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961

General Discussion / Re: Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 20, 2019, 12:57:55 PM »

Enforcer's one of the ships I had the most qualms about buffing / debuffing in Rebal. 

What it should be:  a indelicate tank that can fire its guns and stays useful as a sidekick until mid-game, when Cruisers tend to start mattering more.
What it is, in Vanilla:  a fragile tank that cannot fire its guns long, can't tank shields and loses Flux warfare, and frequently kills itself in AI hands.

I'm not saying that the Enforcer cannot be used in Vanilla.  It's all right, as fire-support for other slow-movers, especially if your primary worry is enemy torpedo bombers.  It's just not what it should be. 

As we've seen with the Hammerhead's relatively-recent buff-to-actual-usefulness, ship speeds are a major factor here.  Enforcer lacks that, so it cannot kite anything else in its class.  But it can charge, which would be useful if it survived the process.  Unfortunately, it frequently doesn't.

In Player hands, SO Enforcer works fairly well as a close-range wrecking-ball, but I'm not sure it's actually an improvement on SO Hammerhead, which is faster, more maneuverable, and has peak firepower (with its System) that is superior on average, certainly superior on time-spent-firing, and has a decent shield, to boot.

So, ultimately I went with giving the Enforcer a lower-arc shield (which in Rebal, translates directly into efficiency) a buff to Flux stats so that it can actually fire a lot, and that was pretty much it.  It gives the Enforcer a meaty role that's in character; it's hard to get one into ideal range of other Destroyers, but if it can get there, watch out, it can probably out-tank you.

Honestly, I just wish the Destroyers all met their thematic requirements better; they're (imo) the sweet spot in the game for ships players should want to keep driving, even in late-game.

I believe most destroyers can stay in late game, but the enforcer to me just feels like a discount Dominator that does not have the flux capability of capacity to achieve it.

It's mighty fine for AA cover at 9FP but such low mobility should warrant more durability and staying power imo.
I have a few mutually exclusive ways to buff it without thinking too much about it:
1)Give it in-hull dual flak turrets (the external row) just like the monitor
2)Give it one in-hull modspec. It could be anything as long as it both fits the low tech and overall role of the ship. I would go for either heavy armor or go crazy and actually make it the only destroyer to have an integrated targeting unit, since it wants to be a Cruiser so damn much
3)Simply give it a higher base flux management set. Both if them are overly pathetic on a destroyer with 1.24 damage to flux ratio

962

General Discussion / Re: Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 20, 2019, 12:05:21 PM »

Alright I have bought a second one. They both have 4 swarmers (I do not have fighter cover yet, only a single Condor with three bombers), two flaks, two Hypervelocity drivers and a heavy Mauler in the middle. Might alter the missile comp and medium mounts when I get fighter support.

Thank you  everyone for your suggestions!

963

General Discussion / Re: Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 20, 2019, 09:11:43 AM »

I do not know who you are, I do not know where you came from, but I love you.

964

General Discussion / Re: Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 20, 2019, 07:51:28 AM »

It probably makes a great point defense platform; load it up with anti-fighter weapons, configure it for missile defense and deploy it against carrier-heavy fleets for cost-effective swarm kills.  Against anything bigger than another destroyer the lack of flux begins to tell very quickly.

It's funny you mention that since my current enforcer build has 4 swarmers, two Hypervelocity drivers, a flak and two double barreled machine guns, I usually have him escorting my Condor carrier.

HVD + Swarmers combo also works really well against freighters and other destroyers so CE they both can hit fast moving targets with commendable levels of accuracy

965

General Discussion / Re: Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 19, 2019, 08:19:12 PM »

I will try that, thank you!

Also, would a missile focused build using annihilator rockets and the ammo modspec fare good too?

966

General Discussion / Is the enforcer worth it?

« on: November 19, 2019, 07:15:41 PM »

I've got to admit that the staggering amount of weapons it can field made me purchase one in my new campaign, but I just can't make it work for some reason. I went as far as dropping the frontal medium turret and all missile hardpoints to try and give it better flux management and fire both flaks and thumpers more but it just feels really lacking to me. Any suggestions?

967

General Discussion / Re: My first endgame fleet

« on: November 19, 2019, 03:58:50 AM »

Sunders die all the time? Every destroyer just pops instantly if a radiant shows up, and they also get shafted by fighters. If you need more evidence that apogee is very strong, it got its shield nerfed from .6->.7 in the last patch because it was too good. Sunders are good ships, but they certainly don't do the same thing that good cruisers and capitals do. They're glass cannons that don't do enough in the endgame IMO.

I interpreted Lucky's comment about the apogee as suggesting it is the overpowered ship of the two, but I'll let them speak for themselves.

My experience with beam spam is that it is very mediocre, but I'm interested in seeing how it performs (and I don't have an aurora blueprint right now). How well does your fleet kill remnants and radiants? That's the only really challenge in the late game IMO. It seems like your auroras will do a very good job of distracting stuff without dying and maybe the absurd number of beams will be enough to drive up flux so that the HILs can kill everything, but remnants have really tough shields and are fast enough to chase stuff down, so it doesn't seem like it would really stand up to big remnant ordos and radiants, but I could be wrong. I can see it really shredding pirates and pathers though.

Lasers work the same way with any enemy provided you have the numbers. Thicc remnants get  disgusting AA so I do not even bother using Dooms and Astrals and just use 5-6 of my Auroras, a few Drovers for fighter cover, my Odyssey flagship and maybe a sunder or two if I can not fit an extra Aurora.

The thing about laser vomit is that it's very flux inexpensive, making all your flux capacity geared towards shielding and defensive/range extension modspecs, allowing a single Aurora capable of comfortably aggroing a Radiant while the others melt the smaller ships until it's just them left and they're getting pressured by 9 graviton beams each on average making them unable to fire or keep the Shields up without venting, it all goes downhill from there. Having so much range to have a Radiant Skimmer twice to try and melt a single ship to no avail against highly mobile cruisers is probably one of the safest ways to deal with them, provided you have steady commanders and micro them once or twice every minute to not get in-between enemies to cut their own retreat.

The thing I found out at my expense in remnant fights is that you either have all your mainline ships vomit lasers from over 1000 range or the one or two that don't will be naturally focus fired by the enemy due to being closer and will get into trouble.

P.S: I guess that's also why Sunders worked very well in my fleet. Having multiple ships engage at around 1300 range more or less divides the incoming fire to the point having low flux capacity, high damage to flux ratio and no armor to speak of never matter; while being able to fire dual graviton and a high intensity laser does.

968

General Discussion / Re: My first endgame fleet

« on: November 18, 2019, 05:48:32 PM »

This campaign basically taught me that flux is always flux since it'll force shields down and weapons not to fire anyway. Hard flux is something that only matters if the enemy can't retreat or you can't finish him off. Plinking something from like 1500 range with a Sunder that litterally melts anything fast enough to kill it and can't be killed by anything bigger because it can't be caught makes both better flux capacity and shields useless in a comparison to be honest with you, especially because you can neatly fit a sunder and an Omen (the little frigade from tesla coil hell) for a lower cost than a single Apogee.

I also believe he quoted the Apogee to showcase how a run of the mill destroyer that can potentially be acquired in the first 5 minutes outside of the tutorial can actually be compared to it and make it look pathetic in comparison, a ship that is showcased as a starter capital ship to make the game EASIER!

969

General Discussion / Re: My first endgame fleet

« on: November 18, 2019, 04:54:45 PM »

I just realized it's got the same frontal armament as the Apogee.

For whom did they balance the Sunder for...

970

General Discussion / Re: My first endgame fleet

« on: November 18, 2019, 04:34:12 PM »

I want to let you know that Sunder is already nerfed and now its only a shadow of its former self.

Kek.

Oh.

I would either keep the current one but hammering the flux regen/ capacity down and replacing everything with a ballistic mount or bringing its FP up to 15, making it high tech and painting it blue. It's so goddamn strong it's not even funny.

971

Blog Posts / Re: Skills and Story Points

« on: November 18, 2019, 03:31:16 PM »

So I just read the blog.  Very, very interesting!

Do we have an approximate release date or did I miss the download link somewhere
 I hope it's the latter 

When it is nearly ready, Alex will post patch notes. Sad to say, going off of previous versions, this release is quite a ways off

Cries in Atlas being harder to find in a shipyard than a Paragon

972

General Discussion / Re: Scarab's suicidal tendencies

« on: November 18, 2019, 03:28:37 PM »

So I tried making this little angry frigade work better with taclasers instead of LRs since they pretty much do the same thing anyway and the results were better, altough it still can't hold a candle to the totally balanced Sunder that you can buy pretty much everywhere and that gets you more DPS per Fleet point than a Paragon.

It's actually fun to manually play it and matrix-dodge incoming fire tough. I consider this endeavor a success.

973

General Discussion / Re: Andromeda, oh Andromeda

« on: November 18, 2019, 03:20:38 PM »

So... I actually realized it's called Aurora. The humiliation. It stings. Make it stop.

974

General Discussion / My first endgame fleet

« on: November 18, 2019, 03:15:21 PM »

Salutations or something!

I've gotten so rich I can't bring my fleet around for a neighborhood trip around the home system and back without at least 5 thousand materials, I've had enough colonies that if I wanted to go around and clear all Panther Cells and Pirate activity dangers regularly I'd litterally be doing nothing else, I played the Red Planet mission and realized I kind of got to it late considering it felt a breeze after the motherf pieces of s absolutely broken tr oh god why is it even in the game Remnant bases guarded by at least a couple teleporting bullshittery dispensers Brilliant class battleships. It feels like I may have run out of end game, non-autistic things to do (if we count bombing everything and anything that's not me out of the core system out) so I'm starting fresh with a new campaign using a couple quality of life mods.

Before that happens tough, I felt obligated to share what ended up being my (actually not Paragon spam as I initially feared) endgame fleet and what you guys think of it, namely the fact that it's most likely NOT as great as I think it is and that I may have had a better result with a smaller fleet, I'd really appreciate it if you actually expanded on that unless it's paragon spam.

Capital ship: Odyssey (1)



I fell in love with this thing as soon as I got my hands on its blueprints. I love the mobility, the versatility, the originality and the feel of it while being manually used in battle. It's great.

Mainline Cruiser: Aurora (8 )



I got my hands on the first one of these at a Tri-Tach military base and decided I needed more, so I frantically ditched all my slow ass inefficient dakka lumps of metal and set off into the outer zones in search of its blueprints, witch were ironically found after I went full solid snake and sneaked into a high remnant risk tri-star system with the blasted blueprint obviously placed IN THE DEAD MIDDLE OF THOSE VERY SAME STARS because of course it was, but I digress.

I just filled it with laser vomit and range/defensive modspecs to make it as disgusting as possible.

Occasional Cruiser: Doom (2)



This used to be my capital ship after I bought a slightly used one on the black market with a d-mod on it, loved it so  much I bought two of them at the same time much later in the game after my original one KILLED ITSELF WITH ITS OWN MINES BECAUSE OF COURSE IT CAN DO THAT after err... having it go high on flux, deploy its mines into a base right next to it, try to phase away but being boxed in by my own ships. Good times.

Occasional Carrier: Astral (2)



Speaking of disgusting, a pair of these aiming at the same target should become another way to say it. I focused on stuffing it full of bombers, support modspecs, a ton of point defence and not much else. Playing my second campaign with a dakka focus not using some of these is going to feel...constructive.

Occasional Light Carrier: Drover (4)



Because you can't feel thoroughly disgusting unless you pair the astrals or just provide fighter/missile cover unless you spam the most broken fighter in the game to a light carrier making it even more absurd. So absurd in fact I even tried spamming just the four of these in simulation to see what they could or could not kill with some micro and asked myself why I even bothered with actual bombers.

Occasional Light destroyer: Sunder (4)



I had people in the forum actually tell me this was real good, had its blueprint avaiable for a long time but only used it at the very end of the game once I actually built four of them for giggles and had my jaw drop at the absolute insanity that is a 11FP midline unit being a more effective laser vomit than pretty much all high tech units in the whole game pound for pound. I have a feeling the nerf hammer is going to have a field day with this one.


I also have a single Apogee (the starter one in fact, yes we all went easy start the first time do not even try convincing me otherwise) and enough Prometheuses/Atlases to go around, you know the drill so I won't explain it.

Have a good day and don't forget to let me know how bad all my fleet is and how I'm not actually enjoying the game and playing it as intended if I bury the enemy deep into litteral flashlight fire until it goes blind, falls, hits the back of its head against the angle of god's space desk and dies. Bye!

975

General Discussion / Re: Andromeda, oh Andromeda

« on: November 18, 2019, 04:16:55 AM »

I forgot that text was there actually haha.

I might give small high tech ships a shot in the next campaigns trying to have them all range focused. I will definitely have a pirate campaign before that tough. I've actually tried raiding pirate/luddic path bases before destroying them and it does make some profit to be worth it, although I guess hauling 2000 Marines in your fleet all the time is definitely overkill.