Faction Packs for 2.0: Questions Questions Questions

[FramFramson]

Had a few hundred hours in a 1.0 galaxy and was looking to get back in with 2.0, but boy am I hitting a few walls with setting up a nice new Galaxy to play around in. I had stopped playing because the blandness of the Avorion universe had gotten to me, but with all the new missions and content, and the added personality of ship captains, I figured it was tiem to come back.

On top of those, I wanted to make sure my new galaxy would have a lot more personality, so I really wanted to start by adding some faction packs, but boy did I ever hit some hard walls!

1) As of this writing there only NINETEEN faction packs in the Workshop, and most of them are Trek or Star Wars. Am I crazy or didn't there used to be a LOT more, including many original designs? What on earth happened? There's dozens of amazing sets of modular ship and station parts - where are all the faction packs?

Okay, I guess I'll be making some faction packs of my own. No worries, there's all those resources from great modders. But wait...

2) I also realized that most of the faction packs which do exist are very block intensive (as are most ships, period, but it's less of a problem for player-only ships). I get that everyone wants the super-pretty ships, but the difference between someone's 10,000 (or 20,000!) block frigate versus the average procedural ship having less than 1,000 blocks is kind of massive! I know the more thoughtful modders add build-screen screenshots with all their ship's stats, but isn't there ANY way to filter the workshop search by block count? Help?

Well, fine, I guess I'll make my own damn ships then, and THEN make faction packs out of them if each ship is only 1k/2k-ish blocks, that's not a huge job, right? Though it's a lot more work than I wanted to do before starting a new game. Hmmm...

3) Okay, so the game does the works of balancing ship volume and Omicron, so I don't need to worry about those, but what about all the other factors? There's a great article on making faction packs (here), but there's nothing there (or anywhere else I could find) about how fast or manoeuvrable to make the ships. If I just want them within vanilla parameters, or a range close to that, what values do I need to be setting??? Sure, I can start a creative galaxy and look at some of the starter ships as a reference, but about the regions inward from that? What benchmarks do you use for, ships from a faction centred around radius 350? What about around Radius 100?

3b) Also, does difficulty scale these attributes? What's the correct capabilities to give to a ship meant for a game set to Veteran? What if I want to try harder or easier modes... do I need to actually make ships faster or slower?

At this point I've gone so cold on starting a new galaxy. If it's going to be this hard to make a new game with a bunch of factions which actually look and feel different from the procedural ones, that just sucks all my enthusiasm right out the proverbial airlock. I'd really appreciate some help here. Anyone? Anything?

 

[FramFramson]

And a new question: Is is possible to make partial faction packs? Mainly I want to know if I can make ships only and let the stations still be procedurally generated?

[FramFramson]

Can't believe absolutely no one has any of the answers here?

At the very very least would it be possible to find out about that last question? Can you make "incomplete" faction packs?

[Darkcread]

hi

[Kirshak]

I'm actually on the process of making a faction, trying to replicate the Homeworld Cataclysm infection entity called the Beast. Actually this is more like two faction because I am 1. Hijacking Vanilla ships and stations and 2. Rebuild them with a more refined look and then 3. Infect them.

 

I am pretty much at the same level than you and harassing my own mind with endless questions, as for right now, I am trying to create ships that are close as possible to their vanilla counterpart stats, but if not less blocks because the infection do increase the block count and my CPU is not in it's best shape at the moment.

 

From what I have heard from the forums, ships do get a buff or debuff depending of the difficulty. For example a 100k hull ship in normal will be 200k hull in expert or something so my suggestion is to build or board a Vanilla ship/station and try to make your model scaled to their stats, the game should in theory scale their stats depending of the current difficulty chosen by the player, at least that's what I have understood from the Discord answers.

 

As for stations, I am not very sure, my guess at the moment is that a faction require a set of stations, I could look at the Discord Avorion bot for the list of required stations. If you are lazy, you could just hijack some vanilla stations, repair them a little bit then upload them as your faction.

 

I will be around more often, let me know what are your progress on your faction ! 

[FramFramson]

I'm going to be trying to make more than one.

Right now I've got a simple modular set mostly finished (doing a 3rd bow section and need some more civil modules for freighters), but the block count got away from me, so the ships might be over 3k when my goal was to keep them under 1.5k (vanilla ships being less than 1k generally). Might still implement it anyway if it's just for one outer-galaxy faction, and of course more robust servers shouldn't have any trouble with the ships. Probably toss up the modules too, maybe on a sprue or something.

My new strat is to find Workshop ships with low block counts but which still look good and make a few variations on them to get enough for a pack. Best is when a designer has 2-3 similar ships like this, so you've got a head start.

The main problem is that you can't search the workshop by block count, so it's more going through any ships I've downloaded (there's a lot, lol) and if any look like they might have low counts, opening them to check. Got a few good candidates so far, but hardly heaps of them.

Incidentally, how do you pull out the vanilla station files?

[Kirshak]

I think you could select a faction to wage war with and capture their ships. That is what I have been doing and their ships varies from 1500 blocks to 3000 blocks. So I base my ships on that, so far I managed to get my ships bellow 2k blocks.

But the stations is an another story, from the captured stations I found, they are around 5 to 6 k blocks. I still managed to make my new stations close to that number, still a few hundred blocks optimized tho. However, I fear that the infected version will be the double of that 

[FramFramson]

On 12/19/2021 at 10:00 PM, Kirshak said:

I think you could select a faction to wage war with and capture their ships. That is what I have been doing and their ships varies from 1500 blocks to 3000 blocks. So I base my ships on that, so far I managed to get my ships bellow 2k blocks.

But the stations is an another story, from the captured stations I found, they are around 5 to 6 k blocks. I still managed to make my new stations close to that number, still a few hundred blocks optimized tho. However, I fear that the infected version will be the double of that 

Yeah, Stations naturally have higher block counts and that's fine.

Incidentally, I was able to confirm that anything you leave out of a faction pack will just be auto-generated as normal, so in theory you could make a faction pack which was as simple as a single combat ship.

[Kirshak]

Oh that's good to know, I personally took a break from making the faction. I managed to get 3 Civilian ships, one shipyard and one Repair station. But gosh it's going to take a while haha