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.
Hmm - last I looked at it was a while back, but it was useful but situational, which I think is where it needs to be. If it's something that's just always good, that'd be a bigger problem.
As a contrary point, while fighters are less powerful then in the past I've found them useful and viable in endgame fleets. I've found destroyer carriers (Condors mainly as I do think Drovers have some sort of bug) to work best with interceptors because they don't need synchronization to do their job, while I use larger ships for bombers. They need orders to guide them as opposed to just rolling over the enemy on autopilot, but thats ok.
Oh yeah, I remember you talking about this a while back, and using Fighter Uplink! Right, right.
Would it make sense to have dynamic level limit? For instance, make it 20 for easy mode, but retain 15 for normal
Hmm - just in general, I'd like to avoid difficulty settings changing the game so qualitatively.
Technically true, but the experience curve grows excessively past the point the developers chose for the max level. Like a hundred fold or something.
At least, it used to. With a lower level in vanilla for the cap, who knows how the equation changed and how it would behave.
This hasn't been the case in 0.95a, though raising the cap - unless done with more care - did have an impact on the rate of story point gain past max level.
* Will the tier/ult thresholds be modifiable? E.g., if I wanted the two combat ultimate skills to require more/fewer of the preceding skills, is that possible?
* Any chance the maintenance-reduction-per-dmod statmod could be value based rather than binary? I fear my attempts to nerf/buff that modifier are going to get messy ^^'
Yes! Although if they required a *different* amount of points, they'd be in different tier from each other. A tier is basically "all skills that require X points". There are two values here - one is the base points required, and the other is extra points required per every skill you take in that tier. For top-tier skills, the former is set to 4 and the latter is set to 2, thus the second top-tier skill requires 6 points in lower-tier skill (and the first top-tier skill isn't in a lower tier, so doesn't count for it.)
And, sorry, no
Any changes to Energy Weapon Mastery, Missile Spec and Long Range Spec?
No, yes, and
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.
Right, fair enough. I *am* also looking at Radiant loadouts and how they don't get access to all the weapons they need too often.
I should also probably change the bonus of BotB to just capture one of the Comm Relays on your side. It's not meant to give you a qualitative advantage, but I wasn't really thinking that it *does*. And that makes it stack too well with Support Doctrine and is just in general way too strong for something that's meant to be a secondary bonus of a skill that already gives you +1 s-mod.
(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.)
Thank you! *thumbs up*
Speaking of these two things, the Drover's Reserve Deployment makes it so specifically bombers don't redeploy after going in for a rearm while the ship system is active. A Drover might be able to launch 4 Cobras with Reapers all at once, but it won't actually be able to re-launch any bombers until the ship system expires. This, if anything, really kills it's performance.
Right, I think that's the bug!
Unfortunately the result of poor vanilla Support fighter behavior. Support fighters completely ignore the player's target (even when set to Engage), so trying to get them to shoot the right thing is like trying to herd cats. Hopefully this could be addressed...?
It's a bit tricky on the code side of things; still, duly noted.
But about skill changes: why not to add ability to give orders to your flagship without use of command points? It will help with neurolink i think, for ex if you wanna to make your ship finish the enemy while you are transmitting to other linked ship. Giving free orders to the linked ship would be nice too, and even without neurolink ability to do this can be helpful (for people who don't like piloting for example). The only problem is to split usual and flagship orders, so other ships from your fleet will ignore flagship's orders and treat this enemy as usual. So if enemy doesn't have and orders for it and you order your flagship to eliminate it, others from your fleet treat this enemy as if they don't have any orders for it, but any non-flagship orders overwrite flagship's orders.
Yeah, you've hit on the problem with the otherwise interesting idea. I think the complications this creates makes it not worthwhile, unfortunately.
Thankfully we can modify the ship cap pretty easily, though the artificial limitation of how many ships you can recover at once is still going to be annoying.
(Worth mentioning: that's going up to 24 normal + 24 difficult.)
Sorry if this has been answered already but we're getting part 2 before the next month right? From what I've read the new new skill system is pretty much complete, and you just weren't able to put everything into a single blog post without it being a huge wall of text.
Yeah, I was thinking of putting part two out within maybe two weeks. It's already mostly written.
Alex, what do you think about boosting "Auxilary Support" cap to 8 from 5? I want to run a wolfpack fleet with a pather colossus as my capital, with ultimate point defence performance. My main ship will be like a moving base smaller ships can fall back to for a breather.
Weeeeeell, the main thing I think about this is if you have a closer look at the screenshots, you won't see an icon for Auxiliary Support...