I'm not sure Advanced Countermeasures should even exist to begin with, in light of these changes.
Spoiler
My concern here is: You get things like HVD/Gauss Cannon being moderately effective against some ships' armor while doing nearly nothing to other, visually identical ships, without a readily available indicator of why this should be the case. Likewise with sending fighters against a ship and them Doing Something or getting swatted like flies.
The invisibility aspect is true of many other buffs. But at least with something like a ship having the zero flux bonus with its shield up or its missiles flying faster, the player can easily see what's going on even if they don't know why. The damage calculation is completely hidden except for the final output. And unlike, say, Heavy Armor, the bonus from Advanced Countermeasures doesn't even appear on the stats card.
There's a bunch of other stuff like this from other skills: -20% damage against armor, +15% damage to shields, etc. But, yeah, ok, this is more extreme. Hmm.
i think the reduced kinetic damage against armor and reduced HE damage against shields are just bad perks from a design perspective; making kinetic/HE even worse against the things they're already bad at doesn't seem like a great idea, especially since the numbers need to be pretty big to be worth spending a skill point on mitigating damage from what is already only a minor threat (relative to other damage types).
Design-wise, the idea is having this skill rewards "playing well" (i.e. taking the right damage on the right defenses) even more. It's a point that it's probably not very compelling unless the numbers get quite high, though.
- retain higher armor damage reduction on exposed hull
- convert a portion of all shield damage taken into soft flux rather than hard flux (should be a significant amount, since there's already a perk that completely negates 20% of all shield damage taken)
- make some projectiles/missiles pass through unphased phase ships (or just reduce all damage taken), as long as cloak is not on cooldown (so it wouldn't make phase ships that recloak asap more annoying to fight)
- increase range of PD weapons
- increase accuracy / reduce recoil / improve target-leading of PD weapons
- reduce flux of PD weapons (maybe by a flat amount, so low-flux PD weapons would become zero-flux)
- increase firing rate of PD weapons (unlike damage boost, this would be visible to an opponent. but wouldn't really work for beams)
- reduce speed/maneuverability of missiles locked onto this ship (this might also be problematic to communicate to the attacker though)
- increased/guaranteed chance for flamed-out missiles to harmlessly bounce off this ship
Some interesting ideas here, nice.
Damper Field: damage reduction down to 50% (from 67%), charge regen rate halved (1 per 20 seconds)
If we're going with the nerf as stated (rather than only reducing charge regen, or making the damage reduction scale with hull size, as suggested in that other thread), Brawler and Centurion could stand to receive a compensatory buff perhaps. Centurion in particular doesn't seem to have a combat role at present other than "be annoying to kill".
Maybe the Centurion could just do with a cost reduction - "being annoying to kill" seems like a reasonable role for an escort frigate. Hmm.
On FSG: If it's going to inflict such a huge speed penalty I'd say it needs some other buff, like lower upkeep cost (i.e. not ~100 f/s on a Hound). (Or make it cost 0 OP )
Spoiler
Perhaps having it vs. not having it was indeed far too dramatic a change for the ships it goes on.
But now I can think of exactly one case where I'd bother using it now: HVD/Mauler sniper Hounds that need to not die to Tactical Laser/Swarmer SRM return fire. For just about any other build, things that don't have a shield and need it to survive... need a 25% speed reduction scarcely any more (Buffalo Mk. II) or arguably even less (Hound, Cerberus). I haven't had a reason to field these ships (with or without shields) in my games as it is, not when I can just get proper warships and cargo haulers in their place.
(and other responses re: MSG)
1) Good call about the upkeep cost, lowered it to .5 (was .75).
2) Played around with it a bit, and it seems decent. Added a Hound and Cerberus variants using MSG and an Arbalest (thanks, Voyager I) to pirate fleets, and they're quite decent. I think overall it'll increase survivability in the context of a larger garbage-ball while reducing it when facing larger numbers of enemies (where speed becomes important). You're probably not going to want to keep using them past the early-midgame, but imo that's alright.
Plus hullmods now have a new balancing factor: rarity. ITU is "mandatory" but isn't available readily. MSG could be similar: if say it's available by about midgame, it may be thought of as something that keeps shieldless ships relevant as weaponry that chews through them becomes increasingly prevalent.
The goal is to make it available early, since by mid-late game, MSG or not, those ships aren't going to be super useful in combat.
Interdiction Pulse. It's cool to see a more aggressive campaign ability. But I'm confused. Is it for stopping fleets from catching you, or stopping fleets from getting away from you?
Some "stopping fleets from catching you", and some "ambushing fleets heading towards you"; not so much "getting away from you" since it'll have no effect on anything heading away. It'll also make using Sustained Burn around enemy fleets rather more dangerous.
New bounties will not spawn near where the player is
It's weird to see world rotate around player that obviously. Plus, it was nice to get extra income for surprise double bounty.
It's only obvious if you're reading the patch notes. Perhaps a better way to put it, in the patch notes, would have been "stopped bounty fleets from occasionally spawning in the same system the player is in, which was confusing and felt weird".
Maybe it should depend on relative sizes of fleets (both chance to interrupt SB/EB and burn level reduction. With cutoff to 0% if casting fleet is too small)? Having single frigate stop Onslaught armada in it's tracks doesn't feel right.
And would be annoying to no end if spammed by small fleets that like to swarm around player due to being too weak to attack directly.
Yeah, I'm still looking at the details here. There's definitely potential for annoyance.
Do they have nerfed swarmers like Talons?
Yes.
Bounty level goes up with player level even if the player hasn't been doing bounties
one step closer to obvilion in space and difficulty slider.
Just to make sure I was clear, already-posted bounties won't scale up with player level. It's only newly-posted bounties that are affected.
That's only the theory though. I think testing against an Odyssey would be more important than testing as an Odyssey to avoid making it unfun.
It's still not super maneuverable, and since it doesn't have a mobility system, I don't think chasing it down would be too much of a problem. Especially given that by the time you're facing one, you've got the resources to invest into any one of a number of faster options - it's not like, say, the Hyperion, where you're just not going to be able to chase it down no matter what. But yeah, it's a good point re: looking at it from the other direction.
Honestly, the AI running around with S-Burn just seems incredibly scary to me. The AI S-Burn buff (no more sensor penalties), combined with the transverse jump and e-burn nerf, will make escaping patrols absolute hell. I mean, how does one even escape from an AI fleet at 18 burn? Is the only option just to S-Burn as well to get away? Is it possible to E-Burn out of sensor range during the AI's S-Burn windup? Is the T-Jump delay short enough to allow for a T-Jump while the AI windsup its S-Burn?
The think to keep in mind is SB fleets have low acceleration and are much easier to dodge by just moving sideways. Also, Inderdiction Pulse more or less hard-counters SB as a pursuit tool.
Hi Alex, I was wondering if there are any user interface changes looking to be added in the new update? I feel like a toggle feature for speeding up time and (in combat) ships facing the mouse would be really ergonomic and fab for taking the strain off some tired fingers ^^*.
No, sorry! For combat, though, there's already a setting to invert shift behavior, so that may be of use to you.
The problem with Heavy Mauler (and HVD) is it is too rare except maybe by endgame. Heavy Mauler is rare enough that I usually reload the game if I lose a ship with them. It is easier for me to replace or recover most ships than Heavy Mauler.
HVD, sure, but I've had a lot more luck picking up Heavy Maulers. Maybe a bit more than average on that particular playthrough.
Lux losing half speed for IR Pulse Laser, why? They were not very strong offensively, and they are more expensive than Sparks. With that change, I might ignore Lux and stick with Broadswords.
It was entirely too good in terms of damage output. Just spamming Lux wings would maul things, and mauling things isn't a heavy fighter's job.
Just as 0.8 made them finally worth using. I don't think I'll ever prefer a Piranha to Khopesh/Dagger after this change.
Re: Piranha. They would become the low-grade guns of bombers. (Actually, they already are, but at least they are effective.) Only good to put on disposable ships if you cannot afford to lose better bomber chips.
They still have the highest damage potential out of all bombers, so I think they'll still have a niche vs larger targets. If you're mainly fighting destroyers or faster cruisers, then yeah, the other bombers will do better, but that's the point - that it was competitive against smaller targets was the problem.
That said, they could possibly use an OP cost reduction, maybe to 8. I'll take a look.
Idea: Instead of the bombs releasing straight forward, release multiple bombs at a time: some go straight forward, but some have a decent sideways component. This makes it harder for the target ship to dodge everything.
It also makes Piranhas uniquely effective in attacking multiple ships at once that are in a "death ball" formation. Even with some spread the target ship will dodge most of them, but there will be so much ordinance that the other ships will ALSO need to dodge or turn their shields.
I'll take a quick look and see how that goes. IIRC I tried something similar and it didn't pan out but I'm not 100% sure on why or even if I did.
Just wanted to chime in that in a play through to level 40 with a fairly even split between combat, leadership, and tech, slightly leaning toward combat, I found that I could accomplish quite a lot with 1 Eagle (Flagship), 2 Pirate Eagles (restored and with combat officers), 2 Sunders (No Officers, HIL), a Heron and a Drover (Both with Carrier officers). My biggest problem was with high tech fleets, as I had to be really careful in dealing with phase ships, since I didn't have a good way to get rid of them quickly, and they can cause havoc. I would reload after failed battles to try again, but I was up to 270 to 300K (Legion flagship for one, Doom for another) bounties and heavily out numbered and still able to win with this setup. It would have been easier with a larger fleet, but not having to worry much about fuel and supplies was the trade off.
Thank you! Good to know, yeah.
I really liked the ideas from Sy about Advanced Countermeasures and agree that the current skill doesn't look that fun, so started a new thread with additional ideas/suggestions: Thread
Cool, will check that out