[Starsector Mods][0.9.1a] Kingdom of Royal Azalea v.2.0.0 || Major Update 03/03 [RYAZ]

Kingdom of Royal Azalea
Download v.2.0.0 for 0.9.1a

:: Announcements ::

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Royal Azalea 2.0.0 is a MAJOR update and is incompatible with older saves!
The update also introduces a dependency to a utility mod I’m releasing, Boarding Utils
It is a requirement, and RYAZ will not work without it because it contains the boarding logic used in spells and weapons.

...StarsectormodsRYAZdataconfig

"ryaz_EnableVFX":true,

I. Summary:

This mod adds a new faction, The Kingdom of Royal Azalea and several systems, mostly in the northeastern in the edge of the sector. The entire faction is centered around “Magic” and “Mages”, translated in a way that works with Starsector’s engine. All of their ships feature Volumatrix Shielding, which gives them multiple layers of shields, and all of them have the special shipsystem: Grand Invocation, which casts a powerful magic spell – the details of which will be touched upon below. Weapons-wise, they are primarily a high-tech faction; only in this case being magic = high-tech. Just roll with it.

Visuals-wise, all of the faction’s ships use the line of ships by HELMUT from Spiral Arms II. I really liked the sort of classic “ship”-ship design and evoked some real Brittania vibes, which worked really well for the faction’s theme, so I rolled with it.

II. Some samples:

[Destroyer] Indefatigable-class
by HELMUT (recolored)

[Dimension Diver] Brigand-class
by HELMUT (recolored)

[Battleship] Invincible-class
by HELMUT (recolored)

III. The Mod in Motion:

IV. Special Features:

Volumatrix Shielding

Onboard mages construct their ateliers at the heart of the ship from which they deploy a powerful, interlinked defensive barrier. This barrier is capable of warding off projectiles and dissipating energetic particles, but is unable to block out heat and pressure. As such, the shield receives 50% more High Explosive damage.

The effectiveness of the shield is influenced by the morale of the mages maintining it, increasing in efficiency while the ship is above 70% CR. Conversely, the shields weaken if CR falls below the same point. Whenever the innermost shield is overloaded, this ship loses 3% CR. Meanwhile, if the outer layers get pierced, they flush part of their accumulated flux into the main ship. Mages can be cycled in and out of the atelier with relative ease to maintain this barrier, resulting in a 50% reduction to overload time. Finally, the shields will disengage completely should CR dip below 30%.

Either Royal Azalean or Arian mariners are required to activate this shield.

• This is a built-in hullmod present in all Royal Azalean warships. It provides multiple layers of shields to their ships. Frigates have 2 layers, destroyers have 3 layers, and so on, linearly. The outer layers are much more fragile than the last layer, and if they overload, all of their flux is shunted to the ship’s main flux bar, partly in hard flux, partly in soft flux.
• Very Important : If you have

  Commissioned Crews, the shields NEED either a Royal Azalean or Arian commisioned crew. They are magical shields, after all. Mages are needed for them to work. If you don’t, then don’t worry about it – the shields will just work on Royal Azalean ships.

• Lastly, if your last shield (the red one) gets overloaded (i.e. the mages themselves suffer the overload and die), your ship will lose CR so respect your limited flux gauge! Your outer shields overloading CAN cause your inner shields to overload as well! You have been warned!

The Chorus of Guns and Magic

Royal Azalean sailors and marines are all capable mages in their own right, and are each capable of bringing their expertise to bear in conjunction with the ship’s weapons. All energy weapons on this ship deal up to 25% more damage the higher the crew’s CR, starting from a base of 70% CR. Conversely, losing CR beyond this point reduces weapon damage down to a maximum penalty of -50%.

Furthermore, a Royal Azalean crew will activate a ship’s Volumatrix Shields, if it has one.

• This is the Commissioned Crews hullmod for Royal Azalea. If you have this, then you have mages crewing your ship.
• Royal Azalean mages simply influence the ship’s energy weapon stats as its base effect.
• More importantly, however, having them onboard activates the most powerful assets of the Royal Azalean fleet: Volumatrix Shields and their shipsystem, Grand Invocation

Order your mage atelier to unleash a powerful spell.

• This is the shipsystem for all RYAZ ships. No exceptions (for now).
• Activating it unleashes one of these powerful spells:
  • White Destruction Field: A wide AoE damage over time around your ship. Destroys fighters and missiles too.
  • Aether Rain: Rains magical blasts on a targeted enemy ship. Hits on the hull will arc for extra damage. Additionally, there is a small critical hit chance that will cause a second arc to hit another nearby enemy target – a fighter or another ship entirely.
  • Zephyr Ray: A single, powerful energy blast that deals hard flux if it hits an enemy’s shield.
  • Seeker Orb: Deploys 5 magical homing orbs that track enemies. Each orb deals medium Energy damage.
  • Balanced Scales: Equalizes all flux levels for nearby allied ships. If the ship has more than 70% CR, it also recovers a bit of flux on top of that.
• Obviously, you will need Mages to activate this ship system – this means either Royal Azalean or Arian mariners. That is unless you don’t have Commissioned Crews, in which the shipsystem is just available like normal.
• The strength of the spell scales with the size of the crew, CR, and bonus to energy damage.
• So, you might be asking – how do I cast which spell?
• Well, that, my friend is a Secret!

Royal Azalean Marine Detachment

Brings aboard a contingent of Royal Azalean Marines. These elite combat mages can be deployed straight out of airlocks and require no special infrastructure apart from storage areas for their weapons and barracks for their personnel.

Adds 1/2/3 fighter bays with a standard Royal Azalean Marine squad.

• A Royal Azalean Marine is a self-sufficient combat mage armed with a pulse carbine and enough magic reserves to power her own shield and cast her own spells.
• They are NOT like normal fighter LPCs, in that they are connected to this special hullmod, Royal Azalean Marine Detachment, which gives a ship without fighter bays a number of Royal Azalean marines (starting from Destroyer-size, up).
• Important: Because of engine limitations, the LPC icons will be bugged when you first mount this hullmod, and will be fixed after a restart. My suggestion will be to mount as many of this hullmods as you want on your ships, all at once, so that after a single restart, they will all be fixed. Removing the hullmod works okay though.

“Gambeson” Armor Mounts

Royal Azalean ships come with the standard “Gambeson” Armor Mounts, which, by itself, gives their armor a flat, all around protection. This means that High Explosive damage is reduced by 50%, while Kinetic and Fragmentation Damage is increased by 50% and 75% respectively. Effectively, all damage types will do the same level of damage to this ship’s armor.

It also allows the ship to mount combat modules, allowing each ship to be specialized in its respective role.

• Their ships can mount the following special combat modules that greatly change how the ship behaves:

Combat Module: S.C.K. ‘Sextant’

Combat Module: M.M.P. ‘Press-Gang’

Combat Module: T.E.S. ‘Paladin’

Combat Module: G.B.O. ‘Crusader’

Teleport Pads

Installs a teleportation pad in the ship’s atelier core. The lost space makes it impossible to cast Grand Invocation. Instead the mages cast Lightning Strike, which teleports a squad of Royal Azalean Marines directly inside the enemy ship. Larger ships can transport more squads at a time, causing more damage for a longer time.

• Any Royal Azalean mainline ship may take this and initiate boarding actions using teleporters!.
• Please check the Boarding Util page for more information regarding combat boarding.

V. Lore:

Following soon after the entrance of the Arian Empire, Royal Azalea made its own entryway into this dimension. Their intention was twofold – to curb the advances of the Empire within the Persean Sector, and to make colonies and client states out of the fractured denizens of the sector themselves.

They have one point of agreement with Aria, however – that they would prefer if the Yuri remained stranded here – and their poisonous Scarlet Ice out of the home dimension.

In the meanwhile, especially for the myriad aristocrat houses – there is money to be made from inter-dimensional trade!

VI. Known Issues:

– Fixed a bunch over the 2.0 update, might have introduced a bunch of new ones too…

VII. Still to come:

– No more?
– I think the mod’s more or less complete.

VIII. Special Thanks:

This mod was made possible only by the generosity of the community spriters who made their works available within the Kitbash Database and the Free Community Sprite Resources. You are the reason why this mod isn’t made entirely out of MS paint chicken scratch (which means I wouldn’t have bothered making it at all because it doesn’t look good):

HELMUT
Makina

Faction portraits are from Azur Lane (asked for permission to use VJNL’s portrait pack, but a reply never came so I just went out and found them myself)

BGM:
gooset
shimtone

Special art for commodities, structures and hullmods:
karakoro
sera
asano (mkgr)
pochi (poti1990)
oadneyung
inika
ekm
reoen

Royal Azalean Flag & heraldry:
mariia_fr / Freepik, 
0melapics / Freepik

Sounds:
C&C Red Alert 2 sounds
Civilization 3 sounds

For coding and internals-related help:
Alex
Morrokain
tomatopaste

For scripts and references :
Black magic to remove minus hullmods if over OP by Dark.Revenant
Edited FX scripts from Tartiflette’s Magic Lib
Edited scripts from LazyWizard’s LazyLib

Of course, a big thank you to the Starsector team, who created this wonderful game! Modding it has become a regular past time of mine.

And finally, you. Thank you for trying out RYAZ. I hope you enjoy it!

The google drive link is private I’m afraid. I’m generally not a huge fan of anime themes but I’ll give this a shot when I can download it. Also, I’m not exactly sure what I’m being credited for? 

Ah, sorry about that! It’s my first time using google drive, since bitchute was acting up… And thank you very much for giving this mod a shot!

And you answered one of my questions in the Misc Questions thread, right?

Haven’t tried the mod yet, but I want to throw a wild guess at invocation activation: Is it based on which weapon group is currently selected? 5 Different invocations, 5 weapon groups to choose from… Seems like a straightforward way to select what to use.

Clever! And that was indeed one of the ideas I was throwing around when I was deliberating how to implement it. But sadly, no dice! I’m sorry for the broken link, I *think * got it right now, so please try again!

i think you have left references to some variants from your other mods
in the titleScreenVariants.csv, at least

Ah, sorry about that! I neglected to test the mod by itself. Will be uploading a replacement link soon!

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Edit: Oh, and please make sure to delete the old files if you’re updating.

This mod is so hilariously odd, in anycase, thanks!

I hope you enjoy!

I. Fixes:

• Neglected to add default_ship_roles entries for the entire line of vanilla skins, meaning they don’t show up in Campaigns.
• This has been fixed.
• These are reskins of low-tech ships, used by Royal Azalean Colonials:

[Light Carrier] Condor (RA)

[Destroyer] Enforcer (RA)

[Frigate] Lasher (RA)

[Fighter] Talon (RA)

• Fixed a slew of crashing issues related to the Spellcasting mechanic, when done in several special cases: (X) Transferring ships, Losing your last ship, etc.

II. Changes:

• Adjusted all warship dissipation values to be sightly lower than vanilla low-tech near-peers. I found after bit more playtesting, particularly in an actual campaign and not just dueling 1 on 1 in sim, that pretty much all of the ships can’t even fire a broadside for more than a few salvos before hitting the flux cap…
• Added a tiered system for the flux feedback when outer Volumatrix Shields overload. Smaller ships now get a smaller flux feedback when breaking shields compared to larger ones. It became a problem since the outer shields of smaller ships basically had nearly the same cap as the main ship – meaning an overload of the outer shield will pretty much fill up the entire flux gauge anyway, which defeats its purpose.

III. Kind of new:

• Added Isolla McGwen’s custom destroyer as a possible super ship start:

[Destroyer] Swashbuckler-class
by HELMUT

• It’s not actually new, I just forgot to put it in too…
• The ship appears in her story mission, Caged Sparrow.

Apologies for the messy release. Got a bit too excited and did too little testing…   

After some testing it seems the grand invocation system is somewhat unreliable, defaulting to Zephyr Ray a lot. There’s also the issue of player-piloted ships being stuck with Zephyr Ray, although I suppose a certain other mod might allow for a workaround for that.

Well you do have part of it right – if all the checks to distinguish which spell to use fail, the code defaults to using Zephyr Ray. This is why it’s very likely that most of your ships will use it! As for player piloted ships, if you were playing on sim in the missions tab, then yes, it’s often going to default to Zephyr Ray due to the above mentioned checks. A typical campaign ought to get you a good selection of spells across your fleet, though! (depending on your preferences)

I love the gimmick of this mod and how it’s ties gameplay mechanic with lore

Thank you very much for saying so! I hope you continue to enjoy the mod as it grows!

After some testing it seems the grand invocation system is somewhat unreliable, defaulting to Zephyr Ray a lot. There’s also the issue of player-piloted ships being stuck with Zephyr Ray, although I suppose a certain other mod might allow for a workaround for that.

Well you do have part of it right – if all the checks to distinguish which spell to use fail, the code defaults to using Zephyr Ray. This is why it’s very likely that most of your ships will use it! As for player piloted ships, if you were playing on sim in the missions tab, then yes, it’s often going to default to Zephyr Ray due to the above mentioned checks. A typical campaign ought to get you a good selection of spells across your fleet, though! (depending on your preferences)

Across your fleet, yes, but the player-piloted ship is gonna be stuck with Zephyr Ray, which is what I’m pointing out.