Balance-wise, I'm pretty sure things will need nerfs at some point
So if you play a phase fleet, you'll effectively have every enemy fleet running at 1/3 speed.
The new ship systems and the decloak delay sound good. I think the phase mechanics are a the core of the problem though. They're presently just an invulnerability button - and continue to be one. Only now, the invulnerable ship also gets 3x speed. This drastically changes the landscape. No longer can -any- ship escape from combat or keep at range owed to a particularly high speed. The previous balance in fleeing, kiting and pursuit has been flattened with a hammer, and that hammer is phase ships. I don't know how I feel about that, it's the single most metagame-altering change you've made.
It sticks out as immediately imbalanced and un-balance-able. I've harped on about how the speed ceiling has been raised owed to officer skills, and how that changed the feel of the game away from a measured, paced, tactical thing towards action and twitch reflexes, and you responded with your plans to change officer skills more towards the defensive to bring the game back in line with the original feel. And here's a change that goes right back to the speed ceiling and takes an antimatter blaster to it. 
As usual, consider this an uninformed opinion since we haven't played the game with the new mechanics yet. I look forward to trying this out and every new mechanic deserves a grace period.
What you're saying makes sense. A couple of other points:
1) When multiple ships are involved, this balance is still preserved, as you don't need to back off faster than the enemy - you just need to back off so that a friendly ship covers you. It's significantly harder for phase ships to maul things outside a 1-1 scenario. And if we're looking at a 1-1, any ship with a speed advantage has this kind of edge, just not to that degree. Base firepower-wise, phase ships are actually on the low end of the scale for their size class.
2) When considering their actual combat power, they should probably be looked at as being one size or so bigger, which is more closely in line with their costs.
3) Flying a phase ship actually *does* feel more tactical than twich, because you have more time to react to things.
They're certainly powerful and game-changing, though. Well, that's what makes it interesting! Balance-wise, as I said, there probably will be some... adjustments.
in fact, my bet is that if you tool up pursuit frigates for nothing but speed they'd probably fail to catch a phase frigate.
Correct. This is actually intentional; if phase ships can be caught up to by a similar-sized ship, they're hard countered by it, and it's a very binary thing and hard to balance around. The way it is now, phase frigates can be balanced knowing that they can't be chased down (excepting things like the Hyperion...)
maybe the solution is just to have phased ships be able to fire at each other?
(There's actually a ship system that, among other things, will force a phase ship into normal space.)
Or reduce p-time to 2x and don't touch any other stats. Should still be plenty.
that would make the slow-motion effect quite a bit less fun i think, even though i agree it still sounds powerful enough from a balance perspective. but like Achataeon said, we'll just have to wait (q_q) and see.
Yeah, 3x is the lowest where it feels like fun bullet time and not just "moderately slow". Totally subjective, of course.
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Topic: Phase Cloaking - a Deep Dive (Read 57830 times)