So I heard DatonKallandor is bashing Scy in the little fenced garden that is now the
SomethingAweful forum, but refuses to post his complains here where it they can be discussed. Lets pass on the petty attitude that is to dismiss someone's work while preventing the author to reply: This is internet, everything's fair game I suppose. However, since a friend sent me his posts, that doesn't prevent me to reply to him here and try to get something positive out of his rant:
Note that SCY is ludicrously overpowered - it's pretty much the perfect example of artist mod. Incredibly pretty and well crafted with a *** ton of unique weapon and ship effects (both visual and gameplay), but the balance is just hilarious. If you play Nexerelin and you start SCY you've basically won immediately.
Ludicrous burn speeds (pretty much everything they've got is at least one category faster than it's class, sometimes more) and incredibly powerful weapons say hello (massive kinetic spike damage from almost tachyon lance range that also teleports the target in front of your guns after they overload, is just one example).
It's not a grievance, it's just a warning to someone considering picking up SCY for a Nexerelin game. The burn speed alone will make SCY kick everyone's ass on the strategic layer because their fleets will simply out-run and/or catch up to everyone else.
As expected, I disagree with most of your points. While usually you aren't "wrong" beyond mixing
facts and
personal opinion, this time you are pushing it.
In Nexerelin, I never
ever saw Scy win a game, or even become a big player. They get driven out early game pretty often actually. On the other hand, whatever faction I took, vanilla or not, I won. I think you can see the common denominator there.
Scy isn't faster than Vanilla... Or more precisely it is faster than a
barebone vanilla ships, but those can compensate with engines hullmods. Hulmods that Scy ships can't mount, making them the equivalent to a fleet with unstable injectors or augmented engines on all ships. Besides some ships aren't faster than their vanilla counterparts, namely the armored ones. And since those can't mount engines mods either, big fleets are actually slower than average! Same goes for combat speed; do I need to mention that since they have a single engine, they are even more susceptible to flameouts? So the result is: small Scy fleets are marginally faster than their vanilla counterparts, and big ones are the same speed or slower if they got a Nemean Lion capital-ship in tow, the slowest ship in the game including mods. Sure having pre-boosted engines will help the early game a lot, but soon you'll find that you have to either only grind small fleets or invest in slow and expensive ships.
Weapons have higher average damage per shot than vanilla on average, that's true. However almost every single one of them have at least a vanilla equivalent that does more damage, for less flux and better range. The exception being the weapons that are far too removed from vanilla to compare adequately, some built-in ones and maybe the small HeMor. Sure I made a lot of fancy visuals effects, and that makes them look and feel strong. Stronger than they actually are because cold hard numbers put them just below the best vanilla ones. Also they have lower than average range, witch cancel most of the ships speed advantage, plus horrible OP cost and flux stat. But maybe you didn't realized that the weapons tooltip display the flux for sustained fire and not maximum dps? Here's the rule of thumb I used compared to the best weapons vanilla offers: 50-80% range, 50-80% speed, 150-200% damage, 50-75% rate of fire, 150-200% flux, 125-150% OP cost. Sure the 200% damage do wonders and is just compensated by the other worse stats, but Scyan ships also have exactly half the weapon mounts of vanilla ships, plus/minus one.
Now there is the Siren teleporter gun problem that I can agree with. Of course it has less than half the Tachyon Lance range, half the damage to shields (and not even hard flux), deals exactly
0 damage to hulls, is ammo starved and is the main weapon of an expensive cruiser that has only 4 other small turrets... Still it can be powerful in fleet battles and quite frustrating to oppose. But surprise, I already tackled this problem on my end. Now the teleporter shells are loaded only if a ships system is activated, with a long cooldown and limited to 5 charges with 50s regen. (and as a system it can't get buffed by extended magazines)
So sure there are still some rough spots, equipments that are a bit too good, but calling the whole mod "ludicrously overpowered" is defamatory at best. I don't pretend Scy is underpowered either though. It used to be (voluntary) quite weak and I slowly worked them up to what I believe is a pretty good spot around mid-tech.
And yes, this is a attempt to flush you out of your Armchair Specialist salon into the real world to discuss your
issues because even if I disagree, it do double-check all my numbers each time, witch can't be a bad thing.
[EDIT] I stand corrected, there was one ship that was 1 burn faster than it's vanilla equivalent with Augmented Engines: the Xanthus sub-capital freighter. An augmented Atlas has 1500 cargo with burn 4, a Xanthus is burn 5 for 1200 cargo. A tiny bit too good then, it's now burn 4.
