Interesting overhaul mod.
Not sure if it has been addressed before, but I see others in earlier posts have mentioned the potential balancing issues of logistic ships. Is this by design?
Like cargo hauling. In vanilla, you've got a progression of ships like wayfarer, buffalo / tarsus, colossus, and atlas. Early game with not much to haul, a desire for fast burn speed, and the need for all the ships in your fleet to be combat-capable, it's economical to get a small gaggle of wayfarers to haul your stuff. As your fleet gets larger and you go for a specialized combat fleet with a few supporting logistics ships, the lower operating cost per cargo hauling capacity of the buffalo and then the atlas dictate you swapping to those ships as your need for larger and larger amounts of cargo space in your fleet go up.
However, it AO, this is the inverse. Take a mercury, with its 160 units of cargo capacity. If you expect 15 light years of travel per month, you've got an operating cost of $154/month; $50 for the 0.5 unit of supply, $10 for the crew salary, and $103 for the expected fuel usage of 15ly of travel. That's $0.96 per unit of cargo hauling. Now take a buffalo. $575 per month for 400 units of hauling, or $1.44 per unit. Colossus is a bit better at $1.27 per unit, but the Atlas comes in at $1.69 per unit -- worse than everything except quasi-combat capable haulers like the tarsus or Sci/Tac/Arc variants of the buffalo. Unless you're planning to put your cargo haulers into combat, you're economically best served by just getting a huge fleet of mercury shuttles to haul your loot. Is this intended? What would be the reasoning?
A) Yeah sure it gets more expensive to haul things with larger ships, that's the penalty for moving towards a late game fleet as you hit the 30-ship cap and are forced to move from frigate-sized haulers to capital-sized haulers.
B) Well okay, but a mercury will die on the battlefield in half a second, whereas the Atlas with its fighter bays, better durability, and weapons systems will survive for a while, so you've got to value that for something.
C) Oops!
I feel like this must be an oversight, as the economical improvement of going from dram->phaeton->prometheus for fuel hauling and mudskipper->starliner for crew hauling (nebula is an outlier, nearly 2x more expensive than 4 mudskippers for the same crew hauling) still hold true as they did in vanilla.
Also, with fog of war, are missile ranges overpowered? I feel like an incredibly cheesy tactic is available of building long-ranged missile boats, deploying tanks at the beginning of battle, then reinforcing with the missile boats (so they are far behind the battle lines), then sending the missile boats off secretly to the bottom corners of the map. From there they can fire away at the enemy in the middle of the map (or even the enemy spawn point) with zero risk of being found, nor any depletion of peak performance time since no enemy is near them. You can even deploy a single kite, send him off towards top right, deploy a long range missile boat, send him bottom left, click the biggest enemy ship your kite sees along the way and hit R to missile lock him, and then have your missile boat salvo away until the enemy ship is so damaged it retreats. Send in another kite to acquire a new target, repeat process, trading a kite for a capital or cruiser grade ship each time. Then send in your cruisers and caps to slaughter what enemy destroyers or frigates are left. Round 2 and all that is left of the enemy is a bunch of badly damaged and CR depleted cruisers & caps to tease for the half-second before your fighters take their last 100 or so HP. I've had to use this tactic against a deathstack that appeared out of an asteroid belt, and my apogee needed to clip the nuts of half a dozen capitals. The enemy only seems to search the 80% middle of the battle map, ignoring the extreme edges unless they have seen an enemy fly there -- never mind there is a torrent of missiles coming from the southeast corner boys, keep sweeping the middle of the map until we find this bastard!
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Topic: [0.95.1a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - *hotfix* 4/14/22 (Read 772113 times)