Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Save/Load UI, Autosave, Intel Map Markers, and More (04/10/24)
Sounds great, but some small suggestions (mostly cribbed from Endless Space 2's ground combat system):Marines use crew quarters, not storage. So most ships aren't able to carry large numbers of marines. The ship that is built for raids, the Valkyrie, can carry a lot of crew.
1. A max invasion cap that can be modified by ship types (troop transports/siege?), modules, skills.
This limits the amount of just "oh i'll raid today, swap out the spare guns, sell all the trash and AI cores from our last run and load up the gun totting hobos we keep in storage". Fleet composition will actually matter more for serious raids. No showing up with a cruiser and 4 atlas' full of marines and expecting a quick and easy victory.
I think defense platforms are fairly limited by the role that mobility/range tradeoffs play in SS--with narrow exceptions, the smallest stationary platform useful in capital-tier combat can plausibly fit ATC and long-range weapons or TSC. The two uses I see for smaller defense platforms would be as a station-substitute for small-scale combat (e.g. a small colony that would surrender if a proper faction sent an occupation fleet but needs protection from raiders until it can either afford a proper station or catches the attention of a proper faction), and missile/launch bay platforms.Consider the Mudskipper MKII. I'd say small defense platforms armed with Gauss Cannons or long range beam weapons would be reasonable. Even just something like a Tactical Laser Grid with ITU and Advanced Optics would be a reasonable annoyance to larger fleets if the platform is supporting other ships/stations.
The second biggest obstacle to HAG, after rarity, is flux cost. Since the weakening of skills, it is hard for unskilled ships to fire heavy weapons for long. Flux cost of HAG may or may not be high enough to prevent continuous fire. Mark IX is probably the most an unskilled ship can handle.Storm Needler is great if you need to break Battlestation shields. I had a Dominator that used two of them and some missiles. With maxxed out flux systems(and no SO) it could fire them for extended periods of time.
Hellbore is terrible for shooting down fast and numerous targets. Some ships do not need to worry about that weakness because they have other things that cover it. For example, Legion has fighters to take out the chaff. Since Hellbore lost half of its DPS, HAG is decent when raw DPS and ease-of-use are more useful than armor penetration, and the ship cannot use Mjolnir for whatever reason.
If there is one ballistic that seems superfluous, it is Storm Needler. Despite being much-improved in 0.8.x, it still inferior to Mjolnir. Storm Needler has less range, costs more OP. It is probably less effective against hull now than before with minimum armor.
oh. question: is it possible to use the console to add the hullmod, that enables broadsides, to the iliad?There isn't a hullmod that forces broadsides. Its just the way ORA ships are built causes them to broadside with a proper lodout.
