The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Ok, guys!

Those of you that have tried out P6014 0.2.0 must've tried the 2 new ships: Baul and Foon-foon. (And those of you who haven't: Go do it already!)
I'm the guy responsible for programming them *ahem*. (Although I can't take the credit for most of the ideas for these ships - Kwayne & Benjamin have been the really creative souls)

I'm asking you to give some feedback on a couple of things we've been thinking with the gang:
- Should Baul's gas explosion shockwaves damage also the Baul ship itself? Currently they don't. If they did, it'd be required to also increase Baul's primary weapon's range to avoid hurting oneself too easily.
- Is Baul's turning rate ok?  It's a bit slowish, but making it too fast would make it too powerful...
- Does Foon-foon's spinning blade attack deal too much damage? Should it be nerfed down? Or is it good as it is?
- Do the ships have enough / too many / too few crew? What about other balance issues?

I have  one comment about the Dervish thing - it's triggered by only left turn key, but not right. I find it a bit strange.

I really like concept of Baul ship, but I think that AI is just to weak to handle its mechanics.

If Baul can become enemies in full game, it really needs to be improved.

Foon-foon's ship is fun to use too, especially secondary attack. Maybe even too much... I pretty much use it exclusively, without touching primary fire. Fly by, and use "lightning saber". Easier then aiming primary weapon. But I like it. ;D

Hmm, that's odd. It's supposed to work on Special+left as well as special+right.
Both of these combos work on my Mac as well as on my PC. Maybe your keys are conflicting? Have you tried using a different key for your special and see what happens?

Great that you like 'em!

The Baul (and Foon-foon) AI weakness stems from the fact that it's just a basic AI without any ship-specific modifications. Too bad we didn't have time to make a proper AI since our dedicated AI guy had some pressing Real Life (tm) matters...  I'll try to give the new ships some decent intelligence for the next update, but it'd be so much easier if we had a programmer on board, that was focusing only on the ships.

Yup, Foon-foon is pretty much all about the secondary :D
We thought of making the primary weapon a bit different since it's a bit dull now. Maybe make it act like Arilou beam - a "stuttering" laser, also make it a bit more powerful. How'd that sound?

What about making the standard weapon capable of charging up like the Melnorme? Instead of firing out a larger beam, it grows a larger ball (indicating the size of the beam), then unleashes the fury?

Not quite as ridiculous as this, but it gives you a general idea:
http://elmundotech.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/iron_man_photon_cannon_bmp_jpgcopy.jpg

My only problem with making the Foon-Foon weaker is it already feels like a pretty weak ship. 
Also, I always imagined the FF saber as something that would need to be charged up.  The ship starts to spin faster and faster, then hit the direction and it would fly across the screen with its beam out. How that would actually work in melee though, I couldn't tell you.

6014 still hasn't (IMO) released a ship as devastating or fun  (other than the non-canon ISD) as any of the big behemoth ships like the Dreadnaught, Maurader, or Avatar.

Anybody find a ship comparable to the Foon-Foon Typhoon or the Baul ship?

Hahah, well that Iron Man's gun is the definition of going overboard, if something!!

Funny - some people have felt the exact opposite: that Foon-foon is pretty strong ship, because of its speed and the amount of damage the dervish attack deals. I actually lean a bit on this side too: It's easy to wipe out the zapsats from AI-controlled Chmmr and also the fighters from an AI-controlled ur-quan + kill the Quan itself. That's the reason I deducted its crew capacity from 20 to 12.

I haven't tried the FF against a skilled human player though so it's hard to say anything about that.

Did you mean the primary weapon would shoot the charge ball specifically as a ball? Or as a saber/beam?
'Another World' comes into mind (see the mega-lazer at 0:14)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcD4KeYO30o&feature=related
Something like that could be fun, it would make the primary and secondary weapons more distinct from each other.

I like the FF as a CHMMR counter.  It's a reason to pick it.  Another world. Wow. Haven't played that game in years! It still holds up really well. Yeah. Something like that would work.

Not all ships meant to be super strong, especially not the Foon-Foon.

It's a story thing. They use their tools in a way similar to how medieval peasants straightened their scythes when they gone rebel.
The Typhoon Sabre is an amplified mining laser, while the dervish is a desperate, risky tactic using a reconfigured Sabre.

As it is now, the Typhoon is very strong: I can level all larger ships with it, against Awesome AI, even with 12 crew (that's still 2 DN shots!)
The Sabre still seem to be purposefully designed weapon, that's why it's needed to tune it down by making the use of the dervish more risky and (a bit) less effective, so players will also use the normal Sabre which should be much more effective but less... constant. Making it "stutter" is a good thing because it adds a simple animation to it.

Sure. Not all ships are meant to be strong, but there should be a reason why I want to choose them.  I'd rather pick almost any other race over the FF. The only exception is the ZFP. They have a devastating tongue attack but I always get slaughtered before I can get close enough to use it  ::)

And it's not just a story thing. The Androsynth are supposed to be super advanced humans. But I like the Earth ship on my fleet better.  The Melnorme are supposed to be wildly ahead of humans in the story, yet they're nothing ultra powerful in actual melee.  Gameplay is king and trumps story.

That's just my opinion. But right now, there's nothing here that makes me want to pick these guys. I like guys like the Vux because he slows down other ships. He's a great ship to set them up so at the very least another ship can knock them down.  I can still inflict a lot of damage as a Shofixti. The Baul and Lurg feel too similar to me. Just defensive ships. You simply can't attack straight on with the Baul because the gas doesn't move forward.  There's some real fun in the FF ship. It's just not there yet. I feel the same with the Baul too.

The Lurg need work. The Lurg is probably the most irritating ship to play against. It makes for long drawn out battles. At least humans will get bored eventually. The AI doesn't.

So what I would like to know, is why I would ever want the FF in my fleet? I'd rather have any of the alternatives because the FF just feels too pathetic and weak.  Same with the Baul and Lurg. Certain ship battles are so one sided with the Baul, like Earthling vs. Baul.  Even on the idiot AI level the Earthling just eliminates my Baul ship completely. But maybe I'm just playing them wrong.  I'm not a melee expert.  I'd love to know what others think on these guys.

A weak ship can still have a great counter to a powerful ship.  A powerful counter to the CHMMR is to knock it's zapsats out. Then if the other guy chooses a CHMMR ship, I'll employ the same strategy as my Vux. Choose the FF to knock out the sats so another ship can take him down.  What frustrates me most about the FF is it feels like it's almost there. 

The Baul is fun to play, he's just not very effective.  Maybe if he moved quicker, or if the gas were to float towards the enemy ship it might work better.

My suggestions:
Lurg Prawn: Scrap it for something else. It's too similar to the Baul, and the Baul is just more fun.
FF:  Longer Battery, longer spin attack time. Hold button for bigger beam. Make the tapping of the primary beam even weaker. Maybe add a spin-up time for FF secondary.
Baul: Gas floats towards enemy. Make them faster.

It would be funny that if the FF primary beam charges too much, the ship just blows itself up.  :D

By the Way. Welcome Kwayne! Finally created an account! Kwayne is one of 6014's artists. He did almost all the melee animation in a couple of weeks. That's insane! Chances are, if you see an HD bio-critter, it's his stuff.  He's an art machine.  :)  And yet, some of his best stuff won't be released until the full game.

Hello everyone. I have the feeling I'm asking something really obvious, but how can I test these ships in the game? I played through the new demo, but can't find these ships/races anywhere in the game, also not available in Super Melee.

Really? Anybody else having this trouble too?
Have you downloaded the latest Demo? We're talking about Project 6014 and not Ur-Quan Masters, right?

http://code.google.com/p/project6014/wiki/Downloads?tm=2

If you can, upload a screenshot so we can see where the problem may lay.

Also the Foon-Foon is a White sphere-like oblong ship, the Baul is dual pointy red ship, and the Lurg Prawn looks like a space lobster.  Selecting a blank ship slot should show all the ships.

Scratch that, I just hadn't played Super Melee in a loong time and didn't realize you need to press enter to see the rest of the available ships. Testing them now. They look good at least. Also while playing the demo, I didn't quite figure out what those bubbles from the Lurg Prawn actually do?

Lurg Bubbles slow down the ship temporarily.

The hard one to figure out is probably the Baul.  His primary weapon does no damage to ships.  The primary weapon and the secondary weapon need to mix to create an explosion. Shoot the red gas and it will explode. Sometimes causing a chain reaction.

@dczanik: Thanks for the introduction. Also thank you for explaining your points in length.

You can consider choosing any ship for different reasons. It doesn't have to be a tactical choice: you may have a credit limit, you may simply want to use your skill with that particular ship, or you play historical battle re-enactment, or you may think that ship looks neat, or there's someone pointing a Magnum to your head, saying your only salvation in this situation is choosing that ship. All of these reasons are just as viable as the king and trumps approach, that's why all of them are unimportant. Would we make a sequel to a strategy game I'd agree, but we're not.

-- I don't think the Lurg Prawn is irritating, actually it forces the enemy to use a risky tactic against them. Lack of flexibility on the players' side is something the Prawn shouldn't be blamed for.
-- The Baul Punisher is a brutal unrefined tactician. You have to lay a string of gas clouds so you can use the chain explosions to cause damage. If you're lucky enough the clouds can stick on an enemy, and when they are, each of them cause even more damage. But because the Baul are technologically underdeveloped, their effectiveness has to come with a price: you have to be careful with the gas or you blow yourself up. If you don't like taking a 180° turn then you can use momentum while assuming a more comfortable direction. The Earthling Cruiser is a great nemesis for the Punisher, but circling near the planet provides some cover and might be helpful in feeding some gas with the Cruiser too. I agree with the speed thing, at least to an extent that the Punisher might just have enough engine power to hold it's place against the Chmmr tractor beam, so he can still use a self damaging tactic against the Avatar. I wouldn't like to have the gas floating towards the enemy, first because gases don't do that, second because moving pieces in a chained trap would make the only weapon of the Baul unreliable.
-- The Foon-Foon Typhoon is a close combat ship, though it's not designed to do any fighting. It's weapons should speak that fact by being glitchy, rough but effective, and risky to use. The dervish is already too perfect against Chmmr sats and Quan fighters and, well ... everything, if you're using it skillfully. It's also a partial defense and an evasion tactic (I used it in all forms). It might need to have a longer cooldown period so a quicker opponent could attempt to retaliate. Also the dervish's range is long enough already ... I guess longer than the Mauler's cannon. The only problematic thing is the basic Sabre: it's weak, even with it's risk being it's close range requirement. It may stutter, or might need charging time to be able to deal larger damage.

Why choose the Foon-Foon? ... #1 opponent against Slylandro Probe.

Well, I am terrible at playing the FoonFoon. Maybe it's just me. So I decided to let the AI have a fleet of FoonFoon Typhoon ships.
I did a test of the Foon Foon.  Me against a flee of Foon-Foon Typhoons.  I chose a group I like to call my "Minions". 

I didn't do any screen recording (I saved you the agony, trust me).
What I found is I was almost able to defeat an entire FF fleet, with just 1 Vux ship. That 1 ship got destroyed. But that's because I ran into a planet a few times.  That's right, I'm actually more dangerous to MYSELF than an entire Foon Foon Fleet  :-\
I chose my 2nd Vux just to finish the 1 species....
(http://i.imgur.com/RpViN.png)

I completely obliterated them. 
Well, that's the Vux, it's more powerful, right?  How about something less powerful. Something quick. Something more on the level the FF is supposed to be?
I chose the Arilou. Arilou vs. an entire FLEET of Foon-Foon!
How did I do?

(http://i.imgur.com/rcE0V.png)

Not a single scratch! With no inertia, avoiding the planets are easier.

So I thought. Okay. What's the WEAKEST enemy then?! Something the FF will be SURE to defeat? How about the Shofixti? Yes, I know some rock at this ship, but not me. I suck.
And yet...

(http://i.imgur.com/Wi5qQ.png)

That one kill. Once again, that's me running into the planet and blowing myself up. Oh, the FF touched me though. Took a whole 2 crew away.  This battle lasted a half hour. My hands are still hurting. Why did it last so long? Told you I suck.  :P

My conclusion? The FF are weak and the AI is broken. Sorry guys.  :-\

If the Lurg were slowed by their own bubbles, that'd keep them from turtling too much. The bubbles will need a short ripening time during which they don't slow. That'd help.

The Baul... seems like you're invincible if you don't charge it, or if you can simply arrange not to cross its trail. That's really really weak. If the gas balls, you know, moved... and especially if they lasted until the affected ship was destroyed, like limpets, amplifying the damage from all incoming weapons.

So, it seems reasonable to want to make one of them homing, and the other direct-fire. I'm thinking, the balls would make a good medium-long ranged direct fire weapon with medium-high energy cost (so the number of balls doesn't get too high, making too thorough a softener), and the main shot a medium-short ranged homing weapon with low energy cost.

@dczanik: it seems you're pretty desperate in proving something, but you of all should know that we didn't have time for making a proper AI for either the Typhoon (which I think got it's AI from the Umgah) or the Punisher. That doesn't mean either of them is a weak design.

However matches against Human players might be a real problem for the Punisher. Even though I think it's a bit stupid, homing gas clouds might be an answer ... but I'd rather pick an alternative if I had one right now.

Aww, don't take it personally Kwayne. I'm not criticizing the design. The forum topic was asking for a critique on the ships. The design isn't weak. The design of both ships are great. I just think they need tweaking. If you re-read my first post on here, I think there's potential for some real fun here. I'm just not having fun with these ships in their current form.  I know the programmers are working hard on the A.I.  I know you worked hard on the design.  But, it needs to be fixed.   You can't have a forum topic asking for input on something, then say I'm "pretty desperate in proving something" when I offer my input.   ??? That's what forums are for.  Shoot, just today somebody complained about the Syreen's chin.  I'll just roll with the punches and fix it.

The Lurg design was mine, and yet I criticized my own ship the most. I hate the Lurg. At least your stuff just needs some tweaking.  The AI is broken though. I just want them more awesome.

Lurg: Turtling is the perfect term. I used to play Team Fortress a lot and I hated matches that everybody Turtled.  The AI is set on that turtling behavior. It would need a lot more changes in order to come up with something effective. 
Baul: Yeah, homing gas does sound stupid.  But maybe there's really a canister spraying the gas, and that homes in on the target? 

My favorite types of ships are the big behemoth ships (CHMMR, Ur-Quan, Kohr,Ah) and the fast strafing ships (Arilou, Supox, Utwig, Yehat).  So probably the biggest reason I dislike the two is both are really defensive ships.  I just have no patience for them.

You presented several screenshots about how crappy the AI works, arguing for a change in design. I just don't see the consistency here, and I don't think it's a honest argument, especially when you ridicule the ship you didn't have the flexibility to play, nor the patience to practice with. Nothing personal of course and I also think the ship designs need tweaking, but I'd rather do that not due to subjective personal measures of how "fun" they are. So forum or not, feelings don't count as viable points.

If you're not patient for "defensive ships", then the Prawn and the Punisher are simply not your ships to choose, the same way the Umgah Drone is not a ship for me to choose. In case you don't like the program on a TV channel (let's say Fox), that's why God created the remote controller, but still there are people watching and liking that channel.

But I want to make you feel better, so I tell you in advance that I got concepts of the Faz and Taalo ships, the former being a crazy action maniac design, the latter being ... well ... a war mammoth -- possibly the largest of them all.

I didn' say before though that I really like the idea of an overcharged FF blowing itself up ... it also fits the concept. Maybe the ship itself needs to pulsate to indicate the danger.
And the canister may be a good idea too.
I think the problem with the Prawn is that it's bubbles suck up too much damage from enemy fire -- making them less resistant could give chance to the player to carve a hole in the Prawn's fortress tactic.

Yup, Damon, the reason the FF & Bau AI fared so poorly against you is that there is no AI for them!

Currently FF only has vanilla basic AI which means it can't use it's secondary weapon at all. Baul has currently copy-pasted Thraddash AI which means it's able to lay its gas clouds, but doesn't have the intelligence to shoot at them. So both of the new ships are incabable of using their strongest weapons on AI. No wonder they get their asses kicked.

I do agree with you that the ships are ALMOST there. Quite fun, but not yet splendid.
-Maybe Baul needs that faster acceleration to defer Chmmr's tractor beam. Or faster turning rate to make a bit more viable against any ship.
-There are so many good ideas here for the FF primary weapon that it's hard to choose which one of them we should start implementing!
-The idea of Lurg bubbles affecting also the Lurg ship itself (after a certain time period) is interesting. It might make the Prawn less obnoxious to play against, forcing it to move more.

Kwayne: No sir. I'm arguing for a change in the Lurg design. :) I think it needs it. That's changing the way it works.  Changing something like making the FF beam life isn't asking for a re-design.  At least, not to me. It's just a tweak, man. :) But you're right. I did concede that I'm just not a big fan of defensive ships. That's why I mentioned it. There's no wrong opinions here, because that's all they are... just opinions.  But if somebody is asking what I think about them, I think it's best to be honest about it. Opinions or feelings on something that are disregarded as invalid defeats the whole purpose of the topic and gathering feedback in the first place. It's cool if we just disagree. 

SuperButcherX: Thanks. I'm glad you're not taking personally since I think I was hardest on you.  The FF just wasn't firing at me.  It's just a few tweaks and I think they are awesome.  But the AI. That's something that needs work.  It moves around pretty good. It's hard to hit.  But they're a little too much of a pacifist. They hardly ever fire. And when they did, the beam was on constantly until I shot at them. I could have sworn that they did better in one of the builds I've tried. This is just a beta demo. I think we all understand things will change in the final version.

Maybe I don't understand the Baul at all. How are you supposed to get the fuel gobs on the enemy in the first place? Ram them butt-first and drop them then?

Think of "globs" as mines, and primary weapon as detonator.

Ok, guys,
judging by this thread and some more or less constructive criticism at star-control.com's boards it seems that the Baul is
a) lacking some aggressive attitude
b) too similar to Lurg gameplay-wise.

This is why I'm trying this kinda thing:
The Baul gas shoots forward quite fast and after that, gradually slows down to total halt.

This way you can play both offensively and defensively: You can lay out a minefield and play the waiting game, or you can engage the opponent, pepper him with some gas clouds and the finish the bastard off with your primary spray!!! HA HA HAA!!!

I also eliminated a bug which reduced the effect of the chain reactioning shockwaves... this resulted in the explosions being perhaps even bit too strong now.

But. Those of you that can: Download the latest updates, compile & try it out. See if you like it better! (I do ;) )

Heh heh heh, it was fun thrashing the 300 point armada with all Baul + 4 FF ships fleet! :D

Although it was much because the AI is pretty stupid against the Baul gas:  Yehat & Kohr-Ah come straight at it, relying on their specials to handle them. Ah well, gotta change that.

Anyway, the forward-shooting gas made the ship much more fun to play IMO. The ship has still freshness because it still has its two-component action and can deal damage to self.

Gekko and I just played a quick netmelee game. FoonFoon seems quite effective against flanking ships, that's enough of a niche to make the current design worthwhile. The primary is pretty useless, but the dervish thing is so powerful that the primary should probably stay mostly useless. We didn't do exhaustive tests or anything, so it could be that it's broken somehow and we just didn't figure it out. :)

I finally found one ship against which primary FonFon beam is useful: Pkunk AI ship.

That thing is just too fast to be hit with dervish thing. On the other hand, if you just keep primary active (and it drains battery veeeery slowly), and turn around  a lot, there is change to hit that Pkunk.

An army with only minefields loses, hard. This scales down to ship-to-ship combat.

....

Glad to hear about the changes!

Comment from Gekko over at the SCDB which I felt would be useful here

I think Chmmr is in a good place but you would want a medium ship (medium speed, medium damage) that can maneuver out of any gravity beam instagibs with enough firepower to destroy zapsats. Kohr-ah is just overpowered, you need someone that can slice through both blades and FRIED, like Utwig. Androsynth... Slylandro does it by kiting. Iirc #uqm-arena thought Lurg was good against Androsynth? Someone help me remember.

Yehat, make someone who has to get into the enemy ships face. Yehat will always win. Mycon beats slow ships pretty easily. Chenjesu usually beats any medium ship that can't deal with the pets. Anyone slow and without ways to kite fighters will drop to Ur-Quan (Orz hardcounters, ZFP can have some success) the exception being Kohr-Ah which just laugh fighters and anything Dreadnoughts send at them, off.

I have a few things to say, but I'll start with answering the first questions.


1. No. As it's been said, if Baul's explosions would hurt itself, it would just make it another Shofixti.
But even now Baul ship needs work. It's either really powerful and dangerous or very much harmless against other ships.
I'm not getting into it's AI programming, I'm sure you see the errors there as I do and fix them.
Personally I think, that if you made the gas bubbles so that other ships can blow them too, that might make the difference it needs.
Also, primary weapon should be more than just a detonator. Even a bit of damage would do. I think it would also make the programming easier.
2. There is absolutely no need to speed Baul up in any way. It's good as it is.
3. The spinning blade is almost instant kill if it hits. With a good AI that ship would be better than Chmmr could be. Yes it's powerful, but it's just a matter of taste do you want to leave it as such. Maybe you should at least increase the energy cost.
4. Difficult to say about crew or other similar issues as long as AI is still what it is. Once the ships have a fine working AI, we can look into that matter more deeply.

Now, I have no great ideas for new ships, but I have to point you to another project, TW-Light, for inspiration. That game is not really my thing, but they do have many interesting ideas for ships abilities, like Kahr ship's boomerang.
http://tw-light.appspot.com/

Also, I had an idea. If possible, it wold be nice if there were some kind of a multiplying ship. Possibly using asteroids as material.

That's all for now. I'll be following.

EDIT: After more thorough exam I take back what I said about foonfoon having the potential to be more powerful than Chmmr. Though it could still be a fine enough ship.

Lol, does that include the Kohr-Ah?

I get killed by the secondary attack from the kohr-ah ship everytime my FF got close.

Don't forget vanilla tw! (http://timewarp.sf.net) tw-light has a lot less ships.

Wait, someone is actually developing tw-light still? Weird, especially since whoever isn't exactly letting the community here or on the SCDB know they're doing it. Who do they expect to play it?


And vanilla timewarp? Oh wait, that thing hasn't been fiddled with for a while.

Hey, just because the entire TW codebase is dead and buried doesn't mean living projects can't take ideas/inspiration from it. It's better than letting all that effort go to waste.

Everything indicates Yurand is back in business (as a one-man crew apparently).

I've been bug testing the upcoming update, and the changes to the Baul are awesome. I love the ship now.

I still don't get where you guys call the Foon-Foon powerful. I guess I'm just not as good as you guys.  I can do well against the lower ships, the blade is powerful and one hit can wipe out the smaller enemies but I usually get slaughtered before doing much damage. Maybe decrease the spinning damage but increase battery life so the FF can get away? My battery usually gets drained, I'm disoriented and I just get blown up.  :-\

Down the line, I'd love to see some of the TimeWarp ships make it in the game as an add-on or something.  I wish UQM had an easy way to deal with adding new ships without modifying the existing code and AI.  What ships were the most fun in TimeWarp? I don't remember being a big fan of any of them. But the fact that we're seeing TimeWarp rise from the dead again just is exciting.  I have a feeling that 2012 is going to be a good year for Star Control fans.

My goodness, there actually is a new TW-Light release there! And it's been in the works since June, apparently. Maybe we need to get that better advertized somewhere.

I'm pretty sure Yurand got motivated again with the demise of berlios.de (he needed to move the project so probably decided to work on it some too).
I know GeomanNL sent a few commits to TW on sourceforge out of the blue this July.  I haven't tried to compile it yet.

And to stay on topic...
Hear hear!
I was a fan of the Chronos, Boomerang (could use a rename), Catamaran (could use some stylistic tweaks), and a few others which I can't think of at this time of night.  I was never really fond of my own creation although I liked the concept of body-slamming an opponent into the planet.  There was a ship that I coded for someone called the Parasite that I never committed to CVS because it would cause random crashes (I was unsafely accessing private variables in a class to avoid rewriting the base ship class).

Maybe Yurand could let people know that it is alive, it'd be a lot easier to advertise then.

Regarding the ideas in Timewarp, you absolutely should utilise them. I only commented on the inactivity because I thought you were comparing it to TW-light, which, as you've now noticed, seems to have updated fairly recently.

I loved the Kahr Boomerang and a few of the Tau ships. It's been a while, so I'll have to take a look at TW again. The Kahr Boomerang is definitively the nicest ship in the game, though.

Bumpity-bump.
OK, folks, v0.2.1. is available, with massively rehauled Foon-foon and Baul ships!

I'm not gonna describe in here the differences to 0.2.0 since a) I want you to experience them yourselves b) I'm a meanie.

Let me know how you like 'em now and I can yet again tweak them more for the 1.0.0...

First impressions:

Baul ships became pretty potent with new changes. I like it that both weapons fire from same direction, instead needing 180 round turn (which was annoying due to low turn rate of the ship). Longer range of primary fire is good too, since Baul mines can damage their ships now.

As for Fon-Fon, it's still fun as ever, although I'm not sure about usability of charged primary weapon. When uncharged, it's much better then before due to slightly longer range and rapid fire. But since its range it still not much, it's pretty difficult to use it when charged, because you need to manage both range and direction of enemy, while doing only single shot (which I don't think it even makes much more damage), and making sure to not explode from overcharge. Easier to just wave with secondary, or do rapid fire with primary.

Anyway, I like it that new ships because good counters for some of original ships (for example Bhaal decimates Illwrath).

Thanks for the input!

Giving a longer range for the Foon-foon primary, when charged up, is an idea worth trying. It was also voiced by one of my friends I was playtesting with. Unfortunately that suggestion came only a day before the release of 0.2.. At that point I didn't dare put anything new and untested stuff in the code, lest I break something.
A long-ranged powerful shot would present the player yet another tactic for using the Foon-foon. But there's also the risk of turning the ship into another Thraddash, so the range shouldn't be too excessive.

Baul can also deal some nice punishment to Chmmr and Kohr-ah in its current incarnation, which I think is refreshing! Whereas I've found Mycon quite difficult to tackle with Baul - and this is good, since Mycon was a sort of loser ship in SC2.

Good to hear that you like 'em overall!

Making the FF primary have a bigger blast with each level of charge was one of the viable ideas, but by the time it came up I was done with the blast you see now and making more frames for it would have taken me to remake the whole burst which I wasn't really itching to do. I was thinking of a halfassed in-between idea, but I'm quite sure it wouldn't have worked out.

Now I have another idea, but I'm quite afraid to propose it because it doesn't need the burst graphic or even having charge phases. And I have another another idea but I don't know how to fit it to the Typhoon's concept.

Btw, tractor effect has been basically unused in weapons. Some kind of a vortex mine would certainly be unique.

Can you add a Venator-class Attack Cruiser too?

Ok well we know we can't legally use the star wars stuff and distribute this project so why don't we change it on the off chance people actually take notice of it?

Star Wars has, at least, up to Disney's acquisition, been very tolerant of fan works so long as they're not released for profit.

We'll see if that continues. If a C&D letter is sent, removal will be trivial.

Well first stars wars took place "in a galaxy far far away", and second do we really want star wars instead of a unique contribution or unique race that actual fans thought of? There's at least 5 other races from the wiki that still need to be added to p6014.

Until I get a C&D, the ISD is staying. I like it. It's fun.  The plan is to have an option to remove it out of melee.  It will NEVER be in single player.

ok well that's good to know it won't be in single player.

I agree!

Any updates on P6014?  The original website is kinda quiet.

thanks!

Yep it's starting back up again, and we're looking for authors/artists/programmers to join the writing team!

what's happening with this? It would be great to have a revival. I used to love playing the FoonFoon and the Vux. Any updates on Project6014?

I think it's probably dead.  :-\

It lives? AHW YEEE!!!

it was written in 2013.

Oh for goodness sake, I am an idiot. Thank you for pointing that out.

Can anyone send me the link to P6014? I can't seem to find the download.

Portable (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3jdk573bKMoV1l3dDdBaEJ1UFk/view)