Ok! Review from just an hour of playtime (and reading your manual):
I chose the Wolf and Drone Tender start, and immediately bought a Condor-H and a Steady carrier officer (level 3). A rather nice find in the starting Corvus black market. Skills are Combat 1 with Defensive subsytems and Impact Mitigation.
Loadouts:
Spoiler
Drone Tender: Default.
Wolf armed with: Starting set, took off the + burn speed engine mod to add stabilized shields and 2 more caps.
The condor is armed with: A Retribution, a Talon, a mass driver and dual autocannon facing forwards, a salamander and 2 bolas, 1 point defense gun forwards and 2 machine guns backwards. 12 Caps, 5 Vents
First impressions, in no particular order:
I like the long delay, long range skimmer. Weapon placement on the Wolf is nice, as is the Condor - I really like the more, smaller mounts on ships that I've seen. Missile balance is nice - a lot of HE burst from swarmers, but they rely on the target having PD and shields down or they do nothing. Bola SRM's on the Condor are surprisingly effective! Really a nice little missile, and your balance of refire time vs reload speed is really good.
Piloting the Wolf so far is quite boring. None of the weapons on it take flux except the swarmers and my dissipation quickly takes care of that, so I don't need to dart in and out of combat to vent (no flux management). Its 'combat speed' is only 70, so if I'm not travelling (larger 0 flux bonus) its very sluggish. I just kind of sit near an enemy pointing near them until they die, which takes a while due to higher armor and lower dps. And the guns fire slowly, so there isn't much to look at either
. The enemy, just pirates so far, don't have anything that pressures the (7400 with .85 efficiency) shield very well, and with everything doing so little damage/having a long refire timer I can just vent at 700 range or so and take like 5 armor damage if I'm feeling lazy. Or use a skimmer charge and pop away if I'm feeling like not risking it. The Wolf does have the same deployment cost as the Condor, so maybe its just supposed to be a very powerful ship compared to pirates? Whatever the case, there's just nothing for me as a pilot to
do while using it.
I did have one good fight where I was very outnumbered and I was trying to take down a kite - it could dodge every shot from the pulse cannons at medium range and was faster than me so I needed to skim on top of it repeatedly without getting fragged by its missiles. That was a good interaction.
The 'shields up reduces passive venting too' hasn't effected me at all yet, will reserve judgement.
The fighters make things more interesting, and I quite like all of the different kinds you've made. I really like how they have defined roles, and I really like how every cruiser has fighter bays, though I haven't been in any combats with cruisers yet. The fighters themselves are moderately effective, though as with everything their overall DPS is low. Certainly the Condor loadout above can smack around pirates with ease. From reading your manual, I think that the fighter update from a few versions ago pre-empted a lot of your fighter changes - speeds and wing sizes seem similar to vanilla. Balance is a bit better than vanilla imo and the few carriers I've tangled with were not overpowered, perhaps because they didn't have good escorts.
Smaller fighter size + low hitpoints works great! PD weapons are good at their roles without being effective in ship to ship combat, while the slow projectile speed of main guns makes them ineffective unless in a great big barrage.
Weapons:
Visuals, descriptions, and relative balance of power seem good from what I've seen so far (and I already said I liked the missiles and fighters). I am skeptical of having entire classes of weapons with 0 flux - but I also understand that that is how you are differentiating 'assault' type weapons from 'fire support' type weapons. Looking at my starting Wolf, I really think the ship would be a flat 50% stronger if I took out the forward PD and replaced it with another pulse cannon - there's no flux usage to balance around. You did say in your manual that specialization is important, so is this just a manifestation of that? Removing the flux management of SS combat contributes to dull frigate combat, but I'll wait to see how big ship play turns out.
Suggestions:
Hard to make because I haven't played much and don't know the larger ships, but... double frigate offense or half their defense? Higher speed? More weapon mounts for frigates in general?
Author
Topic: [0.95.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - *hotfix* 4/14/22 (Read 759620 times)