I wouldn't call the game too hard at the moment, just not really that balanced for the player against the endgame threats. When I ask for fleet compositions to take on the hardest threats in the game all I ever get are "just use the
", or just phase spam", or "just abuse Derelict Contingent or Safety Overrides with story points". It should be possible to take on these fleets without abusing obviously broken game mechanics, and with a wider variety of fleet compositions provided they're well built and heavily story-pointed.
Part of the problem is that these end-game fleets cannot realistically be fought head on by most standard ships due to their officers coupled with the sheer numbers of them, they almost always have the DP advantage from the get-go and this incentivises playing the objectives much more. This would be fine, except it requires your ships to be much faster than theirs so they can can escape the central mass of enemies and flank to re-acquire the objectives. The issue with this is that (aside from it ruling out most midline and lowtech fleets
) is that that sort of gameplay is more focused on ordering the AI around the map the whole time from the tac screen (something Alex I know wanted to avoid) AND it requires a lot of CR to be able to slowly pull apart the swarm as individual units break off. Obviously you can do better with the CR if you use skills like Wolfpack Tactics, give them Hardened Subsystems, and bring as many ships as you can, but this is playing counter to the intended design of this patch of having a diverse fleet somewhere between 180-240 DP. It just feels like older patches with capital spam, except instead you're spamming destroyers and frigates and outright avoiding capitals
.
Ideally I'd like to see it be possible for each design type (low tech, midline, high tech) to be able to tackle the threat in their own ways given they invested in, and are appropriately outfitted. If anyone has done this, especially with low-mid tech, I'd love to see it.