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It's a sad joke for masochists that like playing Lepers in Darkest Dungeon to make the game harder for themselves. Buff it hard or keep it as the joke it is for comedic value!

12 (19%)

A disappointing mess of ships the AI can't use that should be rebalanced to actually hold up in Endgame

18 (28.6%)

It's a slightly underperforming ship philosophy that is fine where it is because "flavour" and "who plays Low tech only anyway!".

8 (12.7%)

A decently performing array of situational ships that are fine where they are if properly combined.

21 (33.3%)

An annoying array of brick ships that take forever to kill and sometimes deal damage. They either don't work or are way too strong!

4 (6.3%)

Total Members Voted: 63

Voting closed: July 21, 2021, 03:08:08 AM

[Arcagnello]

Warning, I'm currently listening to a combination of Antichrist Superstar/Holy Wood Marilyn manson and Iowa/All Hope Is Gone Slipknot, which could result highly biased feedback based off of personal experience and that also may contain harsher criticism than usual, which could rustle your jimmies

I've just completed my low tech only campaign where I was only allowed to use low tech ships, low tech fighter/bomber LPCs and XIV ships that were originally Low Tech. I've had a blast but I've also got some harsh criticism about the entire Low tech vanilla roster.
You've read the title of this thread, I am going to cover that more than anything else I talk about here, but we got to start somewhere and saying the most prevalent ship ability on low tech ships is honestly unremarkable at best and detrimental most of the time at worse is not it.

1) Low Tech contains the ships with the worst logistical profile for actual combat prowess in the entire game
This (I think) is the main reason why most starting players and veterans alike grow to avoid Low Tech ships, let alone build an entire fleet based around them.
These ships may look attractive just by looking at monthly maintenance values at first glance, but they actually have a worse logistical profile for the fleet power they provide, even worse than phase ships. They've got metric tons worth of crew, skyrocketing wages and often warranting an additional crew transport like a Starliner not to carry marines but to compensate for lost crew on difficult fights, they've got absolutely terrible fuel economy and maximum burn values, which more or less makes the low monthly supplies a moot point since the supplies the ship itself does not consume are instead rerouted to longer times to travel to places or the prensence of Ox-class tugs.
What is even more terrible is that Low tech is the ship type that gets damaged the most during combat across all ship philosophies, meaning they not only are an absolute resource hog to lug around the sector, they even consume more supplies and crew during combat too!

There are many suggestion threads proposing a plethora of changes to low tech logistics that make a whole lot of sense, like giving all of them a hullmod reducing monthly supply cost and repair/CR recovery cost by a percentage; or actually giving low tech capitals utility hullmods like ground support packages. Pick your poison, you could honestly just do something about it and Low tech would benefit at this point.

2) Low Lech got majorly snubbed by the new 0.95 ships, Story Missions and Officer/Commander Skill roster
This is hopefully not news to anyone that ever played the game in 0.95 or read at least one suggestion thread, which 80% of them are about how High/Midline got incredibly powerful and need nerfs and/or how much Low tech has become absolutely terrible.
Both are true.

1)Wolfpack tactics and Safety Overrides (just to name two) exacerbate the mobility and flux stats advantage of both Midline and High Tech to the point of ridicolousness. You can complete the game with nothing but Overridden Hyperions even after the hullmod got a duct tape fix which ended up making the ship variety incredibly worse for Low tech and merely incoveniencing ships that were disgusting when using SO in the first place.

2)Damage focused officer skills more or less favour Missile and Energy Weapons, while they mostly leave ballistics behind.
High energy focus is amazing but only works on energy weapons.
Gunnery Implants provides ECM on the elite version making it potentially a lot more relevant on high tech/midline fleets, but you want it on low tech ships anyway because it improves maximum range and recoil
Ranged Spec mostly applies to either a Gauss Conquest or a long range beam Paragon, everything else using it mostly never/very seldomly benefits from the bonus (good luck getting that costant 30% damage using 1000 range ballistics) but you want Elite Ranged spec on most offfense focused low tech ships anyway because shell speed is vital and even allows weapons like heavy mortars and Arbalest autocannons to work nicely.
Target Analysis works for any weapon and therefore does not favour Midline/High tech on the surface, but in reality it mostly benefits highly mobile Midline and High Tech ships. It is the prime officer skill to have on Frigades/Destroyers/Cruisers (when you want more damage), which translates in Midline/High tech getting disgusting damage on their highly mobile non-capitals while Low tech just sits there, looking pathetic with its slow-as-Moloch Frigades, Destroyers and Cruisers that get absolutely curbstomped the moment they get close in order to deal damage to enemy capitals (outside the buffed Enforcer).

4) Then there's also to mention that there are way more officer and commander skills buffing damage dealt than there are ones reducing damage recieved, which combined with the (now slightly improved) AI that does not know how to pilot Low Tech ( I.E.  "not armor tanking") results in only two Low Tech (ish) ships that stay competitive in late game, which I'll cover later.

5)The new story content is great, but it would not be unfair to state that the new endgame mostly favours aggresiveness, strike damage capability, mobility and surefire damage sources (I.E. no bomber/fighter spam), which mostly negates what Low tech ships are good at entirely, the only two outliers being Sabot Spam XIV Enforcer (which I think was from Thaago, if I remember correctly) and the absolutely disgusting Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught (I built this myself, but there probably is a similar design using the same concept somewhere else on the forum), which actually absolutely humiliates the endgame content and that may just be the only ultra-endgame Low tech ship that holds a candle to either Midline or High tech. I'm just gonna paste a post of mine with it. Just beware it's kinda long and it contains story spoilers (it may also work with 3x Storm needlers 3x Heavy Mortars but I like the better range and damage per shot of Mk.9 Autocannons and Heavy maulers):

Spoiler

Horseshoe Crab (Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught)

Spoiler

[close]

Hullmods on the ship because the list is too damn long to fit on the screen:
1) (integrated) Heavy Armor
2) (Integrated) Reinforced Bulkheads
3) (Integrated) Integrated Targeting Unit
4) Solar Shielding
5) Armored Weapon Mounts
6) Integrated Point Defence AI
7) Automated Repair Unit
8) Shield Shunt
9) Flux Distributor
10) Insulated Engine Ass(embly)
11) Advanced Turret Gyros (for the Mk.9 Autocannons and the Railguns that also double as Point Defence)
12) Expanded magazines (for the TPCs)
This thing is actually magical. It's got every single possible bonus either increasing armor, reducing damage taken (across armor and hull), boosting up Hullpoints, flux dissipation and damage done to the enemy (aside from Energy Weapon mastery for the two TPCs).
Why do I have 3600 flux generated by weapons when the ship only gets 1524 flux dissipation?
To make sure the thing fully uses all its flux dissipation to shoot weapons even if it's only using a portion of them, It also has an aggressive enough officer, enough armor, hull hitpoints and residual armor. This Onslaught has around 175 Residual armor spread across 30.000 hull points, and that's before we even count the -35% (or was it 45%?) hull and armor damage taken thanks to officer skills and 100% CR.
Officer skills (swear to all that Ludd loves that he was already named Ahmed when I got him)

Spoiler

[close]

The only oopsie I made in setting it up was making Damage Control Elite instead of Target Analysis. The one thing missing is Reinforced Flux Conduits (I already have Shield shunt boosting EMP resistance, it felt useless) and Blast Doors, but who cares about losing crew members anyway when you can do this under AI control:

Spoiler

[close]

Or this (story spoilers):

Spoiler

[close]

And also that, without a single care in the world (more spoilers)

Spoiler

[close]

You can also just send it into a sea of remnants and it will hold on for minutes while the rest of your fleet is busy elsewhere and is virtually unkillable by frigades unless they either got Reapers able to get thru the absurd point defence or enough PPT to kill it before they suffer critical malfunctions or end up getting crumped.

Sorry, forgot to add one vital aspect of the Shield Shunt XIV Onslaught: Weapon groups!

Weapon Group 1: Two Thermal Pulse Cannons
Weapon Group 2: Front facing Mk.9 Autocannon and Heavy Mauler
Weapon Group 3-4: Left/Right facing MK.9 Autocannon and Heavy Maulers
Weapon Group 5: 6 Railguns and 6 Dual Flaks

Keep all the Autocannons and Maulers all in their own respective group and they will not fire at different targets all at once. Putting them into three separate weapon groups based on their orientation makes sure they all fire at avaiable targets.

Railguns also will not double as point defence if they're not in the same weapon group as Dual Flaks. Dual Flaks on the other hand will not fire into the void when Railguns are firing at an enemy ship with their 1k+ effective range (700+40% range from ITU, +15% from Gunnery Implants), making it a win-win!

[close]

3) The new High tech and Midline ships more or less have powercrept Low tech into irrelevancy. Overhauled Hyperion is death incarnate even without SO and is even nicely piloted by the AI. The Champion (which I foolishly believed to suck before testing it out) is a superior Dominator with better base speed (even better than Eagle, huh), a ship system that gets actually used by the AI and does not get most of its builds killed in the process and a plethora of ship loadouts covering long range, mid range and low range, all of which work better than the Dominator in almost every scenario. Some examples below:

Spoiler

Long Range Champion using Tactical Lasers, Graviton Beams, a HIL and a Hurricane MIRV. Augmeted by the usual hullmod suspects (that get integrated) plus advanced turret gyros, advanced optics and Point defence AI for both Tac lasers to become PD and the HIL to not stop firing half the time due to the horrible turret traverse
Medium Range Champion using double Heavy Needler, Autopulse Laser (with expanded mags) and a Hammer Barrage, plus normal PD turrets and the usual hullmods suspecs (that get integrated) plus expanded missile racks
Short Range Champion with IR pulse lasers at the front, Burst PD lasers at the sides and back, double Heavy Autocannons, a Plasma Cannon/HIL and Safety Overrides plus the usual suspecs for hullmods (that get integrated). The large missile slot can be left empty unless you want it to use a hammer barrage, in which case you're going to want to swap that Plasma/HIL for an autopulse in order to have as much hard flux damage as possible, plus of course integrating Expanded Missile racks

[close]

3)Burn Drive is the worst ship system in the entire game and it got spammed on all Vanilla Low Tech ships, especially capitals
There we go. I finally got to the main meat and potatoes of this thread.
I absolutely despise Burn Drive as it currently works, I think it makes 90% of the ships having it as their system worse and it's also the reason why Ludd Left us.
The only ships that are good having it above other ship systems are Onslaught, Enforcer and Prometheus Mk.2. Every other ship would be better at its role with another one entirely.
Don't believe me? Here's some examples:
1) What would you rather have on your Standard Legion?: Burn Drive to make it easier for the AI to get its naked behind exposed and brutalized by the enemy, or Reserve Deployment on the standard Legion to actually be a competent combat carrier?
2)What would you rather have on your XIV Legion? Burn drive for your precious, almost one of a kind ship in the entire sector to dash into the enemy and get a surprise colonoscopy from the enemy or a choice between fast Missile Racks or Missile Autoforge to actually be a more competent missile boat that is also a carrier and maybe even direct fire wepons?
3)What would you rather have on your Standard Dominator? Burn Drive for that out-of-water-crab to launch itself past the enemy it's fighting so that it can show you why hardpoints on a grossly obese cruiser suck, or would having Damper Field actually making the Dominator a viable tanking powerhouse of a Steel Crustacean?
4)What would you rather have on your XIV Dominator? Burn Drive to precisely tell you why you should have not restored that Orange Pincered Menace and salvaged it instead or Advanced Ammo Feeder, actually making the ship as a whole actually competitive when compared to the XIV Eagle, Champion and Aurora?

There's also what I think is the major imbalance that is the XIV Battlegroup variants basically making the non XIV Low Tech ships more or less obsolete for late game, but that could be extensively discussed in another thread, just briefly:

Spoiler

XIV battlegroup should provide substantial buffs and also increase the ship DP compared to the standard version: I'm thinking of keeping the 10% worse top speed and handling, but better improvements in armor, a slight hullpoint increase and significantly more OP. As a result:
1) Standard Legion (even with the ship system being Reserve Deployment instead of Burn Drive) is worth no more than 35DP, XIV Legion stays at 40DP
2)Onslaught stays at 40DP, XIV Onslaught goes up to 45
3)Enforcer goes down to 8 DP, XIV Enforcer goes up to 10DP
4)Falcon Stays at 15 DP, XIV falcon goes up to 17-18DP
5)Eagle Stays at 22DP, XIV Eagle goes up to 25DP
6)Dominator goes down to 22DP, XIV Dominator stays at 25DP

[close]

As for ships that would keep their Burn Drive, I would apply a simple change I've seen written around in the forum for a while (I don't remember who proposed it first, just let me know and I'll credit this idea to you with an after-post edit):
Keep the same stats of the ship system like recharge time, system duration, the maximum distance it travels and the fact some Hullmods and Officer skills actually increase the speed of burn drive along with the top speed of the ship itself, but make Burn Drive able to be aborted at any moment of the system staying active by the ship activating it.

This would mean that a ship using Burn drive would use the skill, get as close as the enemy as it wants to and then cut the boosters before ramming the target or overshooting it. It would not only be a very good chance for player piloted Low Tech ships (fatfingering Burn Drive while in front of [Redacted], anyone?) but it would actually make AI use the ship system at the best of its ability and not be overly stingy about it because it 1) can't figure out the ship can just be slightly turned left or right to not ram the enemy with it 2) The ship system gets constanty blueballed by allies in the vicinity since it has a fixed travel path and distance that does not combine well with a crowded combat envirorment.

As it currently stands in 0.95, Low tech is not an alternative to midline and High tech, it's a masochistic dream come true for people that want to make Starsector harder for themselves. Make sure to not buff/rebalance said ships and keep Endgame and Officer/CommanderS Skills as they are now if that's the intended balance of this game.

That's all I had to say, really. This thread is long enough already. Off I go jogging because I want to get laid despite my horrible personality it's a good and healthy habit! Have a good day dear Luddites and Luddettes!

[Warnoise]

Your post is as if my heart came out of my chest and typed the whole thing. You can't imagine how much I agree with this and have been talking about it since the release of 0.95

However, I disagree about Burn drive being good on Enforcer. It literally almost never use it. And when it does it ends in a stupid death 90% of the time.

Burn drive will never be properly used by the AI so might as well scrap the whole thing and make something else that can be used by both the player and the AI

[TaLaR]

Burn Drive can work on Onslaught, less so on Dominator, even less on Enforcer. Much better results when player piloted than AI.

However, it's a ship system, useful only to solve a specific problem - to corner a weaker (or weakened) ship that tries to kite or retreat when fluxed.
This is much less flexible than the better systems out there (Phase skimmer, etc).

But Onslaught and Dominator do have good sides to compensate for weak system - TPCs are best energy weapon by far (hah, low-tech), Dominator has a lot more firepower than same 25DP Eagle.
Enforcer I'm less sure about - it's just not oppressive enough to make good use of Burn Drive. Burn Drive is also harder to use on Enforcer than larger ships - system has fixed duration and speed boost, so due to higher base speed Enforcer travels much further in single use. Especially if SO.

I agree that making Burn Drive cancelable will fix most issues (but this time not just by venting, but also second use while already active - so that AI could actually use the feature).

[Arcagnello]

Your post is as if my heart came out of my chest and typed the whole thing. You can't imagine how much I agree with this and have been talking about it since the release of 0.95

However, I disagree about Burn drive being good on Enforcer. It literally almost never use it. And when it does it ends in a stupid death 90% of the time.

Burn drive will never be properly used by the AI so might as well scrap the whole thing and make something else that can be used by both the player and the AI

That's an extremely heartwarming  comment, I'd say it's almost out of place on a thread essentially dabbing on Low Tech, Thank you 

As for the Enforcer, it's probably the only destroyer sized ship I'd trust with the currently barely working, arguably counterproductive Burn Drive. The main job of the ship is basically to get in there, dump Sabots, soak damage and then just die as the rest of your fleet uses the distraction to work on the enemy fleet.

Burn Drive was a terrible ship system on the Enforcer Before 0.95 but the arguably huge buffs it received makes it bearable at best to be honest. It would be an incredibly better choice if the system could be aborted so that the AI uses it exactly when it needs to when closing in on the enemy so that that adorable ball of a destroyer can do its job, especially when Overridden and with Sabots/Expanded Missile racks.

Alex and the team could honestly take a page from the Modiverse and still give the Enforcer a balanced, mobility focused skill instead, like:
Microburn from the Tyrant (Vayras ship pack) that's basically a low tech plasma burn with charges and very fast top speed, 3 max charges but very low actual travel distance. I think it also disables shields.
A ship system from Kadur Remnant (forgot the name) that has no charges and forces the ship to move forward with 30 better top speed/handling, disables shields but reduces incoming damage taken.

Sidenote: Edited the OP (of some, definetly not all) grammar&syntax horrors. Also added a slightly sarcastic poll!

Burn Drive can work on Onslaught, less so on Dominator, even less on Enforcer. Much better results when player piloted than AI.

However, it's a ship system, useful only to solve a specific problem - to corner a weaker (or weakened) ship that tries to kite or retreat when fluxed.
This is much less flexible than the better systems out there (Phase skimmer, etc).

But Onslaught and Dominator do have good sides to compensate for weak system - TPCs are best energy weapon by far (hah, low-tech), Dominator has a lot more firepower than same 25DP Eagle. Enforcer I'm less sure about - it's just not oppressive enough to make good use of Burn Drive.

I agree that making Burn Drive cancelable will fix most issues (but this time not just by venting, but also second use while already active - so that AI could actually use the feature).

That's more or less also how I feel about Burn drive, without repeating what's already written. It's a "win more" button at best and a "lose hard" at worst as it is right now, only viable on the tankiest/disposable ships.

I'm surprised at the Enforcer downplay by the way, it's a great little helper that does not even need an officer when it's filled to the brim with Safety Overrides, Sabots&Missile Racks, Duak Flaks, Two Heavy Machineguns and an assault chaingun.

Just...just make sure to integrate Reinforced Bulkheads so that you can put it back togheder after combat ends? Mmkay? 

[Megas]

1) What would you rather have on your Standard Legion?: Burn Drive to make it easier for the AI to get its naked behind exposed and brutalized by the enemy, or Reserve Deployment on the standard Legion to actually be a competent combat carrier?

With Reserve Deployment as it is (killing replacement rate), Burn Drive on Legion.  I want it to get close and blast things with ballistics.  Otherwise, I would use Astral.

Reserve Deployment is almost as bad as pre-0.8a Accelerated Ammo Feeder, when the latter boosted fire rate without flux discount and made Hammerheads suicide by flux mismanagement.

[SCC]

Burn drive is a strategic mobility system, as far as I am concerned. If ships with BD aren't good enough, then they should be simply buffed, with system change only happening if they just shouldn't have s mobility system.
Regardless of that, I once again ask that burn drive is made cancellable again.

[Amoebka]

The worse low-tech is, the happier I am. 

The last thing I want is slow lumbering ships that take forever to do anything or kill becoming the "meta".

[SafariJohn]

Keep preaching the cancellable Burn Drive!

[Arcagnello]

1) What would you rather have on your Standard Legion?: Burn Drive to make it easier for the AI to get its naked behind exposed and brutalized by the enemy, or Reserve Deployment on the standard Legion to actually be a competent combat carrier?

With Reserve Deployment as it is (killing replacement rate), Burn Drive on Legion.  I want it to get close and blast things with ballistics.  Otherwise, I would use Astral.

Reserve Deployment is almost as bad as pre-0.8a Accelerated Ammo Feeder, when the latter boosted fire rate without flux discount and made Hammerheads suicide by flux mismanagement.

I will admit I have not extensively played with carriers using Reserve Deployment in 0.95, so I'll extend an olive branch and admit a Legion with said ship system could have issues.

That said, I've (surprisingly) done some math and realized that you can get fighter replacement rate improved by 80%:
1) You get +10% by having the carrier with 100% Combat Readiness
2)You get +20% with Expanded Deck Crew
3)You get 50% with the Commander Skill

Additionally, there's also Officer skills like Strike Commander and Point Defence which not only boost bomber damage (and their missile HP, plus accuracy when made elite) and massively increasing damage to enemy fighters and missiles (and even increasing point defence weapon range by 100 units, which I think also applies to fighter LPCs). There's also another commander skill called Fighter Uplink which improves fighter speed which does help quite a bit in keeping bombers going in and out enemy weapons range faster and therefore getting less losses.

I even realized I could've gone away without installing Expanded Deck Crew on my carriers using Khopesh Rocket Bombers (when fighting the Doritos) as even when the whole wing got wiped out and had to be printed back from scratch the replacement rate still mostly held up and was basically back up at 100% by the time the new wing was already unloading their rocket volleys at the target.

Would a Legion with Reserve Deployment eventually start suffering from fighter replacement even if it had all the carrier buffs possible installed on it, maybe even without an officer on it having Systems Expertise? Probably. But I would still take it over a Legion that's either way too enthusiastic to faceplant itself into the enemy or absolutely anemic in using burn drive when it should.

Reserve Deployment would at least make sure the Legion is squeezed dry of its combat prowess while fighting the hard fight.

Burn drive is a strategic mobility system, as far as I am concerned. If ships with BD aren't good enough, then they should be simply buffed, with system change only happening if they just shouldn't have s mobility system.
Regardless of that, I once again ask that burn drive is made cancellable again.

Burn drive is a good mobility system, when it somehow works as intended, I'll give you that. I simply find it nonsensical on either Dominator or Legion.

Trying to "improve mobility" or "enchance battlefield repositioning" on barely mobile ships more or less equals to giving a fat soldier a bycicle instead of a rifle when going to war as far as I am concerned.

Sure, "Fat Jim" will get to the battlefield at the same time as the other privates, alright. But what is he gonna do there? Whack the enemy with the bycicle while every other soldier under your command gets an actual rifle to use?
Would it not be better to just give up on "Fat Jim" coming to meet the enemy as fast as his slimmer comrades, but also give him a hip mounted minigun instead of the rifle instead?

Am I getting too wild with the comparisons or is the concept coming across nicely enough? There are much better Low tech candidates to give Burn Drive to, capitals of that design Philosophy need all the fighting strenght they can get to be competitive against Midline and High tech units of the same Deployment Cost.

The worse low-tech is, the happier I am. 

The last thing I want is slow lumbering ships that take forever to do anything or kill becoming the "meta".

The last thing you want "being slow lumbering ships that take forever to kill" is more or less the entire concept of Low Tech. Think of Low tech as a good old boulder!

*Local Persean League Ambassador visiting a Luddic Church Shipyard; Cycle 209 after the Collapse, colorized*

It's ancient, it's reliable, it's trustworthy and you hit the enemy with it until either you or your foe is defeated. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

The issue (among the many I've written above) with Low Tech is that their most effective ships are also the slowest ones. There is basically no good, decently mobile Low tech Frigate, Destroyer or Cruiser aside from the Enforcer (which is already a stretch) in their roster, since they mostly rely on big ships and mostly use carriers and bombers to chase small stuff.

You can see how Low tech has become really bad in 0.95, considering both its overall durability has been nerfed and the only good way to deal with more mobile enemies is either a near suicidal (Unless you're an Onslaught) burn drive into an enemy with better shields/flux stats or an a swarm of fighters/bombers backed up by extremely anemic carriers that more or less need to have every single Ludd-forsaken buff in the Persean Sector to even consider using fighters.

Low tech as a whole needs to stop trying to make its grossly obese chunks of weapons and armor mobile with Burn Drive (sacrificing offensive/defensive capabilities in the process)and actually introduce proper mobility focused ships to help itself with. It's not that hard to wrap a head around that concept (I hope).

Keep preaching the cancellable Burn Drive!

It's more akin to a kind reminder that Burn Drive is still absolutely garbage, I rarely play Low Tech and this latest campaign of mine reminded me why. I would really like for (around) 30% of ships to not be blatantly inferior to their Midline and High tech counterparts in a game as beautiful as this.

Addendum: I've edited the OP yet again to make more sense. Please let me know if there's anything more that does not have enough syntax and correct grammar to pass as english!

[SCC]

The rifle in your analogy can be both a ship system (e.g. Omen) and actual armaments and stats of a ship (e.g. Conquest).

[Amoebka]

"The issue" with low-tech is that slow stat-check bricks create fundamentally boring gameplay. High-tech, and to some extent midline, ships have clear moments of power and weakness. Shields might be strong, but if you overload one, you can melt the hull in seconds. Ship systems might be strong, but once they run out of charges or go on cooldown, you can punish the ship. This creates windows of opportunity a player can exploit, and it's fun and engaging. Low-tech, by contrast, is too consistent. It hardly even matters when you overload a dominator - you still won't pop it. You either have enough damage to get through the armor/hull in reasonable time, or you don't. Don't you all just love wailing at a low-tech brick with all weapons disabled for 2 minutes because all your weapons do no damage to it?

[Arcagnello]

The rifle in your analogy can be both a ship system (e.g. Omen) and actual armaments and stats of a ship (e.g. Conquest).

Exactly. Burn Drive is a one-directional mobility-focused ship ability and it's the worst one in the game too.

Plasma Burn has charges and a low enough travel distance, meaning that the AI uses it often and properly.
Auxiliary Thrusters and Plasma Thrusters (don't remember if it's the correct name or not) work both when attacking and retreating, which makes them amazing
Phase Skimmer is as above but better, also coming with charges and with the only downside being that shields are brought down and need to be raised back up again
Phase Teleporter is as above, but better³ despite having no charges as it gets a lot more range, the AI uses it to teleport behind the enemy

Most of us are not really asking for the world here, just give ships with Burn Drive either a better iteration of it that works well under AI use or replace it with a fitting give up on mobility entirely and equip said ships with a combat focused ability instead (for ships that are not an Onslaught, the good old horseshoe is fine).

"The issue" with low-tech is that slow stat-check bricks create fundamentally boring gameplay. High-tech, and to some extent midline, ships have clear moments of power and weakness. Shields might be strong, but if you overload one, you can melt the hull in seconds. Ship systems might be strong, but once they run out of charges or go on cooldown, you can punish the ship. This creates windows of opportunity a player can exploit, and it's fun and engaging. Low-tech, by contrast, is too consistent. It hardly even matters when you overload a dominator - you still won't pop it. You either have enough damage to get through the armor/hull in reasonable time, or you don't. Don't you all just love wailing at a low-tech brick with all weapons disabled for 2 minutes because all your weapons do no damage to it?

I generally agree with you on that, having played most of my campaigns using midline, high tech or very mobility focused (Luddic Path) ships.
I would summarize the method Low tech ship roster works by simply stating "these ships are effective as long as they deal half the damage they recieve back to the enemy".

They used to (sorta) work in 0.91 because we had a plethora of ways to both reduce incoming damage and heavily reduce the ability of the enemy to flank thanks to carrier play. Now the former is inverted and the latter has been severely neutered, leaving the entire Low tech roster on life support.

We either need a severe game rebalance (which I would not recommend for what essentially is just one Design Philosophy out of 3...4...5 that has issues) or Low tech as a whole needs both new ships to fill the mobility gaps added to it and/or quite a bit of buffs to keep up with the rest. It is plain and simple playtesting experience (and some basic math) here as far as I am concerned.

[Mordodrukow]

What i dont like in low-tech (or any other type of) ships: bad shield arc. 360° shield gives just too much QoL.

[Retry]

I think the only part I can get behind is cancellable Burn Drive.  Not quite as critical as in 0.91 since AI's not suicidal with it anymore, but it'd help its usefulness in tactical situations.

Absolutely not on the ship system revisions, especially with an enhanced Burn Drive.  The suggestions range from a different flavor of useless (Reserve Wing Legion) to balance headaches incarnates (AAF Dominator or Damper Field Dominator; there's one Damper Field Dominator that I know of in the modiverse, and it's a one-off challenge fight/reward for very good reasons)

Variant files cannot change DP size of a ship, so XIV ships cannot (and frankly, should not) have a different DP cost from their base ship.  It's cute you think the Legion is only worth 35 DP, though.

That said, I've (surprisingly) done some math and realized that you can get fighter replacement rate improved by 80%:

Reaching those stats requires burning a hullmod on EDC (underwhelming even on dedicated carriers), spending over half of your skill points to loop around for both L3 skills, keeping your total fighter bay amount at or under 8 (Max 2 Legions and nothing else fighter wise), and total fleet DP at or under 240.

It's a lot to invest just for a few ships to lessen the fighter CR tank that their systems will cause anyways.

Trying to "improve mobility" or "enchance battlefield repositioning" on barely mobile ships more or less equals to giving a fat soldier a bycicle instead of a rifle when going to war as far as I am concerned.

Sure, "Fat Jim" will get to the battlefield at the same time as the other privates, alright. But what is he gonna do there? Whack the enemy with the bycicle while every other soldier under your command gets an actual rifle to use?
Would it not be better to just give up on "Fat Jim" coming to meet the enemy as fast as his slimmer comrades, but also give him a hip mounted minigun instead of the rifle instead?

The burn drive system does not replace your weapons, so the comparison to giving a soldier a bicycle without giving him a rifle is, yeah, not a good one.

Notably, Bicycle infantry does exist in real life, while hip-mounted miniguns do not.

[Arcagnello]

To Retry:

I think the only part I can get behind is cancellable Burn Drive.  Not quite as critical as in 0.91 since AI's not suicidal with it anymore, but it'd help its usefulness in tactical situations.

That makes me happy, it was by far the most thought over thing I wrote in the entire thread and (given it's also a suggestion that's been made over and over as years went by) it does make the most (straightforward) amount of sense amongts all of them. I'm crossing fingers for both the change to be applied and for the AI to be improved in order to fully exploit this change.

Absolutely not on the ship system revisions, especially with an enhanced Burn Drive.  The suggestions range from a different flavor of useless (Reserve Wing Legion) to balance headaches incarnates (AAF Dominator or Damper Field Dominator; there's one Damper Field Dominator that I know of in the modiverse, and it's a one-off challenge fight/reward for very good reasons)

I may have worded this in a way that's not as clear as it should be, but my main gripe with Burn drive is that it spans such a large amount of distance in a fixed direction that the AI almost never uses it in a busy combat envirorment due to collision risks and not enough "coding" from the AI side to figure out the ship can just be slightly turned left or right and have the Burn Drive engaged to get close to the enemy and not ram it in the process.

I don't have the knowledge or enough time to try it myself today, but I'm not under the impression Reserve Deployment on a Legion would be useless, even without some (or most) the carrier buffs. It would certainly offer better combat performance than the current Burn Drive variant due to the obvious fact the Legion stops using burn drive as soon as it meets the enemy 90% of the time, while reserve deployment works no matter how far or close the enemy is.
I did propose "Reserve Deployment" out of all Carrier skills for the simple reason Mass Recall is an Astral/Scintilla gimmick and Targeting Feed is mostly relegated to Midline and the Heron. Vanilla really has quite the poor amount of carrier related ship systems to choose from I'm afraid.

There are quite the number of carrier ship systems ranging from buffing allied fighter top speed and damage the more they're outnumbered, or just buffing their speed, there are even crazier systems like the Atome-class Battlecarrier (from COPS https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=17090.0 ) that litterally applies Temporal Shell to both itself and its fighter wings.


The same applies to both of my (admittedly shoddy) ship system suggestions for both the Standard and the XIV Dominator. There really are not that many useful vanilla ship systems to choose from and that suggests to me why Burn Drive was chose for the ship. There are some very intersting and balanced ship systems from the Kadur Remnant ( https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6649.0 ) which Alex and his team could take a few pages out of.

Namely, most ship systems on brawl-focused kadur Remnant Cruisera, Heavy Cruisers, Battlecruisers and battleships all revolve around disabling shields while the effect is active but that provide a varying array of bonuses, ranging from forced forwards movements+reduced incoming damage+improved handling (Prophet Battleship) to improved ballistic fire rate, top speed and handling (Ziz  Battlecruiser).

We do have the same IBB Dominator in might right? It was called the Emperor was it not? Just remember that special Dominator had 1)large ballistic turrets instead of hardpoints 2)massively improved flux stats 3) a better shield (if I remember correctly). I would not expect a poultry milktoast Dominator to be as potent with the same Damper Field. Imagine a direct fire, more ponderous Mora variant.

I would really appreciate that to happen really, you don't really pick the Dominator for better damage values over Eagle, Champion and Aurora nowadays, it's mostly there to soak up damage and let the rest of your fleet anchor around it, while maybe doing damage itself while that's happening.

Reaching those stats requires burning a hullmod on EDC (underwhelming even on dedicated carriers), spending over half of your skill points to loop around for both L3 skills, keeping your total fighter bay amount at or under 8 (Max 2 Legions and nothing else fighter wise), and total fleet DP at or under 240.

It's a lot to invest just for a few ships to lessen the fighter CR tank that their systems will cause anyways.

I more or less install EDC on all carriers, especially now that EDC (along two other expensive hullmods) can be integrated into carriers, allowing them to both field expensive fighters they previously should not (Heron can snuggly fit two longbows, a trident ECM&Nav package plus Expanded deck crew and PD+Salamander with the help of 3 Integrated Hullmods). More Replacement time equals less refit times for bombers to strike again and more pressure from fighters that are barely going to come back and replenish their numbers when replacement time got that high.

I personally beat the Doritos with a fleet that had 14 fighter bays in total, still giving me some +30ish% fighter replacement time. Even going double the "intended" fighter bays still nets you a +25% bonus.

As for the skill point required, you're correct, but what that skill selection also allows is the ability to stretch it further and not only get all the carrier buffs, but also
1) 15% CR for all combat ships
2)Wolfpack tactics
3)both officer skills, allowing for 10 level 6 officers (with two elite skills) in your fleet
4)Special modifications for that extra hullmod and capacitors/vents

Ladership/technology combos truly are amazing.

The burn drive system does not replace your weapons, so the comparison to giving a soldier a bicycle without giving him a rifle is, yeah, not a good one.

Notably, Bicycle infantry does exist in real life, while hip-mounted miniguns do not.

I'll do you one better, ever head of the Vespa 150 TAP?

Us italians combining a Vespa with an american M20 75 mm recoilless rifle for the French Paratroops during the 1950s really makes the memes come true, does it not?