Very excited to be able to pilot a Radiant with the new Neural Link skill!
OMG I really like this new layout. It doesn’t sacrifice the decision making but also doesn’t make the entire design seem unnecessarily restrictive.
And also
I’m however legit wondering how colony will be changed. I really hope I can make self sufficient organs without use of AI.
until part 2 is out, I'm afraid.
Derelict Operations seems like a bad design. Pervious version give junk ships straight buff, which is always userful. This one just let you deploy more ships, and they are a bit cheap to maintain... Untill the pick up certain d-mod. But with this strategy you will lose more ships in combat, which will turn into more spendings on repair, crew, fuel, etc.
And you also can pick Hull Restoration instead. So why even bother with this junk? Especially in late game, lol.
I think you're under-valuing having lower deployment points by quite a large margin. And it's supported well by other Industry skills, though to be fair, I only touched on the details there. In particular, Field Repairs makes recovery cheaper, and Containment Procedures do a better job of reducing crew casualties.
This looks very cool!
For Automated Ships, does that meant that 4 unofficered Radiants, and 1 Radiant with an alpha core, have the same number of points? I'm honestly a bit torn there, as combat skills are very powerful, but maybe not 4x poweful... but otoh, those 4 Radiants are a less efficient use of fleet points than 1 Radiant with an Alpha. But support doctrine would boost those unofficered ships (and give them more CR!), or I could put neural link on 1 and then have 3 others, or one neural link, one beta core... lots of possibilities!
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking - compressing that power into a single ship is really, really valuable.
If you got 4 un-officered Radiants, btw, they'd be at malfunction level CR due to not getting +15% from officer skills - so you'd need to either get it from Support Doctrine, or BotB + Hull Restoration + s-mods. Or just go with 3 Radiants!
Worth noting, also, is that the Radiant is now 60 deployment points - and, of course, the Automated Ships threshold is tuned to work with that. But the point is that other automated ships may be worth another look; in particular the Rampart, which is now only 15 points and brings a fair bit of firepower.
Derelict operations requiring officers and lowering the deployment cost kind of implies that its best use would be to spam capital ships... so how does for example a 5 D mod Onslaught match up against a 28OP heavy cruiser? I think that really depends on the D mods, so I can see myself somewhat "fishing" for the "right" ones. Noncombat D mods for example would be amazing: something like increased maintenance becomes the most desired D mod, as it reduces deployment cost in combat for a small increase in money cost (for an Onslaught, 2k credits per month). Reduced crew capacity would be even more desirable. So the value of this skill as it stands seems to go up on recovering big ships with noncombat D mods, which is a bit odd.
It doesn't require officers! That was a tooltip issue (since corrected in the screenshot).
Re: d-mods, that's a good point and something I didn't mention. The non-combat d-mods that can end up on combat ships now come with a reduction to maximum CR, so that they have *some* effect on combat performance. So, Degraded Life Support, Increased Maintenance, and Faulty Automated Systems. (None of these can roll for automated ships, btw, since that penalty would have an outsized effect there...)
Do reductions in deployment cost also apply to skills that are limited by deployment points? e.g. does pairing Derelict Operations and Automated Ships allow your fleet to maintain more AI ships, provided they have lots of D-mods?
The wording in the blog implies it does, but the screenshot of the Automated Ship skill says "deployment recovery cost" which implies it doesn't?
Yes, it goes! The tooltip is wrong, an oversight on my part - thank you for pointing it out.
mercurial scythe of balance coming for your phase ships in part 2
Hoping that is not going to be the story of how a Doom boosted by unbalanced skills managed to get every other phase ship nerfed straight into Drover-tier.
They'll be fine, nothing that won't buff out. The Doom got a little bit of special attention, though nothing drastic at that - just via a range reduction to Mine Strike, and an improvement to how enemy AI handles mines.
I'm liking the direction this is taking, but I can't shake the feeling that this new(er?) skill system is still too restrictive in terms of having to choose a playstyle and sticking to it. I'm assuming there's separate skills that boost one of line ships/carriers/phase ships, with skill points being as sparse as they are is it at all feasible to have a mixed fleet without either dragging along nerfed ships or making compromises elsewhere?
Hmm, I'm not sure I'm on board with calling ships that haven't been boosted to the max "nerfed". That aside, though, I don't see why it woudln't be viable. It's already viable without any skills involved. Compromises are basically the name of the game regardless, though, if you're picking some of the things, you're not picking the rest of the things.