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« on: February 10, 2024, 01:33:30 PM »
The balance on these ships is wild. The Castle and Arsenal are a little too complicated for me to analyze, but the Evergreen, Viaduct, Galaxia and Barracks are not.
Let's start with the worst one - the Galaxia. For 20 DP, you get 6 hangars. But that's only half of it. 4 of those hangars are on secondary segments with Reserve Deployment. Reserve Deployment is worth more than +50% hangars - it's somewhere around 9 or 10 hangars effectively. The Astral, at 50 DP, has 6 hangars and Recall Device. Recall Device is great, but it's not as good as RD, which is one, if not the best of systems in the game. And it doesn't end there - it also has 6 medium missile slots and the DP to fill them. It may be slow as molasses with no shields or armor, but even if it ended there it would be worth a lot more DP. But it has 30k base hull, so it'll last a while too, especially with Combat Endurance. It's also not an AI ship for some reason.
Barracks is crazy for primarily the same reason. 3 hangars + RD for 12 DP makes it much more dangerous than pre-nerf Drover, and Drover was nerfed for very good reason. Drones-only slows it down a bit, but not enough.
Viaduct and Evergreen have the same DP, speed, size (huge), hull, armor and shield (or lack thereof) as Galaxia, but are AI. Where Galaxia carries crew, Viaduct is fuel. It has 6 medium and 8 small missiles. Even if you just fill them all with Harpoons (linked-fire) you'll kill anything of the same DP without breaking a sweat. And then again and again until you run out of ammo. With mods that add good reloading 2000+ range missiles (like Seadragon DEMs from Random Assortment of Things) it gets even more dangerous. It also has a couple large ballistics, though OP is a bit tight for those.
Evergreen is the cargo and ballistics one. Two larges and a bunch of mediums that all face forward, plus a couple built-in locust SRM launchers. Base 550 flux dissipation (same as the other two) doesn't support these well, but even then, as the runt of this litter, it'll punch above it's weight.
All but the strongest of these compete with Radiants for spots on the fleet, since they're AI. But they out-compete it handily - not ship-for-ship - not quite - but definitely for DP.
I think this mod has a lot of interesting designs, but some of them are much too strong.