Game screen shots
Features
Better variants aims to make combat more challenging by adjusting the composition of AI fleets. Features include:
– New and reworked ship variants in fleets
– Officers of ships in fleets have skills and personalities relevant to the ship being piloted
– Autofit being disabled for all fleets
– Special, randomly occurring, themed fleets with unique compositions
– A bar event offering bounties targeting said special fleets
– Adjustable settings found in data/variants_lib of the mod folder
– Version checking
Mod Compatibility
The features from this mod will not be run on fleets from non-vanilla factions, which (hopefully) ensures a decent amount of mod compatibility. There aren’t really any mod compatibility features beyond this. I have not tested this mod extensively with others. Safe to add but not remove.
Change Log
I updated the mod, changes in change log
When trying this out on a new save, all modded factions have no ships in their open/military/special markets. After removing this mod the markets had their normal stock again. I saw a few others having similar issues. I no longer have the logfile, but if you are unable to reproduce anything let me know and I’ll try again.
I realize you state that you only use vanilla ships and BSC is a prefix for BigBeans mod. I looked through their code and saw no bar events or bounties so even though it is a Big Beans ship I think perhaps your code is pulling from it. I believe it may be because BigBeans is a ship compilation and not a faction mod and all their ships are added to vanilla faction “known ships”.
I’ll loop in BigBeans as well since it may be an issue on their end. Either way, keep up the good work!
Well I gave it a go this morning and took an exotic mission and received a crash to desktop:
I realize you state that you only use vanilla ships and BSC is a prefix for BigBeans mod. I looked through their code and saw no bar events or bounties so even though it is a Big Beans ship I think perhaps your code is pulling from it. I believe it may be because BigBeans is a ship compilation and not a faction mod and all their ships are added to vanilla faction “known ships”.
I’ll loop in BigBeans as well since it may be an issue on their end. Either way, keep up the good work!
Forgot to do something that prevents the event from being given by modded factions. I did a fix, download the new version. If you still see the event on a modded faction market don’t view it and wait for it to despawn.
I can’t tell if it is this mod or second wave, or a combo of the two, but everyone and their mom now uses overdriven ships like crazy.
Yeah, this is what I noticed as well, and it’s ultimately what made me stop using the mod. It’s honestly pretty annoying. At first, I thought that it was just pirates and pathers using it, but even the main factions like the Hegemony, Tri-tachyon, and the League’s fleets will be 60%+ overdriven ships. It is just annoying as hell to fight because they just kite and kite and kite and kite the entire battle, which is the most annoying part of any battle. Despite the speed bonus SO provides, it actually makes battles take even longer because any ship in danger has more than enough speed to backup and passive vent, which just leads to both sides doing this over and over again until a few critical kills (usually capitals) leads to the losing side just kiting away. This often means that battles rarely actually decisive and instead lead to you having to chase down a fleet multiple times unless you’re autoresolving. I figure that it’s not much better if you are using mostly high-tech because most low-tech SO builds can outrun non-so high-tech stuff as well.
Other than that, I really enjoy the mod. I kind of wish there was an option to limit SO to appearing exclusively on pirate or pather stuff since that feels more appropriate for them exclusively.