Are people more offended by the lore implications of the Lion's Guard "Special Modifications" hullmod, or it's actual gameplay effects? What about the at-cost Solar Shielding?
I'd guess a lot of the new accounts here posting a big kerfuffle about the Lion's guard are offended that their favorite fashy dictator could *ever* do something that was maybe not optimal after receiving a few decades worth of uncritical praise. Never mind that the Hegemony lost way more tonnage to ambushes than anybody else, the Tri-tachyon needlessly sacrificed a Paragon and lost two wars despite that, and the League is more or less at the mercy of Kazeron's whims (I admit that I don't know too much about the League) and they've all done not the best overall and that makes helps make the factions and the sector feel very much alive.
This blog post is the part 2 of a lengthy story that Alex was excited to post about and share things with everyone and despite the cool things in the blog post everyone just honed in on one thing. Barely anything about PL's cool new laser missiles which make sense in context as they run counter to Low-techs reliance on PD to stop missiles and therefore the League has a missile doctrine that completely counters low-tech's reliance on PD, and therefore counters the Church and the Heg, the two main adversaries of the League. I think the DEMs are pretty trucking neat! And it'll be nice to see how another anti-shield missile that isn't the Sabots might perform, especially since it seems like its more about sustained shield suppression rather than Sabot's burst so hopefully it could be used to create a more reliable bigger opening for that big boom. Barely anyone, if anyone at all, wanted to theory craft cool possible builds with the Pegasus or wonder if they could smash anything destroyer sized or below with 4 hurricanes or thinking about how 4 of the new DEMs would look on that thing. No one really breathing a sigh of relief over the Tri-tach getting *less* fighter spammy than before. Or the Pirates getting separate versions of the Venture, which I'm personally not too excited about since it risks even brickier fleets but I guess I'll have to see how it goes.
Instead, everyone just honed in on The Diktat. Just "Diktat" this, and "Why do their ships gotta be worse than pirate and Pather ships that", and "My space grandma in the slums of Chicomoztoc can bake better ships than Andrada". Well good for your grandma then, but the other posts are just absolutely over blowing things I think. First off, the Diktat actually has a Corrupted Nanoforge. I know when you have lots of mods you can get used to everybody and their aforementioned space grandma having a Pristine Nanoforge where you can't fly 3 LY without tripping over one, but in vanilla only 2 factions have a Pristine and they happen to be the two biggest players in the Sector, the Hegemony and the Persean League. Neither Pirates and Pathers have a nanoforge which is why their ships are absolutely covered in D-mods.
Secondly, the Executor is a capital, and by all rights its actually a pretty decent one with a fair amount of firepower slapped forward ready to punch holes in hulls. Heck, I'd go so far as to say the added energy larges may even give it a bit of utility over the Pegasus, FMR only working for the two rear launchers aside, but I suppose a Ship system might be too integrated to change in so large a warship. Sure, it might have Solar Shielding at cost, but that's one of the cheaper logistic ones anyway and it's probably one of the best mods when fighting Remnants. And sure it might have Special Mods on it or whatever, but its a D-mod you can just pay to get rid of once you reach the post-money stage of the game. Its definitely Persean Leagues better than the Prometheus or Atlas Mk. IIs. The AAF idea, while it has merit, might be too good of a system for the Executor. As anyone that's taken an SO Hammerhead can tell you, you can rip right through *cruisers* pretty easily with just 2 Mediums and 2 lights, let alone 5 medium Ballistics backed up by 4 Med. Energy, 2 Large Energy, *and* 2 Large Missiles all itching to seal that deal. There's a reason the Atlas Mk. II is as fragile as it is and its cause its *got* AAF and is super dangerous if it isn't bothered. The rest of the ships are fine too, I mean an Eagle is still an Eagle and a Hammerhead is *still* a Hammerhead Solar Shielding or no. You can just get them more commonly elsewhere without antagonizing a faction squatting in a single star system.
Thirdly, its not as though they *are* completely incompetent because they got these two new honkin' guns! Guns that apparently are actually exclusive to LG fleets and not something you can stumble into at the Black market in Magec somehow and that's pretty impressive cause I've found Scarabs in some of the most remote smuggling rings, pretty ridiculous for a high priority *ship* Tri-Tachyon, let alone your guns. Guns that are also apparently pretty good when put on the right equipment even if that equipment isn't quite available to the Diktat. Its not exactly their fault that the ships are underfluxed for what they want to use, and besides that I'm willing to bet most, if not everyone here, has at some point made a ship that was overfluxed to a some degree even if its minor. Heck, I'd bet a fair amount of the long time posters here might even overflux their own piloted ships because they can deal with that via limiting use of the weapons in question by toggling auto-fire. Its not like a completely, unusable bad thing that they're using overfluxed guns, after all it'll probably hurt till they max themselves out, its just dependent on the degree to which the guns overflux them so that's a wait and see situation far as I'm concerned. If anything, the new guns and the Executor-class show that they've got direction and an idea of what they want to focus on, its just rigid in thought, is based on a refusal to adapt to their reality, and speaks more to someone wanting to use cool, new toys rather than designed weapons for a target foe like the League's DEM missiles.
I'm also not so sure what's going on with the quasi-Philip-worship going on where people talk about how its stated (in one sentence in the blog mind you) how he's "intelligent and charismatic" while completely skipping the part that states he's a narcissist. Narcissists if nothing else, tend to be extremely confident. A trait that tends to attract people to them, at least initially. They also tend to be very good a manipulating others especially when it helps them receive the admiration and attention they desire. As far as I'm concerned though, regardless of how smart he might be, if nothing else he just so happened to be lucky enough to be at the right places at the right time. After 80 years since their arrival the Heg decided to try out using hero worship, or cults of personalities, to try to unify their population and a Heg officer happened to defeat Loke after a few years of his reign, and that officer *happened* to be Andrada. Fast forward twenty years and the Askonia System decides they might want to join the Persean League. The Hegemony decides to send to an overwhelming force capable of threatening the *Perseans* to intervene and they decided to send Andrada after *twenty years* of hyping him up with their hero worship policy for that *one* battle. After Andrada may or may not have planet cracked a population center, the Heg called him to stand trial and he decided not to and the only thing that stopped him from being yet another named deserter bounty for an enterprising player to hunt down for the umpteenth million time was that he had a force big enough to subjugate a few planets in the system thanks to the force's uncritical admiration of this guy the Heg has been pumping up for a number of years. The only reason his planets have a shade of pink text to them instead of classic Pirate Red is because the Persean League decided if the Askonian council could no longer join them, then they (and likely the Tri-tach) may as well do what they can to prop up this dude that took over and recognized him as a polity, slightly because it was a symbolic bird-flipping to the Hegemony, but more likely to deny the Heg the resources for what would have been a total fuel monopoly in the sector (Heg also owns Nachiketa, a far cheaper source of bulk fuel than Askonia, incidentally. Having both Sindria *and* Nachiketa would basically be game over for the enemies of the Hegemony). Hence, why a Hegemony traitor admiral has mostly midline ships and shares a capital ship design with them rather than being "low-tech faction...version 2!" He's just a smaller piece in a much bigger game. If you want someone that actually pulled off some crazy good stuff in that time frame on their own merits without having to rely on multiple governments propping them up politically, you should take a look at Kanta instead. Kanta decided to flip the bird to the Hegemony on their own and throw their chips in with Loke, and when that didn't look like it was working out they took over and began building up a feared empire on their own. No given forces from the Heg to subjugate anyone with, no hero worship from the Heg to act as a base for their cult of personality, all the factions openly want to wipe her off the map so no protection from one of the two most powerful forces in the Sector, and her military is literally slabs of metal cobbled together with guns taped to them in space caves all in the same timeframe that Andrada lucked his way into subjugating Askonia out of fear of Hegemony reprisal from the Opis incident and she's still around and kicking. Unlike the propaganda surrounding Philip, Kanta *is* someone that *really* knows what they're doing and has forged the longest lasting pirate dynasty in the sector since the collapse thus far. Meanwhile, in the 20 years Philip's had Askonia all to himself the rebels based on Umbra are still around and kicking since his whole thing started. Not someone that strikes me as utterly efficient. Not to mention the sheer amount of all the corrupt officials you meet in the Sindrian bars just waiting to line their own pockets by illegally selling the one exclusive export (and the one of two really important ones) the Diktat has to line their own pockets on the cheap. Can't go to a Sindrian bar for a drink without bumping into some official wanting to rub your nose in all the lobsters they've got to sell you off the record.
TL;DR: The new Persean missiles are cool beans and make great lore sense in that they are designed to bypass low-tech's reliance on PD entirely.
