That's a crazy huge amount of firepower on the conquest. It was all about its broadside, and it covered both sides equally, so each side was like a full cap ship. With a big gun in the middle you might want to boost its FP and cost by a bit.
I'm just hoping it's finally worth its current FP, honestly. It's been the weakest link for quite some time now, due to the lack of frontal armament. The broadside sounds cool, until you realize it's only firing half the weight of an Onslaught no matter how it turns. If you haven't fought an Onslaught in the mod yet, prepare yourself
It really needed a boost; I was killing Conquests like flies in an earlier game where I snagged an Acanthus early. It just doesn't seem right that such a cool-looking ship should have so much trouble vs. anything more dangerous than the usual being-flanked-by-Frigates stuff, which most of the capships can handle without breathing hard. The thing about the Conquest is that in a frontal firefight against a heavyweight, it's actually at a severe disadvantage, due to range differentials that result from its long, thin profile. The Glaug Annihilator had the same problem, but it wasn't quite so bad.
Also, the punkjunkers are really strong. All their ships seem to have near absurd amount of armor and health.
Yeah, but they have a serious weakness (hint: check out what Hull Mods they don't have).
Also, the mining fighter, the prospector? is by far one of the strongest fighters due to it having the armor of a cruiser and the hull of a frigate.
I've found that they generally gets wasted vs. anything substantial- they just don't have the guns to do much good. They tank great vs. early fleets, but really get stomped later on.
If you've found a good way to use them past early game, great, and let us know what tactics make them work for you!
Energy weapons are a bit on the weak side, ballistics both make up the vast majority of options, and have a wider variety. Ballistics have both better and cheaper options than energy weapons. It feels like energy weapons are supposed to be special, but they simply don't have anything special going for them.
It's a mixed bag imo.
I think that right now, the main problem with energy weapons is that their DPS/Flux ratios may not be quite good enough for the plain old "pew pew do some DPS" types.
The beam weapons are fine; they have a special role to play and they're quite useful in their niche.
The special-purpose weapons (AM Blaster, Plasma weapons, the eeeevil that is the Moljnir, etc., etc.) are all just fine and are totally useful.
It's just stuff like the IR Pulse Laser that feel pretty flat and un-attractive to me atm. I'll think up a buff.
On the latest version I have still not seen any faction cap any station except their starting one, not even make an attempt. Also, you can only pick three factions to start with, pirate, hegemony and tritachyon. None of the other factions come up as options. They are still in the game, you just can't play as them.
Yeah, really meant to go look at that, but have been too busy with a million other things
The mod is cool, im sinking hours into it, the balance just feels really strange.
I'd be the first to say that the balance is pretty Alpha atm. If you've got specifics you'd buff / nerf, I'm always willing to listen. Keep in mind that I've played this a lot, so I know where most of the problem children are... the issue is coming up with fixes that don't just create new problems
I just wanna say that playing this mod has been a really unique experience. It almost has an arcadey feel to it, if I might add.
Yeah, the balance and way it plays are really different than Vanilla.
I like more high-speed gameplay, and there are few things more satisfying than killing Cruisers with a Daisho in this mod.
You can play the mod very much in the traditional, green-eyeshades style, though; if you max out Tech, you can build fleets that will just totally crush the opposition with pure math. But the money system keeps people from just building the Uber Fleet of Dewm and rampaging through the System forever (although you can go
almost forever if you can build a fleet that can win a major fleet battle every day or more- it's 100K+ in loot and credits for each big battle fleet taken out, on average).