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[Silveressa]

Honestly my take is that this level of brainstorming won't take us much far when there are so many other unknowns. At the end of the day this will be better suited for the post-patch patch that is aimed at refining the experience.

I've been following along with the discussion thus far, (not having anything worthwhile to add so far) and that's kind of what I've been thinking for most of it?

Crunching numbers and theorizing is nice, but until we see how the next update plays and how the weapons all balance out in actual game it's kind of a moot point given that experience will, (perhaps dramatically) alter everyone's insight and give new ideas on how to tweak things. (If indeed, changes are actually necessary after we see how they do work in play.)

All that aside, the new patch is looking super promising and I'm eager for a chance to enjoy it when it's ready.

[Embolism]

While we're talking about changes to existing stuff, I got a few minor things to suggest...

• The Prometheus Mk.II and the Colossus Mk.II should have built-in Expanded Missile Racks. They're both converted haulers of considerable size, surely there's lots of room for more ordnance in those cargo holds slash giant fuel tank. Hammer Barrage runs out of ammo far too quickly as it is.

• The Venture should get two Mining Pod Wings instead of just one. It doesn't feel right that its drone complement is weaker than the frigate-sized Shepherd. Could also give it the Salvage Gantry built-in hullmod to make it even more like a big Shepherd, maybe nerf Salvage Gantry's cruiser bonus (30) to be the same as the destroyer-sized Salvage Rig (25).

• The Hound (LP) should have Accelerated Ammo Feeder instead of Flare Launcher. This would be in line with the LP Cerberus and Brawler having their ship systems changed to AAF.

• The Hermes should have 75 cargo space instead of 50. It's described as a hauler and is about the same size as the Hound, yet the Hound has 75 cargo space. 50 is the same as the Wolf.

• The Brawler (TT) should have built-in Flux Coil Adjunct and Flux Distributor. Skins can't seem to modify flux stats, so making these built-in would be a way to give the TT Brawler more flux to support less efficient energy weapons.

• The Gryphon's Missile Autoforge should be converted into a built-in hullmod that provides 4x missile ammo and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Missile Racks. As it is it's basically just 2x ammo on top of built-in Expanded Missile Racks that requires you to back off once a fight to vent flux, hardly the most riveting of combat decisions. Its ship system can be changed to Fast Missile Racks instead, always seemed a bit weird that the sole missile-focused ship doesn't have an offensive missile system that other, much less dedicated ships have access to.

• The Trident needs something to make it competitive against the Dagger. It's less OP-efficient per Atropos compared to the Dagger, is much slower than the Dagger, and losing one cuts wing firepower by half instead of one-third. Its better shields is almost completely negated by its slow speed, and better armor means nothing when losing shields disables the bomber completely anyway. I'd suggest giving the Trident some form of PD laser, like it used to have.

[Goumindong]

The trident has been advantages to the dagger and its speed is one of them. The slower speed means that it’s more likely to cycle properly with longbows or other priority kinetic dmg. Daggers, especially Vs targets a long ways away. Are likely to shoot their atropos into shield before the longbows get there to sabot.

[Thaago]

Huh, shouldn't the fighter wing offset positions deal with that? On astrals the daggers and longbows seem ok... but if not, then the offset on daggers should be upped a bit to make them go behind the longbows.

[SonnaBanana]

• The Venture should get two Mining Pod Wings instead of just one. It doesn't feel right that its drone complement is weaker than the frigate-sized Shepherd. Could also give it the Salvage Gantry built-in hullmod to make it even more like a big Shepherd, maybe nerf Salvage Gantry's cruiser bonus (30) to be the same as the destroyer-sized Salvage Rig (25).

{/quote]
Agreed, Venture need logistical buffs so much.

• The Gryphon's Missile Autoforge should be converted into a built-in hullmod that provides 4x missile ammo and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Missile Racks. As it is it's basically just 2x ammo on top of built-in Expanded Missile Racks that requires you to back off once a fight to vent flux, hardly the most riveting of combat decisions. Its ship system can be changed to Fast Missile Racks instead, always seemed a bit weird that the sole missile-focused ship doesn't have an offensive missile system that other, much less dedicated ships have access to.

Disagree, FMR should be given to a new midline destroyer armed with missiles and only missiles.

[Embolism]

Disagree, FMR should be given to a new midline destroyer armed with missiles and only missiles.

Do you think giving Gryphon Fast Missile Racks would make it too powerful? My suggestion is purely a buff to the Gryphon.

The trident has been advantages to the dagger and its speed is one of them. The slower speed means that it’s more likely to cycle properly with longbows or other priority kinetic dmg. Daggers, especially Vs targets a long ways away. Are likely to shoot their atropos into shield before the longbows get there to sabot.

Huh, shouldn't the fighter wing offset positions deal with that? On astrals the daggers and longbows seem ok... but if not, then the offset on daggers should be upped a bit to make them go behind the longbows.

I think if this is happening it's more a failure of the offset position system than any genuine advantage for the Trident.

[Grievous69]

Man all these cool weapon buffs and reworks yet the Pulse laser is crying in the corner with 1.1 efficiency. Ion pulser will straight out be a better choice for most ships, frigates will still have issue mounting any assault medium weapon. Sorry if this was mentioned already but I didn't have time to read everything since my last response here.

[Sabaton]

While we're talking about changes to existing stuff, I got a few minor things to suggest...

• The Prometheus Mk.II and the Colossus Mk.II should have built-in Expanded Missile Racks. They're both converted haulers of considerable size, surely there's lots of room for more ordnance in those cargo holds slash giant fuel tank. Hammer Barrage runs out of ammo far too quickly as it is.

• The Venture should get two Mining Pod Wings instead of just one. It doesn't feel right that its drone complement is weaker than the frigate-sized Shepherd. Could also give it the Salvage Gantry built-in hullmod to make it even more like a big Shepherd, maybe nerf Salvage Gantry's cruiser bonus (30) to be the same as the destroyer-sized Salvage Rig (25).

• The Hound (LP) should have Accelerated Ammo Feeder instead of Flare Launcher. This would be in line with the LP Cerberus and Brawler having their ship systems changed to AAF.

• The Hermes should have 75 cargo space instead of 50. It's described as a hauler and is about the same size as the Hound, yet the Hound has 75 cargo space. 50 is the same as the Wolf.

• The Brawler (TT) should have built-in Flux Coil Adjunct and Flux Distributor. Skins can't seem to modify flux stats, so making these built-in would be a way to give the TT Brawler more flux to support less efficient energy weapons.

• The Gryphon's Missile Autoforge should be converted into a built-in hullmod that provides 4x missile ammo and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Missile Racks. As it is it's basically just 2x ammo on top of built-in Expanded Missile Racks that requires you to back off once a fight to vent flux, hardly the most riveting of combat decisions. Its ship system can be changed to Fast Missile Racks instead, always seemed a bit weird that the sole missile-focused ship doesn't have an offensive missile system that other, much less dedicated ships have access to.

• The Trident needs something to make it competitive against the Dagger. It's less OP-efficient per Atropos compared to the Dagger, is much slower than the Dagger, and losing one cuts wing firepower by half instead of one-third. Its better shields is almost completely negated by its slow speed, and better armor means nothing when losing shields disables the bomber completely anyway. I'd suggest giving the Trident some form of PD laser, like it used to have.

I wouldn't hold my breath for ship variants as they have been an afterthought for a while, like the prometheus and colossus exist just so pirate fleets don't get stupidly big end game.

[Rishel]

Patch 0.95a is very promising, I really like the fact the game is going to be a bit less capital oriented.
From my experience with the game, the early/mid game is for me the most interesting part in the game (combined with the exploration part which kept a major part of discovery).
At this stage, my fleet is well balanced in terms of size and engagement size (As for the AI factions).
The battles are not a mess at this stage of the playthough because fleet composition matters.
Then I tend to lose interest once I reached the endgame with 2/3 well run colonies supported by my 4/5+ capitals fleet.
Where fights are bland and lose the tactical aspect I enjoyed in the early/mid game.

IMO, Alex is on the good way to bring us the same amount of enjoyment from the early to the end game.

[intrinsic_parity]

My long winded justification for my last sentence:

Spoiler

If you cannot choose which ship will be shot but can assume the enemy will focus a weak one then the optimal one on one fit is also the optimal fleet fit. *
You want your ship to be tanky so it survives being shot by a bunch of other ships but do not realize that this means you will get shot by multiple ships more, as compared to dumping your flux, because your allies cannot kill a ship they’re ganging up on as fast if they do not dump their flux. Your allies cannot force ships to backup if they do not dump their flux. Your ship cannot force an enemy to back up if it does not win the flux war and dumping flux wins the flux war.

This is not how the AI behaves. It doesn't try to find your weakest ship, it just engages the nearest enemy and does some basic pivoting around allies and enemies to try and flank or retreat based on relative flux levels (as far as I know). I think this is really the main issue here: nothing behaves optimally, and you have to design your strategy around how things actually work (particularly the ship AI, and weapon targeting AI). You cannot make any assumptions about what ships will focus on or fire at, you have to essentially plan for engagements of random subsets of ships from each fleet (although you do have some control with escorts that you can work around). Any ship from your fleet could randomly end up fighting any ship from the enemy fleet, and you want to maximizer the chance of survival in those random engagements.

If my wolf randomly engages a capital ship alone, I want it spend exactly 0 of it's capacity on dealing damage and spend it all on blocking damage while it runs away, because it has no ability to deal meaningful damage in this engagement, but if it survives, it could deal meaningful damage in a different engagement. Think about it this way: if I am currently losing the flux war (meaning that even if I dump all my flux into damage I still overload first), then firing my weapons over dissipation is just increasing the rate my flux is increasing without any benefit. Simply spending capacity on tanking damage with shields cause my ship to survive longer, even if it is 'falling behind' in the flux war, and that extra time is what will allow ships to reposition to change the terms of the engagement favorably.

A simple example:
My ship is locally outmatched in a 1v1 and has no chance of wining the flux war, but it has allies nearby that together would win or at least stalemate an engagement. If my ship dumps all its flux and loses the flux war faster (but by a closer margin), that's much worse than if it just shield tanked and ran to its allies who could cover it while it vented.

Obviously this is a simple example and there are certainly cases where dumping flux would be the right play, but the point is that doing as well as you can in the flux war will not always result in the best outcome, so you can't just say 'this weapon makes me better at winning the flux war so it's better'. If that weapons also leaves you on high flux more often, then you're more likely to end up in random unfavorable engagements where you take damage (or die).

My goal is to minimize how often ships die while still winning the fight. I choose to design ships that are objectively somewhat worse at winning the flux war in a theoretically optimal scenario because they are less likely to die/take damage due to the random interactions of combat. I might then need to deploy more of these ships to win the same engagement compared to the theoretical best performance of some optimized ships, but in my experience, the expected value of spending some additional supplies to deploy additional 'safe' ships is much higher than the expected value of deploying fewer 'optimized' ships because the cost of losing ships is much much higher than the cost of deploying more. Basically my ships are optimized more for survivability than damage output, which isn't to say I don't try to improve flux war performance, it's just not my highest objective. In my experience, ships designed safely tend to 'stalemate' a lot of situations where they are objectively at a disadvantage anyway because of the AI, so the strategy often outperforms in terms of required deployment cost because my flagship can be damage oriented to win local engagements while my fleet is survivability oriented to avoid losses elsewhere.

Similarly a weapon that did 7500 kin dps and used 6500 flux a second for 28 OP would be amazing.

This is a perfect example. While this weapon in a vacuum with perfectly optimal play would be incredible, it would be extremely volatile and the AI would almost certainly miss while firing it at a fighter or frigate and overload itself for virtually no gain. The AI can target the wrong target or miss entirely, which it does frequently due to weapon inaccuracy, target leading, ship rotation, or range issues. Planning for randomness in weapon usage is also an important part of ship design. IMO, that weapon would be borderline unusable in practice, because while it would sometimes result in instantly overloading an enemy, it would also sometimes result in instantly overloading yourself for no benefit and dying, which is much worse than any positive outcome of overloading the enemy. Using other weapons would reliably result in winning without that chance of dying.

[close]

After all that, my point is just that I found that using the current storm needler resulted in ships getting into unfavorable engagements too often because the AI is bad with overfluxed ships, so the penalty to survivability was worse than the benefit to winning the flux war.

[Amoebka]

Man all these cool weapon buffs and reworks yet the Pulse laser is crying in the corner with 1.1 efficiency. Ion pulser will straight out be a better choice for most ships, frigates will still have issue mounting any assault medium weapon. Sorry if this was mentioned already but I didn't have time to read everything since my last response here.

Every time medium energy weapons get discussed, the conclusion is "they are supposed to be garbage because high-tech has better mobility to compensate". Even though AI is completely incapable of utilizing said mobility.

[Megas]

That's just eyeballing the 33% cut in overall damage output (which would tend to make me think the fitting cost would drop to 66% of its original value - say 18), but then buffing the efficiency by 23% or so, bumps it 22 or 23 OP.

Just a thought about this - I'm not sure that a DPS drop for a weapon that's going to be flux-limited regardless is actually that much of a difference. Arguably, the DPS reduction is almost a buff because it makes the weapon easier to use while largely retaining its damage potential. If it takes an extra few seconds of fire to get the same damage out... heck, that might even be better since it's harder to armor-tank against. There will be some situations where it's worse, too, but I don't think it's as clear cut as just "33% weaker".

This is only true for low-tech ships.  For Conquest, it is a nerf because it has no problem sustaining the old Storm Needlers long enough.  If I need to pair them with Heavy Mortars for HE just so AI-piloted Conquest will engage at the proper ranges, then it needs the DPS to compete somewhat with other weapon combinations with superior range.

The old Storm Needler is effectively a Conquest-only weapon.  The new one will probably require Conquest to stick something in the medium energy mount to make for lost damage, if it even has OP left to afford another weapon or two.

Old Storm Needler is comparable to Mjolnir in flux use, and Conquest can make good use of Mjolnir too.

[Drayg]

• The Prometheus Mk.II and the Colossus Mk.II should have built-in Expanded Missile Racks. They're both converted haulers of considerable size, surely there's lots of room for more ordnance in those cargo holds slash giant fuel tank. Hammer Barrage runs out of ammo far too quickly as it is.

IMO Hammer barrages could use some help overall, a slight base ammo increase would make it a lot less crap compared to the Cyclone. As is its only real selling point is that its cheaper and has a higher rate of fire. Currently its just too of an unattractive weapon compared to the reaper launcher, the only reason any player ever uses it is because it comes as a fixed mount on some vanilla and modded ships.

[Megas]

IMO Hammer barrages could use some help overall, a slight base ammo increase would make it a lot less crap compared to the Cyclone. As is its only real selling point is that its cheaper and has a higher rate of fire. Currently its just too of an unattractive weapon compared to the reaper launcher, the only reason any player ever uses it is because it comes as a fixed mount on some vanilla and modded ships.

Either that or an OP cut (to 16).  For me, the main draw of Hammer Barrage is it is sold on Open Market.  It is clearly a low-tier basic weapon, but it costs 20 OP.  It runs out of ammo way too quickly even with Expanded Missile Racks.

Locusts are cheap at 18 (but not so much with Missile Racks).  They are effective against everything and (with racks) lasts a long time even in an endgame fight.  Hammer Barrage is more expensive and are spent very quickly.

Hammers and Cyclone are unattractive because the only good ship that can use them effectively is the Legion XIV, which cannot be mass-produced.  Gryphon is too fragile to slug it out on the frontline with Hammers, and the other ships have conflicting design issues.  Hopefully, Champion will fix that soon.

[Gothars]

All those balancing and QoL patchnotes read like the playtesting is in full swing! Looking forward to the changed game dynamic.

Size 3 colonies will no longer be targeted by punitive expeditions

Ahh, does that imply size 1 or 2 frontier-town style colonies didn't make it into the game?

Faulty Automated Systems - larger min crew required
Degraded Life Support - reduces max crew (but not min)

If combined, this might lead to some ships needing more crew than they can support, right? Cool, role play wise. Might also make passenger ships worthwhile if you're running a junker fleet.

Increased minimum interval between punitive expeditions to 1-3 cycles

That got me thinking, maybe it would be nice if you could trigger a punitive expedition early (for reputation), so you have a chance to deal with it right away and then explore safely?