The problem for me isn't that personal combat skills can't compete with fleetwide combat skills, it's that personal combat skills can't compete with campaign/logistics skills. No personal combat skill, or officer for that matter, will allow my fleet to get +1 base burn on the campaign map, passively repair D-mods, give me +1 S-mod on my ships (which is very nice QoL on logistics ships), etc. The same pretty much goes for fleetwide combat skills in fact: No officer in the game is going to pick up Wolfpack Tactics for me, only I can do that, so unless I'm not going to be using any frigates at all what personal combat skill can compete with that? And after all is said and done what points are left to invest in personal combat skills? Unless I'm a skilled enough player to solo entire fleets on the wings of the Combat tree (and Neural Link), obviously, but, eh...I'm not .
Those are different dimensions of gameplay, QoL versus direct combat which is where "the rubber meets the road" in this game. If you spend time learning how to pilot a flagship and how the flagship can contribute to the battle, the combat skills are actually the most powerful. With my fleet (2 Dooms, 7 Furies), generally speaking my Doom flagship contributes about 35-40% of the total damage, while the other Doom contributes around 10-15%, and the 7 Furies combined make up the remainder -- so they're contributing on average around 6-7% each. My flagship contributes
multiple times its "weight" in DP, and this is true regardless of if I'm piloting a Doom, an Aurora, a Medusa, etc. Not only that, the player can have a much better understanding of how the battle is progressing than the AI -- where some pressure needs to be exerted, or where the front line is collapsing and a ship needs to be rescued, whether or not you can go in and finish off a target or if it's too risky, etc. -- so the player has much more influence over the battle's success. QoL skills may make the game more convenient, but combat skills -- and the player's understanding of how combat works -- is what unlocks things which are not possible by any other means.
That would become another OP tax for carriers, like Expanded Deck Crew. That would encourage carriers to over-specialize into fighters more than they already do (and not mount any weapons at all).
True, it would make already-limited OP even more difficult to spread out. Hmm. Maybe a skill instead then where fighters get some % of the combat and/or fleet benefits? So that it's still encouraged for carrier officers to take combat skills, and -- similar to Neural Link -- the more combat skills they take, the more powerful the fighters become. Like how a carrier's CR also affects fighters.
To be quite honest, you're just cheesing the battle size mechanics at that point - that's not something I can really worry about as a balancing concern. I think ideally the game would be played at battle size 400.
Granted, to a certain degree it's to funnel the incoming enemy fleet into a more manageable trickle. But it's also because my computer is literally from a decade ago (i3-2100 @3.1 GHz, 8GB RAM), so even with just about all the options turned down battles take a long time since they run at around 10-15 FPS for full fleet fights (i.e. vs Ordos fleets say). And that's vanilla, it gets slower once I start adding mods. So making the battle size bigger also makes battles take even longer with the additional ships.
Regardless of player computer limitations, though, it still seems like making Radiants 60 DP instead of 40 DP will make Remnant fights significantly easier, coupled with Best of the Best making it easier to get the full 60% of battle size. With a fixed battle size of 400, this means 4 Radiants instead of 6 Radiants at once, plus the player can field a full 240-DP fleet instead of a fleet of 200-220 DP (depending on how good they are about capturing objectives). Not necessarily a bad thing, depends on how easy or difficult you feel the endgame fights should be.
(By the way, I didn't really comment much on the skill system because it all looks pretty good -- the new tiers overcome issues with the current system pretty well, so it all comes down to what the specifics are when it's released, and experimenting with it.)
That wasn't the issue with it, though. The issue was it either feeling bad to use phase ships, or to use not phase ships, depending no whether you had the skill or not.
Hmm I didn't read about combining shields/phase into a single skill. However, this is probably a good thing, not just for the player character's skills, but for things like, cryopod officers, especially if they will be much more limited in the future -- if there's a single skill that gives benefit X if shields, benefit Y if phase, then that makes officers more usable regardless of what type of ship they're in.
The problem there is that even an amazing flagship can only be as good as the player is a pilot, and my piloting skills are...questionable at best.
Eh fortunately that's something any player can learn. I feel like how important a player feels the combat skills are scales pretty directly with how much they've invested in learning how to control their ship and how it can affect the overall tide of battle. It's the single most important thing you can do to make battles go your way, so without spending time learning how to fight, you're basically leaving one of the biggest resources you have on the table.
I'm sure different players have different philosophies, but for me, piloting the flagship is about performing a role within the fleet that I the player am good at but that the AI is bad at. After all, there's little reason to pilot a ship if the AI is going to be nearly just as effective at it anyway. In other words, it may be fun piloting a Paragon and watching it zap frigates all day, but if the AI does the same thing pretty much just as effectively, then I as the human pilot am not really contributing much more to the fight.
The AI is pretty bad at judging the overall "pace" of the fight, i.e. looking ahead and knowing that it's about to be overwhelmed, or that there are too many forces on the left flank and not enough on the right, etc. It's also not good at understanding the more local, "tactical" side of the battle; for example, it usually won't know if it's a good idea to run in and attack or not, or if there's an escape route if it gets overwhelmed, etc. I as the human understand this much better. So for the flagship I tend to pilot an extremely fast, hard-hitting ship, with too many weapons than the flux can bear. The goal is to overwhelm them before my flux bar maxes out, and then recharge as I make my way to the next target. In the meantime I'm also watching for how the rest of the ships are doing, so I know where my flagship needs to go next, whether to help concentrate attacks on a vulnerable ship, or to rush in and help tank and disrupt the enemy formation. Generally I start with Hammerhead then move on to Shrike, Medusa, then Aurora, but it varies from game to game.
This works best when the flagship has a bunch of combat skills to maximize how hard it can hit in a short amount of time, how fast it gets from point A to point B, how much damage it can take when needed, etc. That's where the combat skills really start multiplying in making the fleet be more effective as a whole.
Good guess, it'll be 20! (So will the Falcon(P), btw - another ship that's, to be honest, a bit overpowered - but also fun, and I don't want to change the ship itself.)
Aww, the Fury and Falcon (P) were the two best-performing fleet ships that I've found to handle multiple Ordos fleets. (My fleet composition consists of me piloting a fast, hard-hitting ship, like the Aurora or Doom, one or two other "big ships" like Doom, Aurora, Champion, Odyssey, Legion, etc., then "fleet ships" like Fury, Falcon (P), Hyperion, etc. that make up the bulk of the fleet.) In either case, they relied on Sabot pods and Xyphos fighters, which as a combination really shuts down Remnant fleets very well. The Fury won out because it could get 360 degree shields (the Falcon (P) seems to always be getting a tachyon lance up the 30 degree engine gap) and because it could equip the cryoblaster, which kills frigates very quickly. The Falcon (P), with its additional Sabot pods, handles bigger ships better. However the Fury seems to have an issue with plasma burning into hulks or other ships or something, occasionally I find it drifting flamed out into the enemy fleet at over 200 speed (shields up), which pretty much means death. Not sure if the plasma burn AI checks for whether or not hulks are in its path.
So yeah, it makes sense that both should get nerfed a bit by increasing the DP. However, 20 seems a bit much (since Eagle is 22), I'm not sure if it's that close to an Eagle; 18 (like an Apogee) sounds about right.
Would it also be possible to take a look at the Converted Hanger hullmod? I swear every time I try to fit it into a build the ship ends up sending one wave of fighters to die horribly against anything more threatening than a Mining Lasing with a bad cold, and after that fighters just seem to slowly come out piecemeal to die horribly one by one instead of all at once. Replacement rate is awful in general, and also drops so quickly as to be basically useless.
Maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but I've never managed to get the hullmod to justify it's own OP cost. Let stand the added 150% cost of fighters/200% cost of bombers.
If you're using Converted Hangar, think of the fighters as support, not main attack/artillery. For example, Converted Hangar with Xyphos works well. The Xyphos provides 2 ion beams and PD, and hang near your ship (support range of 0), so they won't go off dying. On a cruiser, this comes out to 38 OP (15 for Converted Hangar, 23 for the Xyphos). However, 2 ion beams cost 24 OP, plus the 400 flux to support them would cost another 40 OP, so you're really getting 64 OP's worth of ion beams plus PD. (Since fighters fire their weapons flux-free, from your ship's vantage point -- they have their own flux.) Combined with some kinetic weapons, this is very effective at shutting down the enemy's offenses; Furies with Sabot pods and Xyphos make up the bulk of my Remnant-farming fleet for this very reason.