Hm. I'm using a slightly outdated version of ORA, but I also haven't seen any mention of this in update notes - is there any particular reason ORA is hostile to the Luddic Church, but neutral to the Luddic Path?
Hum, they start Friendly with the Church and Inhospitable with the Path so you must have brought this upon yourself with your actions.
Tried this out.
ORA ships:
1. Are slow; too slow to maintain broadsides in most cases.
2. Have inefficient shields that are huge because they're long / skinny (the Conquest problem). Suggestion: do something like the "shields" I did for a few long / skinny things in Vacuum, where it ignored the Vanilla shield system entirely but behaved like a shield in all important respects. Really not hard to set up, but you'll have to make a (fairly trivial) art asset for the shield.
3. Have energy shot weapons with insufficient punch to really make the broadsides work out well. They simply don't compare with Heavy Blasters, and that's about the only choice that makes sense, because you're not going to get multiple chances to fire before their weak Shields collapse.
4. I don't even slightly understand the Beam nerf and massive penalties for asymmetry; the "buff" doesn't help them much, the nerf hurts ORA a lot.
5. The mobility system for the Cruisers is pretty nifty, but the smaller ships lack something similar.
6. Instead of ITU, please give them something better that doesn't allow ITU. I totally understand why that's part of their design, but it needs to be better (and, if you want to keep the Beam nerf as a concept, it should just buff Energy but debuff Beams).
7. What is the strange dark-purple radius at a huge distance around certain ORA ships? It's a fancy graphics effect but it doesn't appear to have a purpose and it's fairly expensive to render.
1. Yes by 10su/s compared to vanilla high tech, except the Revelation but that ship is so strong already, so not too much. Given their range advantage I'd say it's a fair trade. Some selected ships and systems already got a buff in my dev version though.
2. No they haven't. They fall squarely in line with the average High Tech at 0.6 to 0.8 efficiency and 0.3 to 0.5 upkeep.
3. You must be thinking about the Eschewal there, because pretty much all the other weapons deal more damage per shot than their vanilla counterpart (the Choir being an exception). I already halved the fire-rate and doubled the damage per shot of the Eschewal in my dev.
4. Without the beam nerf, there wasn't even a choice when making loadouts: it was beam spam or nothing. Not a single other loadout ever came close to the performances of a beam loadout due to the large amount of slots, their flux efficiency and the way they scale faster when used
en masse. With ITU though, the ships can still use them alright but they fall on par with regular weapons instead of being a no-brainer. As for the anti-asymmetry penalty, let's just say that leaving one broadside empty freed up to 40% of the ship's OP to install a broken amount of hullmods. Not going to happen. It is just a clamp on empty mounts though, you can make all the asymmetric loadouts you want as long as slots pairs are occupied by a weapon of the same mount size.
5. I'm trying to not duplicate any system too much. Plus mobility systems are everywhere in mods! Although currently I'm changing the Mirth's skimmer for HEF (and raised its speed) but I'm giving a custom teleporter to the Harmony Destroyer.
6. ITU does the same and at least it's simpler than having to explain why you can't use it because of another hullmod since it isn't possible to prevent players from trying to install it without modifying the vanilla file.
7. The beam nerf applies to all ships inside that range of an ORA hull, both allies and enemies. It didn't specifically profiled that particular effect, but I'm fairly certain it's cheaper than using deco weapons on all ships to get the same look.