Any comments or feedback on the "Elite Equipment Upgrade"?

I am considering moving this functionality into a separate "specialization" slot. Every ship will have a single slot and the specializations give large, specific bonuses for a price. (Or, in the case of the Elite upgrade, a broad bonus for a big price).

This is what I had in mind, in part or whole:

- Elite specialization (large, general bonuses for a very high price)
- Defender specialization (armor and shield bonuses, fire rate penalty -- similar to current Defender computer)
- Point Defender specialization (Bonuses to Point Defense)
- Marksman specialization (Accuracy and (minor) tracking bonus. maybe offset by an evasion or movement speed penalty)
- No specialization (and no cost)

This would deprecate the current Elite Equipment Upgrade for the auxiliary slot and the current Defender combat computer. I like this solution a bit better since currently the Elite Equipment Upgrade can be stacked for some really extreme configurations, which was not my original intent.

Hey quick feedback and a bug report:
For the Necroid ship pack there are sections with the wrong model. It uses the mammalian ship set instead, i think their needs to be a variable changed or something. I cant use some of the new sections because my ships look wonky then. ("Fire support" and "storm bringer" for example)

I like the Elite Equipment Upgrade but i think the buff for armor and shield does not work properly and i think it should not give so much boost but a huge buff to disengagement chance so when you loose a fight you don't loose the ships too often. As of now the costs does not outweigh the benefit of building three ships for the same alloys, i think.

Oh and the Enigmatic shield booster thing that give 5% shield regen Is nearly broken. It should max give 1% or 2 %, because star bases stack these and can become UNKILLABLE. This is especially true for early game.

The Kiting module also feels OP. There should be a counter like Afterburners giving +% combat speed to you(Or AI) can build quick chaser ships that counter the kiting.

Some long range weapons like the Gauss rifles also feel too good as to not use them. Their DPS and their ridicules long range make them a go to choice for all medium slots, there design is perfect for the close in to lower shields before the other weapons like laser come into range. I'd say lower their damage below normal Railguns/Coilguns so you have the trade-off for long range but lower damage.
They would also fit the niche of anti-armor better than anti hull. If they do less damage they would not steal the place of lasers.

Overall this feels better than vanilla, fights are more exciting and when a ship design works as intend its double satisfying.
Did you changed anything in regard of disparagement chance? i have the feeling i often don't loose all ships when i loose one fight. If this is intentional: Really great!
I think Stellaris space combat should be less lethal and loosing a ship should be a rare occurrence, maybe it could be balanced out by increasing the costs overall.

First off thank you for the feedback!

For the Necroid ship pack (or any other add-on ship pack), unfortunately the new ship sections don't have the correct models. Paradox included these additional models for the basic species but not the add-ons. I do not have the capability at this point to add new ship models. Note that the AI is programmed to avoid these sections but I have no way to restrict a human player from doing so.

Regarding the elite equipment, can you clarify about the "buff for armor and shield not working properly"? As it stands now, it does not explicitly buff disengagement chance -- However, it DOES increase hull points, which has the effect of increasing disengagement chance. This is part of the reason I made it so expensive, note that another side effect is that for equivalent fleet strength the maintenance costs will be lower (since the maintenance costs are flat per ship). These can be significant advantages in some situations. I don't want the Elite equipment to work as a "default" configuration.

I did not change the Enigmatic shield booster. 3.4.2 Cepheus changed the way regen works and I am not sure if it was intentional or not. It used to have a delay prior to recharging that could be interrupted by doing damage. That delay has been removed. See here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/stellaris-3-4-2-7836-shields-armor-and-hull-points-regen-immediately-after-taking-damage.1525347/#post-28273599

Re: Kite computer. This is a great suggestion and I will look into adding a combat speed bonus to certain items and/or specializations.

Re: Gauss rifles. I agree these are too effective in general and will either reduce their damage or make their armor effectiveness worse (something like -67% against armor, instead of -50%).

Overall there are no changes to disengagement chance. There is also an open bug in Vanilla (from 3.4.2 Cepheus) that reduces tracking to zero in all combat situations. This obviously has big effects on combat outcomes of all sorts.

Hi, sorry i bothered you with typical user ignorance.
It dawned on me that the enigmatic shield battery is from vanilla yesterday. There are some kind of events where you can get your hands on these like 10 years into the game and it makes stations and some ship unkillable.

I don't know if this is possible, but for the ship sets i would recommend to change the models to something that works and life with sections repeating them self or not matching the slots rather than having glitchy models that are painful to use.

Regarding the elite equipment: Also user ignorance as well or more of "i did not tests this properly, sorry".
The buff works fine. But as i said i think the buff could be turned down and replaced with a higher disengagement chance. This would fit a "Elite" role better because you don't want to loose these ships too often.
I don't think it will "default" to this module all the time because the extra cost is really high and nobody is paying 2000 for a destroyer that has 80% the hit points of a 800 Alloy Battleship.
I don't know how the scope on the equipment is restricted by paradox but any % modifier to price or upkeep would be best used here. But i bet you already played with that.
One anecdote, i used to make a double elite Titan which cost me 14000 Alloys and i only build one of these. You could look into how the Offspring ships are build and maybe steal the functions of them for a "elite ships" type. Edit: Offspring ships are just extra shiptypes with an aura slot. :(

Kite computers: Glad you liked my feedback here :) . One thing that already balances them out is station combat. Stations often have long range weapons that counter the kiting pretty well. I use them now in my dedicated "Fleet Killer"- Fleets but not against stations.

Gauss rifles: As i said in my opinion shield damage is maybe the wrong category here, because High velocity projectiles are good at punching through armor but not inflicting heavy damage. Maybe change the Damage to +50% against Armor but -25& Hull and drop the shield part?
The combination of a long range weapon that kills shields before the main engagement is a win-win situation.
But this need to be compared in a spread sheet with all the other weapon types if this fits a role. Would also elevate Kinetic damage to be able to do both Shield and Armor and Hull damage so a kinetic focused empire would have befits from all worlds.
But missiles are already at that place but can be countered if the enemy trades defense for offense.

The Tracking bug was fixed in 3.4.3 :D. I would kindly suggest if you could look into the matter of playing with disengagement chance overall because it makes loose less frustrating and a war is not won or lost with one big management.

I changed the entities to the ones that work across the board, would be cool if you could implement this workaround until paradox decides to add them on their side:

https://pastebin.com/jm7aZdTK

You also can remove this part then:

Maybe thier is a way to get a branch off in the section template like

___

I've read up the wiki and i think you could write script that applies an "ELITE" modifier to a ship if it has at least one of the Elite Components.
So stacking would not be possible because the scripted modifier only applies once. But i don't know if this would tank the performance to too much. Maybe an Empire modifier that goes

The tooltip could show the information that the ship only profits from one module. If you try to add the Elite feature via a component_set you need to make a whole new ship_sizes because they did not include sections in any API what so ever.

Again thanks for the response!

For the next update, I am planning on moving the "Elite" upgrade into a dedicated specialization slot for the ship. As you said, each ship will need to have a "required component set" for the new specialization, but that's actually pretty easy to do. This would take care of the issue with stacking (and also allows for some other interesting configurations like a +damage +tracking -evasion fire support specialization, for example). I haven't used the static modifiers but that may be a more elegant way to do it.

Re: Gauss Rifles. Let me try out this suggestion (+Armor -Hull), maybe +50% armor and -50% hull. In a way I like this because IMO too many weapons have a +hull bonus as it is.

Re: Disengagement chance. The elite upgrade effectively makes the disengagement chance higher because the hull points are higher. I could experiment with a separate specialization for disengagement that is less expensive.

Personally, I found myself not using Elite units until later in the game and only when I had a surplus of alloys. Basically, elite units are more likely to survive combat, they have lower maintenance costs (for the same fleet strength) and they contribute less to fleet cap (for the same fleet strength). They also are more likely to kill enemy ships before they can disengage because they have a +damage bonus. I played around with some crazy configurations like a quad-elite Cruiser but it certainly was not cost effective for general use. Also like you said maybe making a double-elite Titan makes sense just because it takes so long to replace one if it dies.

Re: Ship models. I really like the added ship models (at least the Mammalian ones!). One alternative maybe is to add section entries to the species pack ships (such as the necroid ships) and like you said, reuse the graphics for the sections that exist.

Good news. I was able to modify the ship definitions for the species packs so they will use models that exist, instead of defaulting to the Mammalian section. The turret definition doesn't completely match which results in a few turrets hidden, but overall it looks pretty reasonable. I will include it in the next update.

Originally posted by Gui Montag:

Good news. I was able to modify the ship definitions for the species packs so they will use models that exist, instead of defaulting to the Mammalian section. The turret definition doesn't completely match which results in a few turrets hidden, but overall it looks pretty reasonable. I will include it in the next update.

Really awesome thank you!

Elite module: Are you planning to add the component set attribute to all ships or are elite ships a new ship type just like the Offspring ones?

Gauss Rifles: Also really neat you try this, let me in on your conclusion after your tests! I maybe add a -25% to shields to round it out. They would fit a niche in Kinetics that provide armor stripping without the benefit of an anti shield weapon like the other kinetic weapons, plus they are not as powerful as Laser weapons when it comes to Hull+Armor. I think to make them a better choice they could be cheaper than lasers.

Disengagement chance: I found out that this variable is tied to ship sizes. I don't know if its possible to add components that provide that. But would be cool to have the option to trade damage or surviveability with that. I think that would add some more longevity to warfare and would reduce the poker of running your fleet into another one and not knowing if you loose or win. Would take an edge of the combat.

Re Elite Module. I will have this as a separate component to existing ship types, so there will be an extra slot right below the computer slot. It will have an option for "None", "Elite", "Defender", and maybe a few others. For the first iteration I will probably have the AI ignore this, so it will be a human-only feature advantage.

Re Disengagement chance. Disengagement chance can be increased with modifiers (there's an admiral that increases it, for example, and there's an aura that decreases it). It works the same way in SBC vs Vanilla, and basically there's a % chance of disengagement from every hit to a ship's hull, once the hull has been reduced to less than 50% of hit points. Therefore, a larger hull point pool increases the chance of disengagement, since it will take more hits during this phase. And like you said, each ship is different. Nominally, Destroyers have the highest chance but since they have relatively low hull points, their actual disengagement chance may be lower than a Battleship for example.

One easily missed side effect of this is that heavy-hitting weapons are much more likely to cause ships to die vs disengage. The Large Burst Laser, for example, was specifically designed for this so otherwise might not look like a particularly good choice. So there are cases where you can lose the battle but win the war.

If you like longer battles and more disengagement, have you tried Amazing Space Battles? Once of the best features is that it increases all ships' health and reduces firing rate, making battles last much longer and also effectively increasing disengagement chance.

Elite Module: how does this works file/modding wise. Can you just add lines to the existing ship_size files without overwriting them? Is the interpreter this advanced nowadays?

Disengagement chance: Ah ok, i think i fully understand this now. It's a mechanics that is more meta in a sens of presentation. Nobody tells you in the game, "Yeah if you have more hull the chance to disengage is higher". I think It would work better to trigger on overall ship status and a transparent value on disengagement chance per ship. So designing ships with high disengagement to not loose them so often would be more of a thing. This explains the "Crystallized Armor-Meta we have currently. But this has nothing to do with your mod and i am diverting. To sum it up: i understand now there is no really need for extra disengagement features if its already scaling with Hull.

I was not fully aware that Amazing Space Battles did such a thing but i will look into it, thanks! Overall i am dissatisfied with the space battle mechanic and warfare as a whole in Stellar and i am advocating for a overhaul with smaller unit sizes and a supply system to finally end doom stacking.

FYI the Imperial shipset of the galactic imperium is also subject of the unfortunate model mixing of the sections if you missed that. :)

Thanks I will be sure to include that.

Small bug report: When loading this mod on the latest version of Stellaris (3.4.3) and no other mods, I'm seeing weird additional entries when creating a new design in the ship designer. Next to the usual "Corvette" and "Defense Platform" and other choices, there's system fields like "resources", "min_upgrade_cost", "modifiers", or "section_slots" in the list.

Clicking them results in an empty design window, so nothing really breaks. But you can save them - and then end up in a "cannot remove last desing" situation.

@Omicron Definitely should not happen. Can you confirm, was this a brand new game?

Confirm, was a brand new game, no other mods present. I was testing some shipsets for compatibility, discovered that this happened, and removed everything else to confirm.

However, good news! The next day I got the idea to unsubscribe and resubscribe, forcing Steam to delete and redownload all mod files. And lo and behold: the bug no longer happens.

No idea what caused it - must have been some hiccup during some update process, perhaps?