SD’s Better Strike Craft Stellaris

SD’s Better Strike Craft Stellaris

This mod attempts to make strike craft less crappy in general. As they are, they do good damage ON PAPER, but once in the game you realize that PD annihilates them and that they are terrible for attacking anything but battleships because they have terrible tracking.

Updated to allow for bigger, more carrier focused battleships. Potentially up to 4 hangers (instead of 3) but I include options that replace PD with small weapon slots.

– Makes strike craft faster, especially fighters
– Significantly increases hitpoints, especially for bombers
– Improves evasion and tracking so they can engage corvettes and dodge some PD
– Increases wing size to 12 from 8
– Adds more hanger parts to battleships, less required PD
– Changed bomber projectile weapon graphic
– Added some Cruiser cores with less PD as an option
– Made similiar changes to the amoeba strike craft as well for completeness, they are comparable to T2 bombers give or take a bit.
– Made similar changes to the Swarmer strike craft.
– For compatibility with another one of my mods, if you research T3 torpedoes you get a battleship bow with 4 torpedo bays. ????
– Fixed a few bugs related to turret placement and PD slots showing up before PD is researched. Whoopsie!
– Updated to 1.4
– Added a few more hull options to the bow and stern sections for battleships.
– Added a bow hanger option to the cruiser.
– Added some small penetration to fighters to make them a bit more appealing vs bombers. They ignore 5-10-15 per level of shields and armor. Maybe its because I grew up on Wing Commander, but fighters shouldn’t be crappy..
– Added another bow hanger option to the battleship.
– I noticed the trait “Ex Fighter Pilot” in a localisation file, and I thought, why isn’t this in the game? Now it is. Gives +10% damage and attack speed. It only shows up if you have at least level 1 strike craft unlocked.
– Added “Warbred Amoeba Flagella” as an advanced version that will stay as an option late game. Thanks to Arcalane on reddit for helping me with the custom icon!
– Tweaked Warbred Flagella a bit, they were too good.
– Remove the swarm critter tweaks, as they may be having unintended consequences regarding PD.
– Updated to 1.5, fixed a few instances where you could have PD slots without PD researched.
– It doesn’t look liked 1.5 changed anything about fighters so everything should be fine.
– Re-added swarm fighter tweaks, beware ????
– Re-removed swarm fighter tweaks, un-beware ???? They were still screwing with PD /somehow/, I think anyway.
– Tweaked evasion to be slightly higher on the 0-2 tier fighters. Removed the laser graphic from the scouts and used the same autocannon graphic as the t1 fighters.
– Tweaked the warbred flagella a bit more, still too good. Now should be ok.

Bugs: In the ship designer, the L slots and H slots don’t show up right, it’ll say something like “2L slots” but it’ll actually be 1H 1L. When you select the ship section it displays correctly in the designer, though, and works fine in game. Its a Paradox bug, something to do with how hangar slots are treated in some way as a large slot I think.

Notes: In a few places I change the weapon slot sizes on ship sections for balance reasons, and I put a smaller turret in a larger barbette. It doesn’t look exactly perfect if you zoom in, but there isn’t really a way for me to fix this, and it would be hard to notice in game.

This mod changes the following files:

./gfx/interface/icons/technologies/tech_amoeba_strike_craft_2.dds
./gfx/interface/icons/ship_parts
./gfx/interface/icons/ship_parts/sd_ship_part_amoeba_strike_craft_2.dds
./interface/sd_int_components.gfx
./localisation/sdds1_l_english.yml
./common/technology/sd_soc_weapon_tech.txt
./common/component_templates/sd_weapons_critters_amoeba.txt
./common/component_templates/00_weapons_critters_amoeba.txt
./common/component_templates/00_strike_craft.txt
./common/traits/sdds_leader_traits.txt
./common/section_templates/battleship.txt
./common/section_templates/cruiser.txt
./common/component_sets/sddd1_strike_craft.txt