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[Kahnmir]

So I was going through the main storyline, and encountered a certain rather infamous fight that has a lot of people wondering if phase ships are balanced, or if they even can be balanced:

The triple doom fleet. I was curious to see how bad it actually was since I actually had never encountered it before.

Aaaannndd... I got creamed. Absolutely creamed.
Typically I play Iron mode, and when I lose that hard I usually just start over, but given this fights infamy I decided to cut myself some slack and reload

2nd time around I won, it won't say it was easy, but it wasn't too terrible either. I think one of the things that made the fight hard was I was so restricted by deployment points that I couldn't field my full fleet.

Some notes about my second attempt:

* I turtled HARD and was careful to make sure the AI didn't get caught out of position
* I didn't plan on this, but I had a lot of weapons that happened to be good against phase ships: beam weapons, locust srms, and fighters.
* the fight ended when they ran out of CR, which I think reveals that turtling is perfectly valid tactic to use against phase ships. You don't have to kill them, just outlast them and they'll just fall over dead at some point 

My fleet comp: 1 Paragon, 1 aurora, 1 astral, 2 apogees, and I think some tempests or shrikes, maybe an omen? (I wasn't able to deploy most of my smaller stuff so I don't remember how many of them I had exactly, they didn't contribute much anyway) oh and the brilliant vow class from arsenal expansion, which was the only modded thing I used.
All weapons were vanilla weapons.

Anyway, the fight got me thinking: I think I only lost the fight the first time because it was the first time I had ever fought any significant number of phase ships. I don't think phase ships in general are overpowered (not touching the issue with dooms, I know the arguments, but I frankly don't have enough experience with or against them to weigh in on that).
I really just wasn't prepared, and didn't know what tactics to use. I quickly learned, but it was a nasty surprise regardless.

Thinking about it more, beyond the occasional gremlin, phase ships are rare to face off against.
I think in all my playthroughs I faced off against... maybe 1 pirate shade, and I don't think I've even seen a pirate afflictor except in shops.

Point is, the player doesn't really get a chance to face off against phase ships and learn what tactics to use: you can't just try to outshoot them, you lose if you do and that's fine. Having to turtle it out was an interesting change of pace.

So, what I'm suggesting is that there should be more phase ships. Maybe some small pirate fleets composed mainly of phase ships, and more bounties that make use of them.
The first time that the player encounters phase ships in any meaningful quantity should not be the triple doom fight. Some smaller scale, less dire fights that the player can afford to make a few mistakes in would allow the player to learn and experiment.

[Amoebka]

Yes please. The more phase-heavy fleets the game has, the sooner people will realise how fudamentaly broken, uninteractive and antifun they are.

[Kahnmir]

Well, if there were small phase ship fleets and nobody could make it past the early game without getting wrecked, that would prove you correct.

Now that I think about it, does anyone know if custom sections can be added to the default_ship_roles.json? That would make it really easy to make a mod to test exactly that, if my understanding of that file is correct.

[SCC]

You can do it through default_ship_roles.json, if you want to contaminate everyone's ship lists with phase ships. What I think is a better approach is making a mod with modified pirates.faction file, where you would change ship distribution from 5 in warship, 1 in carrier, 1 in phase ship to 1/1/5 or 3/1/3, and maybe give pirates the Harbinger as a known ship.

[lethargie]

the problem is not phase ship. They are actually probably weaker than their equivalent weight in DP in any other ship.

The problem is the Doom mine system on a phase ship. The system give him greater range than any other ship while phase mean you can't hunt them down easily. Slow ship with PD perform decently, but anything fast will trigger mines left and right before they can be neutralized.

That everyone scream problems about phase ship just show that they either don't care about clear feedback, or just kneejerk react.

[Sharp]

Yes please. The more phase-heavy fleets the game has, the sooner people will realise how fudamentaly broken, uninteractive and antifun they are.

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of phase ships either.

It's not that they can't be beaten, it's just that it's tedious fighting them. They are just incredibly pesky ships which are very good at punishing. Afflictors are just so annoying to deal with, even overloaded they are just whizzing around the place.

And phase ships vs phase ships is also tedious.

Dooms are pretty OP though, with the systems skill they can spam enough mines to kill dedicated PD ships, especially if you have two or three of them.

[Arlian]

The Afflictor [P] ship is the phase ship I most often see during the game as it's quite common in pirate fleets (at least in my experience). I probably see the Gremlin too, but it dies so fast it doesn't even register to me that it was in the battle in the first place. I do agree that it would be nice to see some of the other phase ships being fielded more often by the factions but I rationalize it in my head that it's a rare technology that isn't easy to replicate or be found after the collapse. Would be nice to see another ship that uses the Phase Field system added as only 4 combat ships in the game uses it (No, I don't count the Gremlin as a combat ship and Ziggy is a unique ship you can only have one of).

[CanaldoVoid]

one idea is to have phase ships have a certain phase field around them, when 2 fleets get too close to each other they shock out of phase, simular to how overloaded shields work, so you can use phase ships to hunt for phase ships, and prevent them from moving together as swarms.

[Kahnmir]

You can do it through default_ship_roles.json, if you want to contaminate everyone's ship lists with phase ships. What I think is a better approach is making a mod with modified pirates.faction file, where you would change ship distribution from 5 in warship, 1 in carrier, 1 in phase ship to 1/1/5 or 3/1/3, and maybe give pirates the Harbinger as a known ship.

Thanks, I'll have to try that out!

Ideally there would be dedicated phase theme pirate fleets, but for testing purposes this should work.

[SapphireSage]

After fighting some bounties with Officered Harbingers, I've started avoiding fleets with Harbingers and Dooms in them. I will tell you that having a Harbinger a mile away spam force overload at me for a minute with no way for me to counter through my own actions while the rest of the enemy forces move in and start firing freely is definitely anti-fun. Especially if anyone wanted to fly a capital since two of a capital's main direct defenses (PD and Shields) and one indirect defense (threat of firepower) are instantly nullified with no chance of moving away due to the lowest speeds in the game and nothing you can do about it due to Officered Harbinger overload potentially having far longer range than most weapons and with the ability to do it for a prolonged period. As much as I disliked the Knights Templars having a weapon that forced flux on you potentially causing overloads with shields down at least you could counter-play that by keeping a lower flux threshold in mind, but you can't do that with Harbingers moving up to you at lightning speeds and pushing a button.

One of those bounties had 2(!) Officered Harbingers that would not stop escorting a Paragon with High-Intensity lasers and in terms of effective compositions I would definitely say that was one of them. After successfully surrounding and killing off the rest of the fleet the only option I figured I had to take those three without losses was to just sit around, wait for a minute with avoid orders, and watch them until the Harbingers ran out of CR for easy, unopposed kills before moving in on the Paragon. If any ships had moved in before that, then the Harbingers would have just chained their Overloads on them while the Paragon HILed them down with no real way to do anything about that but retreat against their obscene range.

Edit: Incidentally, the best counter to phase ships in general are officered Harbingers since you can force them out of phase with overloads and burst them down even with the reduced damage, only Dooms won't be defeatable in the 4 or 5 uses you'll get in the engagement due to their higher toughness to their destroyer and frigate sized comrades.

[Vanshilar]

Yeah, there are multiple ways to handle phase ships. One of them is indeed turtling. Whenever they phase, they move at 3x the speed, but they're also losing PPT 3x as quickly -- basically like having SO. So if they can't overwhelm you quickly, then they'll start weakening from CR.

I remember when I first started playing Starsector, and got around to the IBB fights, and hit the phase fight. One thing that worked for it was to simply take a lone Odyssey and put beams (i.e. HIL) on it. Hug the sides, venturing away from the sides a bit to lure a couple of the ships in, then kill them when they unphase to attack, repeat until they died. A bit cheesy (since its exploits how the AI handles ships when they're at the sides of the map), but it works.

[Kanjejou]

Phase ship are okaish, not super interractiv but okay... you can try to fill the space with projectile so they have to disengage and turtle until they run out of time.

The DOOM minelayer is not okay... mine blow too fast or are too strudy even for PD oriented ships... a dominator with PD matrixs all small balistic being vulcan and the *PD perk will not be able to stop a doom to simply bombing him to death... that not okay... because it s not dangerous to do nor weak, its not and harassing tool its pure murder even the rest of the weapons of the DOOM are pointless when you have this monster of a weapon, the twin themal canon of the Onslaught feel useless and a waste of flux compared to that.

[Megas]

The scripted phase fleet with multiple s-mods is overpowered.  My fleet when I first encountered it was no match for it, so I threw my fleet into storage, took a lone tanker (Dram or Phaeton flagship), returned and docked with the mission target, then left while dodging the killer phase fleet.  By the time I was strong enough to kill them much later, the fleet was non-hostile.

As for named bounties with phase ships, after a certain point, they fall like the rest.  Pure phase fleets can be annoying to fight because they exploit and punish default AI behavior, and player needs to turtle or micromanage his ships to prevent them from blundering into obvious traps.

Unskilled Doom is fine.  A bit unfair but otherwise close to par with a battleship, but with much less PPT.  With the three Combat skills (Helmsmanship, Phase Mastery, and Systems Expertise), it is overpowered and can solo fights.

[hydremajor]

a easy fix is making energy weapons able to force phase ships out of phase, maybe energy weapons can hit phased vessels but do no damage at all to armor and hull, it WILL however cause it to build up flux up to the amount the energy weapon deals...

so you can still do that hit and run BS the phase ships are completely dependent on but if you over-extend you're looking at a VERY angry Conquest hitting its maneuvering jets to bring its broadside to bear on YOUR frail ass

to round out that change, add in smaller versions of the mjolnir cannons that can fit in ballistic slots so any fleet can have some energy damage lying around, HECK would probably make the lasher/hound into great anti-phase vessels...

and thematically it makes sense, thoses smaller mjolnirs stand as a stopgap measure for the hegemony and Tri-tach's focus on energy weapons would make sense if they assumed Phase ships were the future replacement of shield tech

Maybe even make it so EMP weapons can knock out systems on phased ships...

[intrinsic_parity]

In my experience, small phase ships can be dealt with using fighters and escorts without any excessive turtling. Solo ships without 360 shields are really the main risk.

Doom is much harder to deal with, and my best experiences have actually been being very aggressive against doom. As long as the AI doesn't roll elite phase mastery, you can usually run them down with a fast ship and as long as you are moving forward, you avoid all the mines they place behind you. Backpedaling against doom is the way to loose IMO.

Harbringers are also not that fast and I think having some beam spam is usually enough to keep them away from you, but they are the ship with the least counters IMO.