Yeah, I was thinking of leaving LRMs/torpedoes for mothership. Unfortunately it looks like this method can't work as we would like it to.

think around the box
 

work within the limitations we have then.

You can effectively have dumbfired torpedos.

Use a turret res plasma cannon and remodel a shot to look like a torp.


Though of course butchers or any 'turret' capable ship could use them.

Still, make a low fire rate, slow/medium speed, high accuracy, dumbfired torp that way.

Could rebalance the larger ships so that only other larger ships really challenge them.

Adjust turret tracking, or at least accuracy for HIGH damage weapons. allow the lasers to be those accurate/weak weapons that demolish fighters, but really just splash against enemy shields/hulls with certain exceptions. The medium accuracy / higher damage cannons and then other higher damage weapons would then have a functions. (Rather useless imho as is, considering the accuracy of lasers and plethora of fighters). I'd love to make those dual heavy cannons worthwhile for once.

Btw, i haven't seen it mentioned here... but I so far I love playing with my allies in corvettes and such and have modded some myself (within your mod) to play with. Having destroyers and other vessels playable for allies would be awesome too. Size hasn't seemed to affect the hanger usage really. Ultimately I have adjusted my settings to turn autolaunch off- but that could allow people to adjust configs for larger vessels. It's a bit messy, but.. then fleet actions are really possible.

The missiles aren't a problem, can easily mod them... it's what the rest of the interface allows. The devs really should consider this in the upcoming expansion pack.

As for overall balance, yeah I'm still working on the integrated patch (fleet / mothership / missile mods). Kept putting it off because I thought there'd be updates to this mod, heh. You're pretty much spot-on about the weapons; I'd also been actually considering removing the higher-tier turrets and expanding light gun types. My experience was that at high levels the mothership pilot Bryna&KT turn your ship from a carrier-type into a battleship-type. I often tank battles with it solo without even launching my fighters, that's just wrong lol. Besides, I find 4 tiers of each weapon excessively redundant - how many players even bother with the tier 1 or 2 guns anyway?

Problem is the game only technically recognises 2 types of damage, laser and other. Plus shields are a universal type anyway, aside from the additional laser defence modules - which only few ships carry. There's barely any difference between lasers and particle accelerators (both laser type), and plasma is also similar damage/rate-of-fire except that it isn't laser damage. We can play around with rate of fire, damage, dispersion, range... that's about it I think.

Edit:
Combination mod finished. It's around 30+mb minus the voice pack (I think I'll let you guys download that separately, it's 50mb). Where should I upload this?

I use filefront because it's fast and doesn't have irritating limits for unregistered users like rapidshare or megaupload.

Well for capital ships, you could build in laser protection into shield modules, or hull rep even, or every bigship module, to show the base laser defense.

That would allow you to make lasers the anti-fighter weapon of choice.

then give every standard ai cap ship at least one or two systems with l-d.

If they didn't hardcode the XML files we could simply add laser defense to bigship-type shield modules :/ Hope the expansion will fix that but I'm not really holding my breath for it (would be awesome if they did, there's lots of things that could use combo tweaking).

Edit:
Thanks for the Filefront tip, uploaded and redownload tested ok.
http://www.filefront.com/17267461/SW3CW--combo_mods.zip
It's only 15mb, I forgot to calculate the size after the mods were compressed.

P.S> Goblin Wizard, if I could trouble you for another favour... could you put your mod's changes.txt file as an attachment on the first post? Thanks! Got a firewall at work preventing me from accessing Filefront, heh.

How will devs know about yours wishes?:-P

Been posting on the Elite Games forum too but it looks like they're too busy to answer.

ah well.

I guess you could just add an extra slot to all cap ships and give them l-d by default.

Then anyone who takes it off... oh well ;)

The answer is simple
Not all of them understand English well
But it's not a problem, moderator and some other key people could make translation