Been looking at the new changes & additions in SCVE (no time for a proper run because I'm busy making my own stuff), and the new things seem p cool but the changes to old stuff are frankly bizarre imo, esp. the changes to the shieldless ships & subfaction carriers.
re : shieldless ships - the thing that sticks out the most here is the complete lack of active defensive options, that makes the ships really boring to play as (imo), because your only really viable option is to hide at long range and plink away at the enemy w/ mag drivers & abuse their onhit to slowly work through their hull.
This is especially prominent on the mazian, if you use the torch drive to get into close range your armour and hull will just get absolutely shredded by any missiles / shorter range high DPS weapons that the enemy has, in a basic test (standard mazian vs sim onslaught) it lost all armour on both sides in seconds, before retreating to max range and plinking at the onslaught with mag drivers for a full 5 minutes, eventually killing it w/ the onhits, the most boring way possible.
If I was to offer a solution I'd say to copy vanilla; give them some kinda right-click damper (or equivalent) so they can shrug off especially high burst and get into range w/o getting immediately shredded by stuff that they currently just can't counter at all.
though heh, you've finally found a way to make the thumper useful! (also the mazian's new sprite looks wierd, those extra armour blocks are really poorly integrated into the rest of the hull & could definitely do with a second pass)
re : carrier changes - these are the most bizarre part of the update, they've just made the ships less interesting to use & forced each one into one specific role with minimal build potential for no apparent reason, not got much more to say about them other than that.
also re: skins of skins, they're not really supported by the game, can't remember where it was but safarijohn tried it for a roider ship & alex said as much.
(and finally sorry if this isn't the most coherent, I've never been good at getting my thoughts down in longer posts, you know my @ on discord if you want me to maybe give a better explanation of my thoughts there)
and the poor shockfires...
What carrier changes? I must have missed that - though from what I've experienced so far the existing carriers weren't changed in this update. He added a drone wing to the Leveller Pollard which I thought was fun, though I'd like to see the hull mod bonus for being built in added (though... that might be another mod that adds those that I am forgetting right now).
I dig the skins, the only problem I've ran into with them is that they don't all show up in the codex. Which isn't a game breaking issue - just a minor irk.
The armor issue - I like the concept. I made the Mazian work by stacking bulkheads and the other main hull upgrade mod. Damage reduction to hull and reduced explosive damage. They tank pretty well as well when you couple them with the elite skill that offers hull regen and increases the base armor damage reduction. There are other skills you have to partner with as well, but there's a lot of options to really stack damage reduction. Though the remaining problem I think is that the damage reduction might be too LOW on the armor. A bump from 25% on the Mazian to 35-40% might solve this without removing it's torch drive. I like the idea of the armor ability you mentioned, but then we are left with an incredibly slow capital that takes most the battle to get to the front line.
But ultimately I understand why he nerfed the armor damage reduction so as to prevent 7500 armor from being OP as hell. I like where he's going with this, and while it might need some refining it's a good direction. As for the sprite on the Mazian, maybe the side armor could use a brush up - I think this is more of an issue of it being okay and not great... which isn't a complaint because all the sprite changes he did look amazing, this would be more of an exception to that rule. I did love the sides of the original sprite - and boss if you're reading, it would be super cool if we could still get that model for a unique variant of the Mazian. Maybe make it unique with shields, faster, and the original turret layout (a bounty maybe? or a rare upgrade?).
