Proposal for 1.82: equipment balancing and choices

[maik]

I think a lot of the problems with OXP ships could be cured by reducing the accuracy back to 1.77 levels.

I'd rather see it addressed by fixing the OXP ships, instead of going back to the old accuracy situation. Something that might be worthwhile considering, is some kind of OXP that did a blanket 'tone-down' of all OXP ships that didn't have a "1.80 compatibility" rating applied to them.

Definitely. The developers have to work on the core game. A lot of OXP ships tend towards the "I'm quite hard, me" end of the spectrum, because in general, prior to the AI upgrades, the core ships were rather easy opponents once players had some decent equipment under them. Following the AI changes, these older OXP ships are not only hard, but smart. It's an unintended consequence, but it's the OXPs that should be fixed, not the core game.

I agree. However, there is no indication for players that an older OXP might have unintended consequences because it assumes a different behavior from Oolite. So it is easy to break your game from a playability point-of-view which shouldn't be the case.

As I mentioned elsewhere, deliberately breaking old stuff by making it incompatible would be my preferred way to deal with it. It is a choice of playability vs. number of available OXPs in the beginning. Over time, the number of available OXPs grows as authors make them compatible.

[SirArian]

So... I don't know if anyone is still interested, but I made a small OXZ that replaces the Beam Laser with the one that was discussed earlier in this thread. I'm not going to put it on the official list, (unless people think it is a good idea,) but thought that people who participated in the theoretical discussion on if it would make game balance better or worse might like to actually try it. And then, after I did, I realized that the last post on here was more than two months old, so I almost didn't share it, but decided that since I had already made it I might as well. It can be downloaded from my Box account here.

EDIT: If you downloaded it before this edit you probably will notice that it is priced incorrectly and that it is always at the top of the list. (Second only to fuel.) These were for me to test it, and I have now uploaded the other version that has it done correctly. Sorry to anyone who may have had to download it twice!

'nother edit: It seems that the beam laser was already toned down... Oh well. If anyone wants to, though, they can install the OXP anyway, and be almost impervious to beam laser fire...