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1

General Discussion / [0.96] I'm back, Wohoo! Expanded/Overhauled [REDACTED] small talk

« on: June 05, 2023, 05:11:19 AM »

Hey you!
Yes, you!
Remember that one autistic dude that wrote a prohibitively long thread about Remnants (among others) which was in fact so long it still remains half finished a year and a half (maybe more) later?

Yeah, I'm sorry about that one (and also about the lack of punctuation and my terrible ability of embellishing everything I write with needless stuff). There have been a few things happening in  my life ya see:

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-I've found a 40 hrs/week job as a Storage Manager in an agricolture/zootecnics shop which I really like
-I've gone back to the gym about 14 to 16 hrs/week since I'm getting old and I was starting to have issues getting it and I wanna keep a good opinion on myself
-I've taken on a gym related diet which is made of 6 meals a day on average, dish preparing and cleaning take about an hour and a half of my daily time
-I've taken to a lot of hobbies in my free time since I hate clubbing and I gotta go find it somewhere else which include Kayaking, Trekking, Herping and many things outside-related. Grass is being touched.
-I've been an avid JRPG and RTS gamer and we've been eating good as of late, so my gaming has mostly been split between Starsector, Age Of Empires 4 and minor others
-I used to essentially only autistically focus on spilling my autism through activity in this forum while gaming or doing chores, but I discovered Age Of Empires 4 casting channels and personalities and they've been my companions for uh, about a year?

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Anyway, a bird told me we got a new Starsector patch and I've been playing it since release (it's mostly sunshine and roses) but I thought that I'd dedicate my return to the ships I love the most in Starsector, [Redacted]!

First things first, Fearless AI has somehow become even more rabid and builds that used to work just fine before fall apart in a thousand pieces now, especially combined with the new ships, which are uh- okay but are, in general, kneecapped by:
1)terrible autofits perverting already questionable builds
2)Inflated DP, especially compared to the 3 kings of [Redacted] ships to get for yourself, which are Radiant, Brilliant and Glimmer
3)Inability of the AI to use the new ship abilities to their fullest extent in a way that does not end up, for example, with the ship just YEETING itself into a pointless death (looking at you Nova) or just pointlessly committing Point Defense Seppuku when there is no point to it

On the other hand, the ability to take [Redacted] ships for your own has gone from taking, for example, a couple of Cruisers with okay CR to legitimately taking 4 Gamma Core Brilliants and a few Overdriven Gamma Core Glimmers, accounting for legitimately half the intended 200-240 DP fleet hard cap, which I think should be adressed a bit better.

Last thing before I go back to work, I fully understand why the Radiant was (and still definetly is) the uncontested [Redacted] King but I think it's time for the venerable fleet deleter to get reined back in and everything else to be buffed, since at this point anything big enough to take the place of additional Radiants is a nerf to the fleet doctrine overall and it's just comical at this point.

I'll elaborate further on all the points in a later date (pinky swear) and provide you all with ways around the new and sidegraded Fearless AI thinking that Plasma Burning and Nova Burting full bore into a station is the best coure of action. See you all in half a day at most!

Edit: I will most likely post anything [Redacted] related in the terribly bloated Redacted thread of mine. I guess that's the ideal place for my rampant Italian rambling.

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Discussions / HUMANITY RESTORED

« on: June 10, 2021, 01:40:12 PM »

PRAISE THE SUN

It's finally happening! AAaaaahahhh

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Bug Reports & Support / Reliable Ship AI behaviour exploit: venting while inside HIL range

« on: June 10, 2021, 06:24:02 AM »

I was in the middle of testing totally fair and balanced Radiant/Brilliant builds for the faction to spawn in Vanilla Starsector when I stumbled across a rather peculiar behaviour from the AI:
Large ships, the ones with the most HP and Armor most affected, seem to heavily, heavily underestimate the hazard that is the High Intensity Laser and vent while sitting inside weapon range with non-critical flux levels either, instead of keeping the shield up as long as possible while attempting to back off.
Some Examples:

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This one is the most egregious I've captured: flux is at around 25% and HP is at less than 15% but the ship AI decides to vent anyway

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The "exploit" seems to happen regardless of ship as long as there's only Graviton beams and HILs doing the work. Introduce even a single Ion beam into the mix and the AI behaviour seems to fix itself as it looks like it really does not want EMP damage on the hull.

The two ship variants I've used to test this with that reliably reproduce it:
"Borer" Brilliant:

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"Bastion" Radiant:

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Suggestions / Beam weapons with Integrated Point Defence AI should keep firing as they track

« on: June 05, 2021, 06:37:41 AM »

Awfully simple suggestion proposting a tweak to how the AI and autofire as a whole treats continuous fire Laser PD weaponsbeam weapons like Tactical Lasers when they're augmented by the Integrated Point Defence AI hullmod.

B-b-but friendly fire!
I see you've never had ships equipped with Devastator Cannons.
The potential friendly fire beam PD weapons would cause by just opening up regardless of perfectly tracking (and hitting) their target is a minor sacrifice I'm willing to consider making if all my laser PD actually shoots down more incoming enemy ordnance, fighters, bombers and missiles instead of...you know...not having enough beam travel speed to do anything and pointlessly flicker half the time at medium to short range targets.

B-b-but flux generation!
I don't think the extra flux generated by better point defence would be an issue, really. Especially if said extra flux manages to shoot down things that would cause Hard Flux instead.

B-b-but laser PD is supposed to be bad!
It would still be a lot worse than both ballistic and missile based point defence/fighter counters. Remember beam weapons and dedicated beam PD are both the most expensive PD for the amount of DPS/accuracy they provide and all deal soft flux damage, which may aswell not exist when fighting shielded fighters if there's not enough of it.

Addendum: would it be possible to have Integrated Point Defence AI also affect Graviton Beams? They're amazing at throwing enemy missiles of course and it would be pleasant for the AI to intentionally do that, for once.
The Ion Beam also acting as point defence and seeking to disable bigger missiles/fighters that have not been EMP'd yet would also be great, atlough that would be a much higher "point defence friendly fire hazard" than the rest of the laser PD combined. I'd still love it tough.

Addendum Number 2: It would also be a really, really nice thing to not have beam weapons and non-PD small weapons alike ON HARDPOINTS try act like PD if IPDAI is installed. I would prioritize the suggestions above this one tough.

Thoughts?

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General Discussion / [0.95a-RC15] (To be) Exhaustive Guide on how to fight and field [Redacted]

« on: June 01, 2021, 12:00:50 PM »

I've been noticing that in the past months a lot of threads in the General Discussion subsection of this Forum have been aimed at recieving feedback regarding the [Redacted], and about how they're quite possibly one of the hardest challenges in the game to overcome. A good thing to see really, since it means there are a lot of budding Starfarers in our midst now, I welcome you all!

I've also realized that despite these threads usually having a lot of vital feedback poured into them, the end result is always the same: they'll all get sucked into the void along with the thread that requested it and only to be replaced by a similar one -sometimes not even late enough for the previous thread to go into the second page of the thread list- asking the same things all over again.

This thread will aim at reducing this occurence; this poorly written, lacking in varied syntax thread with way too much Bold and Italiziced text polluting it is eventually going to contain a set of core concepts:
1)Listing every single buff [Redacted] benefit from, therefore understanding what makes the faction so strong
2)Showcasing all the [Redacted] ships with utmost accuracy
3)Describing how remnants fight thru their personality, weapon selections and how the AI uses its Command Points.
4)Elencating all the possible ways the player can buff its own fleet to compete
5)Teaching a number of varied fleet orders and methods to fight [Redacted] across different Player Fleet Compositions
6)Providing a limited number of Vanilla ship setups, Officer skills, fleet compositions and Player Skill choices that generally tend to work
7)Supplying fellow Slaves Of Moloch with a wide variety of Vanilla [Redacted] Setups to break the game balance with!

Thread Rules:
Be both constructive and polite and I'll be sure to listen.
I am no saint and I do make use of poor comedy and silly nicknames of things, but that's as far as I'm willing to have everyone go too. I can almost guarantee you this thread will have errors and incorrect data in it and I'm counting on the feedback of fellow seasoned Starfarers to straighten it out.
No Story Spoilers.
I am going to assume most players coming to this thread will be in search of pointers as to how to stand a chance against [Redacted] and nothing else about the game, especially no Story Related Content mention of any kind, not even the terrible nicknames I gave to various parts of it.

Without further ado, here comes the Text Wall!

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The things about [Redacted] making them the strongest faction in the game
Without going further into spoiler territory, Remnants are the strongest faction in unmodded Starsector. It is very likely you will suffer your first mid-to-late game fleet wipe at the hands of multiple or even just one decently sized Remnant Ordo. One of the main reasons and the first one this guide will cover as to why that happens is the well documented fact Remnants have the most buffs applied to them among every other faction in the game. In no Particular order:

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Plenty of AI Cores as Officers, putting the Galatia Academy to shame
Remnant Ordos/Sub-Ordos would not be any worse than the usual high end bounty fleets of 0.95 if it wasn't for the special properties AI cores used as officers have.
Alpha, Beta and Gamma Cores not only are always "fully integrated" into Automated Ships (meaning they get 8, 6 and 4 officer skills respectively), but every single one of those skills is also Elite, meaning that these cores not only buff Remnant ships much more than any Human Officer would buff normal ships, but they also massively skewer the Deployment Point balance towards the machines when even a relatively small Remnant Sub-Ordo fights you.

All AI core officers come with one personality type: Fearless. It's basically Reckless but even more insane
This is something which tends to take budding Starfarers by suprise in their first real encounters with the Remnant scourge. They. Will. Not. Back. Off.
The Fearless personality will more or less advance to get into weapon range of even the point defence weapons to get as much damage into the target as possible, the bigger ships are going to be much more likely to simply drop shields and still try to melt your face off instead, the Radiant is also infamous for just venting in front of you while on high flux instead of retreating just to do more damage.

All remnant ships come with 0.6 damage to flux efficiency shields
This is the staple of all Remnant ships. All their units come with an amazing 0.6 damage to flux ratio Omni-Shield, which is most of the time able to reach full 360° coverage with Shield:Conversion: Front, too bad there's no Variant in the Vanilla Remnant Roster that even uses that hullmod. This is also why the majority of the damage dealt to Remnants should be Kinetic, just don't forget about EMP and Armor Tearing or you will start regretting your setup choices the moment you start fighting cruisers and capitals.

Remnant ships have higher peak performance time, higher hull points and higher armor than their respective manned ship classes
Supposedly due to lacking crew compartments and therefore being able to dedicate most of their ship's internal space to components geared towards combat. This means that attrition battles with Remnants are nothing but unwise as having your fleet sacrifice potential strike damage for combat endurance will not pay off in the long run, since they just have more.

Remnant Ships are generally 15-20% stronger than their manned, equal Deployment Point counterparts from other factions
The faction as a whole is intended to be the strongest one in the game, making the fact mostly all their ships are undeniably stronger than similar ships from the other, manned ship factions. The problem however arises from both AI core spam further buffing their superior performance and certain ships (i.e. Radiant) being so far off this metric I'm personally baffled at the fact they haven't been rebalanced yet.

Better Flux Stats (almost) across the board
While generally packing a lot more "oomph" per Deployment Point, Remnants in general tend to have better flux capacity and dissipation than even high tech ships, with only two exeptions. A superior flux pool that can dissipate built-up flux faster massively synergizes with both Shield Modulation and High Energy Focus skills, not to mention the Fearless AI trying its best to fire all the weapons, all the time.

The Remnants have more "Commander SKills" for all their fleets
Instead of the usual 2 Commander skills all other factions get, Remnants get 3:
1)Flux Regulation adding 20% Flux Capacity and Dissipation based off of the base value, mking their flux stats as a whole even more overwhelming
2)Coordinated Manouvers adding up to 20% better top speed (and handling to match) by virtue of just deploying Frigates/Destroyers
3)Electronic Warfare which adds additional ECM Rating  which is also dependant on deploying enemy Frigates and Destroyers

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The Vanilla [Redacted] Roster
Here is a complete, detailed list of all Vanilla Remnant Ships, augmented by stats comparisons to other crewed, generally balanced vanilla ships.
Some important things I'd like you to focus your attention on are how bonkers most Remnant "stats" are compared to "normal" ships and how absolutely, unapologetically terrible most Vanilla Remnants Variants are, even without the intervention of the thrice-Moloch-cursed Autofit mechanic. 

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Lumen-class Droneship Frigate

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Lumen's Stats (above) compared to a Centurion's (below)

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Overview
This little devil is a Wolf with less weapons but better weapon arcs and improved survivability. It rarely does damage and it's mostly there to contest/capture points and sometimes shooting reaper torpedoes up your engine block. 4DP is suprisingly quite high for a ship with only 4 small synergy weapons, giving it more value as a distraction than a combat ship focused around dealing damage.
Vanilla Variants      Personal Rating:Teleporting Annoyance
Standard
Armament: Atropos Torpedo (Single), Swarmer SRM, IR Pulse Laser, Ion Cannon
Hullmods: Resistant Flux Conduits
Capacitors:6     Vents:10
And here we go with the Vanilla Variant Remnant Nonsense. Resistant Flux Conduits on this ship is nipples on a breastplate and so is both the Single Atropos Torpedo and the Swarmer SRM since the ship both has no expanded missile racks or a ship ability that improves missiles. It would work much better with 2 IR Pulse Lasers for shield pressure, a single Ion Cannon and a single Tactical Laser to force the enemy to keep the shields up. There could be some useful vriants using 1 Antimatter Blaster but there would have to be a lot of cuts for that one to fit, considering the ship only gets 35 Ordinance Points to play with.

Glimmer-class Droneship Frigate

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Glimmer's Stats (above) compared to a Wolf's (below)

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Overview
The Glimmer is, essentially, a Miniature Sunder and a Hydrophobic Wolf all in one. It has 1 medium energy, 2 small synergy and 2 small energy weapons all pointing forward for the bargain price of 5 Deployment Points, while also having High Energy Focus. It does suffer in the mobility department which greatly depreciates the frigate when fielded in AI fleets, mostly because Vanilla does not have any decent Glimmer Autofit using Unstable Injector, let alone Safety Overrides.
Vanilla Variants:
Assault    Personal Rating: Hazenut with Flux Asthma
Armament: Ion Pulser, 4x IR Pulse Lasers (Linked)
Hullmods: Unstable Injector
Capacitors:4     Vents:10
One of the nicest Remnant ship builds that's easy, straightforward and tries to mitigate the mobility of the ship. It could be better with a single tactical laser to force shields up, only two IR Pulse Lasers, Front Shield Conversion for the nice 360° shields and a spare small weapon mount that can be dedicated to some heap PD, like a PD laser or a mining one.

Support    Personal Rating: Passable Beamer
Armament: Graviton Beam, 4x Tactical Lasers (linked)
Hullmods: Advanced Optics
Capacitors:10  Vents:10
Again, this is a decent build. The Graviton Beam and the tactical lasers plus the shield generate more flux than the flux capacity of the ship with 10 vents, which could be somewhat mitigated by the addition of a flux distributor and front shield conversion instead of some capacitors. I would personally also install Unstable Injector again since the frigate really struggles to stay away from the enemy if it's pressured.


Fulgent-class Droneship Destroyer

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Fulgent's Stats (above) compared to a Sunder's (below)

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Overview
This Destroyer is very much a supersized Glimmer with significantly better missile strike capability at a poultry 11 Deployment Points. If you paid close attention to the stat windows and compared the Fulgent to both Sunder you will also notice its stats are quite comparable, if not worse in almost every aspect but shield to damage ratio. The overall stats are in line with other Remnant ships (namely the good shield ratio) but the base flux dissipation sitting at 300 more or less destroys the combat effectiveness of the ship entirely, especially considering it's even got high energy focus. Now, the ship would be somewhat decent if it used Sabots and a Phase lance/Ion Cannnon combo but that's not what Vanilla Starsector does. Oh no.
Vanilla Variants
Support   Personal Rating: Slightly Worrying
Armament: 2x Typhoon reaper Launchers (Alternating), 2x Sabot SRMs (ALternating), 2x Tactical Lasers & Ion Beam, 4x PD Lasers
Hullmods: Expanded Missile Racks, Advanced Optics
Capacitors: 10  Vents:4
This is exactly how you should not design a missile boat. All the missile weapons are on alternating instead of linked, the missile damage balance is massively skewed towards HE and there's not enough Hard flux damage to pressure shields with. Advanced Optics is also completely useless and even nerfs the PD lasers further. Investing those ordinance points into something actually useful like ECCM or Unstable Injector would work a lot better instead. The only slightly redeeming quality of this setup is that it will survive longer than most others and you'll still have to deal with it unless you want a nonconsensual date with Reaper Torpedos when the flux is high and you can't get away.

Assault     Personal Rating: Why Does This Exist
Armament: 1x Heavy Blaster, 2x Ion Pulser (Linked), 2x Sabot SRM (Alternating), 4x PD Laser (linked), 2x Tactical Laser (inked)l
Hullmods: Auxiliary Thrusters, Integrated Targeting Unit
Capacitors: 12  Vents:4
I just can't with this variant. I don't know who I need to have their location forwarded to the nearest Pather Cell for this unholy heresy. Does Vanilla Starsector unironically field a ship with 300 base flux dissipation armed with the most flux intensive continuous fire medium energy in the game plus two Ion Pulsers, no vents to speak of and without even overriding it?
This is litterally like mashing a Space Coconut into a glass without adding water, giving an Asthmatic Luddite a straw and then telling him "Go ahead, it's for you, drink!". Don't even get me started on why it even has Aux Thrusters or I might space myself out the airlock and into the nearest Blue Giant.


Scintilla-class Droneship Carrier

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Scintilla's Stats (above) compared to a Drover (below)

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Overview
This Destroyer has all the stats to be a great carrier, with the same ship system as the Astral  two fighter bays and decent flux stats/wepaon mounts for only being worth 12 Deployment Points.
The thing that makes this ship the worst ship the Remnants can field has to do with the absolutely atrocious Fighter LPC choices the faction as a whole gets.  It can either deploy Spark Interceptors, Lux Heavy Fighters or Flash bombers, none of which benefit from the Recall skill. I guess the only thing that can help the Scintilla if for our Lord and Saviour Alex to realize Remnants have no strike bomber LPCs and that basically all fighter bays on Remnants nerf them more than buff them 90% of the time since they're an Ordinance Point sink with little in-battle performance; also due to the fact any Remnant ship with a fighter baydoes not get buffed with any Commander Skill or even just Expanded Deck Crew.

Vanilla Variants
Strike          Personal Rating: Actually Competent
Armament: Typhoon Reaper Launcher, Sabot SRMs (alternating), 2 Tactical Lasers & Burst PD Lasers
Hangar Bay: 1 Lux Heavy Fighter Drone Wing, 1 Spark Interceptor Drone Wing
Hullmods: None, not even Expanded Deck "Crew"
Capacitors: 6   Vents: 13
This is a decievingly well defended Destroyer sized carrier. Too bad it does not have Expanded Deck Crew despite being entirely capable of installing it by cutting on Capacitors and some Vents. Don't asky me why, I don't know either.

Support      Personal Rating: Floppy Linguini
Weapons: Pilum LRM, 2 Salamanders (Alternating), 2 LR PD Lasers & PD lasers (Linked)
Hangar Bays. 2 Spark Interceptor Drones
Hullmods:  None, not even Expanded Deck "Crew"
Capacitors: 5  Vents:19
Talk about nonsense with this one. Everything about this thing is complete Onslaught Engine Block. It's got a Pilum and two Salamander Launchers (which are alternating, because of course they would be) but no ECCM and it's even got the worst Remnant Fighter LPC as of 0.95 without even agumenting its already Condor-worthy performance with Expanded Deck Crew. What an absolute waste of Deployment Points...I guess the only thing this thing supports while deployed against you is actually your fleet. Having a double agent bloating the enemy fleet with a nearly useless piece of shipware sure is helpful.


Brilliant-class Droneship Cruiser

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Brilliant's Stats (above) compared to a Dominator (Middle) and an Aurora's (below)

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Please don't mind the "Low Maintenance" Hullmod on the Dominator reducing its maintenance, which is from a mod called "Low Maintenance" by Zym.
Or do mind it and install it from its official thread link over here, since it's really good!
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=21715.msg327897#msg327897

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Overview
This asymmetric Cruiser a mixture of everything that's Remnant and is the only ship in the roster (so far) that can mount ballistic weapons, Two Medium Hardpoints worth of them in fact, along with 1 Medium Synergy Hardpoint, 1 Large Energy Turret, 1 Medium Energy Turret and 2 Small Energy Turrets. It's the second most potent Remnant ship in their roster at 25 Deployment Points and it's one of the only three ships that generally deal the most damage to your fleet along the Fulgent and the Radiant. There apparently is no Overridden variant in the Starsector Variant files, so it must be a rare occurrence for when the stars align and Autofit does something good for once, exept the fact the Overridden Autofits Starsector pulls usually also come with ITU, go figure.

Vanilla Variants
Standard       Personal Rating:  Annoying Shielded Gaming Mouse
Armament : 1x Plasma Cannon (alternating), 1x Sabot Pod (linked), 2x Hypervelocity Driver (linked), 1x Heavy Burst laser & 2 Burst PD lasers (linked)
Hangar Bay: 1x Spark Interceptor Wing
Hullmods: Integrated Targeting Unit

Despite the rather terrible weapon range synergies, this variant somewhat works and poses a hassle when faced not because it does a lot of damage compared to other Remnant Ships, but because it's incredibly durable for the amount of DP it takes to deploy, especially when it's got an AI of with Elite Shield Modulation at the helm and possibly even Elite Impact Mitigation, Reliability Engineering and Elite Damage Control.

Radiant-class Drone Battleship

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Radiant's Stats (above) compared to a Paragon's (below)

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Overview
Here we go. I'm going to have to go a bit off the rails in criticizing Vanilla Game Balance as a premise: the Radiant Drone Battleship is a balancing abomination that should've been adressed as soon as 0.95 released. The Remnants as a whole were a lot easier to defeat back in the 0.91 days and further back in time, but now that not only Officer skills but also AI algorithms have been improved along all the other new balance mechanics, the Radiant is well deserving of 60 Deployment Points, and this is accounting for the fact that the ship would be worth 70 Deployment Points instead if it was not Remnant and purposefully undervalued.
This ship is currently only worth 40 Deployment pointsbut is able to fit a staggering amount of front facing firepower consisting of 2 large energy hardpoints, 1 large energy turret, 2 large synergy turrets, 4 medium synergy turrets and 4 small energy turrets, in addition to 1500 Armor, 10.000 hullpoints, a 0.6 ratio shield, massive flux capacity, a ship ability that belongs to a Frigate and a 99% chance to always have an Alpha Core Officer making every single stat I just showcased that much more overbearing.
Disabling/Destroying the enemy Radiant(s) when fighting a Remnant ordo will translate in you winning that battle. Failing to pressure and kill it/them because it starts teleporting away and/or because the rest of its allied rabid honeybadger friends get in the way will guarantee a harder battle with more allied casualties and maybe even a loss.

Vanilla Variants
1)Standard        Personal Rating: Wasted Large Weapon Mounts
Armament: 2 Autopulse Lasers (Linked), 2 Locusts (Alternating), 1 Paladin PD & 6 PD Lasers (linked), 4 Ion Beams (Linked), 4 IR Pulse Lasers (linked)
Hullmods: Integrated Targeting Unit, Expanded Magazines, Heavy Armor
9 Capacitors, 50 Vents

Without going into potential modifications to the Vanilla autofit, this is a textbook example of how to NOT set up a Radiant and it's the setup you wish for when fighting an Ordo. Heavy Armor is a 40OP dead weight unless it's integrated, Locust not only do pathetic damage to anything but weaksauce frigates but they also don't even have expanded missile racks, 4 Ion beams is overkill even for me and IR pulse lasers are as pointless as nipples on a breastplate.

2)Strike         Personal Rating: Deployment Point Imbalance Incarnate
Armament: 5 Tachyon Lances (linked), 4 Sabot Pods (Alternating), 10 PD Lasers (Linked)
Hullmods: Integrated Targeting Unit, Advanced Optics, Resistant Flux Conduits
0 Capacitors, 50 vents

This is the most infamous Remnant setup in the whole roster despite being horribly unoptimized. It's more or less a testament to how the Radiant Stats are so broken across the board for a 40DP ship they are able to pull the suboptimal setups up in performance by sheer brute force. Advanced Optics is not only useless since the ship never makes use of that extra range but it also makes T-lances and PD lasers even more unwieldy to swing around and hit their targets. Sabots are both firing in ALTERNATING MODE and without Expanded Missile Racks.

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Things your own fleet should apply (or keep in mind) when fighting the Remnants
With all the things about the opposing force I just talked about, I hope you're ready for me to talk to you about how you could minmax your fleet to have a better shot at taking Remnant ordos, maybe even more than one at once. I will not go into any specifics about ship setups in this section of the thread, but I will make a list of what I think are the most important things you should heavily consider your fleet possessing in order to stand a chance. Do you need to follow all of them? Definetly not. Does following as many of them as possible dramatically increase your fleet's combat prowess and improve your chances against Remnant forces? Ludd yeah.

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1)Yes to fleetwide buffs, no to the industry and combat trees (most of the time).
I will agree on the fact the combat and the industry skill tree buffs are very good. They buff the strongest weapon in the game (your player piloted ship) and make it easier for your campaign to break the economy of the game sooner and not have to worry about money anymore (Industry), but unless you're a litteral pilot god driving the strongest ship in your fleet with absolute concentration all the time or youre breaking the game using 5 D-mod ships with Derelict Contingent, then these two skill trees are to be mostly ignored late game.
In order to have your fleet come close to the aburd levels of "concentrated murder" Remnants possess you'll have to spend the majority of your skill points in Leadership and Technology, not to get a few of the many fleet wide buffs but mostly all of them at the same time.
Weapon Drills, Wolfpack tactics, Coordinated Manouvers, Crew Training, Carrier Group, Officer Training, Officer management, Electronic Warfare, Fighter Uplink, Flux Regulation, Phase Corps and Special Modifications. You're going to need at least 10 of them with a skill tree that's going to look something along the lines of this one:

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With opportune modifications if you want carrier play, phase play or deploy Automated ships or not of course. You can probably have decent results without having this many skills into fleet buffs, but I can guarantee you you're inevitably going to feel your own player piloted ship is pulling the rest of your allied forces and not the contrary that way.

2)Integrated Hullmods and Minmaxed Elite Skill(s) officers are going to be your bread and butter when it comes to properly buffing your own fleet to deal with Remnant forces.
The minimum amount of either would be to have 2 Integrated hullmods on all your most important ships (let us have an example of 6 ships, 3 being capitals and 3 being cruisers)and one Elite skill on all your 8 officers (assuming you somehow have not picked either Officer Training or Officer Management. That brings the total amount of Story Points required to buffing your man combat force as much as possible to 20 Story Points, which in the grand scheme of things is quite the pittance.
I do call tht a pittance out of experience really, since my current fleet has 4 officered Capitals, 7 officered Frigates and 6 cheaper unofficered frigates with and endgame, fully buffed setup that requires 71 Story Points to Achieve:

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3)You will need to always contest the 4 buoys during battle.
All AI fleets including remnants will place "Capture" orders on each one of the 4 buoys that are usually deployed over the battlefield. Commanding your own fleet to do the same will not only make it much more likely that you're eventually going to be able to deploy as much as the enemy no matter the initial Deployment Point balance, but it will also cause the enemy fleet to spread thin trying to control the battlefield, making sure your own fleet is not at the end of very concentrated focus fire.

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4)While having decently long ranged weapons (of any kind) can make for a very useful tool for your fleet to deal with 90% of the things you're going to be fighting in Starsector, fighting Remnants revolves around mid-to-close range engagements against enemies that simply do not care about their own well being most of the time and are solely focused of hurting you and your friends as much as possible. I will extensively cover weapon choices for ships in a later chapter, but all you need to know for now is that mostly any non-missile weapon you can possibly use in your fleet with a maximum range above 900 units can be replaced by one of shorter range with minimal drawbacks and significant increases in damage potential.


5) Keep your main damage dealers togheder to fend off and ultimately deal with Brilliants and most importantly Radiants.
More or less no vanilla ship in the game can indipendendly fend off a single good Radiant setup or two Brilliants (especially if one or even both are Overridden). The trick to dealing with the most dangerous elements of Remnant forces is to have them attacking your main force while the rest of the remnants are spread out and then gang up on them in such a way it is going to be very difficult for them to retreat. Many tactics for this work but they usually revolve around having your main ships all focus fire on "the big guy" and either being mobile enough to keep with it retreating, like in this case with a Conquest accompanied by some frigates further confusing the now overloaded Radiant.

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I will cover peculiar fleet setups that have very little or even no ship variety in the following section of this thread, as they're more of a rarity than a common occurence.

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My Personal [Redacted] Ship Variants
I will admit I did not indend to write this section of this thread just yet, but a (not so) sudden demand of it arose in the past week or so so I felt the obligation of writing it early anyway. There currently are 22 Remnant Ship Variants in this section and they're all currently focused on providing better variants than the current vanilla Starsector has to offer.
I won't lie and tell you they're all amazing, since a good portion of them are setups pursuing a purpose, not to be the end-all version of the ship.
What's more, all the current variants shown here have the following core concepts to follow:
1)only weapons remnants would use so no mining lasers or mining blasters, despite them being in the Remnant weapon selection.
2)no halfmounting (not installing medium weapons in large slots or small weapons in medium slots)
3)no unused weapon mount on any ship
4)weapon groups stay autogenerated, no custom shenanigans or swithcing firing modes from Alternating to Linked (for now)
5)officer skills are not specified since the AI generates the officer skills as the fleet spawns with some unknown algorithm.
6)all ships were tested with unintegrated (and therefore with one less skill) Alpha cores for Capitals, Beta cores for Cruisers/Destroyers and Gamma cores for Frigates
7)all ships were tested with the active Commander Skills Remnants get, which are Flux Regulation, Electronic Warfare and Coordinated Manouvers

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Radiant
This is the ship that I've by far designed the most variants of. It can perfectly afford to use as many wierd, weaponized meme setups it wants and still be amazing due to how inherently strong it is. Some variants are a cut above the rest and I'm confident in your ability to tell them apart from the weaponized memes.
I've had to test the variants with the only Radiant I had in this save which already had Integrated Hardened Shields/ITU; luckily for me tough, those two Hullmods are more or less present on all setups  ;)

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Annihalator "A bad day to not have Point Defence"

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Synopsis: A variant focused on sundering medium to long range rocket firepower backed by enough energy firepower to force the enemy to think twice on approach

Preferred Target: enemy capital ships, heavy cruisers and fortifications

Overview:As per AcaMentis's suggestion to not use Hammer Barrages due to their weapon description more or less making their use on a remnant ship unjustifiable, I went ahed and swapped them for Squalls. The end result being a very, very pressure heavy variant that will overwhelm its target with double ECCM/EMR/Elite Missile Spec Squalls to then just delete it with the combined firepower of dual Plasma Cannons and quadruple Annihlator Rocket Pods.

Bastion "My Face Is My Shield"

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Synopsis: Focused on being an anchor to its own allies and providing long range fire suppression, this variant has almost all the required modifications to be as resilient as possible

Preferred Targets: Destroyers and smaller, enemy fighters and missiles

Overview: Keeping up the pace with more questionable variants, I really wanted at least one radiant to use a High Intensity Laser. It's quite a good harass tool when combined with 4 graviton beams and what most likely will also be officer skills. The Autopulses do decent hard flux damage and the Extended Mags buffs both those an the double paladins, which will ruin most carrier fleet days...just not as badly as the next variant on the list...

Eradicator "Frigates will meet their maker" Does not use Hardened Shields, only ITU

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Synopsis: a hybrid variant combining Sabots, Locusts SRMs and a couple of plasma cannons to quickly deal with anything cruiser sized and smaller

Preferred Targets: mostly frigates/destroyers and enemy fighters, struggles against good long range PD

Overview: this variant is my own personal attempt at improving the "Standard" Vanilla variant which makes me cry in bed every night due to how inefficient and unsynergetic it is. All small weapons are now IR Pulse lasers, both Autopulses and Paladin are still augmented by extended mags, the ship now has Expanded Missile Racks, Hardened Shields and ECCM instead of heavy armor and is using 4 Annihalator Rocket pods instead of the 4 Ion Beams. It would not be a bad idea to swap ECCM out for Integrated Point Defence AI so that the IR Pulse lasers act as makeshift point defence, but I really wanted those Locusts and Annihalators with as much likelyhood to nail the target as possible.

Lancer "Like popcorn in an oven"

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Snynopsis: a supremely medium to long range focused variant that can successfully overpower enemies with lesser shields under sheer beam pressure and superior flux stats

Preferred targets: anything slow enough that does not manage to get out of the firing line and that does not have Fortress Shield

Overview: another obvious variation of a vanilla variant, namely the "Strike" variant that really did not have much (if anything) to do with the word "Strike". The Sabots have been replaced by Graviton beams to both keep shields up and synergize with the tach lances, one tach lances has been replaced by a paladin to both not have the ship backpedal away from Pilums as often (and also because the ship can't handle 5), Advanced Optics has been replaced by Flux Distributor and the leftover ordinance points have been used to install Shield Conversion : Front. The variant does not actually use Hardened shields but is generally stronger than most other Radiant builds as long as it's fighting fairly immobile enemies that don't have good flux stats and whose generator is not overtaxed by firing too many weapons.

Autopulser "Yaaaaaaaa  ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta"

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Snynopsis: A burst-type variant that heavily leans into Autopulse fire with Tachyon Lance support

Preferred Targets: Anything with the misfortune of getting its attention for long enough time

Overview: This variant is, in simple terms, a nutcracker. It will punish its unfortunate target with a hail of some 180 Autopulse charges in short succession and then harass it with repeated Tachyon Lance fire, granting it some impressive armor tearing capabilities and therefore somewhat negating the struggle of Autopulse Lasers of dealing with the most stubborn of enemies. I had to install point defence litterally everywhere else tough, despite my vivid hatred of the Heavy Burst Laser.

Strike A-B "Your limited trial of Life has expired"
Variant A

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Variant B

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Synopsis: two slightly different variants featuring overwhelming Sabot suppression paired with devastating missile firepower but lacking in proper defense

Preferred Targets:: Stationary Targets, capitals, slow cruisers and destroyers

Overview: a vanilla friendly set of variants of the obiquitous "tryhard" set of radiant variants. The two setups are similar enough to eachother I ultimately decided to keep them both into "Strike".

Variant A tends to generally perform better when everything goes well due to having better burst damage, while Variant B has less energy weapon burst but a Paladin PD making it slightly more survivable when things don't exactly go as planned. Both variants heavily suffer from the lack of front shield conversion and resistant flux conduits, making them quite vulnerable under pressure.
Then there's also the issue of the various weapons on these variants being rather synergetic between eachother and therefore losing a lot of effectiveness when they're not striking the same target in rapid succession.

Paralyzer "Now let's see what you're made of. He is coming, you can't run" -Jugulator, Judas Priest

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Synopsis: an attack variant with the goal of meeting the enemy head on and quickly disabling it through massive amounts of EMP damage

Preferred Targets: Anything with the least amount of shield to go though for the massive EMP wave to start working, preferrably Frigates and Destroyers

Overview:A somewhat successful attempt at making the 4 Ion Beam "Standard" variant work. Turns out more hard flux damage is really good when you have 4 Ion Beams to fry everything on high flux with, who would've thunk  ::)
This variant generally works better the least hard flux it takes for the enemy it faces to be fried by the Ion Beams, but it can also spell unavoidable doom to anything it eventually overpowers with the 4 Autopulse lasers, as it's very unlikely it will be able to escape.

Tidecaller A-B "From the Sector a ship a shape is taking form"
Variant A

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Variant B

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Synopsis: unusual variant focusing on long range missile streams and a modest secondary armament to drive off anything getting close

Preferred Targets: Anything, as long as its point defence capabilities are medium to low. The smaller the individual enemies the better it tends to work.

Overview: I was going to finish fabricating variants for the radiant when I realized there was nothing to make Thaago happy, so I came up with these two variants that use quadruple Harpoons and Squalls with both ECCM and Expanded missile racks. This variant will both be able to delete anything getting overloaded from genuinely impressive ranges but also heavily suppress the enemy with a neverending wave of Squalls and a supporting array of energy weapons.

Variant A tends to work a lot better against anything the size of a cruiser and smaller, while Variant B has a much easier time against enemy capitals.

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Brilliant

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Beamer "Can you feel the HIL Mr.Krebs?"

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Synopsis: a highly unusual, strangely effective variant specializing into overwhelming soft flux firepower

Preferred Targets: anything not aggressive enough to compromise it, the less flux dissipation the target has to offset the beam weaponry the better

Overview: while I would normally consider a full beam Brilliant with no hard flux weaponry onboard to be amongst the biggest heresies this game allows its Starfarers to accomplish, it actually works. Very well too. Front shields and Flux disssipator allow it to fire more or less indefinetly with no flux buildup (therefore making shield modulation always dissipate hard flux, especially if the officer also comes with Elite Energy Weapon Mastery) and there also is some sort of AI behavioural bug making enemies nonsensically vent when there's an enemy HIL in range even when they're under 50-30% flux capacity, which you can see here: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=21978.0
I had to install tectical lasers because they ship got close to fire at the enemy with PD lasers otherwise. I was also more or less forced to pick Spark Interceptor Drones as the ship has no point defence to speak of outside the Active Flares.

Lancer "Building up the pressure, until you're feeling low"

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Synopsis: a long range iteration of the ship pairing a Tachyon Lance with supporting weaponry to pressure shields

Preferred Targets: destroyers and up sitting on the slow side of the mobility spectrum

Overview: a much more orthodox variant of the Brilliant, this guy will have much more success than the previous variant against ships with good shield ratios, especially if they're also coming with an officer. The significantly higher ordinance point costs of the weapon this variant has also prevented me from installing a very needed Flux Distributor. Installing some useful missile weapon like a Salamander or a Sabot pod would've been nice but I ultimately decided to go for a Graviton beam to prevent the AI from picking Missle Spec, therefore almost completely wasting an entire officer skill.

Overridden "Cursed, like this thread"

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Synopsis: a hyper aggressive variant with sundering firepower and not much time to use it

Preferred Targets: anything it can keep up with, missile and fighter heavy fleets

Overview: this variant has gone through quite a lot of modifications. I did not really want multiple overridden Brilliant variants (one is more than enough) and I ultimately decided on this one. The closest alternate variant had Hardened Subsystems but Thaago convinced me to install the Automated Repair unit instead, to make it much less vulnerable to be disabled through EMP. The ship has barely enough flux dissipation to use all its offensive weapons and keep the shield up despite being overridden, that's a Heavy Blaster for ya. I found the Overridden variant to be incredibly vulnerable to running away from missiles so I ultimately decided to use a Paladin on the large slots and it works really well. Here's just a simple example of how eliminating missiles keeps the Overridden Brilliant incredibly aggressive:

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The Paladin actually makes this the Brilliant able to deal with an entire Onslaught the fastest among all other variants, and one of the only three that can defeat 3 Dominators at once, besides the Beamer and its shenanigans and another one ;D

Versatile A-B-C "The Swiss-Remnant Army knife"
Variant A

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Variant B

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Variant C

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Synopsis: a balanced variant putting flux efficient weaponry and mobility above firepower for the sake of flexibility

Preferred Targets: Cruisers and anything smaller and not fast enough to get away

Overview: I really had fun with these two variants, but I also wanted to give remnants some weapons they were not making use of before, those being the Phase Lance, the Arbalest Autocannon and the Heavy Autocannon. I had so much fun in fact I couldn't decide between three variations of more or less the same design and decided to include all of them.

Both variant A and B have Unstable Injector making them reliably kite and win against 2 Dominators in the sim, sometimes 3 but that is a lot more RNG dependant. I pondered if I oculd give Variant B 2 Ion Cannons but ultimately decided not to. Variant C has flux distributor instead of Unstable Injector and Ion Cannons instead of PD lasers since it can now somewhat handle all weapons firing at once, giving it more firepower but less kite potential, making it much more likely than the other two at beating the Onslaught without taking all that much damage but also not be as good against multiple smaller ships.

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Scintilla
It's got two variants. They do just fine. I installed "expanded deck "crew" on them since they're carriers and all that but I guess you could swap that with something else, like Hardened shields or something.

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Support "I still hate this thing, it also works with Flash Bombers"

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Synopsis: A support oriented variant sporting heavy fighter support and costant missile pressure

Intended Targets: anything without enough point defence, really

Overview:I really wanted Remnants to have a carrier with good carrier pressure. That's it. It definetly works using Flash Bombers aswell, probably better too unless there is no allied remnant dealing hard flux damage to help the Flash Bombers punch through their victim.

Assault "Why are you making me do this, also works with two Lux fighters"

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Snynopsis: a close range variant combining fighter support with appreciable missile firepower

Intended Targets: anything that does not delete it before it gets close

Overview: This ones a slightly wierder variant that has a lot more bite to either draw off harassers and apply pressure to the enemy itself with sabots and some swarmers all the while keeping shields up with a couple of tacical lasers. You could probably either go full Lux or swap those Swarmers for single, 2OP Atropos Torpedoes (or Reapers) and get double Flash Bomber going.

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Fulgent
I was somewhat suprised at how decent the Fulgent is despite me dunking on it and saying it was the worst Remnant ship after the Scintilla. I still like the Brilliant a lot more tough :P

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Beamer "A healthy side dish of missiles"

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Synopsis: a long range direct fire variant that backs up its lackluster beam firepower with worrying amounts of missile strike damage

Preferred Targets: anything with worse enough stats or too high on flux to oppose it

Overview: decided to kick off the Fulgent variants with a very much "second line" focus. This bad boy will usually hand around his friends which tend to get a lot closer to the enemy and will stand ready to unleash a decent amount of kinetic firepower into the bosy enemy, usually followed up by a healthy doese of Atropos Torpedoes, making sure it's going to be able to nail even the squishiest of Frigates once it's overloaded.

Borer "Putting holes in happiness"

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Synopsis: a heavily specialized long range variant making the most use out of its ship system

Preferred Targets: Ships it can overpower with sheer beam firepower and the high energy focus

Overview: the 300 base flux dissipation on the Fulgent is so terrible it can barely fire 3 Graviton Beams and 4 Tactical Lasers. High Energy Focus really makes the damage spike at times, altough that's really not going to help this ship when it's going to fight an Overridden ship with more flux dissipation than brain cells. I could see those Swarmers being swapped for some easy Sabot pods just for that tough.

Overridden "Heard you were talking Ludd about the Fulgent"

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Synopsis: a relentless Sabot heavy variant with enough mobility to force the fight even when the enemy does not want it.

Preferred Targets: everything it can get a hold on, the worse shields it has the better

Overview: Here we go, the only Fulgent variant along the lines of what I would actually use in a fleet of my own. It's got everything an overridden ship needs to have aside from the absolutely atrocious 720 flux dissipation despite being overridden and habing flux regulation. That just makes me sad. Good old Tryhardgnello would've totally put an Ion pulser instead of the heavy blaster, stripped all PD in favour of extended shields (giving it 360° coverage) and filled it with as many Antimatter Blasters as could be slapped into a front facing position, but alas we got to adhere to some sort of rules forcing common decency here.
It might feel really strong, but the variant also suffers from the same issue most ships using a Fearless officer with a lot of weapons to shoot have, which is easily getting overloaded as they really like sticking to the enemy no matter their flux level.

Rocket "Neverdending stream of pain and suffering"

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Overview: a variant opting for rocket pressure and a supporting array of energy weapons to make it hurt once the flux starts getting high

Preferred targets: Anything that can't evade missiles or that does not have enough PD to shoot them down

Overview: I expected this bad boy to do a lot worse than other variants but it turned out pretty good, even manages to win against all three Dominator variants in the simulator

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with two of them successfully taking down the sim Onslaught by ultimately attacking from opposite angles

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I would expect a version using an Ion Beam to be a lot more...utilitarian in a fleet battle scenario, but the IR Pulse+Ion Pulser combo gives it more than a fighting chance when fighting enemies that want to get up close! Removing the ITU in favour of either more vents or even ECCM could be argued, but the ship has a really hard time closing the gap against enemies already, so much so I did not want to make it even worse.

Support "Obligatory Thaago appeasement build"

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Synopsis: A support oriented variant specializing in exploiting openings carved by its allies.

Preferred Targets:Anything its allies build up flux on

Overview:I had this foreboding feeling that this variant roster as a whole did not have enough Harpoons and that someone might disapprove, so here's one!
I sadly had to account for thi variant to also fend off for itself, meaning it had to be half Sabots. It will provide Harpoon support as soon as something in the vicinity is overloaded tough, and that's real nice.

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Glimmer
Ah, here it is, my favourite frigate in the entire vanilla game. How many times I broke the game balance with you my dear. I've decided on 3 very different variants that should synergize quite nicely with the rest of the Remnant roster.

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Beamer "Ant stole magnifying glass, Ant is going to hurt you now"

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Synopsis:A skirmish variant focusing on mobility and long range beam pressure

Prefered Targets: enemy frigates, sonar buoys

Overview:This is an annoyance. It will rarely kill anything but even the Reckless AI is not so reckless when all of its weapons have 1000 range or higher. Combine this with Unstable Injector and the result is a really annoying distraction that's moderately hard to get rid of, unless you have carriers or roided up SO Frigates of course.

Strike "Wait what happened to my frigate"

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Synopsis: An attack variant specialized on short range strike damage against unsuspecting foes

Preferred Targets: Enemy frigates, destroyers and unsuspecting foes

Overview:I suspected this might now work, investing OP in capacitors, luxury goods like Antimatter Blasters and even Unstable Injector, but the Glimmer always manages to surprise me. You might dismiss it as just another 5DP Frigate but this devil can neatly oneshot most Frigates and even some frail Destroyers like the Sunder if the sabots connect squarely and the AM blasters are yet to be fired into the target.

Overridden "Ludd left us and all that's left is violence"

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Synopsis: A very aggressive yet resiliant assault variant

Preferred Target: Enemy Frigates and Destroyers

Overview:Ah, this brings back memories of when I had 6 of these rabid squirrels zipping around the battlefield, all with fully integrated Gamma Cores and 3 Integrated Hullmods. The design itself barely had enough Ordinance Points to fit (almost) everything I would consider vital but it still retains almost all of its lethality.

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___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This will do it for today, just starting this endeavour has taken me a couple of hours.

Thread development roadmap:
1)Correct grammar and syntax horrors the moment I see them or they are pointed out to me
2)Add the third and fourth parts of this wannabe-guide
3)Provide screenshots for mostly everything, starting with Remnant ships and side-by-side comparisons to similar-DP ships
4)Add screenshots for both the third and fourth segment of the guide
5)Praise Ludd for granting me enough time in my life to write all this

Am I going to keep the thread updated through Starsector Updates?
Yes. Most Likely. Unless we start having Remnant issues in real life too.

Am I ever going to cover (in)famous mod-introduced Remnant ships like the Solar and the sadistic Phase Droneships into the guide?
Eventually. It's most likely weeks away from now and I'll make sure to keep them in spoiler tags to both keep the surface of this thread as Vanilla friendly as possible and preventing people from not sleeping well at night.

Am I going to include any (arguably) effective Remnant Ship setups for player use in this thread?
Nope, but I've got plans to have them somewhere else. Eventually. Yes!

Am I going to start linking this thread to anyone starting a new topic asking for help against [Redacted]?
Not for now. I'd say this sorry excuse of a guide is 25% complete if we're being optimistic. Give it a Week, or two. or a month. *Cries in hand aches*

6

General Discussion / This is what all the Cores and Colony Items in the Persean Sector look like

« on: May 31, 2021, 07:43:36 AM »

Just wanted to post something short and sweet as I'm finishing off my fourth 0.95a, Midline focused Campaign. Expect something a bit lenghtier when I've finally done all the things and I get ready for the 5th one, hopefully as soon as D.R.'s Ship & Weapon Pack and Vayra's Sector are updated 

I've explored every single system in my standard sized sector, built up every single one of my 4 colonies in the same system to size 6 and I'm almost done integrating 3 hullmods in every single combat ship I have, including the frigates. I've seldomly sold any cores and did just enough core farming in high danger places to allow me to actually fully survey them. Please do note I'm playing with Ruthless Sector which adds [Redacted] in space, so the overall numbers may be a bit higher.


The (almost, thanks AcaMentis ) fully explored Sector

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My 4 colonies:

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Cores in my Inventory

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Unused Relics in my Inventory (I did not do any raiding in this campaign whatsoever, despite picking up Ground Operations)

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I'll eventually cover up my combat fleet decently, but the contingent consists of highly mobile ships with a lot of kinetic, EMP and energy damage. There's 170 Deployment Points worth of Capital ships and 100 Deployment Points worth of Frigates. I limited myself to not using phaseships, no high tech fighters and no high tech ship above frigate class. The fleet setup would totally work with Monitor Spam too, I just don't like spamming miniature Paragons across the battlefield.
-2 Officered Herald Class Battlecarriers from Torchships and Deadly Armaments, fitted for direct fire support and heavy fighters
-2 Officered Conquest Class Battlecruisers, using a special variant from Kazeron Navarchy and fitted with 2x Mjolnir, 2x HVD, 2x Squall and Arc Emitters from High Tech Expansion for PD
-7 Officered Aeith Class "Glass Cannon Gunships" From Rotcesrats, using an Ion Pulser, two IR pulse lasers and two Microrailguns from a mod I can't quite remember off the top of my head
-6 Omen Class Frigates using two Graviton Blasters from a mod I can not pinpoint right now.

Some battle screenshot spam:
Back when I had two Gryphons and 3 Conquests:

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The 100DP frigate force encircling pirate forces before me engaging the "Full Assault" order and letting the carnage begin

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"Where did the Persean League touch you" Asked the AI Psychiatrist to the Alpha Core

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Conquest mostly soloing Radiants with rivers of kinetic damage and chain overloads

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Me raging at the infuriating shield AI

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The rest of the fleet is two tugs, two salvage gantries, 6 Atlases and 3 (or was it 4?) Promethei. The total fleet count is exactly 30. My skills are 9 in leadership (I picked Ground Operations), 5 in technology (I picked Special Modifications) and 1 in Industry (I picked Bulk Transport). I initially was planning on integrating 3 logitics hullmods on all my non-militarized capital-class logistic ships but I did waste a lot of story points on ships I did not bring into my endgame fleet so I decided not to.

Here's my modpack for anyone interested. I may write a thread with the new and improved one as soon as I start my 5th campaign with it, let me know if you'd be interested.

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I've still got to deal with the PTSD fleet, Ludd's Angry Broccoli, the Dorito gank Squad, the completely fair and balanced mission and the Explorarium Extravaganza. Sorry I just can't be bothered with spoiler tags since I'm using them way too much already and decided to go with my nonsensical nicknames for the spoiler content. Have a good one fellow starfarers!

7

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / "Wonky" Omni shield priorities in 0.95

« on: May 24, 2021, 04:06:16 AM »

I've taken a superficial look at the 0.95 bug reports to see if this thread would be redundant but there does not seem to be one report similar to this one, so here it is:

I've seen screenshots around the forum showcasing how Frigades and other ships consider most fighter LPCs as actual enemy ships and will engage them instead of the "real" enemies.
Annoying? Yes, but also undertstandable to a degree.What I do on the other hand not understand and that I believe to be an unintentional "feature" is the evident "misprioritization" of omni-shield directioning from the AI.

The AI in 0.95 seems to consider even just fighters and bombers (that have already spent their limted Ordnance) as a bigger threat than actual enemy ships (which have their weapon in range). Here's a straightforward example of a Conquest aiming its 90° omni shield at some Lux Heavy Fighters (which are just offscreen) instead of the Radiant sitting in front of it, despite both the ship orientation and the weapons aiming (and firing) at the Radiant:

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I've currently only got this one screenshot neatly showcasing the behaviour, but I'll provide you with more as soon as I get back to playing!

8

Discussions / Castlevania season 4

« on: May 15, 2021, 12:50:13 PM »

It was amazing, as was the entire series. I've got hopes we get more seasons, but what we got was more than enough. Go watch it!

Oh and by the way, apparently the Studio telling Japan and Kentaro Miura they want to do a proper Berserk anime adaptation was not enough, so they went ahead and did this.
Just...uh...don't watch this if you're a bit squeamish? Mmmkay? 


I hope the message is clear as Day (Armor, heh) and that we're finally, finally getting enough passion and funds for a great Beserk series. A man can only hope.

Post Scriptum: Can you count the times Striga does an Artorias Pose/Attack moveset? I'm at 4

9

Bug Reports & Support (modded) / Game Crash upon pressing I to sell/buy stuff at Chicomoztoc

« on: May 13, 2021, 11:50:11 AM »

I'm quite confused by this crash, happened quite randomly aswell. Here's the crash report!

Code

2715837 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.fleets.EconomyFleetRouteManager  - Creating trade fleet of tier 5.0 for market [Coatl]
2715963 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.SurveyPlanetMissionIntel  - Created SurveyPlanetMissionIntel: Xaphassor, faction: independent
2718853 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Derelict Ship, faction: independent
2727188 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Domain-era Probe, faction: Hegemony
2728646 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.fleets.EconomyFleetRouteManager  - Added trade fleet route from Cethlenn to Chicomoztoc
2728918 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Domain-era Survey Ship, faction: Persean League
2730224 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.SystemBountyIntel  - Starting bounty at market [Eochu Bres], 1540 credits per frigate
2730842 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.SurveyPlanetMissionIntel  - Created SurveyPlanetMissionIntel: Shapishico, faction: independent
2732748 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Mining Station, faction: Ninth Battlegroup
2734423 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Derelict Ship, faction: Persean League
2735694 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Domain-era Probe, faction: pirates
2736945 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel  - Created AnalyzeEntityMissionIntel: Domain-era Probe, faction: independent
2738312 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.intel.SurveyPlanetMissionIntel  - Created SurveyPlanetMissionIntel: Aorme, faction: independent
2738964 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - vayra_prospector_default_D : 26040.0
2738964 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - fluffships_catamaran_c : 15800.0
2738964 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - scrapper_d_default_D : 5740.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - shepherd : 10425.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - shepherd_default_D : 4352.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - wayfarer : 15400.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - dram : 8000.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - Total fleet value: 85757.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - Fleet value change: 0.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - Fleet losses since last wipe: 0.0
2738965 [Thread-3] INFO  new_beginnings.CampaignScript  - ----------
2738968 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.plugins.ambassadorPlugins.IndEvo_ambassadorPersonManager  - creating ambassador at Chicomoztoc
2738969 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  - Spawning officers/admins at chicomoztoc
2738969 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  -     officerProb: 0.65000004
2738970 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  -     additionalProb: 0.1
2738970 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  -     mercProb: 0.25
2738970 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  -     adminProb: 0.3
2738970 [Thread-3] INFO  com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.events.OfficerManagerEvent  - 
2742692 [Thread-3] ERROR com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain  - java.lang.NullPointerException
java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.S$o.getIconName(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.ooOO.setNumIcons(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.l.autoSizeTo(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.l.autoSizeWithAdjust(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.intnew.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.IndustryListPanel.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.O0o0.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.OoOo.showOverview(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.marketinfo.OoOo.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.ui.E.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.coreui.k.sizeChanged(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.L.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.setSize(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.K$5.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.K.setCurrentTab(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.K.setCurrentTab(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.Stringsuper.showCoreInternal(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.Stringsuper.showCore(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.api.impl.campaign.rulecmd.OpenCoreTab.execute(OpenCoreTab.java:40)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.OoOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.actionPerformed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newnew.buttonPressed(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.Ò00000(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.I.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newnew.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.OoOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.Oo0O.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.newui.Stringsuper.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.dispatchEventsToChildren(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.v.processInputImpl(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.ui.o00O.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.campaign.CampaignState.processInput(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.BaseGameState.traverse(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.state.AppDriver.begin(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.combat.CombatMain.main(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher.o00000(Unknown Source)
	at com.fs.starfarer.StarfarerLauncher$1.run(Unknown Source)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

I copied a fair bit above said crash, which I figured would help. Here's my mod list!

Spoiler

[close]

I'm saving before interacting with every planet for now so it's not a bg deal, thank you in advance for any help!

10

Discussions / Total War Warhammer 3 Gameplay reveal starting now!

« on: May 13, 2021, 08:59:17 AM »

For anyone interested in what could be one of the best real time strategy games of all time, enjoy!

11

Suggestions / Is Burn Drive (along with 0.95) the worst thing that ever happened to Low Tech?

« on: May 13, 2021, 03:02:14 AM »

Warning, I'm currently listening to a combination of Antichrist Superstar/Holy Wood Marilyn manson and Iowa/All Hope Is Gone Slipknot, which could result highly biased feedback based off of personal experience and that also may contain harsher criticism than usual, which could rustle your jimmies

I've just completed my low tech only campaign where I was only allowed to use low tech ships, low tech fighter/bomber LPCs and XIV ships that were originally Low Tech. I've had a blast but I've also got some harsh criticism about the entire Low tech vanilla roster.
You've read the title of this thread, I am going to cover that more than anything else I talk about here, but we got to start somewhere and saying the most prevalent ship ability on low tech ships is honestly unremarkable at best and detrimental most of the time at worse is not it.

1) Low Tech contains the ships with the worst logistical profile for actual combat prowess in the entire game
This (I think) is the main reason why most starting players and veterans alike grow to avoid Low Tech ships, let alone build an entire fleet based around them.
These ships may look attractive just by looking at monthly maintenance values at first glance, but they actually have a worse logistical profile for the fleet power they provide, even worse than phase ships. They've got metric tons worth of crew, skyrocketing wages and often warranting an additional crew transport like a Starliner not to carry marines but to compensate for lost crew on difficult fights, they've got absolutely terrible fuel economy and maximum burn values, which more or less makes the low monthly supplies a moot point since the supplies the ship itself does not consume are instead rerouted to longer times to travel to places or the prensence of Ox-class tugs.
What is even more terrible is that Low tech is the ship type that gets damaged the most during combat across all ship philosophies, meaning they not only are an absolute resource hog to lug around the sector, they even consume more supplies and crew during combat too!

There are many suggestion threads proposing a plethora of changes to low tech logistics that make a whole lot of sense, like giving all of them a hullmod reducing monthly supply cost and repair/CR recovery cost by a percentage; or actually giving low tech capitals utility hullmods like ground support packages. Pick your poison, you could honestly just do something about it and Low tech would benefit at this point.

2) Low Lech got majorly snubbed by the new 0.95 ships, Story Missions and Officer/Commander Skill roster
This is hopefully not news to anyone that ever played the game in 0.95 or read at least one suggestion thread, which 80% of them are about how High/Midline got incredibly powerful and need nerfs and/or how much Low tech has become absolutely terrible.
Both are true.

1)Wolfpack tactics and Safety Overrides (just to name two) exacerbate the mobility and flux stats advantage of both Midline and High Tech to the point of ridicolousness. You can complete the game with nothing but Overridden Hyperions even after the hullmod got a duct tape fix which ended up making the ship variety incredibly worse for Low tech and merely incoveniencing ships that were disgusting when using SO in the first place.

2)Damage focused officer skills more or less favour Missile and Energy Weapons, while they mostly leave ballistics behind.
High energy focus is amazing but only works on energy weapons.
Gunnery Implants provides ECM on the elite version making it potentially a lot more relevant on high tech/midline fleets, but you want it on low tech ships anyway because it improves maximum range and recoil
Ranged Spec mostly applies to either a Gauss Conquest or a long range beam Paragon, everything else using it mostly never/very seldomly benefits from the bonus (good luck getting that costant 30% damage using 1000 range ballistics) but you want Elite Ranged spec on most offfense focused low tech ships anyway because shell speed is vital and even allows weapons like heavy mortars and Arbalest autocannons to work nicely.
Target Analysis works for any weapon and therefore does not favour Midline/High tech on the surface, but in reality it mostly benefits highly mobile Midline and High Tech ships. It is the prime officer skill to have on Frigades/Destroyers/Cruisers (when you want more damage), which translates in Midline/High tech getting disgusting damage on their highly mobile non-capitals while Low tech just sits there, looking pathetic with its slow-as-Moloch Frigades, Destroyers and Cruisers that get absolutely curbstomped the moment they get close in order to deal damage to enemy capitals (outside the buffed Enforcer).

4) Then there's also to mention that there are way more officer and commander skills buffing damage dealt than there are ones reducing damage recieved, which combined with the (now slightly improved) AI that does not know how to pilot Low Tech ( I.E.  "not armor tanking") results in only two Low Tech (ish) ships that stay competitive in late game, which I'll cover later.

5)The new story content is great, but it would not be unfair to state that the new endgame mostly favours aggresiveness, strike damage capability, mobility and surefire damage sources (I.E. no bomber/fighter spam), which mostly negates what Low tech ships are good at entirely, the only two outliers being Sabot Spam XIV Enforcer (which I think was from Thaago, if I remember correctly) and the absolutely disgusting Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught (I built this myself, but there probably is a similar design using the same concept somewhere else on the forum), which actually absolutely humiliates the endgame content and that may just be the only ultra-endgame Low tech ship that holds a candle to either Midline or High tech. I'm just gonna paste a post of mine with it. Just beware it's kinda long and it contains story spoilers (it may also work with 3x Storm needlers 3x Heavy Mortars but I like the better range and damage per shot of Mk.9 Autocannons and Heavy maulers):

Spoiler

Horseshoe Crab (Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught)

Spoiler

[close]

Hullmods on the ship because the list is too damn long to fit on the screen:
1) (integrated) Heavy Armor
2) (Integrated) Reinforced Bulkheads
3) (Integrated) Integrated Targeting Unit
4) Solar Shielding
5) Armored Weapon Mounts
6) Integrated Point Defence AI
7) Automated Repair Unit
8) Shield Shunt
9) Flux Distributor
10) Insulated Engine Ass(embly)
11) Advanced Turret Gyros (for the Mk.9 Autocannons and the Railguns that also double as Point Defence)
12) Expanded magazines (for the TPCs)
This thing is actually magical. It's got every single possible bonus either increasing armor, reducing damage taken (across armor and hull), boosting up Hullpoints, flux dissipation and damage done to the enemy (aside from Energy Weapon mastery for the two TPCs).
Why do I have 3600 flux generated by weapons when the ship only gets 1524 flux dissipation?
To make sure the thing fully uses all its flux dissipation to shoot weapons even if it's only using a portion of them, It also has an aggressive enough officer, enough armor, hull hitpoints and residual armor. This Onslaught has around 175 Residual armor spread across 30.000 hull points, and that's before we even count the -35% (or was it 45%?) hull and armor damage taken thanks to officer skills and 100% CR.
Officer skills (swear to all that Ludd loves that he was already named Ahmed when I got him)

Spoiler

[close]

The only oopsie I made in setting it up was making Damage Control Elite instead of Target Analysis. The one thing missing is Reinforced Flux Conduits (I already have Shield shunt boosting EMP resistance, it felt useless) and Blast Doors, but who cares about losing crew members anyway when you can do this under AI control:

Spoiler

[close]

Or this (story spoilers):

Spoiler

[close]

And also that, without a single care in the world (more spoilers)

Spoiler

[close]

You can also just send it into a sea of remnants and it will hold on for minutes while the rest of your fleet is busy elsewhere and is virtually unkillable by frigades unless they either got Reapers able to get thru the absurd point defence or enough PPT to kill it before they suffer critical malfunctions or end up getting crumped.

Sorry, forgot to add one vital aspect of the Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught: Weapon groups!

Weapon Group 1: Two Thermal Pulse Cannons
Weapon Group 2: Front facing Mk.9 Autocannon and Heavy Mauler
Weapon Group 3-4: Left/Right facing MK.9 Autocannon and Heavy Maulers
Weapon Group 5: 6 Railguns and 6 Dual Flaks

Keep all the Autocannons and Maulers all in their own respective group and they will not fire at different targets all at once. Putting them into three separate weapon groups based on their orientation makes sure they all fire at avaiable targets.

Railguns also will not double as point defence if they're not in the same weapon group as Dual Flaks. Dual Flaks on the other hand will not fire into the void when Railguns are firing at an enemy ship with their 1k+ effective range (700+40% range from ITU, +15% from Gunnery Implants), making it a win-win!

[close]

3) The new High tech and Midline ships more or less have powercrept Low tech into irrelevancy. Overhauled Hyperion is death incarnate even without SO and is even nicely piloted by the AI. The Champion (which I foolishly believed to suck before testing it out) is a superior Dominator with better base speed (even better than Eagle, huh), a ship system that gets actually used by the AI and does not get most of its builds killed in the process and a plethora of ship loadouts covering long range, mid range and low range, all of which work better than the Dominator in almost every scenario. Some examples below:

Spoiler

Long Range Champion using Tactical Lasers, Graviton Beams, a HIL and a Hurricane MIRV. Augmeted by the usual hullmod suspects (that get integrated) plus advanced turret gyros, advanced optics and Point defence AI for both Tac lasers to become PD and the HIL to not stop firing half the time due to the horrible turret traverse
Medium Range Champion using double Heavy Needler, Autopulse Laser (with expanded mags) and a Hammer Barrage, plus normal PD turrets and the usual hullmods suspecs (that get integrated) plus expanded missile racks
Short Range Champion with IR pulse lasers at the front, Burst PD lasers at the sides and back, double Heavy Autocannons, a Plasma Cannon/HIL and Safety Overrides plus the usual suspecs for hullmods (that get integrated). The large missile slot can be left empty unless you want it to use a hammer barrage, in which case you're going to want to swap that Plasma/HIL for an autopulse in order to have as much hard flux damage as possible, plus of course integrating Expanded Missile racks

[close]

3)Burn Drive is the worst ship system in the entire game and it got spammed on all Vanilla Low Tech ships, especially capitals
There we go. I finally got to the main meat and potatoes of this thread.
I absolutely despise Burn Drive as it currently works, I think it makes 90% of the ships having it as their system worse and it's also the reason why Ludd Left us.
The only ships that are good having it above other ship systems are Onslaught, Enforcer and Prometheus Mk.2. Every other ship would be better at its role with another one entirely.
Don't believe me? Here's some examples:
1) What would you rather have on your Standard Legion?: Burn Drive to make it easier for the AI to get its naked behind exposed and brutalized by the enemy, or Reserve Deployment on the standard Legion to actually be a competent combat carrier?
2)What would you rather have on your XIV Legion? Burn drive for your precious, almost one of a kind ship in the entire sector to dash into the enemy and get a surprise colonoscopy from the enemy or a choice between fast Missile Racks or Missile Autoforge to actually be a more competent missile boat that is also a carrier and maybe even direct fire wepons?
3)What would you rather have on your Standard Dominator? Burn Drive for that out-of-water-crab to launch itself past the enemy it's fighting so that it can show you why hardpoints on a grossly obese cruiser suck, or would having Damper Field actually making the Dominator a viable tanking powerhouse of a Steel Crustacean?
4)What would you rather have on your XIV Dominator? Burn Drive to precisely tell you why you should have not restored that Orange Pincered Menace and salvaged it instead or Advanced Ammo Feeder, actually making the ship as a whole actually competitive when compared to the XIV Eagle, Champion and Aurora?

There's also what I think is the major imbalance that is the XIV Battlegroup variants basically making the non XIV Low Tech ships more or less obsolete for late game, but that could be extensively discussed in another thread, just briefly:

Spoiler

XIV battlegroup should provide substantial buffs and also increase the ship DP compared to the standard version: I'm thinking of keeping the 10% worse top speed and handling, but better improvements in armor, a slight hullpoint increase and significantly more OP. As a result:
1) Standard Legion (even with the ship system being Reserve Deployment instead of Burn Drive) is worth no more than 35DP, XIV Legion stays at 40DP
2)Onslaught stays at 40DP, XIV Onslaught goes up to 45
3)Enforcer goes down to 8 DP, XIV Enforcer goes up to 10DP
4)Falcon Stays at 15 DP, XIV falcon goes up to 17-18DP
5)Eagle Stays at 22DP, XIV Eagle goes up to 25DP
6)Dominator goes down to 22DP, XIV Dominator stays at 25DP

[close]

As for ships that would keep their Burn Drive, I would apply a simple change I've seen written around in the forum for a while (I don't remember who proposed it first, just let me know and I'll credit this idea to you with an after-post edit):
Keep the same stats of the ship system like recharge time, system duration, the maximum distance it travels and the fact some Hullmods and Officer skills actually increase the speed of burn drive along with the top speed of the ship itself, but make Burn Drive able to be aborted at any moment of the system staying active by the ship activating it.

This would mean that a ship using Burn drive would use the skill, get as close as the enemy as it wants to and then cut the boosters before ramming the target or overshooting it. It would not only be a very good chance for player piloted Low Tech ships (fatfingering Burn Drive while in front of [Redacted], anyone?) but it would actually make AI use the ship system at the best of its ability and not be overly stingy about it because it 1) can't figure out the ship can just be slightly turned left or right to not ram the enemy with it 2) The ship system gets constanty blueballed by allies in the vicinity since it has a fixed travel path and distance that does not combine well with a crowded combat envirorment.

As it currently stands in 0.95, Low tech is not an alternative to midline and High tech, it's a masochistic dream come true for people that want to make Starsector harder for themselves. Make sure to not buff/rebalance said ships and keep Endgame and Officer/CommanderS Skills as they are now if that's the intended balance of this game.

That's all I had to say, really. This thread is long enough already. Off I go jogging because I want to get laid despite my horrible personality it's a good and healthy habit! Have a good day dear Luddites and Luddettes!

12

Suggestions / Make [Story Spoilers] fights scale with the player's Battle Size setting!

« on: May 07, 2021, 09:57:13 AM »

How many of you reloaded the game and experimented with different setups when you fought the [Spoilers] fights for the first time? I'll be the first one to admit I did, and I soon found out you could reduce or increase the maximum battle size all you wanted, but the fights themselves did not change, hence the following suggestion that's also serving as this thread title. I'm going to use memes instead of actual ship names so you don't have to open hald a dozen Spoiler tags.

Dorito Gank Squad Fight:
After some testing I've more or less come to the conclusion you can reliably off a single Spooky Scary Bag with around 90DP worth of AI controlled ships (a single Shield Shunt, Derelict Contingent Radiant with 3 Integrated Hullmods and a fully Integrated Alpha core probably beats two by itself, but we don't talk about that), so I've concocted the following equation that really sucks because I don't have either a big enough brain or a degree in mathematics:

Number of Crumpled Bags=1+{[(Battle Size/2)/120]*1.2}

You'll fight an additional Bag Full Of Fun whenever the equation fully reaches the next number. I would personally give the existing Bag(s) buffs based on the remaining "score" of the equation (say that for every 0.99 all Tesseracts get a 99% Flux Capacity and 99% Flux Dissipation bonus which gets equally split between the Doritos if there's multiple already on the field)

Addendum
Harpoon Affectionado, Thaago had some legitimate doubts about my math skills (I'll agree they're not great at all) so I wrote some examples below, let me know if the calculus checks out!

I think the above formula probably doesn't really do what you want for the omegas? As stated it gives 2 enemies from 200-399 DP battle size, which IIRC is every battle size except the max of 400 (don't have the game open in front of me). So its really just an extra enemy surprise for players that exactly max the battle size, and no change for anyone else.

The equation simplifies to 1 + BattleSize/200, rounded down...

Hm... Wait let me calculate some more examples to test this!

Dorito Gank Squad formula: Number of Crumpled Bags=1+{[(Battle Size/2)/120]*1.2}

200 Battle Size (minimum vanilla setting)
1+{[(200/2)/120]*1.2}=2 which translates into 2 Doritos with no buffs

300 Battle Size (stock vanilla value)
1+{[(300/2)/120]*1.2}[/b]=2.5 which translates into 2 Doritos with +25% extra flux capacity and 25% extra flux dissipation each (since the 0.5 translates into a total of +50% base flux stats, evenly distributed)

400 Battle Size (maximum vanilla value)
1+{[(400/2)/120]*1.2}[/b]=3 which translates into 3 Doritos with no buffs

700 Battle Size (obtainable through settings file editing)
1+{[(700/2)/120]*1.2}[/b]=4.5 which translates into 4 Doritos with +12,5% extra flux capacity and 12,5% extra flux dissipation each (since the 0.5 translates into a total of +50% base flux stats, evenly distributed)

1000 Battle Size (obtainable through settings file editing)
1+{[(1000/2)/120]*1.2}[/b]=6 which translates into 6 Doritos with no buffs

Now you're making me wonder if I wrote the OP wrong or something  I'll add this to the OP as an addendum!

Ludd's Angry Broccoli Fight
This is a bit trickier IMO, since you'd only ever fight one of these (unless Alex has played Darkest Dungeon recently) so we've got to modify the equation a bit to only make it apply the same bonus as above and not add additional units:


Buff Multiplier={[(Battle Size/2)/120]*1.2}-1

This is the same buff as above that improves flux capacity and flux dissipation by 100% every 1.0 in value.

Thoughts? I could very well imagine the additional 1.2 multiplier being reduced or outright removed, but I'm strongly under the opinion that fights get easier and easier the bigger the Maximum Deployment size increases on the player's size, so I would at least keep it to 1.1.

13

General Discussion / Reminder: There's a [Censored] in the fringes of the [Story Spoilers]!

« on: May 07, 2021, 09:21:29 AM »

Warning! Story Spoilers ahead!

Spoiler

I've finally gotten to the nascent gravity well contaning the Alpha site and the Ziggurat fight (which I'm extremely disappointed by the fact I can't salvage by the way, it ruins my technological troglodyte roleplay) and I took some time to fully explore the system from head to toe, since I've had a discussion with a good chap on Twitch during a Starsector stream about something special being hidden in it.
Turns out he was right, and I found it!

Spoiler

[close]

There were some Remnants fighting it for some reason. How hilarious would it have been for us to fight a Tesseract here, without the option of retreating?
Come on Alex, I know it was on your mind, Just Do It^TM!

Spoiler

[close]

I actually forgot to make a screenshot of them, but you'll find 3-4 Hyper-Redacted weapons inside the cache. I'm not sure if the exact position is the same every playthrough but it should not take more than a month of in-game time to find it in the system using sensor burst otherwise.

Post Scriptum
Here's my low tech only fight against the angry broccoly of death by the way. I'm updating a thread of mine soon and I may aswell partly write what I'm pasting in there aswell.

My Fleet setups specifically made to counter the Zig:
Tyrant (forgot to swap the MK9 Autocannon at the front and the Expanded Deck Crew for both Automated Repair Unit AND Resistant Flux Conduits)

Spoiler

[close]

XIV Legion (fighter spam to distract the motes was actually really useful, but I should've swapped boradswords for Thunders)

Spoiler

[close]

Pebble Battlecarrier (from the Asteroid Ships Pack https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17871.0 , which I suggest you to get since it's great)

Spoiler

[close]

Venom-X superfrigate (ship itself is from Underworld https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=11002.0 , that small ball shaped weapon is a Small Arc Emitter from High Tech Expansion https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=19548.0 )

Spoiler

[close]

The Fight itself
Deployed capitals first, I made the mistake to not have the two Pebbles Escort the Legion

Spoiler

[close]

First Contact

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I made the mistake of giving a Kill Order to all my Capitals, which resulted in the Legion going headfirst into the Zig and not let the two capital ships with a Paragon's shield and nearly 60k hull points each do their job and tank the hell out of it

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Aaaaand the Fat Pigeon's dead, some 5 seconds before the Zig itself got deleted. Great. I remember that overload text making me laugh so hard I had to pause the battle for a while.

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I thankfully saved up a Story Point, turned out to be really useful.

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Gave the Zig its lore accurate name before hauling it back to my home planet and never touching it ever again in this campaign

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General Discussion / Discussion: Should we stop militarizing civilian ships in late game?

« on: May 03, 2021, 03:44:15 PM »

I'm in the process of finishing up my third campaign and I may have just realized that I should stop integrating militarized subsystems into my civilian ships for late game:




I've got 260 Deployment Points worth of actual combat ships, but an additional 86 Deployment Points of Militarized Civilian Ships is putting a rather large dent in my 3, very important Commander Skills improving damage, flux stats and maximum CR.
I'm not even playing a campaign in which CR is vital (one with Derelict Contingent above all others) and I'm already in the process of refitting the entirety of my utility flotilla (exept the ones in which I've spent a story point to integrate M. Subsystems in, because I'm a dumb Luddite) by the time I get to the good story stuff.


I can see the counterargument of wanting to militarize civilian ships for early game combat prowess, halfed signature and not increasing maintenance costs by 50% upon installing capacity hullmods, but do you really need that late game?

You don't need militarized ships in combat unless you're attempting the mother of all cheeses using Derelict Contingent and some mod-derived hullmods like Collapsed Cargo Holds to create the mother of all tanks in combat most of the time.

You don't need a lower signature considering that by the time you start fielding Atlases and Promethei any sort of stealth play has gone out of the window (you can also install Insulated Engine Assembly for the above mentioned capital haulers to have the same exact 150 signature as capitals anyway)

You may not even need increased crew, cargo or fuel capacity since the game now favors relatively smaller combat fleets, which leaves plenty spare fleet size for a girthy utility flotilla. I've been discovering the joy of slapping Efficiency Overhaul/Augmented Drive Fields/Solar Shielding/Insulated Engine assembly/Surveying Equipment on my civ boys instead and I got to admit I've beenf eeling pretty darn good about it,  without needing extra capacity in the slightest.


Thoughts about this? Am I the one special Starfarer in the sector that just realized that he maybe, maybe should stop militarizing everything in sight now that there are Commander skills that get diminishing returns based on how many militarized ship DP you're above the limit?

Edit: I've forgot how to do a poll. Ludd save me, I need sleep.

Edit 2: I have now seen it. Into Bed I go. See you tomorrow!

15

General Discussion / Is this the best recipe for canned crab? Do you have anything tasting better?

« on: April 25, 2021, 05:06:13 PM »

So I found a derelict XIV Crabbinator in the hood while raiding...err...Nachiketa for fuel? That's the one right? The one with the Syncotron core I'm not stealing because I'm planning on buying fuel there for free for the remainder of the campai- oh I'm sidetracking already this is not good.

Back onto the Obese Cruiser With Flux Asthma, I wanted to at least try and use all the weapon mounts this time, and no halfmounting and flipping the bird to the entirety of the large ballistic weapon roster for two Heavy Needlers since that's pretty much all this Continuous Fire Word Misuse joke of a cruiser can handle on most days of the week.

If you've read the suggestion section of the forum and eventually became desperate for constructive discussions enough to read my convoluted messes, you will already know that I tried using the Hegecrabbo with triple Breach SRM and was disappointed with it enough to warrant a thread where I whined about the AI doing AI things. Very original, I know.

So, with the failed attempt of trying the new weapons and the buffed ones, I went to the one setup of the Crabby Patty I actually liked:

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Isn't there anyone else disappointed that we get a Volturian Lobster but not a Hegemonian King Crab? What kind of faction bias is this Alex?!

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It also comes with another setup:

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This one looks a lot less tasty. Man I don't know what kind of live containment tank they shipped this with but it does not look healthy!

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Oh, for Ludd's sake Sundog, did you really have to introduce a trait that worsens handling even further?

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I feel really bad about integrating Hardened shields instead of ITU. But we both know which one is more expensive and I sort of wanted them both. That's what you get for not nerfing shields ladies and gentlemen, when even an incredibly specialized, armor tanking Steel Crustacean needs to have Hardened shields you know it's bad.

The reason why this works is very simple. The AI is dumb, on both sides of the engament. Given an identical set of ships and recources, the easiest setup exploiting the second troglodyte on the other side the most wins.

The AI really does not like getting hit with a flaming family car made of plasma every few seconds, so it raises the shields up. Because said flaming family car made of plasma has a VERY long travel time, the AI will keep the shield raised for a long time, opening him up for the most disgusting weapon in the game to do its job: the Overridden Hyperion with Wolfpack Tactics and an Officer the Sabot SRM Pod.

This might sound nonsensical, but those two Hypervelocity Drivers may aswell not be there against enemy cruisers and capitals. In fact they may aswell be detrimental to the ship as a whole since their long range will sometimes drive the enemy away from the range of the sabots. I still installed them since I'd hate for this thing to be completely USELESS against anything anywhere near the definition of "long range", but the build as a whole would probably be better off with either two Heavy Autocannons or Two heavy Needlers instead. Arbalests are out of the question since they have too short of a range even for a cruiser with both ITU and an Officer with Gunnery Implants.

As for the hullmods, I like solar shielding alright? I'm in full midgame and endgame feels like that one scene...movie...Alien? Where Ripley is thinking of the Alien and staying absolutely terrified of it 99% of the movie? You could probably make space for Aux thrusters, but do you really need it with 108 sabots ready to go and fire in a 360°circle surrounding the thing? And what is it even gonna do when the only fixed weapons are a pair of Hellbores? Just show them menacingly at the frigades flanking it, sacrificing a goat to Mammon to hit the Ludd-forsaken thing?

So, how does it fare?
Before any performance is talked about, I'll just premise that I'm almost as close to a 100% tryhard Canned Crab as it gets with 3 hullmods, the technology skill increasing flux capacity and dissipation and 10 skill points into leadership. The only two things I'm missing from making this almost perfect is Elite Missile Specialization for faster Sabot vomit and Elite Impact Mitigation.

It's the only build I could cobble up togheder that manages to defeat Three Crabs in a Bucket by itself under AI control, most of the time. Sometimes the reaper torpedoes tap it a bit too hard.
First crab on the plate opened up while still alive with a knife

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Second crab tossed into boiling water while also still alive

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The third crab ran away inland but got eaten while -of course- still alive by monkeys. It's true. Youtube it up.

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I also had the Pincering Menace face off against the Sim Onslaught and it won, surprisingly. Man the setup of that somehow manages to disappoint me more every time I use it as a benchmark.

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Edit: I've finally gone around and reworked the Hegecrabbo to the specification suggested in this thread! This is how it looks now!

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I've also experimented with the Assault Crustacean variant, but I do realize I've integrated two hullmods (hardened shields, expanded missile racks) an overridden sea dweller of a ship should not have if I'm planning to go whole hog.

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I honestly don't know why people tend to sleep on the Devastator cannon at point blank ranges, it's legit terrifying. I will properly test an Assault Crustacean when I get myself a new ship of the same category what I can properly refit and post the results down here with when that happens!



To close this gruesome culinary experiment making everyone wonder why I don't like crabs, how do you cook it? Is it still using Hellbores or have you loaded it up with mayonaise instead? Let me know!