matilija Posted December 19, 2023 Share Posted December 19, 2023 (edited) So I'm working on a mod to rebalance ships so that I don't just insta delete all the low level pirates that pop in, I had gotten in a bad habit of downloading mods and building crazy ships, and found out recently that my ship was at the point where I could just park by the key and most of the enemy ships would be vaporized by auto turrets before I even lost my shields...on the hardest difficulty, so I decided that ships needed to be better balanced....even if they aren't purely due to my own careless mod downloading. I was able to increase targeting radius from 2k to 7.5k increased target lock fade from 6 seconds to 10, increased ranges on all weapon types with better ranges for higher classes, EM weapons ABC ranges are 1.75k/2.5k/3.25k, Missiles 8-10k(this doesn't actually work), lasers 4-6k, balistics 3-4k, and PB's 5-6.5k. I mostly wanted this to ensure missiles could be useful..but I'll get to why this doesn't work Here's a kind of snippit of a spreadsheet that I came up with to ensure all ships had enough hull/shields and weapons couldn't be too OP. min-max based on class and level. You'll notice I made hull fairly stronger than shields, purely because I don't think there are any skills that can buff hull like there are for shields. Class- A B C Levels (1-100) Shields 10000-19000 14375-24375 20750-29750 Reactor(hull) 10000-30000 20000-40000 30000-50000 Then I went to weapons, I did the math and made sure that all lvl 1 weapons could do exactly 2% of a max level shield/hull combo of the same class(with just a few exceptions) based on a full power loadout of that weapon type and their rate of fire, and a max level weapon of that class can do 4%...or, if you have 3 different weapon types with max loadouts a range of 6-12% total damage per second to wipe out a ship of that class. This also made it so that even a maximum loadout of the best Class C weapons money can buy, it would take a minimum of 3 shots to kill the lowliest of lvl 1 class A ships. Exceptions being lasers and ballistics, they still do the same 2%, but are calculated differently, balistics do 75% more dmg per second to hull then an otherwise same spec PB weapons, but they do 75% less dmg to shields, and the reverse is true for lasers..this makes lasers and ballistics basically just as good as PB weapons when used in tandem vs. using 2 different PB weapons, because you can find lvl56 class C lasers and ballistics, but if you went with PB weapons, you might have 1 lvl 56, but you would be stuck with another lower lvl option which would do less damage than the first......But then, there are missiles.... And this is where my problem lies, I know where the damage information for missile weapons is stored, it's in the explosion data column of the ESM, and the range is in the projectile column but I can't copy to override them for some reason with xedit, I have all of the shields/reactors, EM weapons, PB weapons, Lasers, Ballistics modded, but can't for some reason mod the missiles, making them now woefully inadequate...has anyone else ran into issues with xedit not letting them mod certain parts of the game? And has anyone smarter than me figured out a workaround? Edited December 19, 2023 by matilija Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matilija Posted December 19, 2023 Author Share Posted December 19, 2023 Ok, this is dumb, but I actually figured out a work around, but it's going to take some serious time....so the damage data is stored in the explosion, which I can't modify...the explosion is linked to by the projectile, which I also can't mod, and the projectile is linked to by the missile launcher, which I can mod.....so i need to find out the damage ratings of all the projectiles in the game, figure out how many would need to be launched to get close the dmg output I'm looking for, change the launcher to point to the projectile of choice and adjust the ammo cap and number of projectiles to be launched to equal the damage output per second I'm looking for..........which might be the most convoluted out of the box way of doing it as I could possibly think of....but I think it will work........ Edit: Actually, I know it will work because I just tried setting up the CE59 to launch 10 projectiles at once and it was glorious! https://tinypic.host/image/Missiles.tnJsu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HeyYou Posted December 19, 2023 Share Posted December 19, 2023 3 hours ago, matilija said: Ok, this is dumb, but I actually figured out a work around, but it's going to take some serious time....so the damage data is stored in the explosion, which I can't modify...the explosion is linked to by the projectile, which I also can't mod, and the projectile is linked to by the missile launcher, which I can mod.....so i need to find out the damage ratings of all the projectiles in the game, figure out how many would need to be launched to get close the dmg output I'm looking for, change the launcher to point to the projectile of choice and adjust the ammo cap and number of projectiles to be launched to equal the damage output per second I'm looking for..........which might be the most convoluted out of the box way of doing it as I could possibly think of....but I think it will work........ Edit: Actually, I know it will work because I just tried setting up the CE59 to launch 10 projectiles at once and it was glorious! https://tinypic.host/image/Missiles.tnJsu NOT an angle I would really want to see that from. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurreth Posted December 19, 2023 Share Posted December 19, 2023 5 hours ago, matilija said: has anyone else ran into issues with xedit not letting them mod certain parts of the game? And has anyone smarter than me figured out a workaround? Yes, there are things in Starfield.esm that xEdit will not let you copy. You can't copy reflection data (in some places called houdini data). This limitation is clearly explained in the release notes, which you should have read before you started using it. Essentially these are huge blocks of embedded data which has not been decoded, no one knows what it does, and copying it can cause serious problems even if it is identical to the original, so xEdit doesn't let you touch it. Is there a workaround? Yes. You can make a copy of Starfield.esm, rename it, load that in xEdit, and then delete everything you don't want. My first planet experiments were done this way. It takes forever to set up, and since xEdit does not have an undo function you will make mistakes, remove something you didn't want to, and have to start over. Likely several times. I don't recommend doing this unless you are extremely patient and have a lot of free time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matilija Posted December 19, 2023 Author Share Posted December 19, 2023 Sadly free time is all I have right now, I tore my distal bicep tendon at work about a month ago, so I've been slowly teaching myself modding while I'm on medical leave and can't really use my dominant arm....typing with 1 hand is slow going, but at least it gives me something to do while I'm on medical leave and otherwise indisposed..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aurreth Posted December 19, 2023 Share Posted December 19, 2023 49 minutes ago, matilija said: Sadly free time is all I have right now, I tore my distal bicep tendon at work about a month ago, so I've been slowly teaching myself modding while I'm on medical leave and can't really use my dominant arm....typing with 1 hand is slow going, but at least it gives me something to do while I'm on medical leave and otherwise indisposed..... Ouch, sorry to hear that. Something similar is where my FO4 Vault Empire mods came from, too much time on my hands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matilija Posted December 19, 2023 Author Share Posted December 19, 2023 It's alright, I used to mod Morrowind back in the day, it's not that much different, and it's kind of nice to have the time to work on what I think will make the game better by the time I'm done...I also found another option besides just changing numbers of projectiles, it looks like I link a different missile ammo to each weapon, so I can use fewer hard hitting projectiles like those from the Atlatl_280C rather than having ~90 Vanguard missiles firing at once! LMAO Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matilija Posted December 20, 2023 Author Share Posted December 20, 2023 Thank you for your help Aurreth, my mod is here and ready for consumption, or avoidance, whichever you prefer. https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/7770 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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