Oh, one other thing - Have you considered making many of these available to Support ships?

Flagships are great, but you can often end up with a flagship supported by, say, half a dozen large supports - except they feel a bit simplistic to build and could really do with more options.

Since Spinal Mount already has a size check, you could even have that one too. The big balance factor is that maint cost is not a thing, and so labor and initial cost need to be considered more.

Hi Darloth!
The seeming superfluous modifiers are because I had a big spreadsheet I was using to calculate dps, ratios, and a special "balance" value I created based on damage, reload, range, accuracy, and fire arc. So I did some cut and paste and it made it easier to tweak the numbers. :)

I do want to open them up to supports. I want to get everything dialed in good before flipping the tag. Because supports have less than half the hex space.. they get hit harder by the 4 hex requirement to make the more complex weapons.

I kinda of shot from the hip on the cost side for build and supply cost. I think maintenance needs to be added in.. but don't want to make these mods be too expensive where no one can afford them until late game.

Supports with maint cost won't be auto-built, which sometimes is what you want and sometimes not when considering mod balance. I can certainly see some of the more specialized modifiers adding it (even if it was just a bit) even on supports - but in general thanks for making these, I think more weapon modifiers like this is probably the best way to go unless we come up with a truly new weapon idea. Many things can be built by combining modifiers like this.

If you wanted to have flak ammo working, I think it would be possible via code but you'd need a new effect that could make an either/or decision based on one of the effector variables - probably a double that you either set to 0 or 1. It would be a bit fiddly, and lose much of the effector->effect elegance the system currently has, but I think it's possible. Then in the effect code, it would just call out to whichever sub-effect it needed, I'm... at least 75% sure that's possible :)

Thanks Darloth. I'm not sure the Flak ammo is worth the pain of jury-rigging the coding. :( It was cool, but using a specific flak cannon mod seems to do the job well enough since the modifiers can be applied to it. :)

Yeah, probably isn't worth it if you're at all happy with how it works now :)

After playing a few games I have to say I'm really happy with where the balancing landed. It gives the weapons flavor without making them too overpowered. I'm going to concede defeat on the flak ammo in order to save my sanity and to work on other things.

I'm looking at maybe engine improvements (overdrive, imp maneuvering thrusters, etc..).

Good luck with the engine improvements - I had ideas for them but never managed to actually -implement- anything. I will probably get around to putting maneuvering thrusters into my subsystem assortment, but maybe you can think of something more interesting than just thrusters you slap on the outside of a ship (each hex must be external). If not, those will probably be fine too. I'm just struggling to think of how to balance them really.

Well... here's what I've made so far today.

Support Hulls:
Prototype modifier - minor maintenance cost for monitoring the prototype subsystem causing the design to fall outside of standard defense production.

Flagships:
Overdrive modifier - through a series of engine redesigns and power amplification, speed has been improved with a slight reduction to maneuverability.
Vectored Thruster modifier - by articulating the exhaust port of the main engines, engineers have been able to increase maneuverability although the fragile actuators necessitate a slight decrease to top speed.
Improved Maneuvering Thruster subsystem - by removing hindering plate armor from around the maneuvering thruster ports, engineers have been able to increase the ouput to these thrusters. (Max of 16 can be applied; external system like armor)

Right now I have everything working and preliminary balance values in place. I still need to add the descriptions to everything and do a little internal testing.

After using this a bit more, I worry that the High Yield Warheads modifier for missile weapons doesn't really have enough tactical use. It doesn't significantly increase the DPS of the weapon (less than 10%) because it also increases the reload time so much. Since missiles are already pretty good at cracking armor, the increase in per-hit damage isn't that big a deal, so you're mostly just paying more supplies and less range for a mostly equivalent weapon system.

I am unsure the reload time penalty is the right penalty for this sort of ammo - I would consider increasing the maint cost, build cost, and mostly supply cost more, but reducing the reload penalty. One thing you haven't modified much yet is labor cost - maybe significantly increase the labor cost to make this seem a high quality mod that you pay -construction time- for, to get better (if slightly shorter range and more expensive) missiles.

Actually, you could have a whole Quality modifier all on its own, where systems could be high quality or rushed, and do something with that - but either way I think the HiYield mod could do with being looked at, and maybe further testing.

The rest seem good. I built a railgun today that could fire across the system and did almost 4000 damage on hit, on a size 128 ship. Not sure it would ever hit anything mind you, but it was nice to be able to.

One other area you might want to consider looking at is accuracy. Right now you're making rather small changes to it, so I'm unsure they'll have much effect. It also applies mostly... heck, ONLY to railguns, and do remember that positive accuracy is only 'worth' half as much as negative accuracy. Spread * 0.5 is the same magnitude of change as Spread * 2.

Since accuracy is not a stat presented to the player via the design window, this probably is difficult to really see, and we might need extensive testing to really be sure of stuff... but as a gut feeling, I suspect the accuracy +/-s aren't currently doing much. The fact they're used as balance factors on things that can be placed on lasers and missiles is also a little worrying. Not sure how to resolve that one, but maybe pull aside most of the accuracy tweaks into ammo and perhaps some railgun specific things.

Yeah accuracy was kind of a tertiary balancer. It was actually one of the things I wanted to go back and play with. So I guess I'll start up that exercise when we've got this autoupdate issue figured out. :)

Missiles were kind of a pain for me. Their reload was long already and a lot of the new modifiers just exacerbated that, but I didn't want to tackle creating missile specific modifiers until I got feedback that they definitely don't work right. :( Maybe you're right, the missile ammo is the way to go because really, the missile is the weapon system and the launcher is just the delivery system.

Guess I have a lot more work to do... :)

Edit: Oh yeah.. and the prototype modifier. (Fixed)