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General Discussion / Meso made me write a feedback thread so here goes [SPOILERS]
« on: March 29, 2021, 03:05:12 AM »
So I don't usually like doing these kinds of threads, but Meso pestered me into writing one up cause I kept tossing my opinions his way. This list will not follow any particular structure or anything and I'll just add things as they come to mind.
Phase Ships
Lets start with the low-hanging fruit: Phase ships are still an absolute chore to fight and the Phase Fleet in the story only drives that point home even more. The fight is incredibly non-interactive since all you can do is try to hold the phase ships at bay while praying not too many of your ships will get blown to smithereens by all the mines coming your way or deleted by reapers after a Harbinger turned off their shields and everything.
The supposed AI improvements have done very little to help that. Phase ships will be more aggressive at times, but rarely stay uncloaked for long enough to really take meaningful damage unless you have beam weaponry. Lowtech just struggled to deal anything against phase ships since their main two counters are Beams and Fighters, but the latter is the counter to everything so it doesn't really count.
Some more specific thoughts:
- Doom: Plenty things have been said about the mines in the past and they still hold true, except now that thing can also get faster mine regen and an extra mine capacity just to make absolutely sure any ship that dares to vent will be obliterated immediately.
- Harbinger: Having your shields disabled at random is terrible and removes a lot of counterplay when facing these things. It is also the only real phase-counter since it can pull ships out of phase. Why that is entirely exclusive to the Harbinger is beyond me.
New ships
- Fury: Seems really cheap for its DP when you can get two of these for the price of one Aurora. Aurora might also be a bit too high on DP these days.
- Ziggurat: Yep it's about as strong as you'd expect, but good god it's also another case of Doom-syndrome with a slow phase ship that just sits in phase and attacks from there. It looks great and I enjoy flying it for now, though.
Story Points
I really love these in many ways, but imho their scaling is very off by being tied to your levels, making you gain them very quickly early on but becoming very hard to earn in lategame. Imho these should be earned more gradually to be able to actually make decent use of them throughout a campaign. In their current state, they encourage hoarding at least some of them for the lategame, which the mechanics involved seem to imply is not intended.
Skills
First off, the current set of skills seems to favour hightech quite a bit, imho.
- Energy Weapon Mastery is insanely strong. This is an effect I actually made as a hullmod for some rare and unique ships in my mod with an added rate-of-fire debuff to maintain effective dps and I thought it was a really really strong effect like that already. The range-limitation on the hightech version isn't much of one given the naturally short ranges of energy weaponry, which also leads into my next point:
- Long-range specialist or whatever it was called (writing this from work during a break) appears to be the ballistic counterpart to Energy Weapon Mastery, but is only really usable by midline. Lowtech hulls lack the agility to dictate engagement ranges and will very easily lose the bonus damage. More importantly, though, Lowtech heavily relies on impact mitigation as their primary defensive skill meaning they can't really afford to take long range specialist. I feel this skill would be fine if the damage bonus was a curve without a minimum range bottom.
- Impact Mitigation and its shield counterpart should really share a node to actually force specialisation in one defense type. Right now hightech players just pick up IM as a freebie on the way since long-range is rubbish for hightech anyway.
- In its current form the junker fleet skill (the damage reduction chance per d-mod one) feels really weird and it seems like now the best way to make a lowtech hull tanky is by turning it into clump of d-mods to abuse this skill, especially against an increasing number of enemies that are capable of just stripping off armor easily. Chance-based damage reduction also feels awful to me. I understand why it's done this way (to preserve the effectiveness of HE weaponry against armour by still allowing full-penetration hits that flat damage reduction wouldn't) but it gets really silly when firing a reaper becomes a diceroll on whether it will actually do anything. Imho this skill should just lean into the residual armor aspect it has.
- Wolfpack Tactics seems fine, honestly. I feel it's overhyped for the most part, given its effects are tied to officers. It's certainly a good skill, but not broken.
Omega
The design:
David you *** madman these things are so sexy and really selling what they are supposed to be. The weapons have some clarity issues, though, making them look kinda pixelated when zoomed-in at all.
The ships:
Okay, these things I am not a fan of. In my opinion they are difficulty done in all the wrong ways by having them simply be overpowered stat sticks. They outgun you, they outtank you, they outrun you. A Tesseract can simply choose to delete any ship that doesn't have a way of effectively negating an attack due to the combination of temporal shell and weapons with insane damage output. There is very little method to fighting these outside of abusing various kinds of cheese (Doom mines, Hyperion backstabs, ...). A normal balanced fleet basically has to resort to throwing enough ships at the problem and taking heavy losses in the process. In my opinion these things are simply not very interesting beyond the splitting mechanic as they rely heavily on sheer brute force and being good at everything, which is already what the Remnant did.
I feel this makes them compare very poorly to a good example of a boss faction like the Templars in the modiverse which are equally very strong, but with distinct weaknesses and tactical counterplay.
The weapons:
These are really cool, but I think they didn't need to be as strong as they are. Being exotic alone would've been enough to make these really cool and the ships are strong enough already. Generally that's not the main issue though. Imho the dual weapon types on these feel like a pointless gimmick as they are still energy weapons in every meaningful way, including the low range which makes the infinitely more useful on hightech hulls and hightech really didn't need that kind of buff. They are very limited in supply, of course, but imho there needs to be some comparable goodies for lowtech. Also those anti-armor weapons *** on lowtech way too much. Where's the shield destabiliser?
Anyhow, this is all for now. Will add more as it comes to mind. Also just my opinions, of course, feel free to disregard.
Phase Ships
Lets start with the low-hanging fruit: Phase ships are still an absolute chore to fight and the Phase Fleet in the story only drives that point home even more. The fight is incredibly non-interactive since all you can do is try to hold the phase ships at bay while praying not too many of your ships will get blown to smithereens by all the mines coming your way or deleted by reapers after a Harbinger turned off their shields and everything.
The supposed AI improvements have done very little to help that. Phase ships will be more aggressive at times, but rarely stay uncloaked for long enough to really take meaningful damage unless you have beam weaponry. Lowtech just struggled to deal anything against phase ships since their main two counters are Beams and Fighters, but the latter is the counter to everything so it doesn't really count.
Some more specific thoughts:
- Doom: Plenty things have been said about the mines in the past and they still hold true, except now that thing can also get faster mine regen and an extra mine capacity just to make absolutely sure any ship that dares to vent will be obliterated immediately.
- Harbinger: Having your shields disabled at random is terrible and removes a lot of counterplay when facing these things. It is also the only real phase-counter since it can pull ships out of phase. Why that is entirely exclusive to the Harbinger is beyond me.
New ships
- Fury: Seems really cheap for its DP when you can get two of these for the price of one Aurora. Aurora might also be a bit too high on DP these days.
- Ziggurat: Yep it's about as strong as you'd expect, but good god it's also another case of Doom-syndrome with a slow phase ship that just sits in phase and attacks from there. It looks great and I enjoy flying it for now, though.
Story Points
I really love these in many ways, but imho their scaling is very off by being tied to your levels, making you gain them very quickly early on but becoming very hard to earn in lategame. Imho these should be earned more gradually to be able to actually make decent use of them throughout a campaign. In their current state, they encourage hoarding at least some of them for the lategame, which the mechanics involved seem to imply is not intended.
Skills
First off, the current set of skills seems to favour hightech quite a bit, imho.
- Energy Weapon Mastery is insanely strong. This is an effect I actually made as a hullmod for some rare and unique ships in my mod with an added rate-of-fire debuff to maintain effective dps and I thought it was a really really strong effect like that already. The range-limitation on the hightech version isn't much of one given the naturally short ranges of energy weaponry, which also leads into my next point:
- Long-range specialist or whatever it was called (writing this from work during a break) appears to be the ballistic counterpart to Energy Weapon Mastery, but is only really usable by midline. Lowtech hulls lack the agility to dictate engagement ranges and will very easily lose the bonus damage. More importantly, though, Lowtech heavily relies on impact mitigation as their primary defensive skill meaning they can't really afford to take long range specialist. I feel this skill would be fine if the damage bonus was a curve without a minimum range bottom.
- Impact Mitigation and its shield counterpart should really share a node to actually force specialisation in one defense type. Right now hightech players just pick up IM as a freebie on the way since long-range is rubbish for hightech anyway.
- In its current form the junker fleet skill (the damage reduction chance per d-mod one) feels really weird and it seems like now the best way to make a lowtech hull tanky is by turning it into clump of d-mods to abuse this skill, especially against an increasing number of enemies that are capable of just stripping off armor easily. Chance-based damage reduction also feels awful to me. I understand why it's done this way (to preserve the effectiveness of HE weaponry against armour by still allowing full-penetration hits that flat damage reduction wouldn't) but it gets really silly when firing a reaper becomes a diceroll on whether it will actually do anything. Imho this skill should just lean into the residual armor aspect it has.
- Wolfpack Tactics seems fine, honestly. I feel it's overhyped for the most part, given its effects are tied to officers. It's certainly a good skill, but not broken.
Omega
The design:
David you *** madman these things are so sexy and really selling what they are supposed to be. The weapons have some clarity issues, though, making them look kinda pixelated when zoomed-in at all.
The ships:
Okay, these things I am not a fan of. In my opinion they are difficulty done in all the wrong ways by having them simply be overpowered stat sticks. They outgun you, they outtank you, they outrun you. A Tesseract can simply choose to delete any ship that doesn't have a way of effectively negating an attack due to the combination of temporal shell and weapons with insane damage output. There is very little method to fighting these outside of abusing various kinds of cheese (Doom mines, Hyperion backstabs, ...). A normal balanced fleet basically has to resort to throwing enough ships at the problem and taking heavy losses in the process. In my opinion these things are simply not very interesting beyond the splitting mechanic as they rely heavily on sheer brute force and being good at everything, which is already what the Remnant did.
I feel this makes them compare very poorly to a good example of a boss faction like the Templars in the modiverse which are equally very strong, but with distinct weaknesses and tactical counterplay.
The weapons:
These are really cool, but I think they didn't need to be as strong as they are. Being exotic alone would've been enough to make these really cool and the ships are strong enough already. Generally that's not the main issue though. Imho the dual weapon types on these feel like a pointless gimmick as they are still energy weapons in every meaningful way, including the low range which makes the infinitely more useful on hightech hulls and hightech really didn't need that kind of buff. They are very limited in supply, of course, but imho there needs to be some comparable goodies for lowtech. Also those anti-armor weapons *** on lowtech way too much. Where's the shield destabiliser?
Anyhow, this is all for now. Will add more as it comes to mind. Also just my opinions, of course, feel free to disregard.
