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General Discussion / Additional Information Compilation (for Skill Changes)
« on: July 03, 2021, 04:43:42 AM »
OP:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22185
The post is mainly for my self reference. If you want to reply, go to OP.
If this is against the forum rule please PM, let me know and delete the post
(Regarding comment about baseline should make an alpha radiant at 60%)
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=22185
If this is against the forum rule please PM, let me know and delete the post
Worth noting, also, is that the Radiant is now 60 deployment points - and, of course, the Automated Ships threshold is tuned to work with that. But the point is that other automated ships may be worth another look; in particular the Rampart, which is now only 15 points and brings a fair bit of firepower.
Re: d-mods, that's a good point and something I didn't mention. The non-combat d-mods that can end up on combat ships now come with a reduction to maximum CR, so that they have *some* effect on combat performance. So, Degraded Life Support, Increased Maintenance, and Faulty Automated Systems. (None of these can roll for automated ships, btw, since that penalty would have an outsized effect there...)
I did, actually! It's now "Tactical Drills", boosts 240 points worth of ships (but with only +5% damage - I try to keep bonuses meatier, but +10% fleetwide is just... too much), and indeed buffs your marines.
I *am* prepared for this one, actually! The game doesn't limit what you can put the hullmod on - just, only the first two ships with it on the battlefield are linked, assuming you're in one of them. If one is destroyed, the remaining one can link with another ship, etc.
The hullmod also can't be built in - not to prevent exploits, but to 1) keep SO company and 2) it's a cheap mod and it's not a great idea to do it since you might want to remove it and it's a waste of an s-mod slot, anyway.
(Regarding comment about baseline should make an alpha radiant at 60%)
Hmm. Let me take a look - I might've mixed up some numbers or just mis-remembered exactly where it's at in 0.95a. ... yeah, let me just raise the threshold to 120 points, at least - so that it's at 50% and out of debuff range.
(You do have the option of giving it an extra 10% (or even 15%) CR, though 10% involves going up into Industry, and making that 15% involves going all the way up into Leadership, as well.)
I've increased the XP to get from level 1 to 5 a decent amount, and from 5 to 10 by a smaller amount. Nothing drastic, though. Oh, also - only of interest for modded games, but raising the level cap will no longer mess with the SP gain rate once you reach max level.
I'm not saying that redefining the trees by a more strictly game-mechanics-driven meta-organization is wrong or anything, I just don't like it as much as what we're used to. I suspect that Technology will still be the player's first stop if they want to make their ships into hotrods (now that I'm thinking about it, will Tech still have a +10/10 vents/caps skill?), and having the ultimate hotrod skill in a different tree, one that feels less focused on this kind of tweaking, seems pretty weird when you're not looking at it in relation to the whole design philosophy.
Fair! The 10/10 effect is now 5/5 and rolled into Flux Regulation, btw (which gives +10% instead of what it used to).
To be quite honest, you're just cheesing the battle size mechanics at that point - that's not something I can really worry about as a balancing concern. I think ideally the game would be played at battle size 400.
I don't think that's a good solution. That basically makes it so that a Reaper (1× 4K damage, reduced to 1900) will end up doing less damage than two Hammers fired back to back (first hit gets reduced to 900, second hit gets the full 1500, total 2400 damage). Not to mention that any weapon that has high per-shot damage balanced by low rate of fire (either directly or indirectly by means of high flux cost) will be severely reduced in usefulness.
The numbers are a bit off - since "-25% hull damage" from the base skill applies first. But "more small hits do more damage than fewer large hits" is an intrinsic property of the effect. For example, without the "every 2 seconds" rule, a Reaper deals 1500 out of its 4000 potential damage, while 6 shots dealing 500 damage each deal 3000 out of their potential 3000 damage.
Edit: with regards to fighters, I was talking from the persective of a interceptor/support fighter user, not the bomber user, and that +100 target leading elite bonus was soooo goodAh! 50% of that bonus went to Fighter Uplink.
Although I do have a few questions. Given we now have percentage reductions in deployment points for ships, will they be allowed to be fractional, or will they be rounded? For example, does a Lasher without officer and under Support Doctrine cost 3 DP, 3.2 DP or 4 DP to deploy? And does Support Doctrine add with or multiply with the reduction from Derelict operations (20+30=50% off DP costs?). That will allow for some interesting fighter saturation attempts. Assuming they add, and if you get choosy with your D-mods, you can get something like 18 Herons worth of fully operational fighters in 180 DP (or 36?! Condors).They're rounded so e.g. 5.5 becomes 6, while 5.4 becomes 5. The Lasher thus costs 3 points. That does means that some ships will benefit a bit more or less than they "should" but I really don't want to get into fractional deployment points!
The modifiers from DO and SD are multiplicative, as with other reductions. (Though under the hood, the SD multiplier is flat, while DO is a multiplier, but functionally it amounts to them being multiplicative...)
Hmm, the fighter thing could get a little weird, yeah. I suppose we'll see! (36 Condors would require increasing the number-of-ships cap...)
And Fury at... maybe 18-22 DP (?)... will still be a very good high tech cruiser, I mean look at the flux stats and mobility of this thing, it's a bit of a mash-up of some of the good parts of Eagle, Falcon, Aurora and Shrike.
Good guess, it'll be 20! (So will the Falcon(P), btw - another ship that's, to be honest, a bit overpowered - but also fun, and I don't want to change the ship itself.)
One step ahead of you! Containment Procedures now reduces crew losses by up to 50%, at 240 total deployment points in your fleet. With that and potentially Blast Doors (and/or Damage Control from Support Doctrine, if you want to combine top skills that way), I think there's solid options to take care of this.
Thankfully we can modify the ship cap pretty easily, though the artificial limitation of how many ships you can recover at once is still going to be annoying.
(Worth mentioning: that's going up to 24 normal + 24 difficult.)
Given three ships all with Neural Interface: A (Flagship), B and C
Transfer from A to B, A and B receive bonuses. Then transfer to B to C, is it B and C with bonuses or is it A (Flagship) and C which get bonuses?
You can only transfer between two ships at any given time. If all three are on the field, then you'd only have A and B linked and receiving bonuses.
I guess if the original ship leaves, I cannot Neural Link to another, and... can it actually swap out of a neural link ship via command shuttle? (If so, that is some advanced cloning-on-demand technology for the player to body surf, especially on a ship that cannot support human crew.) I get that if the old flagship leaves, Neural Linking back is impossible.
If you swap out of the "linked" (but not original) ship the shuttle will take off from the original ship or its hulk. If neither is present (i.e. if it retreated, or the hulk drifted off the map) then it'll follow the standard thing it does when you "transfer command" without having your flagship deployed - it'll just fade in somewhere near the target ship and go there.