Another round of mostly-this-patch-specific feedback after reaching mostly-satiation point with my 3rd character (story done, colonies securely established and maxed out, fully explored sector with minor-spoiler exceptions:)
Spoiler
Tesseracts can keep their coronal taps though, especially when I didn't settle any of the affected systems, I'm not messing with those again 'kaythanks!
- Colony stuff: It feels like it's a bit harder and demands more investment to make profitable colonies now. Maybe Hazard Pay just makes it more obvious month by month how much money is sunk in as opposed to how growth incentives used to work, especially for high-hazard planets? Maybe high hazard planets just cost way more now and that's intended? If that is intended, okay, I -think- I like it. I have now certainly have felt the temptation to do stuff like colonize cryovolcanic worlds just for mining, or not necessarily pushing all planets to max possible size ASAP; I certainly haven't done any real math though, so that may be wrong. I also don't use AI core admins since I read that post about spamming them being kind of a temporary thing while colonies don't yet have their full gameplay purpose established. Getting fewer but more substantial attacks by the factions is welcome, too, and does feel better than a constant stream of pirate nuisances; my latest character just had a giant space battle fending off 3 fleets of Persean League goons over my 'capital' world and I found it a very satisfying battle and victory. The way officers (even when I reduced the AI merc officer multiplier from 2 to 0.4) nudge DP limits in station battles might need tweaking though. When the station eats ~50 DP and you have multiple fleets attacking you it's a real strange-feeling underdog 160-240 situation when I'd expect a big star fortress to provide a substantial defender's advantage. I guess the bigger ones do point quite a lot of guns at the enemy for the amount of DP they take up though, so maybe that's actually enough... Maybe it needs to be this way for attackers to actually have a chance to win.
- Skill system: After messing around a lot more with it now, I can appreciate the idea of the layout as it is, though the main pain points to me come from how skills that either 1) encourage you to make most of your main fleet a particular way or 2) "you really can't use both (at once)" don't necessarily seem like they fit neatly into pairings for a wrap-around kind of system. As before, I'm much more of a roleplayer than a min-max-player (though I do certainly do a bunch of that too), and as such this is more about what feels good/bad and what I feel incentivized to do/not do than exact numbers and fine tuned balance. Anything I don't mention is a pairing and choice I'm -mostly- fine with, beyond things that have already been mentioned earlier such as the ECM problems, and the one notable exception of the Automated Ships skill which I haven't yet actually played at all with. As much as I liked the fantasy of a suggestion (sorry I forgot who made it!) I saw about a skill tree going from skills concerning a single ship, to fleet-wide to grand management style skills to mirror the sort of progression you make in game, I also make the assumption we won't see a revamp on the same scale as this one was any time soon (if ever). Spoilered to keep post size down somewhat...
Spoiler
a) Derelict Contingent: This skill suggests more or less something you are meant to tailor your whole (main combat) fleet around, and it's a very particular tailoring at that, demanding and encouraging substantial alteration and adaptation to make proper use of it. To me that might indicate that it's a skill that doesn't fit neatly into a "choose 1" system, and that it might be better suited to being learned elsewhere than in the skills, perhaps in a special quest-like a la the red planet? I also finally ran into an enemy fleet that clearly had it (derelict exploration drones) from a bounty and that was kind of frustrating when I was flying a missile ship at the time. When the enemy has it you can't really play around it much either, but if it only happens in special contact bounties I guess it's not entirely out-of-the-void; it could be really annoying to new players who don't think about a somewhat niche skill in Industry being an enemy fleet thing?
b) Wolfpack Tactics shares the Derelict Contingent thing in that without a DP limit it also kind of suggests a "build-your-fleet-around-it" approach, however in practice I have a much easier time actually making some use out of it even without going for a full frigate focus, and it feels much more like something you can actually adapt around; especially if you take Phase Corps too/anyway and have a couple of phase frigates around for their handy utility effects. I have no clear rational reason for why Wolfpack feels better than Derelict Contingent in this sense, however; perhaps it's just much easier to figure out a couple of useful frigates than a couple of still-useful, heavily D-modded and shieldless ships? Having a big Darth Nihilus style flying wreck as a flagship does have a certain thematic appeal, however...
c) From the C1 tier, you can't really make use of both from unless you're in a carrier or battlecarrier, so if, say, you're all in on a missile flagship, or want to gun for a master-of-combat character and need/want both the skills in higher tiers this one grates a bit.
d) C2 at first looks a bit rough to have to take both to progress, but I've come to appreciate the value of Point Defense; getting fighter-swarmed still starts stinging when flying smaller ships, especially when I'm so in love with the Fury and want to use it to go in hard to take out enemy carriers.
e) C4 as has been mentioned is probably the most grating tier to me; you really can't use both at once and while you -can- adapt around it having 2 different ships for yourself doesn't feel natural, especially when you consider a lot of the DP-scaled skills we now have.
f) Overall I've ended up finding that Wolfpack, Phase Corps, Carrier Group and Fighter Uplink at least are very possible to reasonably adapt your fleet around so they're only as 'dead' as you let them be. I understand that monofleets end up pretty degenerate so I'm seeing the point of the scaled bonuses here. I'll just drop that 6 hangars feels a bit tight for the carrier skills, but I think that's been mentioned before, too.
g) I think L1 is the tier that leaves me the most lukewarm. While Auxiliary Support like the previously mentioned skills is technically also only as dead as you let it be, and the idea is kind of neat, I'm struggling to figure out what to do with it since so many civ-ships have really awkward weapon mounts (outside of mod-added ships but I'm leaving those out for this); I guess that suggests Escort Package for PD escort ships is the easiest adaptation to make? The result of them eating into the militarized DP skills feels a bit rough though since that makes for a few, fairly niche ships in order to keep the bonus at a level that still feels impactful, and simultaneously not take away too much power from more consistently deployed main warships. Its competitor, Weapon Drills, is rather unexciting; and has the same thing going where its tighter DP limit makes the bonus shrink and become practically unnoticeable; and even at its full 10% it's kind of on the brink of what's even noticeable moment to moment. I'd not miss Weapon Drills if it was removed and replaced with something else entirely.
h) The skills containing the crew loss reductions have some other effects that are still nice and useful, so this is pretty minor, though these components feel kind of meaningless; life is too cheap to really care much about them. Ship crews probably need to be half the size, but ask twice the pay each for these to start being noticeable, but maybe that just asking for other troubles somewhere?
Looking back on this, to think, some of my feels-bad-man moments with skills may suggest my brain is a bit mis-tuned with regards to the way the DP/hangar limits work, though; I do very much feel the compulsion to not eat so deep into the limits that the bonuses shrink so small that I can't notice them anymore (even if they may remain substantial if we had detailed breakdowns of post-combat stats), which may really not be 'correct' and more of a thing I just have to get used to.
- Spelling error: "Ancyra Station is AN bastion..."; in the mouse-over tooltip about... Well, yes, Ancyra Station.
- Not-really-this-patch-but-still: Pathers feel a bit passive; I end up fighting a lot of pirates in my games (to the point where I usually end up selling some blueprints on the black market just to vary up their ships a bit more), so maybe the occasional Pather raid from their out-among-the-stars bases to disrupt industries they hate could be a fun way to vary up the pirate raids? Like, pirates still raid to steal stuff, but now sometimes Pathers raid to disrupt offensive industry (like the major factions do you when you start eating into their market shares)? I don't think the game needs a larger quantity of raids, so just replacing ~10-15% of them with Pathers could maybe be fun. Since I rarely have to fight them, they still tend to catch me off guard with just how much more aggressive they are, which is a fun "oh right" moment when combat starts. Plus, you could keep the option to bribe them with 'tithes' if they catch you in the midst of their raids to keep them differentiated from the more 'shut up and die'-style pirates.
I mean hey, look at those phase ships some more, nothing going on here, just a slightly bigger Shrike for twice the DP cost, don't worry about it officer!
