I made a mod that tweaks the way ship damage works in the game.

It was kind of bothering me how SiS had this interesting game mechanic for tracking how combat damage affected ships by damaging weapons and other ship systems, but it wasn't really relevant most of the time since ships typically got destroyed before taking major systems or crew damage.

This mod makes system damage and destroyed weapons more relevant by reducing structure damage taken by ships. Systems damage is unchanged.

The reduction depends on the damage dealt by the weapon and the target's total hp, so small ships being hit by heavy weapons will still likely be destroyed outright.

However firing a lot of light weapons at a large ship will result in destroyed weapons, engines, reactors, etc, since systems damage is unchanged from vanilla. However it is more likely that the hull will remain intact.

Ships still get destroyed in combat, especially smaller ships, and also due to exploding reactors and ammo magazines, however combat damage will cause ships to lose a lot more combat effectiveness (from destroyed weapons) before the ships are destroyed outright. Also, sometimes ships will be completely disabled instead of being destroyed, and can be captured after the fight is over. I find combat is a little more varied as a result of this mod.

While I have been playtesting it I still haven't finished a complete game with the mod, and so there is a good chance that I will continue to tweak things.

To install, unzip the "CombatDamageMod" folder into your "steamapps/common/Stars in Shadow/Mods" folder