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Tactical Mod 3.7

Tactical Mod adds more depth to the MOO:CTS tactical battles by adjusting the way ships maneuver, giving weapon categories and individual weapons roles, adjusting how player build ships, and changing how the AI designs their ships and fleets. Balance in the mod is not passive mathematical balance. Instead the mod focuses on balance through active decision-making. What this means is a well designed fleet will have an advantage over a generic fleet that can appear unbalanced. A player that scouts and actively adjust designs to counter enemy fleets will do better than if they rely on generic designs and auto upgrades as tech is unlocked.

Larger Ships are now designed to turn and move more slowly allowing for groups of small ships to outmaneuver them in combat and putting more emphasis on mixed fleets rather than building only large ships.

Weapons have seen significant adjustments and continue to be refined. My balance goals follow MOO2 weapons where possible. Weapons now have different combinations of mods available to them following their available mods in MOO2. Cooldowns are based on a 5 second “turn” matching the default auto-pause setting in tactical.

Missiles are your primary weapons early and do high up-front damage but have low rate of fire and can be countered badly by ECM and late game point defense. Cannons are good vs. hull but become less efficient as shields improve and mitigation greatly reduces their damage. Beams become effective mid to late game where their high damage counters shield mitigation and good computers can overcome their inaccuracy, but they don’t tend to be as good against the hull. Torpedoes are standoff weapons. They work well as area denial and are effective against large ships or defenses but are easy to dodge with small fast ships.

I’ve changed the space requirements of weapons and significantly increased the cost of the all-around arc to make ship design more intentional. Normalizing many of the weapons sizes allows you to refit fleets to face different enemies more easily. Weapons now have roles that aren’t always just a linear unlock of damage. Many times, adding mods to an equipped weapon is better than taking a new one.

Last of all, the AI now has significant differences in ship designs, favored weapons, special equipment, and fleet composition between races. I’ve also reintroduced randomized AI personalities so that players don’t always face the same mix of ships every game. The goal behind these changes is to make scouting necessary and force players to design ships to counter specific races and combinations of enemy ships.

For those not on Steam, the mod is available through Nexus Mods:
https://www.nexusmods.com/masteroforionconquerthestars/mods/60