@scarfaceGood essay, did your due dilligence. yea, you can change the price, its in uhhh... ship_data.some excel-like file.
I've got to be accurate sometimes, you know? The inherent shame of creating s.posting threads about the XIV Dominator being a crab and all that had to have their opposite written eventually
I am aware of how to edit ship files, but I won't do it. I'm under the opinion it's a very selfish thing to do in the first place, since it's only done for yourself and it more or less
bastardizes the mod to obey your selfish needs.
If I think something about a certain mod needs to be changed I'll
complain push a discourse for chages based on well-explained reasons as long as I'll have the mod installed and I'm actively interacting with the content/mechanics it introduces, hence the essay
And you got it almost right, except for one thing, surge damage. I loved conquests. like, a lot. i used them with either reapers or hammer barrages to one shot enemy capitals or space station sections. No other capital ship has that kind of surge damage. However, role of Staple is to trade one for one with other capital ships of low and high tech as well as oppose redacted ships. you will find it very hard to actually maintain your damage and outdamage other capital ships due to low flux. i should know, i flew staple for dozens of hours, along with most of my other ships when i was making sector wide empire. also, AI does well with staple, like you said. also another reason for its stats. I envisioned midline to be the norm of the sector, with high-tech being rather restricted and low-tech something that only hegemony or crazies use. But again, you can change the price. if you dislike price of staple. Oh and lower OP on staple is intentional too, to prevent some uber builds.
Alright, now that I've laid the foundations regarding the Staple's stats compared to a Conquest and what
I think would be a better DP for it, I'll show you a more
empyrical kind of data:
personal experience!
I've currently got 2 Conquests and a Staple in my fleet (they're mod Conquests from Kazeron Narvarchy with buffs similar to XIV varints, but they get 10% better handling and 5% less shield samage instead)
The Two Conquests are the definition of
tryharding. They're purpose built to fight [Redacted] and [Endgame Stuff]. They have 6 Level officers with the absolute perfect skills for them and:
-
Elite Missile Specialization allowing the two squalls to have
300% ammo (when combined with EMR) and
double the rate of fire with half the reload time.
-
Elite Target Analysis allowing the Conquest to deal
240% EMP damage across the two mjolnir Cannons, the two Hypervelocity Drivers, the two squalls, the two sabot pods and even the entirety of the Point Defence system, which is from High tech Expansion and also deals EMP damage.
(I ended up switching those two missiles for actual sabots later, yeah)
Giving you an idea of how well it performs:
The Staple on the other hand has been set up...suboptimally, really. Triple Gauss and enough Flux Dissipation to fire them does not
sound bad and certainly does not perform bad in the designer (it beats 3, decently set up 40DP capitals in the designer at once now, just FYI) but the AI on such a mobile ship tends to switch target very often and Gauss despite being augmented by Turret Gyros still don't perform well when the ship's costantly switching targets.
Then there's also to mention my Staple officer is suboptimal and I've got to find a good one that
-is
aggressive-has helsmanship, Reliability Engineering, Gunnery Implants, shield modulation, Ranged Specialization and Target Analysis
-has made Ranged Specialization and Target Analysis
Elite to both do a disgusting amount of more EMP damage
and basically hit with the large ballistics all the time.
Here's some samples of Remnant fights where these two designs were in it at the same time:
Sample 1: Remnant Ordo with Alpha Core BrilliantsIn this fight the arguably subpar staple build not only did
better damage than Conquest builds that litterally
fire two squalls as fast as if they had 4 of them but the fact it gets a 360° shield and more base flux capacity also meant it took a lot less damage when compared to the conquest, that as of this patch would rather orient the shield towards some bloody Lux Heavy fighters than in the general direction of that Ludd-Forsaken Radiant with 5 Tachyon lances.
Sample 2: Bigger Remnant Ordo with both Alpha Core Brilliants and RadiantsYou can see one out of two Conquests did more total damage, but if you closely look at
what the Conquests and the Staple actually damaged during battle you'll notice that as the
Conquests were cleaning up smaller remnants, the Staple was busy
tanking and slapping Radiants.
I don't know what else I can say about this really.
If a suboptimal Staple with a meh Officer, no elite skills and poorly thought out setup at best
is better at balnding Alpha Core spam remnants better
than Conquests buffed up the whazoo does not convince you about the staple being worth a bit more deployment points, I don't know what will
Addendum: I've finally gotten myself an aggressive officer for my Staple, and while I denied myself the pleasure of making a 6 Sabot SRM pod build by Integrating Flux Distributor instead of Expanded Missile Racks, I'm pretty damn sure a Staple with
-2x Mjolnir
-2x MK.9 Autocannon
-2x Hypervelocity Driver
-2x Ion beam
With the same officer my tryhard conquests have will perform better in every single way and won't have the issue of running out of ammo either, not to mention it can reasonably fit both Automated Repair Unit and resistant Flux conduits thanks to having more OP, which added to the 360° shield makes it disgustingly durable for a ship with this much mobility and firepower.
Addendum Nr.2I personally envision a tryhard Staple to have (Integrated) Hardened Shields/Integrated targeting Unit/Expanded Missile racks and a choice between
-6x harpoon pod, 3x Mk.9 Autocannon,1 Mjolnir, 2 Ion Beam
-6x Sabot pod, 2x Mk.9 Autocannon, 2 Mjolnir, 2 Ion Beam
-Stabilized Shields, Solar Shielding, Automated Repair Unit, Resistant Flux Conduits, rest of OP into vents first and capacitors later
-An Aggressive/reckless officer with Helsmanship, Reliability Engineering, Shield Modulation, Gunnery Implants, Elite Missile Specialization, Elite Target Analysis
I don't think there needs to be a collection of screenshots to showcase why the above build would befit a 50DP superbattlecruiser rather than a 40DP one, or would you like me to do that?
You should look into price of superships too, I'd actually appreciate insight into that since i just kinda eyeballed the DP
I only have the blueprints for the Pelagornis and the Ragnarok but I'm currently on constructing them both while I'm currently 100% exploring the sector. Some initial thoughts:
I only think the Pelagornis has a fitting nameThe
Luddic Path does not have a iota of Norse culture in it, naming their biggest ship
Ragnarok is therefore very wierd. Better names that currently come to my mind would be Path, Apostle, Judgement. They all fit their lore much better:
-
Path speaks for itself. It's the name of the faction, signifies a path to both redempion for its followers and leaves a path od destruction to the damnent servants of Moloch and mammon!
-
Apostle is a bit more subtle, but it would describe the ship as Ludd's most devout follower, the one that's willing to go out of its way the most to fulfill the Martyr's final wishes
-
Judgement is rather straightforward. It's the ship in the Luddic path that's most likely to bring just that to the servants of the twin devils.
Nagato, again, comes from Japanese lore (and Naruto, unironically the last good chapter in both the anime and the manga) and does not fit all that well in the naming Scheme of ships that are more or less all derived from the
Conquest. I've only got one name suggestion but I do think it fits the Dreadnought rather well:
PhalanxIt's the main battle formation of the armies under the command of Alexander the Great, one of if nt the world's most successful
Conqueror (along Genghis Khan, but he's a lot more famous for the amount of offspring he generated than the land he had under his control) and it fits the ship very well.
It was an almost impassable wall of long spears across three rows all pointing forward in real life, and it's going to be
an almost impassable wall of long range lead in StarsectorAs for balance, I don't know yet. They've got relatiely low ordinance Points for their Deployment Points but I can see a lot of integrated hullmods coming with the ship, so they might not be all that off DP-wise.
My issue (that's not balance related) is their 200 Deployment Point Cost. You're more or less unable to deploy them unless you either play at 400 battle size or edit the battle size setting in the settings.json file, which more or less breaks game balance when playing at 400 B.S. or lower since,
regardless of your Deployment Points, you can always deploy at least one ship.
Example: You're fighting a remnant ordo at default (
300) battle size and you
only get 120 Deployment Points at the start of the battle, but
you'd still be able to deploy a 200 Deployment Point Dreadnaught despite that,
effectively cheating game balance.Rebalancing all these ships around 120, 150 DP at most would not only solve this issue but also allow more varied fleet compositions that include them. I would even argue it would be great for this mod to work in unison with
Varya's Sector and have these ships appear in
Special Bounties. I also would totally envision these ships to appear in very big, endgame fleets belonging to their own factions if they were "only" 120 Deployment points.
I'll have more feedback regarding them when I end up using them, have a good read until then!