Wow, that is a long list of changes! Looking forward:)
Can't wait to put it out
Noooooooo But I like Aux support, It's fun skill for making ships like the venture actually useful in combat, the skill just needed some tweaks. Will the 2 Packages at least be buffed at least in exchanged?
They won't. I like the concept too, but I don't think it works out well in practice, unfortunately.
I believe the problem with the breach srm is that "CONSERVE_FOR_ANTI_ARMOR" tag on it messes with the ai so it will only use it ever to strip armor and not to actually hurt things. Causing it to ignore an exposed hull for an area with armor left.
It will occasionally fire at hull, but generally speaking that's the intended behavior - the missile does a lot of work vs armor and it doesn't make a lot of sense to "waste" it doing what's often relatively minimal hull damage
Why not just increase the other needlers to 750 instead of bringing heavy needler down?
Ah - I don't think buffing the Light Needler to 750 would be a good idea, as it's already quite good, whereas the slight range nerf to Heavy Needler feels just about warranted.
In general: pretty reasonable changes. The only thing i dont get: were energy weapons OP? Why so much buffs for ballistics? I mean: ok, plasma was good. But what else? I understand the asymmetric balance conception, but anyway...
With the caveat that I don't know exactly which changes you mean, and so my answer might be off-base: generally, these are buffs to specific weapons to take them from "generally pretty bad" to "useful". So I don't think it makes sense to consider this as a buff to ballistics in general. It's about opening up more options/giving more purpose to things that already exist but don't see much use, rather than, say, a buff to the top-tier performers in the ballistic lineup, if that makes sense.
Great stuff all over the board. One of my my favourite improved small detail being:
Interacting with abandoned stations (such as the one around Asharu) now plays the salvage/survey music
Also all the deployment cost changes make sense to me. Especially the reduced cost for the lower-end pirate variants: nice incentive to use those less-than-ideal-but-still-serviceable ships early in a campaign.
Hyperion receives two serious nerfs: higher deployment cost + Wolfpack Tactic PPT tweak. Sounds reasonable, the ship should be less of a no brainer, but still a great option.
*thumbs up*! To be fair, someone brought up the salvage music thing a while back, so it was on my TODO list from that.
Additional music being added at some point or out of scope?
I hate to promise things that aren't 100% set in stone, so let's just say it's fairly likely at some point, and we've had some internal conversations about it.
Phase Anchor:
One ship *per battle* can execute an "emergency dive" maneuver instead of being destroyed
Counts as retreated instead and loses an extra deployment's worth of CR
So... if both sides have phase ships and an enemy phase ship dives first, does that mean none of the player's phase ships can dive if one of them gets defeated later?
Hm, that's an interesting point - my first thought is "Oh, clearly that should be per side", but then you run into the same problem if you have an allied fleet in the battle that has a phase ship...
Yeah, it's the first one period, globally. Disruptions to the n/p-space interface, you see! But in practical terms - at least at the moment - no ships under AI control have that hullmod anyway. I don't think it'd necessarily be a problem even if they did, though.
I hope combat is playable in my Vega 11... Being limited to only exploration killed 0.95a for me.
Was combat performance in 0.95a worse for you than from 0.9.1a? It's hard to see why that might be; it should've improved if anything. Hmm. But performance with 0.95.1 should be about the same as 0.95, regardless.
To clarify: both Polarized Armor and Impact Mitigation (Elite) increase armor reduction to 90%. Did you just want to give two opportunities to get this effect or is this a typo? Getting both wouldn't have any additional effect, would it?
Augh! What happened here was I changed the IM effect later and at that point wasn't thinking that it was the same as the PA effect. The description is written assuming only one effect doing this, but the way it'd actually work is you'd get to 95%. Hmmm... it sounds like I need to come up with a new elite effect for IM, darn.
"Substantially increased" is kind of vague when you were specific with other stats. What's the Dominator at now, 15000 HP? Legion roughly equivalent to an Onslaught now?
Yeah - Legion's a bit less than Onslaught, IIRC, something like 18k.
I'm on the fence with the Hyperion cost increase: the non-SO version is not remotely as versatile because of how SO interacts with the Teleporter. With SO, absolutely worth 20 DP. Without...eh, I think 15 is about right. I'd daresay Hyperion benefits from SO more than any other ship to the point where it is fundamentally a different ship under SO versus without. Even without, you have to have Helmsmanship Elite to kind of make it work under fire (drop shields and hold fire). Dangerous precedent, I know, but could SO add +5 DP/supplies per month to the Hyperion rather than bumping the base model to 20 (or come up with a more clever way of handling that)?
Hmm, yeah, I woudln't want to do that. I do see what you're saying, though.
(SO increasing deployment cost by some amount
could be interesting across the board, though... but that's too sweeping of a change to want to mess with right now, though.)
Tons of QoL improvements, new ships, skill overhaul, slipstreams, and some interesting weapon adjustments...this is a heck of a "minor" patch! Very much looking forward to it
That change makes me sad, actually. I would love for different admins to be, well, different, so there's some excitement in finding particularly good ones. But that means having lots of different skills (less powerful and more specific than current ones). Going to no skills except one is a bit disappointing, so all admins are totally generic.
Obviously I don't know, but this could just be placeholder until some more interesting Admin skills are cooked up. Might not have been worth the Dev time this pass.
I'll just say that this is something we've talked about internally - but, don't want to go into details in case nothing comes of it. But I also don't think that having a 3 skills total is *that* much more interesting, given that the skills are all fairly general-purpose boosts anyway.
Heavy Mauler:
Now fires bursts of 3 shots with a long cooldown
Overall slightly lower DPS than before
Reduced flux/shot to 200 (was: 225)
Significantly increased accuracy
This change doesn't make much sense to me - Mauler felt fine to me the way it was. With this change, it feels like it doesn't synergise with Hypervelocity Driver and Heavy Autocannon both.
Hmm, you mean as far as it having reduced ability to put on sustained pressure, forcing shields to stay up more? My impression of the Mauler doesn't match yours, though; I could be off about it but it didn't seem like it was actually all that useful. This version is more about having some ability to burst down armor, at long range and with good accuracy, which feels like it might be more of a niche. But, open to being wrong about that.