What kind of big buff? I thought it's already the strongest in the game. Not cruel enough, are you? I think remnant unique weapons drop would be nice addition.
10,000 more max flux and higher armor (iirc) but doubled the cooldown between teleports.
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I am a cruel lord indeed. Regarding unique weapon drops: I like this idea! I'll keep this in mind for future updates. This one is already getting massive and with the recent feedback continues to grow.
Faction ships review time!!
Nice, thanks!
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Remnant: Holy crap fleet. Good thing they can't burn. Actually lost against everyone in auto resolve. Radient has sucide tendency to teleport into battle immediately and of course die. When will I be able to capture one, hurry up dev.
The wait is worth it for the quality that comes with updates, trust me. The suicide tendency might be partially helped by the above buff. A teleport into a bad situation is less likely as the ship is now monstrous in battle. But retreating teleports are less likely too- so a trade off there which mostly benefits player convenience at the expense of additional difficulty when encountering that ship.
I'll take a look at autoresolve, though, that shouldn't be happening so I probably forgot to change the FP values.
Archean Order: Revenant ship is pretty bad, lacking a lot of weapon mounts, also a very serious matter to all energy base ship is that the weapons flux/damage ratio are the most inefficient. It's usually self suicide all the time by firing till no enough flux for shield. Mine got killed by a Legion(XIV) with no crafts, so bad I don't want to recover it. I think Archean needs one more frontline capital ship or repurpose that Revenant. Megalith is pretty bad in AI fleet as it's so slow, the front line are all gone before it arrive. OP Phase bomber.
Everything mentioned here except the energy weapons flux/damage ratio has had some changes. Notably, the Megalith is no longer a combat carrier to the AI and the speed limiting and replacement increase hullmod has been removed. This will make it get to the battle far more quickly.
Additionally, I'm (right now actually) coding a hullmod to hopefully reduce the cooldown of it's ship system to replace the carrier hullmod. So the Megalith is a special ship that still replaces fighters quickly due to its system- but without the carrier limitations. It will be a true dreadnought indeed and very difficult to take down. It's deployment cost is substantially more as well.
Adamantine: Overall OPnessly balance. Hivemind Orb is OP, projectile speed wise, can't be countered with PD. Widow is your best Anti-craft support but usually, shoot ship instead. Great fighters loadout. Has the strongest star fortress of all with so many Reapers. AD>High Tech>AO.
Hivemind is meant to be relatively uncounterable and force an engagement by the player. The downside? AI can't determine this and so in the player's hands it's practically an "I win" button in large amounts. It's meant to be really rare as a result. To be fair, most legendary weapons feel that way, though.
Psi-Corp: Why are you even here? Has the weakest fleet of all. Could make do as a minor faction. Apogee is weaker than vanilla. Odyssey is Odyssily weak.
They are supposed to be a
little weak (they are the underdog you root for) but I'll take a look if they are too much so. Other feedback has also been given related to those, so lot's to go on/look at there.
Tri-Tac: Paragon speed is just superb than vanilla, the second best ship after Tyrant. Astral missing one small mount texture. Harbinger is pretty cheap this time. Auto resolve may never be in their favor.
I'll take a look at the Astral texture thanks for that find! Why is autoresolve not good for them, I wonder? Their FP are just as high as Hegemony ships. I wonder if it is their fleet size... hmm.
Hegemony: Strongest fleet below Remnant. Devastator + Boltter is great. Onslaught(XIV), apart from the ability and terminator beams, is very strong for 30+5 points (not sure but look like it’s bug at 30 instead of 35). Terminator is actually a very crappy beam. Can't it be thicker to look more imposing? Normal Onslaught might actually be stronger with more ballistic? Legion(XIV) ability is so good, a very strong fire support ship as well. Dominator with Reaper is scary and can fire guns indefinitely with so little flux cost for some ballistic weapons. Eagle and Falcon (all models except AD) are not so great, easy to kill, can't kill anything maybe due to gun arc.
Onslaught(XIV) is 30+9 now (iirc) (nope checked and still 30+5) and it's Terminator Beams are longer ranged now and represent a cost efficient alternative and higher OP opportunities. This really improved the AI's use of them, specifically.
As far as looks and Terminator balance, should do doable. I never thought of the Terminator as bad though. It strikes with such speed it is really easy to sneak shots in while the shields are down. If it's used on shields its bad, though, definitely.
Persean: A little love for midline ship? Executor and Conquest Feel great but a bit squishy. Has good balance weapons. I do feel that there are too many high tech ships and would like to have more midline for Persean, Diktat, and Independence.
Noted. I have another faction in mind, too, that will mostly use midline ships so that will expand the roster as well.
Prate/Ludd: Practice targets. Very threatening early game. Pillager is too squishy. I think the smallest fleet is still too large for starters. Can there be an additional smaller size fleet like a picket roaming out of the system like Luddic mini fleet for pirate? It could also be paired with a mini trader fleet for the would be pirate starter.
Pillager is probably squishy on the pirate side since I think it has D-mods. In general, though, it's speed and firepower are it's main attributes so it needs to be a tiny bit squishy. Fleet sizes are being adjusted in the next official update.
Overall Frigates: Too slow to survive. Have no meaning endgame. I think frigate should be half as fast as the average bomber/gunship, at least 120-150 in speed without boost. It should be balanced so that even with navrelay it will still be lower than fighter speed. Frigate should be an annoying ship that is hard to kill. I do imagine frigates as the Millenium Falcon fast but cannot shake away TIE fighters but also won't get swarm by it either. Also, peak performance time is not enough.
Made some notes here. It will likely also help the collision issue to do this, so I will definitely do something here. Maybe this update, maybe the next. It's a pretty substantial change to make that could break a lot of things easily so I will need to test a lot.
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After more testing, the consortium start is very doable even with the 1 frigate agent start. Just worked my way up from that start to getting a doom AD in iron man. The night reaver start isn't too hard once you buy a freighter, which only takes a couple months of commission salary. I haven't tested the doom yet, but if the harbinger and the stats are any guide I will probably be soloing small fleets with it. The flux dissipation is higher than a battleship, so phasing between massive damage bursts to reload and dissipate flux is likely an extremely powerful tactic with the mod changes.
If you want to make the consortium fleets extra scary, I suggest making the default loadouts include insulated engines. The players wouldn't see them until they are quite close.
Edit: the Doom AD is less OP than I expected from using the harbinger. The triple plasma cannon harbinger is somewhat uniquely OP.
Thanks for the tests. I'll take a look at the harbinger. Sounds like some reduced dissipation is in order.
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I noticed that when I had 2 Apogees in my fleet, whenever I equipped them with any fighters they were waaay too timid and never used any of their guns offensively, only using their fighters to attack which really squanders their amazing flux potential to be more aggressive. Only when I got rid of all fighters they had during refit, then they behaved normally.
I dug into the ship_data.csv in the hulls folder in your mod and noticed that under the hints column, the Apogee was labeled as 'CARRIER, COMBAT'. I'm assuming that this is telling it to act as a combat carrier? In any case, it never moved within range to use its energy weapons.
once I got rid of that tag, my Apogees behaved much better and closed in to attack with all of its weapons. Could this be the reason why Apogees feel a lot weaker in this mod?
Fixed for the next update, good catch! Forgot I did this because of the large number of bays before I made the carrier changes. Even not considering the AI issues, it isn't really an apt description now.
Been having a lot of fun with your mod though, having a blast on my second playthrough of the game!
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Glad to hear it!
*EDIT*
I'll take a look at autoresolve, though, that shouldn't be happening so I probably forgot to change the FP values.
Well, no they should be good. Not sure why this would happen to be honest. It appears like they should autoresolve at a higher win rate according to FP stats.
Additionally, I'm (right now actually) coding a hullmod to hopefully reduce the cooldown of it's ship system to replace the carrier hullmod. So the Megalith is a special ship that still replaces fighters quickly due to its system- but without the carrier limitations. It will be a true dreadnought indeed and very difficult to take down. It's deployment cost is substantially more as well.
Actually I did this in a new ship system for the Megalith that does the same thing. The new built-in hullmod is just to make it raise it's shields faster for AI purposes (I removed the built-in accelerated shields in favor of this- they will stack).