Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
With skills like EWM/BWM and hullmods like ballistic rangefinder and HSA, specialization is much better than midline mixing that can't properly benefit from anything. And their mobility advantage has been significantly eroded by cancel-able Burn drive.
Hmm - in the name of avoiding (or at least mitigating) power creep, wouldn't the Responsible thing to do here be dialing back the Eradicator, Fury, and perhaps the Champion, a slight bit? Not something I'd want to do now, regardless, but those ships are very much meant to be balanced against the Eagle. As noted, it's a jack of all trades which makes it a pretty useful balance center point to try to work around.
Support Doctrine does synergize well... with Wolfpack Tactics
On a more serious note, I'd like to hear your opinion if 8 skillpoints (5 in tech, 3 in combat) is considered too costly for one additional non-automated ship with the performance of a level 5 officer.
I'm not sure where 48 is coming from. If I have 240 points, and my ships go from costing 20 to 16 (20*0.8 ), I go from 12 to 15 ships on the field. 15*20 = 300. So I'm curious, is it necessary for a player to get a full +60 DP bonus, for the skill to be worth a skill point? Having not played around with uneven deployments all that much, I'm not actually sure. It seems really strong to me though.
Is being able to deploy, say, 255 (+15 DP) already a sufficient benefit for a tier 5? +15 would be like a straight up 6% fleet strength buff, plus additional skills on more ships. A 25% overall fleet strength buff 60/240) for 1 skill point (even as a tier 5) sounds like too much. I don't think any of the other tier 5s really come close to that, do they?
As a more concrete example, I could imagine an 8 officer build (with the +1 to officer level skill) running 9 Furies (8+player), for 180 DP, then still having 60 DP more for frigates without officers. That would be an example of Thaago's "wide" build. I feel going from 7 Scarab/Tempests to 10 is a non-trivial bump, plus also adding peak performance and speed to each of those frigates is a non-trivial bonus. All it takes is a little bit of out numbering for the AI the start having problems with being able to back off and vent.
How much a fleet multiplier would one expect from a tier 5 skill, and how does that compare to the currently existing ones? Neural Link is like +1 officer. That's maybe a 12% increase in officered ships, which doesn't quite translate to raw fleet power? Automated ships perhaps gets you a 60 DP ship really worth, say, 75? A Radiant certainly isn't worth 100 DP, for example. Best of the Best is perhaps an 8% OP buff (imagine 315 OP capital, getting two s-mods worth 30, then another worth 30, so 30/375 = 0.08), which doesn't equate to a raw 25% stronger fleet. Hull Restoration is +10 to +15% CR, so a +5% multiplier perhaps? Derelict operations is a bit harder to estimate since you need to include a bunch of d-mods decreasing individual ship effectiveness.
