First post here, great mod, enjoying it immensely.
I have a few suggestions that I feel could be used to potentially improve the Flood conversion mechanic.
- Flood spores work like the boarding party ability used by the Corsev Battlecruiser from Sins: Rebellion
http://sinsofasolare.../Boarding_Party
- Or, multiple Flood spores are required to take over larger ships. Perhaps combine this with the 'boarding party' mechanic to allow ships to be destroyed and converted by stacking damage from multiple Flood boarding parties.
- And lastly, all shielded ships are immune to flood spores while the shields are up. (This would include the future UNSC Infinity).
I have a genuine question regarding the last point. It was my recollection from the Halo series that shields provided immunity to Flood spores (until the shields were down). This would greatly help Covenant ships deal with Flood, which sorely lack anti-fighter capability needed to deal with spores in their current form.
1 and 2 are ruled out. The flood has gone through a significant revamp since then. They work much better. Also, point 2 is impossible due to hardcoding.
Point 3 is (I think) impossible due to hardcoding, because even if the shields go down, the ship will still be marked as "having shields". The requirement would be "can only be used on ships without shields" but since the ships have a shield count it would still be unable to infect it. "Ships with hull only" wouldn't work either, as the shields negate the hull aspect.
As for your question, the Shadow of Intent took a dispersal pod straight through the midsection of the ship, and it would have had shields. Unless the shields were taken offline in order to glass the Citadel, they had no problem (at their velocity) punching through the shields and then hull of the ship. The Covenant can now adequately deal with the flood, pickets have been buffed and the CAS is now immune to flood infection. They are just as capable of handling the flood as the UNSC. The almighty Unikraken is hoping for a release SoonTM but that remains to be seen.
Hope I answered your questions.