Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)
Quote from: Hiruma Kai on January 04, 2021, 11:05:05 AMAn Afflictor can be an amazing ship in player hands, depending on the player and the situation. However, they also are very intolerant of player mistakes. I wouldn't solely rely on it in an iron man run, for example. And even player piloted afflictors can struggle against campaign high tech bounty/tri-tach fleets or redacted fleets. So saying they're the best single ship in all combat situations (which is the typical meaning behind a SS rating in a combat context), is probably not correct. There are counters, and those counters exist in actual campaign play. And certainly for some things outside of combat, like trading, it is a sub-optimal ship.TT bounties are primary targets for Afflictors - getting that Astral out of commission before fleets even meet counts for a lot, same for normally hard to catch Herons. Dooms are genuinely dangerous though, unphasing around them without having dropped speed to zero in advance is a potential instant death. Need to be very aware of their positions and reach.Redacted are not Afflictor's bane either. You can't directly kill a Radiant with Reaper Afflictor in non-suicidal manner, but you can ALMOST kill it with Reaper Afflictor and then safely finish the job with AM Afflictor. Or just use AM from the start, though that would be slow vs up-skilled armor.There are very few situations when AM Afflictor really can't do anything. As someone noted, Xyphos spam would be a problem, but you probably still could pick off ships that got too far from carriers. Afflictor is also NOT good at soloing high tier space stations - stations have near perfect overlapping 360 coverage, so there is often no safe attack trajectory that won't get you killed/badly damaged in 2 seconds needed to rephase. But in almost any fleet combat situation Afflictor can kill many times it's DP worth of ships.Fleet composition-wise my goal is up to 5 Afflictors, a player capital (Conquest, Odyssey or some fast mod capital), officer-piloted capitals/cruisers + carriers, logistics. A few reserve player ships of other types optional.Requiring logistic usefulness as part of SS rating would be silly imo - no ship can have both top tier combat performance and logistic profile.
An Afflictor can be an amazing ship in player hands, depending on the player and the situation. However, they also are very intolerant of player mistakes. I wouldn't solely rely on it in an iron man run, for example. And even player piloted afflictors can struggle against campaign high tech bounty/tri-tach fleets or redacted fleets. So saying they're the best single ship in all combat situations (which is the typical meaning behind a SS rating in a combat context), is probably not correct. There are counters, and those counters exist in actual campaign play. And certainly for some things outside of combat, like trading, it is a sub-optimal ship.
One of the things that hurt Venture most was losing it's fighter bay and having brick drones locked in.I'd like to see that capability return, even if it means losing the bay entirely and replacing it with built-in converted hangar.
I started playing after the change, was the Venture too strong or something with fighters? I'd see that strong but not something that anyone would see as overpowered. Am I missing something, what was the thinking at the time?
The big mining drones could stand to be better