And it feels like low tech is getting a lot of subtle buffs from some of these skills. Polarized armor is an obvious boost to high armor ships, bringing back the 85%->90% max reduction, as well as the +50% armor for calculations (admittedly scaling, but still). That straight up increases the amount of damage before minimum stops applying by 50% (at 0% flux). Assuming high flux, say, 75%, I'd guess you'd get 37.5% more effective armor for calculations, which means 1.5*1.37 that overall that minimum damage period lasts twice as long.
IMO the offensive buffs aren't even subtle, ordnance expertise/ballistic rangefinder/ballistic rangefinder look like they really beef up low-tech.
As a guess the range improvements are the more important part, easier to keep multiple ships on the same target despite low tech being slow.
As you said, ordnance expertise on ships with huge OP pools and very low base venting is obviously still great.
Curious how it plays out, seems like Dominator gets a nice consolation price for not having HBI.
I mean, this just doesn't hold up in practice! And if you land a single Reaper on a heavily armored capital (i.e. the Radiant, in this case), much of its damage potential will be spent on armor anyway, and calling that a dud is a bit much. I do understand your logic here, but I don't think it adds up - and playtesting bears that out. Reapers feel powerful.
I don't like damage control's 60%/2 secs for 3 reasons:
- it's pretty hard to show the player which ships will shrug off tons of hull damage at any given time, certainly clunks up the UI
- AI already has some trouble using missiles, this skill complicates that further
- friendly AI can potentially mess with your shot. You can work around their hellbores/whatever, but it's a new way for allies to annoy the player. No matter how rare it is, the few instances it happens will be remembered
IMO it'd be much cleaner to have a weaker effect, but with no frequency limitation.
More reliable, less ways to get frustrated, easier to handle HIL/strike beams.
going just by statistic it looks like the radiant is just a flatly better ship
https://imgur.com/a/qPZTBkg
This is one of those cases where the stats don't tell the full story:
- Ziggurat can use time dilation+a bunch of strike weapons to hammer anything down in record time
- motes are nasty, and very versatile
- Ziggurat is a phase ship so has very high effective speed
It's well worth the 75 DP, and feels easy mode even for that.
I said it for years, I'll say it again: Starsector is a power fantasy, finding ways to attain excessive power is what makes such games fun, and perfect balance is a detriment in that respect. It seems this realization was almost reached in the Neural Link + Automated Ships section ("it's way too strong but also really fun"), but then a nerf was applied instead. Fun overload detected, deploy emergency nerfs!
Starsector is a power fantasy
for you.
Plenty of players enjoy optimizing different fleet compositions against content that's hard enough to require some attention.
Nothing wrong with having your preferences, but your post basically says those looking for a challenge just don't understand your absolute truth yet.
That's not a good argument, and not a good way of convincing people.
"perfect balance" doesn't happen in any game and as already explained isn't a goal here, either.
The "good enough" threshold for complex single player games is usually very generous anyway.