Hello,
not sure if appreciated or at all wanted but I felt like giving some feedback regarding this mod. This comes from somebody who's never played modded before. I wanted to try Nex since the idea of having some conquering to do in the late game sounded alluring. Furthermore I planned to include some shippacks, with the main goal of keeping everything very vanilla in terms of balance. That's how I stumbled on this mod.
Another note: I've been playing this save file since March and I noticed that you've update your mod since then. Not quite sure how much has changed and how much of my experience is still up to date. The version I've been playing on was 0.8.
Very early it was qute clear that your mod was special. Not only do the ships look right at home (since it was my first time playing the new patch, at times I wasn't sure if that new ship was modded or a freshly added vanilla one) but also feel great to play. There is a lot of creativity here. I was blown away when I first found the home system of Kassadar. Their ships are amazing too, even the reskins are elevated by the theme and special hullmod.
I fell in love with the Castigator (LI) right away. It is what I wanted to Eagle to always be and turned out to be my most flown ship by the end.
And imagine my surprise when I found out that even the Halbmond was from your mod. The mini quest offers a unique spin on things and keeps you guessing what cool blueprint you'll unlock next. My only complaint (although more personal preference than anything) is that I dislike tugging around massive capitals everywhere and wish there was an auxiliary ship that offered the same hullmod the Halbmond does, but I'm sure and understand you did it like this for balance reasons.
With that out of the way, I wanted to give my perspective on the Legio. At first I didn't pay too much attention to them and did my own thing in my own corner of the galaxy but at some point I couldn't help but notice that a big part of the sector was turning awfully red. Now that is no complaint in and of itself, I'm pretty new to how Nex works so this might have just been the luck of the draw and one faction snowballing early but either way, I felt forced to intervene in order to preserve some faction variety. A couple of killed fleets in, I didn't really see anything out of the ordinary but then during one battle I noticed a Manticore soloing multiple cruisers of mine. I thought the friendly AI was being silly again but when I rushed in to clean up, I had to learn that the Manticore indeed was able of effortlessly outgunning and outtanking ships thrice his size. I genuinely couldn't believe that it was supposed to be this strong and actually thought it was bugged or at least that I rolled a very unlucky loadout. No, I would soon learn that it was probably the weakest of the daemons.
Anyway, long story short I soon realized that the culprits were the AI ships and got the idea of taking the skill that let's you salvage them. I am not sure if this is intended but the player can indeed salvage them. Yeah, these ships DON'T belong in the player's hand. Like I mentioned at the start, I was aiming for a very vanilla experience with the added ships but these creatures are nowhere close to that. I got my hands on a couple of the frigates with the temporal shell ability and no vanilla content stands any chance against them. They are 6 (I believe?) DP and can solo the simulation paragon fairly easily. I deployed two against the Guardian and they can kill it without breaking a sweat, one would've done it too probably. I haven't tried it but I wouldn't be surprised if two can kill an Ordo, if I as the player was able to control them, I am sure I could solo more than an Ordo piloting a single of these frigates. What about the Tesseract fight? If you tell me 24 DP worth of these monster can do it I'll believe you. 12 DP? Maybe, either way I didn't use them because I didn't want to ruin the fight for me. It's nice to have a 6-24 DP "auto-resolve-button" when you run into 3 fully stacked pirate armadas (or literally any vanilla late game fleet for that matter), but I am not sure that is the intention behind them. 200k - 400k bounties have no hope of even putting a dent into them when I release multiple at once, altought I'm sure even one would be enough...
So why run them when they trivialize the game? Well, where do you get them from? You're not the only one using them afterall. Even fielding these extremely overpowered ships I am struggling against Legio fleets. The thing is, they also have daemons and you probably run a bunch of worthless ships that are hopelessly outgunned (so anything that isn't a daemon). Even piloting the vanilla equivalent of the "I-win-button", the Ziggurat, you'll be struggeling against anything bigger than a destroyer. And don't get me started on the capital ship... You need to overload that thing more than 3 times to kill it, oh and the bigger fleets usually run multiple of them. They are so tanky that you'll feel like you're playing one of these bullet sponge shooters where the bots take a whole sniper magazine to the dome before they notice that someone is shooting at them.
Not only does the combat get warped around Legio, but trading too. Their capital world is the cheapest place to to buy Marines, HA, supplies, the list goes on... Supplies might be cheaper on Chicomoztoc at times but Legio doesn't care about smuggling and you're there already so why not. By the time you made your round trip around their home system, their capital has already new dirt cheap HA for you to buy up once again. It's a damn money printer! I think I must have misunderstood their MO, all this time I thought they were the "bad" guys but no, they wear red because they act as the Santa Claus of the sector, practically giving away stuff. Come to Santa's workshop and get your heavy armaments, kids! But in all seriousness, there is little point NOT to make constant trips to their cap every chance you get. Even when products elsewhere become cheaper due to surplus, odds are they're even cheaper on their capital by default.
So what is the point of this post? My intention was not to write up some sort of rant, although skimming through what I just wrote sure makes it seem like one. I just wanted to give some feedback on why I think it should be made quite clear what you're getting yourself into by playing with this mod. Your OP reads that this mod is supposedly close to vanilla in terms of balance but has some overtuned rare stuff for the player to find. There is no way the Legio is meant by that "rare" stuff, right? They own half the bloody sector on top of Santa's damn workshop. They are everywhere!
There is nothing wrong with having a challenging faction, even an extremely overpowered one as a worthy foe for the player but I feel like that should be made clear. I just wanted a chill playthrough. Had I known that the entire combat, economy, the whole playthough would revolve around the Legio by the end, I'd have turned them off. Do I regret playing with this amazing mod? Not at all, it made my run but also left a sour aftertaste at the end when I learned that I had to either clean this red mess up or move on prematurely. I can't be bothered to blow up all these bullet sponges.
I recommend you have a very clear warning so players that play your mod for the first time know what they are getting themselves into.
Oh, and thanks again for this otherwise fantastic mod! I hope that talented people such as yourself never stop making these mods.
