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« on: January 10, 2019, 08:22:42 AM »
My recent PACK only Nexerelin playthrough has been a challenging fresh change of pace since no other faction, modded or otherwise, fills their plucky underdog niche. I think having to rely on outdated D-modded hulls is rather thematic. However, I have noticed a dearth of purchasable dedicated combat ships.
The Mastiff cruiser and the BRT destroyer are the only two pure combat ships I have seen for sale after a year of in-game time. NPC PACK fleets and patrols seem to also only field these two as their dedicated combat ships along with an assortment of the various PACK frigates and freight destroyers. Interestingly, NPC PACK fleets seem to use vanilla Condors over their own GFB carrier, which I have never encountered in the campaign. The Shar Pei, along with other destroyers like the Pitbull and the Komondor as well as Schnauzer frigates are similarly absent.
I assume the lack of availability of ships is partly due to the nature of the open market. At any given time, half of the Petra market consists of multiple copies of the various vanilla tankers, civilian transports, freighters and salvage rigs. While I understand the necessity of filling the ship roles that PACK lacks, in practice these common hulls can be purchased in much better condition at other markets. There doesn't seem to be an easy fix for this since these vanilla ships shore up PACK's smaller roster. The other market, Christchurch, appears to suffer from the same issues albeit at a much smaller scale since the market itself is tiny.
From a non-PACK playthrough perspective, I find myself very rarely interacting meaningfully with PACK. Their markets are relatively small and the lack of heavy industry makes it hard to justify the trip over. At the same time, their fleets are often severely D-modded, discouraging piracy for the sake of ship acquisition. This isn't a big deal, however, because it doesn't detract from gameplay and they still add variety to the ambiance of the sector.
In addition, while I don't believe that a modder is in any way obligated to accommodate the works of other modders, the steadily increasingly roster of other high-quality 0.90 compatible mods will make it more difficult to acquire a specific faction's blueprints in a heavily modded game. This is probably more of an issue with how blueprints are acquired in the base game, but there may be times where the player only discovers PACK blueprints very late into a playthrough or even no PACK blueprints at all.
At the end of the day, I don't think military markets and heavy industries are needed if they break the established lore of the faction. I do, however, wholeheartedly support increasing the variety of non-custom PACK ships that are available on the open markets.
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