re. Construction Rigs
I don't really feel these are a good investment ever. I think it is better to 'spend' the LR on another combat ship. I tend to find that most of the time either my ship(s) get totally destroyed or I take 0 damage. Also, shield-heavy/hull-light ships have less need of it.
I know that everything is not in the game yet and that time will become more of an issue later but still I think they should also increase CR regain for the ship they are assisting (weapons could load externally, check and signoff done externally etc.)
(unless they already do and I haven't noticed...)
If the construction rigs repaired CR instead of health I would be very very happy! Especially with CR regen at half. Repairing ships is nice, but getting a mothballed or malfunctioning ship to battle ready quickly is huge. Also: so far there are two skills that up repair rate, and none that up CR regen, so the rigs would be filling a niche instead of duplicating (and providing a way to pay money to avoid the emergency repairs skill...).
On the Construction Rig: agree with Zaphide / Thaago. It's just not really useful atm. If it repaired CR at a decent rate, it'd be worth having for carrier fleets and Frigate swarms.
I'll give that a bit more thought. Conceptually, it's a little harder for me to make rigs fit in with CR recovery, helping with external weapon loading aside. (Yes, yes, I know, the "realism" argument isn't a good argument.)
Just clarifying, so with the removal of the repair % a day limit, does that mean you can only repair one vessel at a time, but it will do so using as much supply as possible to speed that one repair?
No, the supplies get split between the different ships based on the total repair cost for a given ship. Say ship A takes 100 supplies to repair, and ship B takes 200, and they're both "logistical priority". Ship B would get 2/3rds of the supplies and ship A would get 1/3rd, regardless of how damaged either ship is.
But CR recovery and Repair Speed are at least separated now right? hooray
Yes.
Though I'm not sure if it still applies, but when you have near 0-10% CR you can still use engine coasting to slightly bypass he high engine malfunction chance.
Right, that's intentional.
1) CR recovery rate is already a bit on the slow side for most ships, I think (capitals can take over a week to recover from a single deployment). On the other hand, the new system means people can fight a bunch of consecutive battles then go home to a station to recover. Still, instead of halving it to go with the halving of deployment costs, could it be something like 25% lower than before?
Hmm. I'm really not sure why that's necessary; I don't want to trivialize the CR recovery times for larger ships.
3) Is frigate CR loss in combat restored after the end of an engagement round, or is it permanent? If the latter, this change means the relative cost of frigates staying up after their bedtime is increased. This probably isn't a net negative for balance* (especially after the implementation of peak active performance allowed frigates to keep running considerably longer than before)**, but it's something to keep in mind.
It's permanent. Also, one thing I didn't mention in the post because it's not directly related to the changes: I've reduced the peak active times somewhat, by somewhere between 30 seconds to maybe a minute and a half or so, depending on how much the ship had to begin with. The Hyperion, for example, is down to 90 seconds.
EDIT: Right, one question. How do these changes affect an inferior AI fleet deciding to stand and fight rather than risk being harried to death?
It's aware of this and tries to avoid getting ships harried past the "critical malfunction" level.
Just read the blog again, and noticed critical engine malfunctions. Does this mean that if engines malfunction that badly that it is dead-in-space and cannot retreat? If so, that is too harsh, especially for ships with CR decay. Flameouts due to normal engine malfunctions are bad enough already.
That would be too mean even for my taste
You can't lose more than 2/3rds of the engines due to critical malfunctions, and further, critical engine losses don't count for the purpose of flameouts. So, for example, say you've got 8 same-sized engine nozzles on a ship. Normally, when 5+ (i.e. more than half) are disabled, that causes a full flameout. Now, say 5 were permanently disabled by critical malfunctions and are out. It'd take 2 more nozzles being disabled by incoming damage before a flameout would occur.
Quick question: Have you updated CR loss from accidents to support the new changes? I'd imagine that the values from that should be roughly halved as well, otherwise it'll still be far too easy to go from "Everything's more or less fine" (at, say, 41% CR) to "We're all doomed!" (at, say, 11% CR) in one accident.
Good catch; updated those.
CR penalty from taking hull damage as well. (And probably one or two more sources we forgot)
That's already based on the deployment cost.
**The peak active performance timer stops going down when the frigate is idle, but is the same true of when the timer runs out and you get the CR loss per tick?
No. Once CR decay begins, it continues ticking even at zero flux. Found this out the hard way when fighting Hegemony System Defense Fleet with a single Lasher.
Hmm. Changed it so that it doesn't for now; may need to take another look at the decay rates though, to make sure you don't have too long.
Will Frigates still have CR decay during combat?
...
Fairly new to playing this game and I found the Frigate's CR decay to be frustrating at times especially when the AI decided to play hide and go seek instead of retreating.
Yeah, they will. If the AI still goes to play hide-and-seek, that's a problem, but a separate one (if you could point me to some specific circumstances - say, what fleet vs what fleet, what the battlefield looked like, whether it had objectives, etc) that would help.
If so this seems like it might get very unfun early game, especially if you have a long battle and your Frigate ends up exploding on its own due to a Critical Malfunction.
Well, that just means you'll have to get the job done a little faster
Those early battles can be rather brief once you figure out what's what. This
is a bit of an issue in that you get a frigate at the start, though, which also happens to be the ship class that probably requires the most piloting experience to use well.