Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Megas]

What happens after the player steals it?to (a bit late in a game).

What you'd expect!

Back to square one and perma-shortage for profit, if nothing else changed.  But given the difficulty of raiding big heavily defended worlds (I do not remember if Eventide has a battlestation or star fortress), it is something that probably does not happen until player can do worse at that time of the game.

Make the carrier skills reduce roaming range. Explain that it's because the officer is taking a hands-on approach and you can't really do that without any communications, now can you? Well, assuming you're going back to carrier skills. If not, make it a part of "affects ships with officers" skill? Making it a hullmod is also an option, but possibly less desirable.

Hmm, I don't think skills giving an unavoidable debuff to something is great.

I avoided old shield skill at level 3 (that had both shield and phase buffs) for officers because 4x time shift to phase ship was a major debuff to effective PPT (given how much time AI wasted while phased), even if hard flux dissipation to shields was good for those ships.  Similarly, old Gunnery Implants 10 because the faster fire rate made it easier for AI (or even playership if relying on autofire) to flux themselves to death with loadouts that were relatively flux neutral at normal fire rate.

Skills that hurt the user... hurt, more so if it is coupled with a genuinely useful buff, like hard flux dissipation for shields plus 4x time shift for phasers, or half recoil with +25% fire rate to all guns (that makes flux use too high).

[Gothars]

Maybe the assault/escort package could be preserved to change their role to an emergency option by increasing deployment cost. For me civilian ships never really made sense as part of my regular combat force. But I have sometimes resorted to deploying them when I'm about to lose a fight, as distractions. That was actually fun, it felt like a "really giving it my all" sort of thing. Hullmods that support and expand that would be great. Maybe they increase deployment cost so much you can only deploy a civ ships once, in an emergency, but then in acts like an SO ship.

Hmm - I'm not sure that this is a case that it works to design something like this around. If a battle's gone so far off the rails that you're about to bring in civilians... chances are this isn't a case you've specifically outfitted them for, at the expense of logistics hullmods, right?

I wasn't thinking it should be a logistic hullmod as a tradeoff, but that you can't deploy civs thus equipped more than once (for a while). So if you are still losing the fight after emergency deploying them, or getting in another shortly after, you will now have trouble retreating with all your civs having 0%CR.

Basically, your loadout choice would be to have civs without combat packages that are good at running away when you lose a fight, or civs that are good (well, "good") at helping you not to lose the fight in the fist place. Both cases don't have to cut into the logistics capabilities of these ships, but can, if you want to really optimize them for that role.

As I mentioned earlier, fleetwide fighter bonuses seem like the only way to go for fighters. But what if *those* were, say, doubled by the presence of an officer on the ship? That'd certainly make you feel like putting an officer on a carrier was worthwhile, without getting into all the problems of personal skills boosting them. Really liking this, actually! Would have to tweak the specific skill numbers some, of course.

Mh, interesting, but it seems like that would favor battlecarriers a lot, which can profit way more from officer skills than stand-off carriers, while benefiting equally from the fleetwide fighter bonus boost.

Mhh... Except maybe if officers need a skill or two to actually access the full fleetwide-fighter-bonus-boost. Then the optimal battlecarrier captain might have 0-1 of these skills, and the optimal stand-off carrier captain would have them all. Haha, kinda coming full circle here - or maybe it's an upwards spiral?

 

[FooF]

I like the idea of simply the presence of an officer in a carrier does *something*. Even if officer skills become somewhat tangential to how the carrier operates, the fact they do improve fighter performance makes me want to put them in a carrier.

In regards to trading fighter range for some sort of fighter buff, I would love that for ships like the Legion, Mora, and to a lesser extent something like an Odyssey. I typically run these ships without ever using "Engage" and allow the fighters to simply be another form of damage. A way to improve that would be stellar, though I'd want to it to be heavily incentivized to pair with an Officer and work with global skills. Something like a "Battle Carrier Retrofit" hullmod that, on its own, adds 5% damage/HP/accuracy to fighters at the cost of some OP and -50% fighter range (and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Deck Crews). However, global fighter skills would directly tie into this that also adds a variable flat amount of damage/hp, etc. based on total # of flight decks. An officer adds some multiplier to this number. Maxed out, maybe a 20-25% increase? Of course, the global skill that boosts these attributes would be like the Phase Cloak/Shields skill: if a ship doesn't have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets the normal fighter bonuses but if it does have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets this set of buffs. That way you're not having to choose at the fleet level but at the individual ship level. There's probably a way more elegant way of doing this but I think a distinction between battle carrier and fleet carrier would be kind of cool.

Also, +1 to Hyperion TP charges.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

I like the idea of simply the presence of an officer in a carrier does *something*. Even if officer skills become somewhat tangential to how the carrier operates, the fact they do improve fighter performance makes me want to put them in a carrier.

In regards to trading fighter range for some sort of fighter buff, I would love that for ships like the Legion, Mora, and to a lesser extent something like an Odyssey. I typically run these ships without ever using "Engage" and allow the fighters to simply be another form of damage. A way to improve that would be stellar, though I'd want to it to be heavily incentivized to pair with an Officer and work with global skills. Something like a "Battle Carrier Retrofit" hullmod that, on its own, adds 5% damage/HP/accuracy to fighters at the cost of some OP and -50% fighter range (and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Deck Crews). However, global fighter skills would directly tie into this that also adds a variable flat amount of damage/hp, etc. based on total # of flight decks. An officer adds some multiplier to this number. Maxed out, maybe a 20-25% increase? Of course, the global skill that boosts these attributes would be like the Phase Cloak/Shields skill: if a ship doesn't have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets the normal fighter bonuses but if it does have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets this set of buffs. That way you're not having to choose at the fleet level but at the individual ship level. There's probably a way more elegant way of doing this but I think a distinction between battle carrier and fleet carrier would be kind of cool.

Can't make it too good, but +1 agree.  Seems like since carrier skills for player are fleetwide, kinda need an incentive to also put officers on carriers.  But keep bonus light AND random, like slightly reducing CR loss for fighters or slightly increasing effective fighter range.  Is ECM for fighters a thing?  If so, could maybe add a small effect to that also.  No officer gets the same bonus, and only really matters if officer has a carrier skill anyway, since non-carrier officers won't get attached to carriers unless absolutely necessary for some reason.  Could even just make effect dependent on carrier skill...

[Alex]

Mh, interesting, but it seems like that would favor battlecarriers a lot, which can profit way more from officer skills than stand-off carriers, while benefiting equally from the fleetwide fighter bonus boost.

Maybe I'm not thinking this through correctly, but it seems like it would favor battlecarriers with officers less than now.

Right now, an officer on a battlecarrier gets more use out of their skills than on a carrier. If the officer increases the fleetwide skills' bonus to fighter wings, then putting them on a dedicated carrier - which presumably has more bays than the battlecarrier - will provide more utility, countering at least some of the advantage of putting that officer on a battlecarrier, or even all of it (and perhaps then some), depending.

Haha, kinda coming full circle here - or maybe it's an upwards spiral?

(Hah! Yes, but also no )

In regards to trading fighter range for some sort of fighter buff, I would love that for ships like the Legion, Mora, and to a lesser extent something like an Odyssey. I typically run these ships without ever using "Engage" and allow the fighters to simply be another form of damage. A way to improve that would be stellar, though I'd want to it to be heavily incentivized to pair with an Officer and work with global skills. Something like a "Battle Carrier Retrofit" hullmod that, on its own, adds 5% damage/HP/accuracy to fighters at the cost of some OP and -50% fighter range (and is mutually exclusive with Expanded Deck Crews). However, global fighter skills would directly tie into this that also adds a variable flat amount of damage/hp, etc. based on total # of flight decks. An officer adds some multiplier to this number. Maxed out, maybe a 20-25% increase? Of course, the global skill that boosts these attributes would be like the Phase Cloak/Shields skill: if a ship doesn't have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets the normal fighter bonuses but if it does have the Battle Carrier hullmod, it gets this set of buffs. That way you're not having to choose at the fleet level but at the individual ship level. There's probably a way more elegant way of doing this but I think a distinction between battle carrier and fleet carrier would be kind of cool.

I wonder if a 50% fighter range bonus would be enough, and I also wonder if there even is a sweet spot where the fighter range is low enough that force concentration isn't big a concern, while fighters have enough room to form up and do a proper attack run.

That said, it seems like the "officer increases effect of fleetwide fighter skills" would already get much of what you'd like to see, namely 1) boosting battlecarriers and 2) having that be contingent on an officer.

[LookItsRain]

Set them on alternating, that would even out the flux and damage over time.

Not helpful on a big ship, like on Onslaught or Conquest, where I have one mauler pointed left and another pointed right.

Also, AI does not always maintain alternating perfectly (like if it wants to spam its missiles, it will fire them one-two-three and mostly override alternating).  I find alternating useful mostly for manual control of missiles.  Alternating is a pain to use on guns meant to fire automatically.

Maybe im off base here but i have strong opinions on this:
On the Hull Restoration skill and similar effects: To me, this just seems way too stacked in terms of usefulness, it basically nullifies ship losses, removes d mods on obtained ships and even gives you a significant CR boost. With how easy it is to also scoop up salvageable ships thanks to story points, overall i feel like its too easy and cheap to obtain and repair ships compared to 0.91 which was the polar opposite.

As far as I am concerned, this is easy: the cost of Hull Restoration is not getting the skills that actually improve your fleet's performance. In a choice between, say, Automated Ships and Hull Restoration, I will definitely go with Automated Ships.

Classic case of QoL vs. combat power, like taking Navigation or Sensors instead of another combat skill the player wants more and gives up QoL because he does not have enough points for both QoL and combat power.

In my case, I probably take Hull Restoration because it gets tiring reloading the game after a single mistake, and reloading is faster than grinding a few hours to recover money and progress lost to the rust monsters in a game with combat rewards balanced mostly on flawless victories.  And the AI is incompetent enough and/or player does not have enough control to prevent all casualties, except in fights where player can auto-resolve them away in a pursuit battle (which do not need combat ships to get free kills, just send in the barely armed civvies and clunkers to do it).

That said, getting Hull Restoration would interfere with getting Tech 8 and enough combat skills to dominate with Radiant flagship.

P.S.  With Hull Restoration, fixing Remnants, Ziggurat, and other ships acquired only by looting them (after battle) cheap is nice.  Fixing ships is bloody expensive, especially capitals.  Ziggurat is especially pricey with its restoration being close to two million credits, and the restoration skill removing the d-mods from it (and other capitals with repair bills close to a million a pop) is especially nice.  Endgame bounties only give about 300k per bounty, and the loot goes toward replacing what the player's fleet consumed on the trip.  This is why I write the game's rewards assume flawless victories, and the hull restoration skill extend that threshold from flawless victory to lose a few ships.  (Field Repairs was good only for one or two ships, including those looted from battle, which can send threshold back to flawless victory so player can fix the new former enemy ships in his lifetime.)

Perhaps i overvalue the QOL and repairs, but to me the d mod repairs along with how easy it is to salvage ships will net you overall more combat power vs dedicated combat skills. Automated ships is likely equally as good, simply because the radiant is absurdly strong. In the current build even with AI mistakes etc, you still almost never actually lose a ship, especially because any time you get intercepted and think you cant reasonably win, you just press your 1 sp get out of jail button. Even if you lose a ship, you likely already have something to replace it anyways. IMO, just mothballing a ship as it repairs as you fly around and do everything else seems way to easy, id like to see a middle ground between this and the absurd credit cost of normal restoration.

We will get a much better idea once the patch gets released though.

[JUDGE! slowpersun]

• New technology skill, top tier: Neural Link
  • Allows rapid transfer between two ships with the Neural Interface hullmod
  • Transfer is instant if combined DP is 50 or below
  • Uses "switch view to target" key for transfer
  • Both ships benefit from the player's personal combat skills at all times

I forgot to ask this earlier, but when using this skill, does it still cost a CP to make your companion ship attack stuff, or is it free?  Because that would suddenly and very seriously change the possible uses for this skill... but seems kinda like rule of cool would override some of the concern...

[Thaago]

Because fighters consume the same OP budget as weapons and flux, I think having a pilot skill that boosts both guns and fighters in some way would work well! Its kind of like a single budget boosted, rather than just one aspect of it boosted.

[SonnaBanana]

Should Cybernetic Augmentation give bonuses to raids/marines?

[IonDragonX]

Should Cybernetic Augmentation give bonuses to raids/marines?

I'm with you there! Makes sense.

[Histidine]

The idea to use officers to enhance carrier fleetwide skills is pretty nice! It does have some odd effects (in the naive implementation the carrier officer's specific skillset and even level don't matter, could even leave them at level 1 to save on the salary), but I think it'll do the job.

Well if that shortage I mean would have been created by a volatile shortage, I wouldn't have complained about it in first place, I caused by an high command consuming more fuel then a fuel production with synchrotron can produce, without admin boost.

Ah - does Andrada not have Industrial Planning in 0.95a? He does now, so that'd explain that aspect of it.

Andrada has Industrial Planning now? Huh.

That highlights one (minor) side effect of the admin skills removal; the loss of characterization among the unique admins (and arguably procgen admins for high-tier markets in general). Kanta and Sun have all three skills because they're skilled leaders of their respective political organizations (despite Kanta's questionable sanity), Daud has them too because he could have been the player character in another timeline. Andrada only has Space Operations and Ground Operations; he's an excellent military leader but has no particular talent in civilian administration, and it shows in the polity he's created. Rao and Ibrahim have no admin skills, perhaps because one's a worn out old soldier and the other's a (likable) fraudster.

Might be cool if some of the named admins got the alpha cores' Hypercognition, or even unique admin skills that exist nowhere else in the game.

(Incidentally, Nexerelin fixes Sindria's High Command being an absurd fuel hog by putting a gamma core on it. Although why do Military Base and HC have such high resource demand (size+2 and +3 respectively), anyway?)

[intrinsic_parity]

Beyond that, Sabots still only do mostly temporary damage, and e.g. removing the EMP component would make it possible to make firing them mostly a waste by just turning shields off.

HE missiles can just as easily be wasted into PD or shields. I think that sabots are the outlier in that they are very difficult to waste.

Question, why Scarab OP reduced?

It felt a little too strong to me. I don't think it's a major change; we're talking -50 flux dissipation - which, ok, it matters, but its base dissipation is so high that it's not going to feel that nearly as much as most frigates.

I agree that scarab is currently slightly too strong, but I think that there are enough factors (multiple hullmods and skills (flux and shield stuff) it disproportionally benefits from being nerfed, lots of things that compete with it being buffed, so that it will already be a bit worse next patch. I also would argue the loss of 5 OP = 50 dissipation will really hurt since any excess weapon flux generation is effectively tripled by its system (e.g. firing 30 flux/sec over dissipation will generate 90 flux/sec while system is active and you will overload faster). I already struggle to have enough OP/vents, even when I am leaving half of its slots empty.

[Yubbin]

Beyond that, Sabots still only do mostly temporary damage, and e.g. removing the EMP component would make it possible to make firing them mostly a waste by just turning shields off.

HE missiles can just as easily be wasted into PD or shields. I think that sabots are the outlier in that they are very difficult to waste.

I completely agree with inrinsic here, firing almost any HE missile (besides reapers) into shields has barely any effect unless you shoot a lot of missiles, or you're shooting a frigate. On the other hand, sabots either raise flux by a large margin, or emp all the weapons, because they are impossible to shoot down! The main annoying part of sabots is that they hit the ship they are fired at 90% of the time! Lowering the range where they split and increasing the spread of the pellets would be a step in the right direction I think.

[Alex]

I forgot to ask this earlier, but when using this skill, does it still cost a CP to make your companion ship attack stuff, or is it free?  Because that would suddenly and very seriously change the possible uses for this skill... but seems kinda like rule of cool would override some of the concern...

The skill has no effect on any command point costs.

Because fighters consume the same OP budget as weapons and flux, I think having a pilot skill that boosts both guns and fighters in some way would work well! Its kind of like a single budget boosted, rather than just one aspect of it boosted.

Hmm - did you see the earlier point about force concentration and not wanting to buff fighters directly from officers because of that?

Should Cybernetic Augmentation give bonuses to raids/marines?

Should it?

The idea to use officers to enhance carrier fleetwide skills is pretty nice! It does have some odd effects (in the naive implementation the carrier officer's specific skillset and even level don't matter, could even leave them at level 1 to save on the salary), but I think it'll do the job.

That might just be good enough! I'm not sure whether basing the bonus on officer level in some way would be "neat" or "a pointless complication"; kind of leaning towards the latter, to be honest.

Andrada has Industrial Planning now? Huh.

That highlights one (minor) side effect of the admin skills removal; the loss of characterization among the unique admins (and arguably procgen admins for high-tier markets in general). Kanta and Sun have all three skills because they're skilled leaders of their respective political organizations (despite Kanta's questionable sanity), Daud has them too because he could have been the player character in another timeline. Andrada only has Space Operations and Ground Operations; he's an excellent military leader but has no particular talent in civilian administration, and it shows in the polity he's created. Rao and Ibrahim have no admin skills, perhaps because one's a worn out old soldier and the other's a (likable) fraudster.

Fair! But also, "oh well"; I don't feel like that kind of thing justifies keeping complexity that was otherwise judged to be not pulling its weight.

Might be cool if some of the named admins got the alpha cores' Hypercognition, or even unique admin skills that exist nowhere else in the game.

The Culann admin has it, but don't tell anyone, especially the Hegemony

(Incidentally, Nexerelin fixes Sindria's High Command being an absurd fuel hog by putting a gamma core on it. Although why do Military Base and HC have such high resource demand (size+2 and +3 respectively, anyway?))

Seems reasonable to me; ultimately these kinds of industries could well be the ultimate reason for having colonies in the first place...

Question, why Scarab OP reduced?

It felt a little too strong to me. I don't think it's a major change; we're talking -50 flux dissipation - which, ok, it matters, but its base dissipation is so high that it's not going to feel that nearly as much as most frigates.

I agree that scarab is currently slightly too strong, but I think that there are enough factors (multiple hullmods and skills (flux and shield stuff) it disproportionally benefits from being nerfed, lots of things that compete with it being buffed, so that it will already be a bit worse next patch. I also would argue the loss of 5 OP = 50 dissipation will really hurt since any excess weapon flux generation is effectively tripled by its system (e.g. firing 30 flux/sec over dissipation will generate 90 flux/sec while system is active and you will overload faster). I already struggle to have enough OP/vents, even when I am leaving half of its slots empty.

I guess we'll see!

Beyond that, Sabots still only do mostly temporary damage, and e.g. removing the EMP component would make it possible to make firing them mostly a waste by just turning shields off.

HE missiles can just as easily be wasted into PD or shields. I think that sabots are the outlier in that they are very difficult to waste.

I completely agree with inrinsic here, firing almost any HE missile (besides reapers) into shields has barely any effect unless you shoot a lot of missiles, or you're shooting a frigate. On the other hand, sabots either raise flux by a large margin, or emp all the weapons, because they are impossible to shoot down! The main annoying part of sabots is that they hit the ship they are fired at 90% of the time! Lowering the range where they split and increasing the spread of the pellets would be a step in the right direction I think.

I had a feeling someone would mention this

The thing is, firing HE missiles like this into shields or PD is a piloting error. Except for when it's not, i.e. when you're trying to achieve an overload by forcing shields to stay up, let's say. And in that scenario, maybe they'll be shot down (though Sabots also face that possibility vs at least *some* PD), but it's not as trivial to nullify as it with Sabots.

With Sabots, a primary use case is firing it into the shields of a relatively fresh, and almost certainly not overloaded, opponent. If they can be almost completely neutralized in that case by simply turning the shields off, that's a much, much different situation from that which HE missiles face.

HE, you're either firing enough to overwhelm PD with acceptable missile losses, or you're firing at an overloaded/venting target. Or you messed up. With Sabots, instead of "you messed up" it'd very often just be "opponent right-clicked when you were hoping they wouldn't". There'd be some window of opportunity to use Sabots, still - paired with HE damage to keep shields up, perhaps? But it feels like it would be quite narrow. On the other hand, with EMP damage, they generate *some* kind of opening regardless.

Lowering the range where they split and increasing the spread of the pellets would be a step in the right direction I think.

Hmm, there's something to that - though, again, they tend to face "fresher" opponents, so if they become easily susceptible to PD, that has a much more outsized effect on them than it would on HE missiles, which have a different use case.

[SonnaBanana]

Should Cybernetic Augmentation give bonuses to raids/marines?

Should it?

Yes 
No need to be major bonuses