I was asked for more information about the reasoning and goals behind LoA update 1.3, and decided it would be a good idea to post them here in case anybody else wants that information... So here it is...
To be concise, the primary, penultimate, omega limit break goal of this update was to rework the faction into something that could stand on its own in the line of battle without help from vanilla ships, or other mod factions, and to do so without adding any new ships.
If you want more details... here's a wall of text for you.
While the reason it has been over 4 months since a major update is prettymuch exclusively related to my work on Interstellar Imperium, this has allowed a good bit of feedback to pile up over time.
While some was more useful than others, one of the most common sentiments I got was that, in general things felt "A bit underpowered" which is...sufficiently vague if nothing else. But even the worst of feedback can serve as an indicator of the existence of something that needs a light shed on it. So I filed it away for later, luckily, at some point, a fleetbuilding tournament happened, of which Arkgneisis Midtech (the internal name for the ships flown by the ARS) was sortied by two different participants. Getting to see them in action over such a large scale, by people who did not possess my own experiences and biases was fantastic for providing insight to the workings of my own ships.
While plenty of small stuff came to light, the one thing that stood out above all else was that the faction really had no means for standing on its own. The way to beat them was to get in their face, which isn't so difficult, at which point very few of the ships in the lineup could really fight back. The only way around this it seemed, was to bring in ships from other factions to form a backbone, as showcased during the final round of the underdog league, when my ships showcased excellent capacity to serve in support roles, and almost exclusively support roles.
Having a total four ships in each size class at current, (minus capital) this really isn't an acceptable situation. That should be plenty to form a robust and adaptable fleet.
So I took a closer look at the lineup, and determined what ships weren't serving any particularly useful roles, and what roles were missing from each size class (except for capital) And drew up a plan for re-working things. For one, the fleet as a whole only had one effective anvil in the Lyons class cruiser, and had practically no ships that could serve in an assault role without getting minced. I also looked at the general balance of all the ships, and adjusted things accordingly, this was over a month or two so I wont get into details. While I was at it I also resolved to remove vanilla ship systems from the faction entirely... for uh...reasons. All except the Hawke...because I really couldn't think of an alternative for it thematically or mechanically.
Other, smaller ideas crept in along the way, such as the change to the faction hull mod, which is the result of an epiphany. Many people have complained about the ships being too slow, despite their base speed stats actually being very high compared to vanilla. With their built-in range and accuracy bonuses, increasing such stats much higher would undoubtedly result in uncountable kiting tactics across the board, so why not give them a flat buff to their Zero Flux speed bonus, let them go crazy fast, but only when they aren't doing anything particularly important.
Why give larger ships a bigger bonus then? Well that's simple, a frigate getting an extra 25 to its ZFSB doesn't really change much about it, its just a slightly better frigate. But give a capital a bonus of 30? and now that capital can somewhat keep up with the other ships in its fleet, forming a battle line at roughly the same time as the other ships, rather than bringing up the rear. This plays into the notion that the ARS is a faction combatively based on mutual support and teamwork, and since their ships were already considered largely under-tuned, the potential for being a tad strong in chase scenarios and what not didn't really seem to problematic.
Another change is the further increase to their hull points on average, as many may have noticed, Ark-Mid shields are pretty terrible, and *most* of their armor is mediocre or flat out sucks. I'll admit, this fact slipped through the cracks because most of my previous testing was done with ideal, long-ranged loadouts against the basic simulator fits which...are neither of those things. So the faction needed some sort of defensive strong point, where before most of them had none.
In a decision that might seem a bit strange, I raised most of their armor so that all of the non-anvil ships are merely "below average" instead of outright terrible, and then made their true defensive strongpoint their hull, giving them hull stats that are pretty good at worst, and stretch the definition of weight class at best.
This was done primarily for thematic reasons. Starsector is the type of game that lends itself well to the Dark Souls school of storytelling, and so I always try to leave scraps of information, or convey certain feelings through gameplay and descriptions. and with that in mind, Arkgneisis Midtech is supposed to be a design paradigm trying to juggle an impossible set of requirements.
We need ships that are cheap and easy to maintain, we need ships that don't require big crews, we need ships that can travel far and fast. And most importantly, we need ships that can win, and not only win, but win -without- a numbers advantage.
Obviously somewhere here something has got to give, both in real life, and in game, no engineer could possibly satisfy all of these requirements adequately. And this heavily plays into why Hull is going to be where the Society can tank the most damage. Despite their outward appearance, the inside of an Arkgneisis Midtech ship is very much constructed from equal parts engineering genius, and ductape/prayer. As a result they aren't particularly good at stopping damage from occurring in the first place, but they should be very good at ignoring that it happened, soaking up blow after blow until they are ragged frameworks pockmarked with holes, but still coming back for more.
I hope this explains some of what I am going for here, Im not going to pretend like I'm there yet, but maybe if anything feels off to any of you, your feedback might get me just a little bit closer.