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391

General Discussion / Re: Balancing: Do frigates render fighters worthless?

« on: November 06, 2014, 06:25:53 PM »

Even you should know by now

"Even" me? What's that supposed to mean?

Just that you've been here for a good long time, and Megas is rather vocal with his view of how he plays the game. Didn't mean to offend you if I did.

The "even you" construction generally implies that whoever "you" refers to is rather slow on the uptake, and as a result the construction tends to be insulting. "Even the town idiot knows that the sky is blue." "Even you should know that penguins cannot fly." If you want to imply that someone due to their position/standing/seniority/experience/etc should know something, you should use a construction more like "you of all people." E.g. "you of all people should know that penguins don't fly, Mr Ornithologist." Of course, this too can be insulting, as it implies that "you" should know better but for whatever reason don't, which can call the competence of the person "you" refers to into question. Even if the "you of all people" construction is taken as an insult, it is generally taken as less of an insult than "even you" constructions, as the "even you" constructions are more or less a thinly-veiled way of calling someone an idiot - "you of all people should know ..." implies a lack of knowledge of a kind with which "you" should be particularly familiar, while "even you should know ..." implies both that "you" lack knowledge or understanding which should be fairly obvious and also implies a lack of confidence in the general competence, observational skills, or knowledge of whoever "you" is on the part of the speaker.

As far as the actual subject of the thread, I'd say that frigates tend to be better for small fleets and fighters tend to be better for large fleets. Small fleets want the strategic speed of the frigates so that they can pick and choose who and what they engage, large fleets love the immortality of the fighter groups (as long as a carrier is present) and the way that fighters don't really interfere with the other ships in the fleet. Frigates may perhaps be better than individual fighter groups in many ways, but that doesn't matter much when you can have at most maybe five or six ships attacking a single target before you start losing effectiveness because there's a frigate blocking your Odyssey's plasma cannons or some other nonsense.

Larger fleets should also prefer fighter groups because larger fleets are more likely to engage in long battles, and frigates have a limited useful deployment period. Fighters don't, unless you count running out of replacements (or flight decks, but you hopefully brought enough carriers to the party). It also doesn't hurt that larger fleets are more likely to engage things that can kill or severely damage a frigate in very short order, which can be very expensive or time-consuming to correct, whereas with fighter groups I at least don't lose the fighter group even if every last fighter were destroyed and not a single crewman were recovered so long as I have one flight deck surviving somewhere in my fleet.

392

Suggestions / Suggestion: Give some indication of how much Shielded Cargo Holds help

« on: November 06, 2014, 05:05:12 PM »

It's currently rather difficult to tell how much Shielded Cargo Holds are doing for you. I'd appreciate it if there were something in the toll breakdown which either listed exactly what you were billed for, or that said something along the lines of "Shielded Cargo Holds in your fleet concealed ABC credits worth of cargo from the inspectors, saving you XYZ credits on this inspection."

Otherwise all I know is that that last customs inspection cost me 10 or 15 thousand credits or however much it actually cost, and I have no idea if those pirate Buffaloes I purchased on the black market at New Maxios are doing anything worthwhile for me in return for that string of smuggling investigations and the market destabilization.

393

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 06, 2014, 01:38:17 PM »

Regarding the Condor, I agree that making it slightly logistically cheaper would be a reasonable solution. I'd go for 4 to 4.5 supplies per day rather than 3.5, as I think 3.5 makes it too much better than the Gemini in deployment costs (30% cheaper to deploy than the Gemini; 4 supplies per day makes the Condor 20% cheaper to deploy than the Gemini, while 4.5 supplies per day makes the Condor 10% cheaper to deploy than the Gemini, if the recovery time is unchanged) and too much more logistically efficient (only 4.15 logistics per flight deck as opposed to 5.25 per flight deck for the Heron or 5.35 per flight deck for the Gemini at standard skeleton crew).

I also think that availability should be tweaked so that the Condor is generally more easily obtained than the Gemini. Regardless, I still don't think that the Condor's relatively lacking combat capability compared to the Gemini is a serious problem. The Gemini was designed with a flight deck; that it suffers less reduction in capability for it than a converted freighter seems appropriate to me. As far as making the Condor faster on the strategic map, that's something that I'd rather have on a more modern light carrier, perhaps something similar to a Medusa, or perhaps a well-done Medusa conversion. It'd be odd to me that a conversion of an old freighter which appears to have rearranged and removed some of the engines (rather than improving them) and added some mass to the structure and armor should end up creating a vessel that's faster than anything of similar or greater size other than the most advanced combat destroyer.

Something else which might help the Condor would be a built-in version of Extended Missile Racks, possibly something which could stack with the standard Extended Missile Racks.

394

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 06, 2014, 11:22:21 AM »

The Condor being relatively lacking doesn't bother me. It's a conversion, it's ~28% cheaper up front than the Gemini and has lower outfitting costs, and fast missile racks are decent for making it a worthwhile long range support ship despite only having a single medium missile mount.

I don't include the up-front costs in any of my looks; money has been the least of my problems past really early game  That said, I actually think that the Fast Missile Racks don't work well; it means that the Condor's out of ammo quicker.  I'd honestly prefer that the Condor cost a bit more Logistics but was a genuine alternative to the Gemini; I really don't care much about the lore explanations if it effectively means there's just one carrier worth buying.  I also don't have any problems buying Geminis in my game, so the choice between the two is a no-brainer.

If I'm shopping for a carrier, it's not the carrier's guns that I care about. It's the flight decks, and as a flight deck, the Condor is about as good as the Gemini. The Gemini is a bit more logistically efficient and has some better secondary features, namely its good fuel and cargo capacities and its potentially better armament and better multiple deployment characteristics, but you paid for those when you bought it.

I strongly object to making the Condor into a two-deck carrier if the other dedicated carriers remain with their current numbers of flight decks and nothing else changes. The only value that Condors, Geminis, Herons, and Astrals have for me is as carriers of varying efficiency and durability, and as a carrier, a two-deck Condor makes the Heron and the Gemini obsolete. Yes, the Heron would be more survivable and the Gemini has marginally more firepower, but the two-deck Condor would be far more logistically efficient than the Heron as a carrier, allowing additional fighter groups to be included in the fleet, and would be twice as capable of supporting fighters in battle as the Gemini. The Gemini's superior armament and the Heron's somewhat superior durability and at best light cruiser level armament don't do them any significant favors since I don't want my carriers in the battle line anyways. Close behind the battle line, sure, but there ought to be some heavier warships to serve as the battle line, because a real battle line with effective anti-fighter measures will shred the dedicated carriers.

395

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 05, 2014, 10:50:26 PM »

You seem to have added one to the burn speeds of all your destroyers; the Medusa only has burn-5 in the base game and so is slower than any frigate other than the Shepherd and Brawler, which are as fast as it is, and all the other destroyers other than the Construction Rig are burn-4.

However, I will point out one thing that irks me a little:  between the Gemini and the Condor, I don't feel that there is any contest; the Gemini is superior.  The Condor's problems are several; it's under-armed, slow, and it doesn't have any advantages as a carrier.  If it had two decks, it would a contender, and no, I don't think it would replace the Heron, which is a different animal.

The Condor being relatively lacking doesn't bother me. It's a conversion, it's ~28% cheaper up front than the Gemini and has lower outfitting costs, and fast missile racks are decent for making it a worthwhile long range support ship despite only having a single medium missile mount. I know I've said this before, and I know people may disagree with me, but the Gemini feels like a purpose-built escort carrier, or at the very least like a Q-ship, despite its description claiming it to be a freighter. Purpose-built warships are better than conversions? Who knew? Simplest correction is to change the Gemini's description slightly to make it clear that it was originally a purpose-built escort carrier with enough cargo space that it's now being used as a freighter since the sector's trade lanes are dangerous enough to warrant the use of military-grade vessels in the merchant marine.

I also don't agree that the Condor doesn't have any advantages as a carrier. It's cheap and fairly common. Its lackluster speed makes it easier for the heavier warships to pull ahead of it, keeping it relatively safe from enemies. Fast missile racks makes its single medium missile more useful as a support weapon than the Gemini's single medium missile, and that it has a pair of small ballistics rather than a pair of medium ballistics means that you're not losing out on much by filling those with PD rather than something more offensively useful, which would also cause you to want the carrier to close in to make effective use of the weapons, which endangers the carrier somewhat.

I also don't care for the Phaeton; it bothers me that it's basically worthless in every way.  I've never had to buy up a Fuel storage ship; I can't see that ever happening, unless Cruiser / Capship fuel storage was nerfed quite a lot.  So it should be a little more useful as a combat ship.  Idea on that: give it some pretty serious armor and allow it to be used as a poor-man's Monitor.

Most capital ships and cruisers don't carry enough fuel to really extend the range of the fleets in which they're found. Average range across all frigates is 63 lightyears, average range across all destroyers is 79 lightyears, average range across all cruisers is 71 lightyears, and average range across all capital ships is 85 lightyears. If you drop the Hound/Hermes/Mercury/Dram/Ox/Cerberus/Shepherd from frigates, the Buffalo/Buffalo II/Tarsus/Valkyrie/Phaeton/Mule/Construction Rig from the destroyers, and the Atlas and Prometheus from the capital ships, that becomes an average range of 50 lightyears for frigates, 51 lightyears for destroyers, 71 lightyears for cruisers, and 51 lightyears for capital ships. The Onslaught is likely to reduce the range of any fleet that it is a part of rather than increasing the fleet's range. The Venture and the Apogee are the only cruisers likely to significantly increase a fleet's range, while the Odyssey is the only capital likely to significantly increase the fleet's range.

Cruisers and capital ships have large fuel capacities, but they burn so much of it that most of them are not really substitutes for a proper tanker, if you need to extend a fleet's range. It's less true for cruisers since most of them have fairly low fuel consumptions relative to the amount of fuel they carry (most common cruiser range is 66.7 lightyears, as opposed to 40 for frigates and destroyers, and 50 for capitals), but you're also probably not going to have a lot of them relative to the number of ships in your fleet. Currently, with how close together the systems are, you'll probably never need a tanker unless you want to engage in fuel trading. If and when the campaign map gets bigger, I could definitely see the tankers coming into their own as fleet support ships.

Just as a quick example, all frigates other than the Ox consume 1 fuel per lightyear, and most cruisers consume 3 fuel per lightyear. If we took a range-66.7 cruiser and 3 range-40 frigates, the fleet range would be 45.7 lightyears. If you add a Dram, the fleet's range would be 83.75 lightyears, while if you used a Phaeton instead of the Dram, the fleet range would be 146.7 lightyears. If instead of a tanker you added a second cruiser of the same type as the first, the fleet range would be 52 lightyears. It's fairly clear that the tankers are exceptionally good for extending your range; the only problem is that the map isn't big enough to justify their use, or alternatively that current ships have too much range to justify using a tanker. Larger fleets will get relatively more benefit out of using a tanker rather than relying on the fuel capacities of their larger ships to boost the fleet's range, simply because adding even 300 fuel and 3 fuel consumption per lightyear to the mix (one Venture or Apogee) or 750 fuel and 10 fuel consumption per lightyear (an Odyssey) isn't really going to do all that much for a fleet that already has 1500 fuel capacity and burns 30 of it per lightyear; adding 1000 fuel and 2 fuel per lightyear (a Phaeton) will.

396

General Discussion / Re: How do you deal with onslaught in a capital ship?

« on: November 05, 2014, 04:15:54 PM »

The Onslaught is notorious for its firepower paired with its armor, leaving the flux capacity for the weapons themselves; even more so with skilled NPCs. No frigate fleet can topple a lone one without losses.

Ever fly a Hyperion? The mission Sinking the Bismar would be entirely beatable by me using the Hyperion on its own if only the Onslaught were present, and a better player could probably handle the fighters and the battleship just fine with only the Hyperion. It's probably also doable with just the Tempest, though that has a somewhat more difficult time diving behind the Onslaught. It's true that neither side gets any skills in that fight, but I'd be more than a little leery of saying that skills would significantly improve the Onslaught's performance against a ship that can jump over to its unshielded backside, fire off some torpedoes or an antimatter blaster or some other heavy weapons, and jump out of range before the guns can respond. I don't know that the computer can manage it, but a person certainly can.

397

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 05, 2014, 12:12:56 PM »

soft flux can cause overloads

Only at the overwhelming levels of a HIL / Tachyon Lance, at least in Vanilla, and there, rarely.  The AI's shield-up behavior doesn't run every frame, apparently, or the Soft Flux damage is applied after it decides.

Other than those two weapons, I've hardly ever seen a Soft Flux Overload happen, tbh, even against weak ships (I think somebody brought that up last time we had this discussion, and I had to re-create it, because it just won't happen with Tac Lasers and Gravitons, for example); instead the AI drops shields for a few frames, then raises, while I frantically sweep the beam over the parts to either side hoping to do some real damage, lol.

Tactical Lasers and Gravitons can cause overloads in small ships. I've done it many times to Lashers when flying a Wolf with a beam armament. It's just a lot harder than it is with weapons that create hard flux, and usually it requires that the Lasher is already about to die and so cannot really afford to drop its shields while your beams are hitting it, or is afraid of an inbound missile, or something like that.

Also, I'd dispute that the HIL causes 'overwhelming' levels of soft flux. If it remains true that kinetic damage doubles the effective DPS against shields, a HIL is only 25% better against shields than a Graviton Beam is, and I'm much more likely to be able to carry a pair of Graviton Beams than I am to be able to fit a single HIL. Plus, the Graviton Beam is by far more flux efficient on my end. I can agree with the Tachyon Lance giving relatively overwhelming levels of soft flux (by comparison to other beams), but that's because it hits the target with a lot of soft flux all at once, rather than taking the more normal approach used by beams, which results in a steady trickle of soft flux generation.

What is the difference, in terms of Supply / Fuel efficiency, between an all-Frigate swarm at Burn 12, say, and a Destroyer fleet at burn 7?  Does the increased durability / DPS of Destroyers make up for that cost, long-term?

It depends on which frigates and which destroyers you're using, but in terms of fuel consumed per lightyear per logistics point, the only purpose-built combat destroyer which is noticeably worse than most combat frigates is the Enforcer, which requires 0.652 units of fuel per logistics point to cross one lightyear at the standard skeleton crew level (even so, the Enforcer is still a more fuel-efficient choice per point of logistics than the Hound or the noncombat frigates). Hammerheads and Sunders are down at four ninths of a unit of fuel per logistics point to cross a single lightyear at standard skeleton crew levels, which beats every frigate except for the Hyperion, Omen, and Tempest, while the Medusa is down at 0.373 fuel per logistics point to cross one lightyear, which beats every frigate other than the Hyperion. Most frigates require less crew per logistics point than most destroyers do, which makes their supply consumption for equivalently large fleets somewhat smaller, but the Lasher requires more crew per logistics point than any destroyer, and the Shepherd requires as many crew per logistics point as the Enforcer, the most expensive of the combat destroyers (the Tarsus is equally crew-intensive per logistics unit, but it's not a combatant). The Medusa, meanwhile, requires less crew per logistics point than the Wolf, Hound, Lasher, Brawler, Cerberus, Monitor, and Shepherd. If you're looking at freighter efficiencies rather than combatant efficiencies, the destroyers win outright in fuel efficiency when you factor in cargo capacity, and probably also in supply use efficiency. All of this is assuming you're keeping the fleet at the standard skeleton crew levels.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make, but if it's that destroyer groups are less fuel-efficient than equivalent logistics values of frigates, that's mostly not the case. If it's that destroyers are less supply-efficient than equivalent logistics values of frigates, that's generally true, but even if you're looking at roughly doubling the supply consumption, it's still roughly 0.1 supply per day per point of logistics of destroyers versus roughly 0.06 supplies per day per point of logistics of frigates, which isn't a very big deal, even though a burn-12 fleet is roughly 45% faster than a burn-7 fleet (assuming that the lightyears per day conversion for hyperspace speed also holds in realspace). Fuel thus far has been by far the greatest single expense that I've had to be concerned with outside of combat recovery as a midsize fleet can easily use hundreds of it going from one system to the next, and there are clear and often significant fuel savings available for consolidating frigates into equivalent logistics worth of destroyers, especially if the purpose of both ships is cargo hauling.

If you're wanting to build a Burn 8 fleet, are there any Destroyers you want or must not have?

If you want Burn 10, to catch small Pirate fleets and push Pirate bases into Unstable, are there any Destroyers you can have at all?

What skills do we have, and do we have the theoretical infinite supply of Ox Tugs and the logistical capacity to use them, the money to afford them, the fuel and supplies to use them? Because if we have as many Ox Tugs as we want, any destroyer other than the Construction Rig can be brought to Burn-8 with Nav-2 and Augmented Engines (assuming you have or can find the ordnance points for them), and you can drop the tug at Nav-6 or the Augmented Engines at Nav-10 (but you cannot drop both the tug and the Augmented Engines). Medusas can be Burn-8 at Nav-2 even without an Ox Tug if you can put Augmented Engines on them. If you have enough Ox Tugs, you can make any arbitrarily large fleet of destroyers, Herons, or Falcons attain Burn-10 with Nav-10 under the assumption that you a. don't use the construction rig and b. have the ability to install Augmented Engines on each of your ships; Medusas can hit Nav-10 with an Ox Tug and Augmented Engines starting at Nav-6, and can drop the tug at Nav-10 (or reach Burn-11).

So yes, it's possible to reach Burn-10 with most destroyers, as long as you have enough skills and are willing to sacrifice enough ordnance points to pay for Augmented Engines and are willing to spend the resources required to have an Ox Tug per destroyer.

398

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 04, 2014, 10:15:50 PM »

As far as the EMP stuff goes, it might help if EMP damage against shields were counted as additional soft-flux damage rather than being, as far as I can tell, ignored.

As far as cutting the range of the beam weapons... Maybe a little, but it's the blasters and pulse lasers that fill the close-range weapon role for energy; if you were to cut it as drastically as suggested, the new beam weapons would essentially be a completely different category of weapon from what they are currently, and would heavily overlap with the current blasters and pulse lasers. The only similarity between the current Tactical Laser and a range-400 Tactical Laser which had acceptable performance for a weapon with that little range would be the name, and perhaps the weapon graphics. Beyond that, I don't really like extremely short-range weapons. Weapons like the Antimatter Blaster, one of the few non-PD weapons with only 400 range, are borderline unusable by half or more of the ships in the game, and I really don't see that converting beam weapons into something in the same vein is in any way a real improvement.

399

General Discussion / Re: How do you deal with onslaught in a capital ship?

« on: November 04, 2014, 09:41:03 PM »

Just tried "Forlorn Hope" for the lols.

Man, that is difficult. I managed (somehow) to kill all the escorts without the onslaught coming to find me, but was killed by a few lucky shots while we were locked in a stalemate where neither could harm the other.

I really think the Paragon's standard loadout of tachyons is pretty rubbish. I only found them minorly useful to pick off some stragglers and tear up fighters at a distance, in a fight they simply lack enough power to matter. In the campaign I ran a solo Paragon and slaughtered similar fleets to the one in "Forlorn Hope" all the time with a dual plasma cannon setup.

One issue when comparing campaign difficulty to mission difficulty is that in the campaign you get access to all your character's skills, which could be adding up to 105 ordnance points to your Paragon, up to 10% extra flux capacity and venting, 10% more hull integrity, a fair amount of armor, or any of the stuff the combat skills give you. The only advantage the Forlorn Hope Paragon has over a Paragon piloted by a campaign character with no skills applicable in any way to single-ship combat (which basically means a pure-leadership character, as Combat aptitude gives bonuses to combat readiness - though this is not fully applicable, since you could be running a less-than-elite crew and using Combat to match the Forlorn Hope Paragon's combat readiness - and Technology aptitude gives you 3.5 ordnance points per aptitude point on a Paragon - which you'll only not use if you're deliberately handicapping yourself) is access to just about whatever hull mods you want.

400

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 04, 2014, 09:25:11 PM »

Things that sound like they're good for a given job need to do that job well enough to seriously consider using it, depending on the goal.  Tactical Laser sounds like a primary arm; it should work as a primary arm.

Funny, I always thought the "tactical" in "Tactical Laser" was one step removed from a marketing buzzword... (it's not a term that's defined anywhere, unlike the weapon role tags which IIRC are specified in the manual, so all it does is sound cool)

I rather suspect that xenoargh is referring to the description in the weapon tool tip, which starts by naming it the "standard combat laser," and which is expanded in the Codex to call the Tactical Laser the "workhorse of beam weapons in the sector," or some such thing, rather than the name "Tactical Laser." Of course, we could also extend that to saying that the Codex information is in-universe information with a mix of marketing and reality rather than an out-of-universe unbiased evaluation of the availability, utility, and standard use of the weapon.

I don't get the rationale here; these ships are basically so crippled by the Burn stat that they're literally not worth getting until you're not looking at Frigates or a Frigate-based fleet any more.

Is it a problem if some frigates only work as support in larger-ship fleets, assuming they do that job reasonably well? If they don't, well, we can just rebalance that.

In my view, not really. However, I think there might be a small issue with the Shepherd, as it's more or less a (very) light carrier and a wing of mining pods that cannot support other fighters, but its lack of speed prevents it from acting as a minicarrier for frigate groups or most destroyer groups, and the Gemini or Condor combined with real fighters are generally a better way of getting a carrier and fighter support into a destroyer group or a convoy escort. It is the economy option of economy carriers, though, and it isn't a bad light freighter, trading speed for a bit of efficiency, so it probably doesn't need significant improvement.

The Brawler's lack of utility outside a larger fleet doesn't bother me; it seems more or less like a purpose-built fire support frigate, anyways, rather than being more like the Wolves, Lashers, Tempests, and Vigilences, which feel more like the kinds of ships you'd consider using as lone patrol vessels.

401

General Discussion / Re: How do you deal with onslaught in a capital ship?

« on: November 04, 2014, 08:45:43 PM »

onslaught vs onslaught boils down to fitting specifically to win the slugfest against stock model.

My question is about taking on onslaught in a capital ship other than onslaught.

If you're flying a Paragon, blast it with whatever you can that doesn't build up your flux too much while it's burning in to you. Then put up your fortress shield, wait for the Onslaught to waste a lot of its flux taking shots at your shields, drop the fortress shield, hammer it, pull back a bit while keeping the shields up enough to defeat the heavier weapons, and let off a bit of hard flux, then move in and repeat the process. Paragons are about the only ship I can think of that can go toe-to-toe with an Onslaught and expect to win. They're also the only capital ship that I've ever beaten an Onslaught with in a one-on-one fight. One-on-one combat with a full battleship should be a very dangerous thing for a battlecruiser or especially a carrier to attempt.

First experience was Forlorn hope (I still didn't manage to beat it) and I got frustrated at how paragon cannot control range against onslaught, not to mention its wolf escorts that refuse to be separated however I try.

The thing to do in Forlorn Hope is to try to keep as out of the middle of the main body of enemies as you can, pick a target, hold fire until you can get the target into a good location relative to your guns, and then unload everything on it to try to burst it down quickly. If you're trying to win rather than going for a high score of some kind, forcing the opponent to retreat is about as good as killing it outright. Don't worry about separating the Onslaught from its light escorts, just blast them to death with sudden bursts of heavy weapons fire - a pair of fully-charged Autopulse Lasers can more or less one-shot a Wolf that gets into a bad spot, especially if supported by your other guns. You can weather the initial storm of fire by putting up Fortress Shields and pulling back as best as your Paragon can, to keep the range between you and the Onslaught open; when the Onslaught shows signs of running out of flux, and especially when it starts running out of missiles, it's time to get more aggressive. Be very careful not to overload if you can avoid it, because even battleship armor isn't all that great against Harpoons or constant streams of Annihilator Rockets. I find that Stabilized Shields and Accelerated Shields are very helpful for this mission; you want to take every opportunity you can afford to drop your shields and dissipate hard flux, but you need to have the ability to cover your ship's huge rear end quickly if something dangerous comes flying in from off screen; Stabilized I think allows the Fortress Shield to stay up longer by halving the rate at which it builds up hard flux (which incidentally translates to less time with your shields down trying to lose some of it to prevent overloads and other power issues), and Accelerated Shields make it much easier to raise the shields in reaction to incoming fire, rather than having to preemptively raise the shields.

402

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 04, 2014, 07:27:36 PM »

The big thing to bear in mind with the two, though, is while the Heavy Needler is better on Soft Flux efficiency for DPS (with a cost in terms of recycle time and wasted bursts), it comes at a high cost, OP-wise.  Depending on what you're flying, that may matter.  I generally find Heavy Needlers aren't great buys for Destroyers, for example, and are completely verboten for Frigates (not that there are many that can mount one) that aren't player-controlled.

I personally think that the Heavy Needler being better on your soft flux efficiency for the DPS is a bit deceptive. The difference in flux generation between the two weapons is only ~45 flux per second in favor of the Heavy Needler, at least on the time-average costs, and the 5 OP more that the Heavy Needler costs relative to the Heavy Autocannon could alternatively be spent on 5 vents (+50 flux dissipation) or 5 capacitors (+500 flux capacity) or something in between. Unless you were already going to go for full vents or full capacitors, I'm not convinced that the Heavy Needler really saves you that much. Granted, it depends on the base flux statistics, and there are other factors than time-average flux efficiency to consider.

Come to think of it, I kind of wish that weapons listed their per-shot flux costs on the weapons details, rather than making it something that you need to back out of the information given.

Huh, OK, so if I'd done Comm taps, I'd see it?

No idea. I haven't actually tried comm taps yet. Volatiles just occasionally show up in the price update notices I get. Same goes for Organics and most of the other resources that tend to fall off the filter list (mostly anything that isn't ore, food, supplies, or fuel). It also seems to update with more complete information if I take the time to visit several stations in each system, though I'm not sure if that's due to getting a more accurate local news bulletin from sticking around longer or from actually visiting the market.

Make beams to do something bad to shields or flux dissipation on a target ship. Say for 20 seconds of beam hitting ship its shield loses damage to flux ration due to destabilizing and or reduce target ship soft flux dissipation while shields under active enemy beams for some time due to power required to stabilize shield.This way shield cant tank beams forever and must be shut down and re-engaged to drop the negative debuffs from beam usage. As beams usually found on high-tech ships it is logical they must be counter to speed and shields in some way.

Degrading flux dissipation is effectively what beams do currently. As long as the target's shields are up, beams provide a steady trickle of soft flux, usually roughly enough to prevent the target from quickly dissipating soft flux passively. I'd also question whether or not we need another way to break shields. Hard flux is already effectively a shield destabilization - you've caused something to go wrong enough in the shield system that only shutting the shields down can let you straighten out whatever issues hard flux represents in the power system, at least for any ship other than the Monitor, and if you don't correct it quickly enough you'll eventually have enough feedback problems to cause ship-wide system failures. I suppose it could be interesting for beam anti-shield efficiency to have an inverse relationship of some kind to the shield's regular efficiency (e.g. beam damage is divided by shield efficiency rather than multiplied by it, or it's multiplied by 2 - [shield efficiency] rather than the standard shield efficiency, or some such thing). Beams are unique in that they don't cause whatever most weapons do to the shields that creates the feedback that results in hard flux on the power systems.

403

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 04, 2014, 02:04:35 PM »

I am of the opinion that a visual change to beams will not affect my view of them. I find the current graphics for the existing beam weapons to be fine. My issue with beams is more that with many of them, you're giving up some significant portion of a ship's heavy weapons slots for a weapon that just doesn't cut it as a primary armament. Which would you rather have as your primary armament - an Autopulse Laser that can apply ~2000 hard flux (modified by shield efficiency) or damage to the opponent within 2 seconds of entering firing range, or a High Intensity Laser that can't even overcome the base amount of passive flux venting on three quarters of the direct combat destroyers?

As a long-range pressure kind of weapon, beams also suffer in that they kind of lack the ability to punish a target for dropping the shields, venting, or even overloading. They do low amounts of damage over time to a small area where the beam connects with the target hull, so it's relatively easy to mitigate the damage dealt simply by rotating the vessel under fire. Missiles do much better in this role even though they run out as the battle drags on, because they actually have the ability to punish you for dropping the shields or venting at the wrong time, or for being unable to prevent an overload (missiles also tend to be much better at forcing an overload, as it's either a lot of hard flux on top of however much flux you already have, or it's a lot of damage to the hull and armor; beams don't really pose this kind of threat, especially to larger vessels). Missiles have the additional advantage of not interfering with any allied vessel that happens to be between it and the target; beams tend to stop firing when there's a chance of friendly fire, and the ships seem to try to avoid cutting across a beam (sometimes), which messes around with their ability to maneuver.

404

Suggestions / Re: Thoughts (long)

« on: November 04, 2014, 11:31:06 AM »

there is no listing in the UI for things like Volatiles, for example, so I have no idea who needs them and at what prices.

Actually, there is a listing in the UI for things like Volatiles. The problem is that the filter option only shows up when you know a relatively recent (within the week/month/year filter listed above the other filters; changing the timescale filter can change which commodity filters are available) price for the item, and in my experience you almost never see price updates for Volatiles.

So it's all about food shortages, pretty much; I haven't seen a single other type of economic Event during this playthrough.  

No Trade Disruptions? Those tend to produce abnormally high or low prices for a handful of commodities, though they generally aren't as profitable as actual shortages. They do however seem to last longer; in my experience, the food shortages tend to produce a relief fleet that flies off to anywhere that had a shortage within a week or two.

Then there are all the inconsistencies.  Volturn should be a constant source of Lobsters; it's not.  It shouldn't ever be going hungry, because, well, it's an agricultural world- it's not.

I actually wouldn't be terribly surprised if Volturn were an overly specialized world suffering from an incomplete project to modify the local ecosystem to support large-scale production of Volturnian Lobster and whatever else the Domain had wanted Volturn to produce; without the support provided for the project, the ecosystem has gone way out of balance, and Volturnian lobster production on Volturn suffered as a result. The Domain seems to have been primarily concerned with setting up worlds which in the long run would support one another by producing cheap food on worlds like the current form of Tartessus, expensive luxury food on worlds like Volturn, manufactured goods on factory worlds, recycled materials on planets like Agreus, etc. Volturn suffers from two issues - one, whatever the Domain was doing to its ecosystem when the Volturnian lobster was introduced probably hasn't really stabilized, and two, the Volturnian lobster is probably being overfished to bring in enough money to pay for the food imports that Volturn so desperately needs to support its population, since its native aquaculture isn't at a point where Volturn can be considered self-sufficient, at least with regards to feeding itself.

Remember, the Volturnian Lobster is an introduced species (well, sort of; it's a cross between something presumably native, and something from Earth), not something with an established place in the ecosystem. It doesn't seem all that unlikely to me that whatever the lobster is doing to the ecosystem, in combination with whatever changes were made (or were begun) to make Volturn livable and productive and the fishing done by the inhabitants, has resulted in a now-unstable food supply because whatever was meant to keep the ecosystem in balance, and whatever regulations were in place to keep the fisheries at healthy levels, have been out of whack for so long that things have begun to go seriously wrong. It's also something where it's not all that difficult to believe that the low-tech (by comparison to reengineering a planetary environment) solution of just creating special habitats for farming lobsters works better, at least until the planetary environmental engineering project finishes, which would help explain why there are a reasonable number of worlds which are better at producing Volturnian lobster than Volturn is. Heck, if the Domain's planners were reasonably similar to the people of today, they might just have introduced the Volturnian lobster hybrid, noted that it was experiencing a population boom (because it was a highly successful invasive species and was crowding out its competition and not suffering from much predation), called it a success because lots of Volturnian lobster was exactly what they wanted to see on Volturn, and didn't realize that there were long-term issues with the ecosystem caused by the introduction of the species, which would show up after, say, 200 years without whatever support the Domain had been giving Volturn.

That's an explanation which fits the known information reasonably well, in my view. Probably not perfect, and it may not be fully lore-consistent.

405

Suggestions / Re: Change Ship Behavior?

« on: November 04, 2014, 05:00:23 AM »

Or if the engagement range of choice favored the weapons in the earlier weapon groups, or if your checkbox were instead an override to say "engage at this weapon's chosen range" rather than a "consider these weapons when choosing engagement range" option.