Oh wow lots of posts to catch up on today!
Tough shields, mines and close range assault/pd (600 or so) weapon loadout would fit AC theme and fill the gap. It should be less maneuverable than the tyrant but gets a non rechargeable speed boost skill like burn drive or sth so it can get to the thick of the fight quicker than tyrants, but cannot easily get out. Maybe more pds on medium/large turrents instead of stuff like atronach beams to differentiate its role. Just my 2 cents I'm sure I'll love whatever you ended up adding!
Some more tactical variations of the Tyrant itself are planned that are designed around anti-fighter/missile. The non-recharging speed boost for the light battlecruiser is an interesting idea.
I think I will try that out and see how the AI handles itself with it. Unlike burn drive, I think I'll allow an active shield while it's engaged to support the defensive nature of the ship.
Can confirm skilled up is compatible, as well as a dozen mods:
Trailer moments, adjusted sector, combat analytics, combat chatter, common radar, disassemble reassemble, nexerelin, starship legends, supply forging, unknown skies, audio plus, and the usual libs.
Oh nice I'll have to add those later on if they aren't there already. I'm pretty sure some of them are.
I made an account just to post the fact I love this mod to death. I saw the discussion around the Tyrant and I wanted to give my two cents on it since it's my flagship, by far my favorite ship in the game out of any mod.
If kitted out with weapons that fire in bursts and/or Strike weapons, the Tyrant is almost a war crime that eats anything at or below the level of a Cruiser for breakfast. During my last session I went up against a carrier fleet composed mostly of Cruisers. Teleported right through the frontline fighting and wiped out their entire fighter support before they could react.
After seeing an Adamantium Consortium fleet get their Tyrants blown to pieces by a Hegemony Detachment I decided these things probably need support to function properly in an engagement against other Capital Ships.
After my time with it I recognized three things that make the Tyrant much more effective in combat:
1. There are very high armor/shield ships in my fleet providing supporting fire and more importantly distracting the enemy.
2. I am running the Tyrant with a build that increases armor and flux capacity with low flux cost weapons.
3. I intentionally avoid engaging other Capital Ships directly.
I agree with the suggested changes to AI along with a tanky frontline battleship for the AC, they'd go a long way to increasing their overall effectiveness.
First off, welcome to the forums and thank you for the comment!
Thanks for giving your experience with the Tyrant both from a player experience and when under AI control. I have at least 3 additional weapons I want to make and try out with it. These will likely also be used in conjunction with the new ship too.
One of them will be a low flux cost assault weapon - likely with a burst fire element to make it hybrid strike/assault with limited range to offset the low flux cost.
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Re Tyrant balance discussion"
@basileus
I agree that the Devastator in particular is very nasty (Legendary weapon after all) against the armor-reliant Tyrant if it gets hit from a couple of salvos that break the armor along a whole swath of its hull. In general though, at least imo, the problem with the Tyrant drawing out battles has more to do with its system mobility preventing any reasonable tactical punishing compared to other ships - rather than its actual combat efficacy. Or I guess, in that sense what I'm saying is it isn't the defensiveness of the Tyrant or the AC that causes this annoying drawback but a combination of AI timidness and massive mobility compared to other capitals that could contest the Tyrant. I think that is part of the reason why fighters are more effective against it. The mobility factor is removed in that instance and so therefore it
has to rely on its armor and pd weaponry to have a chance at surviving - which is a good thing. What I would like to see is more situations where that comes into play with enemy AI ships such as in npc faction vs npc faction battles.
What I'm hoping is that by reducing the distance that the Tyrant can flee when surrounded or cornered I can allow it to be punished more easily - both by the player and the admiral AI. Since that change might make the Tyrant more vulnerable under AI control due to its current place in the fleet synergy of the AC (as the line heavy hitter alongside the Eagle (Ad)), the additional fleet composition element will hopefully handle that potential issue without requiring any further additional changes to the Tyrant.
Especially since, as you pointed out, a lot of people like to personally fly the Tyrant, I want the changes to mostly be along the lines of more AI friendly compositions/changes rather than changes to the ship itself, if that makes sense. Reducing the jump range is pretty minimal to the player's overall ability to fly the ship as they can still use the ships strengths to great effect considering they can make better judgement calls on when to attack compared to the AI.
Still, until the next Starsector update I think you are correct that it will be a herculean task to accomplish. I'm hoping its not a futile one, but we will see. I'd prefer to not remove it from the general AC lineup since it is an iconic ship of that faction alongside the Nightreaver and Malevolent. That being said, the battlecruiser will take up a capital slot and have a greater chance to spawn, so that will certainly dilute the appearance of other capitals somewhat.
I'm actually currently debating upon whether to make the new ship a tanky heavy cruiser with moderately high DP instead a light battlecruiser so this does not happen, but the cruiser space is already filled by the Nightreaver, Eagle(Ad) and Doom(Ad) so it's a bit of a tight fit there as well.
As far as the Hivemind, it and the Apocalypse Cannon line are also used by the Archean Order faction. The AC also uses the Tachyon Lance alongside the Tri-Tachyon corporation. I think the Malevolent has a variant that uses both already, but it wouldn't hurt the have the Tyrant sniper variant use them as well that is definitely true. I'll do some experimenting along those suggestions.
Just saw your second post:
Interesting comments on the AC carriers/Cobra bomber. I think we are on the same page as far as fleet synergy considerations and maintaining each faction's theme when making adjustments. Albreo's builds provide a good foundation of what roles new weapons should take and how to build the Tyrant for AI
If you don't mind, any suggestions to increase fleet synergy? I know the new ship will be a start and hopefully the new weapons will fill in some gaps as well, but I'm curious as to your thoughts there. I want all factions to have fleet synergy on some level - with hopefully a varying amount of tactics the AI deploys based upon specific variants available in any given battle.
I would also agree that Sci-Corps/Trader Guilds definitely needs more iconic ships and a legendary line of ships and weapons to bring them more on par with other factions. Sci-Corps have had a few changes in the last update and some better autoresolve calculation is hopefully coming in this update.
@Albreo
Thanks for sharing the loadouts! Something similar to those will certainly make it into the stock variants. And as I stated earlier I have a few ideas on new weapons to better take advantage of the Tyrants strengths in respect to the AI. Those will probably replace some of those weapons (especially ones like the Gatling Laser that are more of a Hegemony weapon) but overall I see the general theme of what you are going for and I've got some notes in my head.
One of the new weapons will be a large version of the Smokescreen so that will
definitely give mass fighters some pause if you are familiar with that weapon at all. The primary limiting factor of the smaller versions is ammo/regen and the large version won't have that downside as much.
The variety issue will be address eventually. The Archean Order also suffers from this a bit. This is mainly just because the lore of these factions requires mostly unique ships rather than either using stock vanilla ships or reskins of vanilla ships.
(I *think* I've addressed the Hivemind issue, btw, but I'll need to do more testing to be sure.)
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Hey again! Thanks for welcoming me onto the forums! I'm happy to be here!
I do have another question, it's about the station and terraforming mod! Does it work with Archean Order? Or does it cause any bugs that might detract from the experience?
Thank you again for being so warmly welcoming!
No problem at all I'm happy to do so.
I looked at
Terraforming and Station Construction and everything seems fine from what I can see. The only caveat is that the source code is not available so I'm not sure about the quests. On the surface though, I tested out starting a new game and interacting with a market and no crashes and things seem normal for the market in the dev version. I don't think anything has changed between the current release and the dev version that would effect the mod, so it should be good.
If anyone has been using that for a deeper campaign playthrough and/or completed the quests the mod gives, feel free to chime in!