Does this mod tweak REDACTED fleets at all beyond adding some ships? I think i fought them last like before .95 but *** hell the amount of PD they're fielding was absolutely insane. I had 2 14th legions with S-mods, a paragon with S-mods, 2 14th dominators, with support cruisers and they got utterly obliterated by a medium fleet. Missiles and fighters weren't getting within 500 range and i watched a destroyer take my paragons full firepower and stay flux neutral. I had 10 officers, 3 of them level 7 the rest level 6 with everyone having at least 1 elite skill.
I'm going to drop all carriers and missiles and try to build a pure gun fleet that has nothing but kinetic weapons then just save scum to see what works because i've never seen such brutality haha. I even tried to take on a station with that fleet and it was firing non stop while pooping out insane swarms of fighter craft haha. I remember high threat systems being attrition warfare but i don't remember losing an entire capital fleet so convincingly before.
Just colony mods, this is the only ship/weapon mod i'm currently using. Its late game and my colonys are making tons of cash so i can afford to order new capital ships just to fight REDACTED fleets. I'm guessing its the jump in AI officers from medium threat systems to high because even my exploration cruiser fleet was handling medium fleets just fine. The biggest problem is my torpedoes are absolutely useless and won't get through--like missile and fighter weapons just aren't an option which is kinda nuts.
I remember having to swap out to a heavy kinetic build back in the day to deal with radiants just to keep pressure on them but my 50DP, 3 S-mod, lv7 officer paragon was getting bullied by that 25DP cruiser which was just blowing my mind.
The 0.96a energy weapon buffs may be the culprit. The small and medium Burst PD lasers got OP reductions and an additional charge, while the Gravitron beam got a shield debuff (5%/8%/10% more damage for 1/2/3+ beams respectively).
It doesn't help that - from what I've observed - REDACTED ship
loadouts can be completely random as well. So far as I can tell the game normally uses a bunch of presets most of the time, since you're dealing with standardized navies, but that's not so with certain groups. Their weapons, and I presume hullmods, can be totally random at times. There might be some general guidelines like "fit at least X% or X points of PD", but I haven't delved too deep into the code and loadout systems to say for sure.
Anyway point is I've seen a Radiant fitted with 5 Paladin PD arrays - as you can imagine, fighters and missiles couldn't get anywhere near the thing, but it had far less firepower than your average Radiant and so crumpled like so much tinfoil when its support was taken out. Conversely I've also seen one that had several (possibly a full rack of 5!) Tachyon Lances and was utterly monstrous, because the sheer amount of EMP it could put out would simply "turn off" or instantly flux-overload literally any ship it so much as glanced at; fighting it was basically a case of using one ship to bait and tank the damage whilst everyone else wailed on it before the thing's support took out the tank. God forbid the monster decide to stop focusing on disabled targets because it would just run through and turn
everyone off, at that point it's reload your last save time.
Sometimes you may just run into a group that hard-counters your fleet setup, and you either have to avoid it until it despawns (
if it despawns) or retool to take it out. I've lost some good ships that way even in pre-0.96.
