Description:
The main motivation for this mod is that I do not like the vanilla balance of ships with mobility out-ranging immobile stations. The idea is to inverse the balance so that stations have more powerful turrets and longer ranges than ships but suffer from immobility. To prevent defence stations from being overpowered, they are given certain limitations: number of defence modules on one station (defence slots), tracking ability of the high power turrets (rotation speed ...) and special fleet setups to counter defence stations (siege fleet).
Overview of Contents:
The changes this mod made fall into three major categories. For details please see the nexus mod page. Here we only give an overview of the three categories and the ideas behind:
- Sector ownership: Sector ownership means little in the vanilla game, especially to the player. The idea is to limit the amount of defence a station can mount and have sector ownership providing combat advantage to all stations in the sector. This way, stations are vulnerable to even a small raiding fleet without sector ownership because of the limited defence but can be dangerous to even destroyer fleets with sector ownership due to combat advantages it provides. This way a defence station that claims ownership will be of strategic value to both attacker and defender.
- Defence station: Gameplaywise, a defence station in vanilla is either meaningless or overpowered, depending on whether it is near a gate. However, with the sector ownership change, defence stations obtain general importance due to their ability to claim and the ability to well defend itself. On one hand they should be capable enough to defend, the idea is to give them access to a variety of strong turrets effective to small or large ships. On the other hand, they can only mount a limited amount of defence (though much higher than production stations) and the turrets are intentionally given weak points (very slow rotation speed so bad tracking ability) so that it is still possible for specially designed fleets to take down defence stations.
- Station siege: There needs to be a way for fleets to effectively counter defence stations with acceptable cost. The idea is to overwhelm station defence at close range by large S ship swarms. The station turrets are designed to be deadly to all ships (small and large) at mid and long range, but can hardly track agile small fighters at close range. Normally, a S ship swarm gets wiped out before it can reach close range, but carriers are given the special ability to project fighters directly to close range of the target station, bypassing the mid and long range dead zone. With this ability, carriers are naturally the flag ship to coordinate the whole station siege effort.
There are certainly bugs I'm not aware of. However, the one problem that is certain is that the above idea (i.e. turrets deadly to fighters at long range but fail to be a threat at close range) works OK in high attention (IS) but fails badly in low attention (OOS). Currently the only workaround I've found is to significantly reduce hitchance in low attention, which drastically increases the duration of a battle in low attention and potentially brings about many other problems (I do not know).