The Races & Tchorak Balance

[ExplorerBob]

Variations in friendliness isn't done, but I think it's finally in hand, and I can finally begin to turn my attention to other aspects of the mod.

When I originally did the Odd Adventures balancing, I made the tech changes mostly by looking at what SAIS had, and changing WW to match. I intend to look over the files and redo it as necessary, so unbalanced ships and weapons will be brought back under control.

In the process of design, I split the races into several "tiers", or "rivalries", with the idea of having a 'good' race to match each evil one.

Tier 1 - Low tech: Humans, Garthans
Tier 2- Moderate tech: Muktians, Urluquai
Tier 3 - Advanced tech: Zorg, Tan Ru
Tier 4 - Superior tech: Yellow Kawangi

This list neatly covers most of the SAIS/WW races, but it leaves out the new addition, the Tchorak.

The Tchorak ships are strong enough so that I would classify them as being tier 4 -- that is, up there with the Kawangi. However, my design philosophy is in conflict with that. The Yellow Kawangi are the original powerful race; their ship is the supreme threat in the first game. Making another race that can match or surpass that is a Bad Idea™.

Therefore, this means we need to nerf the Tchorak ships.

My main idea for doing this is to get rid of their weapons' invulnerability, so that parts of their ship can be disabled during the battle, and to get rid of their regeneration -- after all, their ships are large *rocks*, in the depth of space. I doubt they're going to instantly repair (besides, my revised Ravians do, and it would help to make that a distinct ability).

How would you feel about this?

- Bob

[sgqwonkian]

No one objected, so apparently it won't ruin the mod, at least not for any of us who check this site more than once a week.

Not sure Tchorak ships are actually Tier 4, more like 3.5. They can be beat by a number of different fleet builds that would be wrecked by the Kawangi. Just a reality check: You're aware that there's two versions of every Tchorak ship, right? So the Vent Mother and the VentMother do not have the same stats. Which one you're actually fighting really effects the difficulty of the battle.

Personally, I'd be a little hesitant to remove the weapon invulnerability, as it's one of the features that makes the tchorak unique. (The same could be said for the regeneration, but you've moved that to Ravians, where it makes more sense anyway.) An alternate possibility that would keep some of the unique feel, would be to keep the invulnerable systems (or reduce them to a system damage multiplier of .25 or so) and then just reduce the Hull (hit point) values a bit to bring them down in power. Or, just do that to the harder version of them.

Just a thought. As I said, changing these details won't ruin the mod for me.