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1

General Discussion / Re: Anything desperately in need of Balance Pass next version (Add yours here)

« on: December 23, 2024, 08:55:49 PM »

Yeah that's true. I put burst pd on the back, and tend to have a decent amount of burst pd distributed around the fleet to shoot things down, and it helps the AI a lot, but it still derps out sometimes.

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General Discussion / Re: Anything desperately in need of Balance Pass next version (Add yours here)

« on: December 23, 2024, 08:17:53 PM »

@Thaago

Understood, nerfing Phase Lance

Hah! XD

To be honest, the phase lance might be slightly too efficient. But a little more flux cost wouldn't do anything to Harbingers using them; they are limited by the refire delay and bleed off the flux of firing very soon. A change to Phase Anchor would be sad, but more like it in terms of reigning in the build. But it would also hurt some other weapons too and I'm not sure what would work well.

3

General Discussion / Re: Anything desperately in need of Balance Pass next version (Add yours here)

« on: December 23, 2024, 02:15:57 PM »

In an era of Destroyers being very strong with Escort Package, (most)Cruisers are too expensive to deploy.  I think their DP values in general should be looked at to make them more competitive with Capitals.  I realize the DP values affect the AI fleets as well, so these DP values reflect how I view the ship from a player perspective. 

I don't think that adjusting DP values in response to Escort Package is the right move here, because that would warp everything before the endgame 'capital + escort' phase. Its a very sweeping set of changes instead of fine tuning the offender, Escort Package.

Imo, Escort Package should be made a little worse for destroyers and a little better for cruisers to narrow the gap. Maybe even just giving cruisers the S mod bonus would be enough; it would still be only half as much as the destroyers get thanks to caps being 1 size bigger than cruiser, but 10% better shields is nothing to sneeze at for a buff.

I do think some cruisers should be re-evaluated from a design perspective, but offering valuable ideas there is outside of my wheelhouse.  I do, however, think that all XIV versions should have markedly different styles rather than just +OP/Flux +Armor -Speed.  More stuff like Legion vs XIV Legion and less stuff like Dominator vs XIV Dominator.

Agreed! I really like the more meaningful changes of the Legion and would love to see it on other skins.

Fury -  It's been hurt a lot by the CH changes and struggles tremendously without SO.  It's a strike ship with no real ability to disengage.  20 DP -> 18 DP.

Champion - Large Missile nerfs really have made this ship's burst damage less effective than it was.  It's still good, but it's way too expensive at 25.  25 DP -> 22 DP.

Dominator  - There's zero reason to field Low Tech over XIV, but even so it's 25 price point is too high.  25-> 22 DP

Gryphon - This ship absolutely needs to be nerfed.  Maybe it's the missile spam in general that's the problem and not the hull, but they're too oppressive. 20 -> 25 DP

No comment on Fury and Champion because I just haven't played with them enough this patch.

For Dominator, I don't think its DP should be lowered because, while I agree Bungee_Man that the Onslaught outclasses it, the Dominator itself is a strong ship that will beat every other cruiser in a fight, in exchange for being vulnerable to being swarmed. I'd rather have Onslaught go 40 to 45 than dominator 25 to 22.

For Gryphons, I agree with Megas that it is the Squall/Harpoon combo that pushes it over the edge. Vanshilar's suggestion from a few pages back to change Squall/Harpoon range from 2500 to 2000 would make a big difference, as less Gryphons could combine on 1 target and they would individually be more vulnerable.

...
Maybe lower Harbinger DP to 14, lol

O_O

I mean, sure, buff my favorite flagship to let me have more phase ships with a higher bonus... it's probably because I'm not as good with mines as other players (I can't seem to get the knack of doing the crazy things I've seen others do in video clips), but I do better with Harbingers than with Dooms as my player flagship.

I think the bigger issue with the Harbinger is that now that I've done a lot of experimentation, I'm never going to do anything other than phaser anchor + phase lances + advanced optics, ITU, and escort package. It's just such a dominant build!

4

General Discussion / Re: Anything desperately in need of Balance Pass next version (Add yours here)

« on: December 22, 2024, 02:38:31 PM »

...

On topic, Reality Disruptor. It was triple-buffed in 0.96, which made it about nine times more effective. It is stupidly broken both in player and enemy hands.

This is very true. The current "Disruptor" Tesseract is about 5 times more deadly than the "Strike" Tesseract, because reality disruptors hard counters almost every ship in the game. Only 360 degree shielding ships can engage it without immediately losing every weapon and engine for far too long.

It's also very boring to fight against, because after the player ship is hit you just sit there doing nothing for a very long time.

5

General Discussion / Re: Anything desperately in need of Balance Pass next version (Add yours here)

« on: December 22, 2024, 01:33:10 AM »

Before changes to the Astral, I'd want to see more support for fighters themselves. The bay limits on skills is good design for encouraging mixed fleets, but with most of the old skills axed fighters just don't receive the numerical boosts to remain competitive long term. Digging up a few of those and adding them in somewhere (either as part of combat skills on officers/support doctrine or just folded into somewhere else) would go a long way towards making all carriers better.

Herons are better pure carriers than astrals on a DP basis, but I don't think its incurable. Astrals provide much more direct fire support with 2 large missiles. It's just the huge DP price tag and slowness...  Plus, comparing the Heron to the Astral on a DP basis is tempered by rarity. The Astral is a common as dirt capital available for sale constantly while the Heron is an ultra-rare experimental prototype, which isn't even guaranteed to spawn once in the entire sector!  It's like comparing regular weapons to tesseract ones. Ok, that isn't true, but I have not once in this version managed to find more than 1 in a run without resorting to console commands or setting up my own manufacturing.

Monitor delenda est. I want it gone as well; its entire niche as it stands is "make the AI look stupid" which is just not a good thing to have in the game.

6

Blog Posts / Re: Anubis-class Cruiser

« on: December 20, 2024, 12:10:31 PM »

Well that's neat! A cruiser with temporal shell is going to be interesting for sure, especially with the flux gymnastics to make triple lance non-viable. Reducing the value of vents/caps is different from anything else which is fun. I wonder though... Safety Overrides?

7

General Discussion / Re: Is the AI effective at all with antimatter blasters?

« on: December 19, 2024, 11:23:57 PM »

AMB range is very close to explosion radius of cruisers/capitals. Player can play around this by targeting parts of ship furthest from explosion center and doing it while moving away. AI doesn't prepare like that and often just aborts attack attempts.

Can confirm. I've experimented with putting gunnery implants on my phase frigate pilots for this reason. Helps with light needler range/recoil and because eliting it for +4 ecm is tempting, too.

8

Suggestions / Re: Hammerhead composite slots

« on: December 17, 2024, 12:31:27 AM »

The EHP is why I said earlier way back in the thread that a Hammerhead really loves capacitors. The base amount is reasonably important, but the difference between 4200 and 5000 base capacity is just 4 caps. That's far less than the amount of capacity that gets wasted on builds that have too many vents and hullmods. (Looking at you, reddit builds!)

IMO the Hammerhead wants just a few key hullmods (half of which are S modded) and should be pouring the rest into flux stats. My current HH has 12500 EHP, and that would go up without more OP investment if I had Flux Regulation, but I'm only level 7 (only by 420/(.8*.8 ) = 656, but that's not nothing). If people are running Hammerheads without caps or hardened shields and think the shield is weak, then I agree; that's only 5250, less than half of the HP the ship can do.

For reference, my current Support Doctrine HH build is:
2x heavy mortar, 2x light needler, 2x reaper, 2x vulcan, Hardened Shields (S Mod), Armored Weapon Mounts (S Mod), ITU, Solar Shielding OR Insulated Engine Assembly (same OP cost, depends on what I'm doing). 20 vents, 19 caps, Support Doctrine has Ordinance Expertise.

I'm up in the air about the Armored Weapons S mod, it makes the ship run just a bit hot even for me. Main guns + shields = 600*1.1+100=760 flux, 513 dissipation, so 148% ratio (with PD not firing). Without the S mod it would be 137%.  That might be a mistake; S modding ITU instead saves 2 OP which could go towards either flux stats or changing vulcans to burst pd.

9

General Discussion / Re: Is the AI effective at all with antimatter blasters?

« on: December 17, 2024, 12:07:43 AM »

...

Also, are there any tricks to linking this weapon to get it to fire well? Is it better with or without things like Unstable Injector? What kind of officer aggression works well? Reckless?

I always link AM blasters into PD weapons! They are amazing on autofire as they are top tier assault weapons, but the AI treats them too much as 'strike' for my liking. For ships that might not have PD (like an omen as it has the system, or an afflictor though I actually like having a burst PD on them for AI use) I'll add an emotional support PD just to get the AMB to fire.

That handles the firing aspect of it; usually aggressive AI will work for getting into range. I use eliminate orders frequently as well, but that's not a thing specific to AMBs.

I do not like Unstable Injector with it; the death explosion radius is uncomfortably close with range penalties and the AI gets (rightfully) scared of being that close to a 0 health enemy, and might go out of range. For my afflictors/shades I experimented with range boost even, just to edge past that radius of nasty popping.

10

Suggestions / Re: can we get a pirate Paragon?

« on: December 16, 2024, 02:07:28 PM »

I like to see P versions of all the ships whose blueprints are available and make it so that when player sells a blueprint to pirates (via black market), they unlock more P blueprints.  For example, selling Paragon blueprint gives Paragon-P to pirates.  Onslaught or Onslaught XIV blueprint makes pirates produce Onslaught-P.

That would be really cool! What a great idea.

Huh, maybe when pirates are raiding, they have a % chance to get blueprints if the raid is successful? That would make for a bit more of an evolving pirates threat.

11

General Discussion / Re: Dealing with numerous phase ships

« on: December 16, 2024, 01:55:43 PM »

When I was running a phase pack that was my strategy - phase frigates in control groups of afflictor + shade which I'd right click eliminate any enemy stragglers. Sometimes I'd have to cancel the eliminate if the target reached safety, but a lot of the time it was a quick kill.

The AI usually countered with a fortress ball, which is pretty effective. I eventually added an s-emag onslaught (for the TPCs, I didn't really use the other slots with ammo weapons, nothing really fit the role, but I also had a Gauss (muahahaha gausslaught) and maulers) to the fleet to act as hard flux artillery, which helped to break the, uh, circular formation.

12

General Discussion / Re: beams

« on: December 16, 2024, 01:51:40 PM »

Hmmm, how do you stop kiting strategy that way? Or is that not needed? Or is there some compromise between range and hard flux better than the current balance?

For example, currently a graviton + 4x tac laser medusa is weak against anything larger than a cruiser, but completely unkillable (1400 range + phase skimmer without counting gunnery implants). Turning the 700 soft flux into hard would make it a whole lot more powerful!

Beams have lower DPS than pulse weapons per mount, so would lowering them to 700/800/900 in the small/medium/large mounts work? That gives them a 200 range advantage over pulse weapons and brings them in line with ballistics of the same size class (more or less). Advanced optics would have to have a hard look at it: its already a top tier hullmod and it would become even better. Down to +100 range? Just gone? I'm not sure.

With the above, beams get reduced to low DPS, very high accuracy weapons. That's not a terrible niche I suppose. Kind of like energy HVDs (comparing a 800 range graviton brought to 1000 with AO to current HVD, the new graviton is a little behind in DPS, probably very ahead in accuracy that would even that out, and costs much less flux. Otoh, much less hull damage).

This got kinda rambly, sorry. On the one hand, I think beams could be balanced for hard flux; on the other, I don't think they need to be to be useful. Having them be hard flux would simplify how weapons and flux works (all weapons do hard again, no loophole). That's good for explaining and new player understanding, but it also removes the mechanic so makes combat a little less rich.

For example, the graviton is currently a debuff beam: -200*shield efficiency flux per second and -5% shield efficiency. Whether or not its good enough at that role is another matter (hard to tell, I think its close though), but if it did hard flux it would leave the niche of debuff beam and just be a weapon.

13

Suggestions / Re: EMP working on Phasecoils

« on: December 16, 2024, 02:40:08 AM »

...
I'm done. The old Phase design was fine if you didn't chase the frigates and let them come to you. The current Phase AI and design is so gimped in the AI's hands it's not worth using outside of player control. If people are struggling against any Phase ship other than System Expertise Doom, they need to acquire strategy and planning, along with refining application of said labors.

That's not quite true. I admit that I haven't played around with the gremlin or grendel very much yet, so maybe they suck; but the shade/afflictor/harbinger/doom line are all, under AI piloting, incredibly powerful. Better offensive bang for buck than any other ship I've found. But it takes specific skills, builds, and orders to get them to reach that potential, which the AI does not provide. They also need cover to vent, some sort of anchor to take the heat off of them (I used to use Medusa for that purpose as they are such incredibly mobile shield tanks; a fully officered/S-modded Medusa puts down about half the kills as an Afflictor in those fights).

I'm not saying the AI phase ships are nearly that threatening, but the ones in a player's fleet sure can be!

14

Suggestions / Re: Hammerhead composite slots

« on: December 15, 2024, 08:13:31 PM »

In terms of the brawler Hammerhead viability in the early game, and against non-pirate cruisers, I'd like to present this album: https://imgur.com/a/brtkd1Z

Upon waking up and seeing 4 enemy cruisers and 3 destroyers that it would have to be the sole brawler fighting against, my level 3 AI officer Enki Proxima first had a cup of coffee. Then he chose violence. With fighter cover, including EMP cover, and frigate skirmishing support to stop him from getting surrounded, he got 58 DP worth of kills.

This is very soon after the tutorial. I hit a sindrian supply/heavy armament fleet with 4 eagles, 2 sunders, 1 hammerhead, 2 centurions, and a brawler. I've got a Hammerhead, Heron, Condor, 2 wolves (1 with me in it), a kite and 2 shepherds. This is the tutorial fleet, D mods and all, with 1 Heron that I got for very cheap from a pirate bar mission. Now granted the enemy officers weren't great - level 2 and 3s for the most part. But then again neither were mine (best was the HH with a level 3). In addition to the loot, I got a sweet Eagle out of it! Took a story point, but its 1 D mod was Compromised Hull, one of the mildest.

Here's the post-battle summary:

Spoiler

[close]

The Heron did have elite PD that increased the range of its Talon and Broadsword guns, but it also has Defective Manufactory, the single worst D mod it could have! The Talon wing did shockingly well, (actually out-damaging the broadsword!), but the Claw wing was the somewhat-unsung hero of the fight (can you be unsung when the damage report is giving 94k EMP damage to you?). It turns out that when a cruiser is fluxed up by ammo-feeder light needlers and broadsword machine guns, a claw wing can completely cripple it. 2x heavy mortars with ammo feeder and no incoming fire makes quick work of things!

I lost a few ships, but lets be real a D mod Condor has the life expectancy of a baby squirrel in a cat cafe so I'm barely even counting it as a loss. At least this way it died in a hard fight...

15

Suggestions / Re: Hammerhead composite slots

« on: December 15, 2024, 01:43:08 PM »

While I like Sarissas a lot and I'm not saying a Shrike with CH them is bad, I've had issues relying on them for kinetic damage. They tend to point in the wrong direction a lot!

...

I want to see the Hammerhead get its PD coverage back. And if that means turning the rear two turrets from hybrid into energy, then so be it.

As is, any hammerhead build I actually use these days (and it's not my favorite destroyer to start with) will leave those back two slots empty and use converted hangar to get the actually-functional PD coverage it used to be able to achieve with a pair of LRPD.

That's my main ask as well. Are you using DTA Wasps by chance for your PD? I've had great success with them, and they're OP cheap.