Yeah, heh, I wanted to give the GTVA ships the same level of sexy firepower as the UEF ships from the trailers. I actually looked up how to make the trails from the karuna's weapon files and started messing with it to make it shorter and more distinguishable. It's just too nice an effect to pass up! It also helped differentiate them from the swarms of terran turret 2 pulses. Fury's right, actually, I made a few table tweaks in between recording sessions. On one of them I accidentally turned the trails off of the terpulses. Yeah, from 1:30 to 2:00ish. Wasn't bad looking at all, actually. Might experiment with a much longer, thinner, and fainter trail.
I think total rate of fire is down on the big pulse turrets actually, they fire two shots over one and a half seconds and wait about two or three more before going again as opposed to the one second or half second reload time they used to have. The smaller pulse guns I need to double check, but I can get back to you on the numbers. Yeah, old sterpulse = 3 shots/sec, mine is 2 shots/1.5 sec. The effect is just way easier to see.
I can't speak to the hull piercing effect actually. No idea how that happened. Maybe that's the flak hull piercing effect? I ... believe it has one. I didn't mess with that, I just thought it was pretty neat.
It's actually a whole lot harder now, with the exception of universal truth, though I lost that twice while recording. Shivan bombs lock on and reload considerably faster, so when bombers (fff nahemas) slip through the rain of fire and start homeworld sliding all over the place they can really ruin someone's day. If you watch the universal truth segments I put up around 5 mins in, I think you can see in one of 'em I was about to lose the temeraire. Terran Turret 2 now does only a quarter damage to shields, so those rapid fire cannon need to score a very very large number of hits before they can actually kill something. Note at ~3:30 a nahema flying right through about a hundred direct hits with only a moderately damaged forward shield quarter. Then I shot its shields off with balors.
Then those PD guns will kill people quickly. The big pulse guns also excel at stripping shields, but they're rather more dodgable. Even more amusingly, the most badass shipkilling bombers of yore, the nephilim and the seraphim, are too big to really dodge that well and so the defenses do represent an improvement on GTVA shipbuilders part towards competency. Of course, Nahemas are fast and not as big, so a few tend to slip through. I actually thought about making it the other way around, where the rapid fire guns rocked at shields but bounced off of armor, but that didn't seem fair to the shield-heavy shivans.
The burst flag didn't work, actually, or I was doing it wrong. That's all swarm and swarm wait.
Speaking of boosted shivan weapons, yeah, it's no longer possible to loiter around shivan capital ships for extended periods of time (with some exceptions). Their point defense guns don't DPS quite as hard as GTVA ones do, but they're nothing to sneeze at. I also put the cycle flag on the shivan and vishnan guns, cause in the freakin' fs2 opener the manticore has cycling lasers and I like that effect. What else... the shivans have a big pulse gun of their own now, you can see at the very end its blasts trailing off into the distance behind the Laraje. And yeah, Cains now feature a large array of antifighter weaponry, Liliths a balance of missiles and anticapitalship beams, and the Rakshasa is a four pack of SReds with some point defense. Lilith is general purpose (and, well, the Lilith and thus the best), the Rakshasa is for shock jumping, and the Cain is for sitting around grinning and wasting everyone's time like an idiot.
Like I said, there's only a few missions where the changes got dramatic - Fallen Angel is rather a lot tougher with the lucifer blowing arbiters away in single shots, though I swapped all of its blob turrets for SAAA and proceeded to be rather... disappointed... with its performance. They have ****ty arcs, and its missile turrets practically never fire. The hard part about Fallen Angel is that your allies will burn the Lucifer down to 15% health rather quickly, even after I nerfed their beams somewhat. Preserving the Balance has some... hecticness; I swapped out a few blob turrets on the nose of the Demon out for some beefed up SReds (I imaginatively named them MRed), so if the Temeraire is going down too quickly you can lop those off. Also, the Ravana's point defense DOES work rather admirably. Universal Truth is honestly the battle of endor at this point. The contribution of the random number generator now exceeds the contribution of the player, but it's all worth it for the eyecandy. Oh, and Curse of Prescience should last a little longer. It's my favorite level, so I might have reduced the lucifer's forward firepower and massively improved its broadside firepower, so it has to pull significantly closer before it can dole out the harshness.
EDIT: A really easy way to make everything exactly the same as it was would be to put the "huge" flag on terpulse and sterpulse, meaning those .25 damage vs. shields gatling guns would have a lot harder time knocking down the bombers on their way in and putting more emphasis on the player. I may have to try that out, even though it goes against the fluff. Too bad there isn't a way to increase bomb hit points or introduce random aiming error into a blob weapon...
