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[Flying Birdy]

For both 0.8 and 0.81, I've been playing a salvage build pirate. And with the latest nerf to leadership maintainance cost reduction, d-mods have risen greatly in relative strength. The salvage playstyle is quite strong, but just requires a different mind set when playing.

First, don't buy ships. Kill people for their ships. Need a super rare ship? You don't need to fly around markets. Go to TT and kill their fleets until you get what you want. Money is only for supplies and crew, and restoring your flagship if you want.

Second, D-mods are amazing. I've begun farming certain fleets to recover ships, in attempts to get specific d-mods on specific ships. Honestly, the supply cost reduction of some d-mods FAR outway its costs for certain ships. For example, I do not fly cargo ships that do not have d-mods (a shipping fleet costing 0.3 supply a day? Yes please. Freighter costing <1 supply per month? Yes please). I do not fly high-maintainance ships without d-mods. Here's my tier of d-mods.

Tier 1: You want these. Negative effects can be ignored.
Compromised Armor
Compromised Hull
Structural Damage

The more the ship relies on shields or maneuverbility, the less relevant the above d-mods are. These d-mods are so good that I prefer hyperion, tempest, afflictor with these d-mods than without. These d-mods are even acceptable on many cruisers flown by the AI, as long as the cruisers are either Mora or dominators.

Tier 2: 10-20% OP to compensate for these d-mods.
Faulty Power Grid - general annoyance on ships. Can be compensated for by playing around with your capacitor and vent loadout.
Unreliable Subsystems - kills SO ships. Otherwise fine.
Glitched Sensor Array - Annoying to have, but can be compensated for through hullmods. think of it as 10-20% OP loss.
Damaged Flight Deck - Annoying, but can be ignored on most carriers. Just need to use fighters that die less (daggers, longbows, etc)

When determining loadouts for ships in the above, do not be afraid to underequip a weapon slot (small weapon in medium turret) or to not equip a weapon at all. Not equipping that rear facing PD might be worth the 4 OP it saves, giving you some extra points for making the ship at least strong in a frontal role.

Tier 3: pretty bad, scrap these ships.
Degraded engines - An honest pain in the ass for most ships. While allocating 10-20 OP for a augmented drive field negates this effect, the D-mod still lowers the potential burn speed for your ENTIRE fleet by 1. This is the one d-mod I do not want to see on my tugs.
Phase Coil Instability - <30 second peak performance time on a SO phase ship? No thanks.

[Megas]

I agree with most of them, but there are some that can vary depending on ship.

Faulty Power Grid can be either tier 2 or 3, depending on ship and ideal configuration.  For example, on a Wolf, Faulty Power Grid means it cannot brawl with hard flux weapons very well, and must be relegated to beam boat.

During 0.8, Glitched Sensors means Paragon could not outrange battlestations.  On the other hand, Glitched Sensors on a carrier could easily be tier 1, since few of them work best without weapons.

Degraded Engines is only tier 3 if it is on my slowest ship, like on an Atlas or Prometheus.  Otherwise, I put it on tier 2.

[SCC]

Armour and hull (D)-mods are deal breakers for me if I use any Mastery ship. Well, to be exact - compromised hull is most of the time OK, but armour-affecting mods aren't. Degraded engines are a non-issue if ship isn't already the slowest in your fleet. Additional deal breaker on any ship, for me, is faulty power grid - I can tolerate it on a scrap ship, I can tolerate it if it's the only (D)-mod, but it decreases survivability and firepower of ships.
Doesn't phase coil instability decrease time compression when in phase? I'd say that's a deal breaker for phase ships, since not only they last shorter, they also have (due to being "slower") last longer - at the same time!
Otherwise... I think I agree with the rest.

[Megas]

Also, Unreliable Subsystems can sometimes be a deal-breaker in grueling fights, especially on smaller ships or carriers.  There were times the reduced performance hurt my carriers hard.

[Cycerin]

Honestly, I think D-mods are too good right now. Pristine ships should be something you covet, not an almost-sidegrade. I used an Onslaught-D with comp armor, powergrid and subsystems for a long time and I'd say there is no practical difference in terms of combat efficiency compared to a mint Onslaught, if you build smart. 20 supplies/deployment? Yes please.

[Megas]

@ Cycerin:  And if the mods are punishing enough, it does not matter too much if the ship and weapons are easily replaceable; just recover the ship, dust it off, and make it fight again.

P.S.  If (D) mods do not hurt enough for the discount, the way to fix that is to lower the benefits, not make the penalties hurt more.  Some of them already hurt quite a bit, but the benefits are often worth it, especially if the only way to get pristine ships is restoration, and that is too expensive to do for every ship.  Until endgame, recovery is usually the only way for me to get more ships.

[Zhentar]

First, don't buy ships. Kill people for their ships. Need a super rare ship? You don't need to fly around markets. Go to TT and kill their fleets until you get what you want. Money is only for supplies and crew, and restoring your flagship if you want.

Any tips on how to find Prometheus and Atlas? I've been challenging myself to get by without ever buying a ship and it's worked out great for combat ships but I've had some trouble finding the civilian ships that I want.

[Megas]

Big salvager fleets (those that go pirate at times) have tankers.  Kill them!  Maybe kill trader fleets for Atlas, or scavenge from such fights between them and pirates (or other).  If you need to kill friendlies to do so, turn off transponder and make sure they do not know you who are before attacking them.  (The game will ask you if they can identify you.)

[intrinsic_parity]

I think pristine ships should have higher max CR, and maybe slightly longer peak performance times.

[SCC]

I think pristine ships should have higher max CR, and maybe slightly longer peak performance times.

The problem is that, supposedly, people will avoid like the plague any ships with (D)-mods if (D)-mods are severe, while if they aren't, they make very little difference.
I think that this might be partially psychological thing - do you think that if every ship could have a (D)-mod or a reverse (D)-mod (improving performance), would people use only best options or would they settle for "normal" ships? Even if ships with reverse (D)-mods had the same stats as the present ships, people would see them more favourably because there aren't 2 levels of (D)-mods, but (D)-mods and reverse, positive (D)-mods! Somewhat dirty trick and it's used in real life as well. I wouldn't go against this implementation, though, because Alex (if he ever did that) would most probably settle on multiplicative modifiers, which would mean, for example, that for every OP you get 11 f/s. But it won't ever happen because it muddles everything unnecessarily... So we're back to square one.

[DMinatrix]

P.S.  If (D) mods do not hurt enough for the discount, the way to fix that is to lower the benefits, not make the penalties hurt more.  Some of them already hurt quite a bit, but the benefits are often worth it, especially if the only way to get pristine ships is restoration, and that is too expensive to do for every ship.  Until endgame, recovery is usually the only way for me to get more ships.

I think that the investment cost into the industry tree is already a good cost towards getting these d-modded ships to be a viable strategy which is what Alex intended with the industry skill, bringing in more viable builds for fleets.  In order to get the maintenance reduction you already need to invest at least 6 points into your skills, and at that point you might as well go with the rest of the tree and grab the halving of d-mod severity for another 3 points, nearly a quarter of your levels are gone (or less depending on how you use your 3 free skill points).  I like how it is right now because I can get a decent difference in feel from a scavenging fleet to a fire superiority fleet based in high tech capabilities and optimizing pristine ships.  Also it's just fun to be able to play the game as a collectathon of sorts as I pick up more free ships and am rewarded for my skill choices while also making myself a bit less potent of an individual pilot of a ship.

[DatonKallandor]

Honestly, I think D-mods are too good right now. Pristine ships should be something you covet, not an almost-sidegrade. I used an Onslaught-D with comp armor, powergrid and subsystems for a long time and I'd say there is no practical difference in terms of combat efficiency compared to a mint Onslaught, if you build smart. 20 supplies/deployment? Yes please.

A skill line focusing on pristine ships would do. Of course D-mod ships seem good now - they've got mutliple skill lines making them better. Pristine ones have zero. The correct thing to do isn't to then nerf D-mod ships and skills so that even with skills they're mediocre.

[Flying Birdy]

I think that this might be partially psychological thing - do you think that if every ship could have a (D)-mod or a reverse (D)-mod (improving performance), would people use only best options or would they settle for "normal" ships? Even if ships with reverse (D)-mods had the same stats as the present ships, people would see them more favourably because there aren't 2 levels of (D)-mods, but (D)-mods and reverse, positive (D)-mods! Somewhat dirty trick and it's used in real life as well. I wouldn't go against this implementation, though, because Alex (if he ever did that) would most probably settle on multiplicative modifiers, which would mean, for example, that for every OP you get 11 f/s. But it won't ever happen because it muddles everything unnecessarily... So we're back to square one.

Theres definitly some psychological component to it. I think players are naturally geared towards min-maxing and thus flying fleets that perform optimally.

I don't know if you've ever played the game darkest dungeon, but that developer essentially forces imperfections upon the player's build (all your "heroes" gain "d-mods", regardless of winning or losing.") That game forces players not to min-max, as it would be game losing. Most players can't get used to imperfections in their build, and thus have difficulty adjusting.

I, myself, being a complete min-maxer, couldn't bring myself to flying one single d-mod ship in my fleet in starsector, until I forced myself to in my salvage save. And even then I thought it was bad, because it was just so weird having ships that had mounts unequipped and/or underequipped. The loss of 9 skills points was annoying too, because I couldn't be a badass combat pilot. Had to force myself to keep playing on that playthrough. 10 hours after my playthrough I still hated my d-mods.

But then I fleet wiped (lost 20 of my ships, only carriers survived) going after while killing a TT fleet. Normally, that would be cause for a reload. However, when I recovered the aurora I was looking for, I thought twice about reloading. Amazingly, I realized that recovering and retooling my garbage fleet (which I recovered in entirety, minus weapons and crew) only costed about 100k. Definitely worth it.