Changes to player speeds?

I am launching this thread to create a place for people to talk about mods they have made on the player ship. Specifically changes they made to speed or acceleration and the gameplay that resulted.

Almost everyone has a modded set of values. Perhaps you removed the lateral thrusters. Perhaps you removed the speed caps on AI ships. Perhaps you decreased top speeds to a crawl. I would like to hear about them. Did you like them? Or hate the change?

What values did you use? So that others may give your ideas a try.

-Gtrout

As I mentioned to you GrandpaTrout, I once modified all the ships speeds by reducing the lateral thrusters to almost nothing, and virtually removing the speed cap for all ships (increased it to 999999999km/s or something). I tweaked some other things, but the end result was a more realistic flight experience. It did not feel like I was flying around in a big airplane anymore. I guess it was an extreme version of the original I-war settings.

I remember some interesting battles that resulted. I would often build up a huge amount of speed when approaching a target at a station. Then as I drifted by at unbelievable speeds I would strafe my target. The station defences would activate and some ships would come after me. The interesting part was that I had so much speed that these ships were required to LDS repeatedly to keep pace with me. I guess the A.I. could not figure out, our would not utilize the removed speed cap when trying to chase me.

Overall the game compensated fairly well for the changes I made. One noticable area where it did not was when observing freighters approaching stations. Invariably they could not decelerate and ended up smashing to pieces against the station.

One thing I did find during some Buda 5 play balance tests was that the player HAD to have a small accelleration advantage to effectively dogfight (to get inside the AI confort zone and close the fighting range).

From the realmofconfusion forum:

"Super secret Skunkworks testing methods.

I made all of the AI ships to have identical (or equivilent) thrust values to player ships just to see what would happen. So far, the game still works. Since nobody could ever find any evidence of an AI thruster boost, I decided to see if it actually did exist so that I could find out what it was. So far, there is no evidence whatsoever that it does exist. The first person to ever indicate that there was one was Qlippoth, I believe, when he was making AI ships player-flyable because he was finding that they handled like overladen slugs in player hands. His reasoning (which I now believe to be incorrect) was that the AI ships had some sort of thruster boost. However, since AI ships get screwed six ways to Sunday anyway, the way I see it is that the player ships are a lot faster than their AI counterparts (this happened in I-War 1 as well, though I think it was to a lesser degree).

The only evidence I've ever seen to support the AI boost theory is mostly conjecture based on what I think is a false assumption. There is no mention in any of the modding documents that I've found that says that the AI gets some sort of speed boost, and so far the AI ships are not dramatically outrunning player ships when they have the same values.

Also, KS, another test you might want to use is the following: use iFleet, get a ship that is equal to one of the ships you can fly in the game. Have it formate with a neutral fighter of some sort, then formate on your wingman. If you can keep formated with your wingman, it should all be good."

Ouch, anyway, been doing some research to try and jog my ship modding memory, stumbled on this about the differences between AI and player ships. I haven't corroborated this yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.

(I'm famous! *points at name in damning text*) O o

- Qlippoth

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(Somewhere) I've got mods that drop acceleration values across the board to 50% and 10% normal levels. I enjoyed it immensly; felt more like I was piloting a ship instead of an 'airplane in space'.

But I ran into the same problem Cambragol did... freighters were unable to stop and ended up smacking into stations. At L-points they would overshoot by 30-70 km and have to work their way back slowly... which slowed down the traffic patterns.

I'd decided that the only good workaround was to increase the size of all LDSi fields around stations and L-points by the inverse of the drop in acceleration rates. This would allow freighters and other large ships to stop in time while preserving the illusion of space flight. Without having to test over and over.

But I never pursued the matter.

It is also my observation that if the player has values exactly matching the AI ships, he will not be able to maneuver against them. This would work better if the forward thrusters were weaker than the rear thrusters. A ship could not retreat as fast as you could close. But if wishes were fishes...

Hmm...when I modded all my ships speeds, I made the player and computer ships identical to each other. I had no troubles maneuvering against them, and I also had rear thrusters that were an order of magnitude or two more powerful than the forward thrusters. I actually would swing my ship into reverse and apply full thust to slow down when approaching stations. That was fun.