance. In sector fight and OOS calculate differently and so modders like Shuulo can't just give Xenon Ks more turrets, because they are not the best at in sector fight without maybe crush the balance OOS. Actually he gave K?s a 7th turret, was 6 before. Now we only can collect data, how this will work.

I know, it has it's own charm to have so much firepower and 43 lasers firing at same time, while 47 A.A. turrets hit the smaller vessels. I can see the picture. But what price to pay for this one time event, you only see in sector or as player ship, while in OOS it will kick asses like nothing.

Ok, maybe i should go the route to:
mk1: battleships (none or few docking slots)
mk3: M0 ships (more hull and docking slots (without the additional turrets))

Originally posted by Sco81:

Ok, maybe i should go the route to:
mk1: battleships (none or few docking slots)
mk3: M0 ships (more hull and docking slots (without the additional turrets))

Generally a good idea.
Today/Tomorrow i will do some comparisons. Some aspects to take into account. Like amount of XL turrets/direct fire weapons, overall turret coverage. How many turrets can be used at same time in player hands.
Made a lot of screenshots actually to work with.

I do this with data from XR ship pack, i don't want to hype it, it's not perfect and has also some in-player-hand-op ships. Like Egosoft overdid it with Raptor, master of OOS.

But many other are at some point comparable with their special pro and cons. 12 battleships in that pack plus XL freighter/ miner + L some destroyers.

The ship packs included 2 "motherships" are basically, what you call M0. Hybrids, Super Carrier. I would say, they are around M0+ to M0++.
Personally i missed a XL fighter with M-dock to play around at some point. But they are very strong. I really don't want it THAT easy.

Some short numbers:
The typical vanila/ XR ship destroyer (to be correct this is the old M2 class) has combined defense of 350-500k MJ.

XR Battleships (M2+) live at a range of 600-1000k MJ combined defense. Thats ~50% to 100% over destroyer class.

Titan (M2++) (fortified) battleship, while not the fastest killer, has a huge boost in defense MJ of 2200 MJ. So again ~100% over the best XR battleship. Personally i think, 2000 MJ should have been some border, but Titan has enough disadvantages to let it slip. Well made by Shuul.
That's what i told, the longer the ship lives, the more damage sums up.
And this is not like X2/X3 where every hull damage can cause destroyed components. ^^ So, already easy mode.

More facts/ suggestions later. 5am here.

I am reducing the mk3 turret power level make it equal to mk1.
While i was doing this, i saw some op mk1 ones too, like the OSR ships.
Have to reduce these too.
It would help a lot if you can compare and make some suggestions to the ships to adjust these for a better balance.

Where can i find OSR ships?

Found them at TTC. Both Sucellus i couldn't buy there. No access to a blueprint preset, no engine available.

50k MW weapons on a MK3, i had tears in my eyes. Looks like a study. A death star would be feared, if this monster would fly next to it.

Btw. damned the OSR models are yummy!
I've seen some effects on some ships too. Smoke, electricity effects?

Are your ANTMAT turrets fixed in some angle or do they rotate like any turret 360° horizontal, 180° vertical?

Actually i'm on Eternal Dawn, the biggest hard hitting boy. The use of so many XL turrets let MW grow like nothing.

1 XL PIK turret comes with 374MW
1L hunter turret (short range fighter defense) 82MW (4,6 hunter per PIK)
1L plasma turret (8,7km) 114 MW (3,3 plasma per PIK)

This XL-turret thing, i can imagine, is the main raison for all the high damage numbers on your ships.