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[intrinsic_parity]

Hard flux is only beneficial for breaking shields, but if you ruin your efficiency to get hard flux, you still can't break shields (before the enemy breaks yours), so it doesn't do anything except possibly enable some degenerate kiting strats that are miserable to play anyway. Any sort of 'significantly increase flux generation' or 'significantly reduce damage' without altering range is not going to work for HSA IMO.

[Zaizai]

Hmm - that's an interesting idea, and frag damage for "high scatter" is thematic! The thing with beams keeping their regular range, though - imagine something like the Odyssey vs an Onslaught. You could outrange it and deal hard flux safely (with some allowances for burn drive, but that could be managed).

Or, heck, for a better example - a beam Aurora could kite almost any other cruiser all day with zero risk and with nothing they could do about it. I'm not offhand sure if "beams + optics + cruiser-level ITU" outranges "large non-Gauss ballistic + capital-level ITU"... so that's 1000 * 1.4 + 200 = 1600 for the beams, and 900 * 1.6 = 1440 for the ballistics, right? With skills - most notably Ballistic Mastery - mixing things up a bit, but not enough. So that same Aurora could kite and take down almost any capital ship with impunity, too, the only possible exception being the Paragon. It just gets very non-interactive and boring - I'm not sure you can combine "better mobility" with "better weapon range with hard flux damage" and get good results.

Makes sense, what about still reducing the range, but maintaining it in a sweet spot where it's higher than other energy weapon, but can't get high enough to outrange everything else? Or maybe just make it so shooting the beams completely stops your engine or heavily slows you down, so while you would outrange another capital, you wouldn't be able to keep it at range anymore while still inflicting hard flux. Maybe in the lore the modification would also reroute some power from the engines to the weapon system, to explain this.

[SethMK]

Hmm - that's an interesting idea, and frag damage for "high scatter" is thematic! The thing with beams keeping their regular range, though - imagine something like the Odyssey vs an Onslaught. You could outrange it and deal hard flux safely (with some allowances for burn drive, but that could be managed).

Or, heck, for a better example - a beam Aurora could kite almost any other cruiser all day with zero risk and with nothing they could do about it. I'm not offhand sure if "beams + optics + cruiser-level ITU" outranges "large non-Gauss ballistic + capital-level ITU"... so that's 1000 * 1.4 + 200 = 1600 for the beams, and 900 * 1.6 = 1440 for the ballistics, right? With skills - most notably Ballistic Mastery - mixing things up a bit, but not enough. So that same Aurora could kite and take down almost any capital ship with impunity, too, the only possible exception being the Paragon. It just gets very non-interactive and boring - I'm not sure you can combine "better mobility" with "better weapon range with hard flux damage" and get good results.

Makes sense, what about still reducing the range, but maintaining it in a sweet spot where it's higher than other energy weapon, but can't get high enough to outrange everything else? Or maybe just make it so shooting the beams completely stops your engine or heavily slows you down, so while you would outrange another capital, you wouldn't be able to keep it at range anymore while still inflicting hard flux. Maybe in the lore the modification would also reroute some power from the engines to the weapon system, to explain this.

Wouldn't hampering your own mobility make it so smaller ships could kite you with impunity?

I do like having HSA affect movement but why not have it affect enemy movement by creating particles that produce drag on the target. Coding it should be easy, copy the rifts from the rift lance set damage to zero on the rifts but have them be high gravity like a giant star or black hole. Since the rifts don't last long to pin down a ship you have to keep hitting them and naturally the strength of those artificial gravity wells would scale with the damage of the beam so a tactical lasers gravity well would be tiny compared to a tachyon lance's as far as intensity goes. Also the larger the ship the more resistant it would be to those effects so more beams would be needed to achieve the same slowdown.

Would probably want to make sure it didn't hamper turning though to prevent being able to lock down a target in a spot where none of it's firing arcs can reach you. But I Don't think high gravity affects turning.

Could rig the effects to only apply while shields are up so the hard counter is to drop shields which is what the goal of HSA is anyways. Keep shields up and end up slowed or drop shields and take hits to armor and hull. Assuming you can't escape while keeping shields up. But that would be a bit more complex to code.

[Draba]

Because, frankly, I think HSA was a bad idea in the first place and it's a tough one to work with. Some beam weapons are in a place where if you turn them into hard flux dealers without a penalty, the become absolute monsters. The Phase Lance, for example - HSA + Phase Lance basically makes Heavy Blasters entirely obsolete. Reducing range is just about the only way to generically (that is, not on a per-weapon basis) adjust it so that it doesn't end up making a bunch of other stuff useless, and it's far better for it to be extremely situational than it is for it to be too good and therefore the only good choice in many situations.

IMO best solution would be to simply remove HSA, duds happen and it prevents lots of headaches trying to get it into a good place in the middle.
Energy weapon split between shorter range hard flux and long range beam feels nice as-is.

If it's kept 1 idea would be:
- reduces range
- gives a decent damage boost, X% at 0 weapon range, 0.5 X% at 50% range, 0% at 100% range
- damage is still soft flux

Keeps part of what makes beams unique, but still makes them better at smashing shields if you give up some range.
Downside is that it might crunch up ships with weak/no shields a bit too hard.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

The order confirmation audio bleep seems to have disappeared. I don't get any audio feedback when I order ships to escort, or to capture a control point.

As has the audio cue for picking up and putting down inventory items. Lemme reinstall real quick and see if that fixes it.

[Alex]

The order confirmation audio bleep seems to have disappeared. I don't get any audio feedback when I order ships to escort, or to capture a control point.

Huh, weird! Just checked and it's still there for me.

[Wyvern]

I'm not quite sure exactly when this happened, but I do want to drop a comment here that I like the increased chance of finding ships in debris fields; it's still not common, but it's a nice perk - in earlier starsector versions, I'd often gotten to the point of just ignoring the things because there was never anything good in them.

Edit: to clarify, this is when salvaging a debris field; I haven't noticed any change in the odds of actual visible-on-the-map derelicts.

[Alex]

I'm not quite sure exactly when this happened

Me neither, if we're being honest. I do remember fixing some bugs regarding "salvage special" assignment; possibly that was involved/got affected.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

Reinstalling the game fixed the audio issue, false alarm.

[Alex]

Reinstalling the game fixed the audio issue, false alarm.

(Whew!)

[Sly]

Didn't work. It simply lacks the punch.

It didn't work? You couldn't kill the Fulgent? That's a bit disingenuous. The HSA strategy is more dangerous, yes. I realized *and* recognized that a full loadout of ASM would be safer in my post, there's no need to make such a sweeping generalization. At least you were willing to try it, I guess.

You chose a good loadout for the Doom, ASM is a fantastic weapon. It's possibly the best loadout.

You'll understand if I don't want to further consider the merits of HSA with you.

Hmm - that's an interesting idea, and frag damage for "high scatter" is thematic! The thing with beams keeping their regular range, though - imagine something like the Odyssey vs an Onslaught. You could outrange it and deal hard flux safely (with some allowances for burn drive, but that could be managed).

The Onslaught, Frag Damage, and High Scatter keywords gave me an idea: if beams produced "flak explosions" near the point of impact (but far enough away to 'scatter' from the target ship and deal no appreciable damage to it), it could theoretically provide a useful fire support effect in destroying outgoing missiles and fighters. If the "flak" were smart enough to provide good single target suppression, it might be worth going the other route: no soft or hard flux damage to shields at all, as the beam is being scattered.

[ubuntufreakdragon]

Beams don't need 100% Hardflux, but 0% is to less in many situations, beams shouldn't deal hard flux at max range.
I was against HSA before 9.5 release, and it didn't worked, so how about my old suggestion:
beams get up to 25%/50% hard flux below Distance X and 0% over Distance Y, they could keep their ranges and still get useful hardflux.

I use Turret Gyro very often, HIL needs them against non caps.

[Ruddygreat]

It's not quite clear enough to me how polarized armor and shield shunt work now, so ill ask here.
Is it that it gets upto 50% increase at 50% hardflux, or is it 50% increase at 100% hardflux?
As conseqence to this, is shunt with polarized armor still getting 50% increase, or is it only getting 25%?

It's 50% at 100% hard flux, so shunt with polarized armor would get a permanent +25% armor strength from Polarized Armor.

<darth vader voice> NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
now that that's out of my system

Imo dropping the shield shunt % has missed the point of why PA was so bad to fight against - at higher flux levels the ai is much better at managing their flux than the player, making them just take so much longer to kill because you end up with an onslaught / dominatior with like 5k effective armour that just refuses to die, even if it can't kill you back.
w/ shield shunt this is a moot point because all armour is limited, even my "number go big" legion would lose all it's armour to a single reaper (whereas a PA onslaught w/o shunt could just raise it's shield to take the reaper, it might overload but it'll still have loads of armour to fall back on)

and re slipstreams - i've found them to be interesting but ultimately annoying because you can't ask for bounties (what i'm doing ~60% of the time) in whatever side of the sector they're favouring, it would be nice if missions were given out with some weighting towards that

[SonnaBanana]

Hopefully we'll be seeing changes to CA in the next hotfix.

[Zaizai]

Hmm - that's an interesting idea, and frag damage for "high scatter" is thematic! The thing with beams keeping their regular range, though - imagine something like the Odyssey vs an Onslaught. You could outrange it and deal hard flux safely (with some allowances for burn drive, but that could be managed).

Or, heck, for a better example - a beam Aurora could kite almost any other cruiser all day with zero risk and with nothing they could do about it. I'm not offhand sure if "beams + optics + cruiser-level ITU" outranges "large non-Gauss ballistic + capital-level ITU"... so that's 1000 * 1.4 + 200 = 1600 for the beams, and 900 * 1.6 = 1440 for the ballistics, right? With skills - most notably Ballistic Mastery - mixing things up a bit, but not enough. So that same Aurora could kite and take down almost any capital ship with impunity, too, the only possible exception being the Paragon. It just gets very non-interactive and boring - I'm not sure you can combine "better mobility" with "better weapon range with hard flux damage" and get good results.

Makes sense, what about still reducing the range, but maintaining it in a sweet spot where it's higher than other energy weapon, but can't get high enough to outrange everything else? Or maybe just make it so shooting the beams completely stops your engine or heavily slows you down, so while you would outrange another capital, you wouldn't be able to keep it at range anymore while still inflicting hard flux. Maybe in the lore the modification would also reroute some power from the engines to the weapon system, to explain this.

Wouldn't hampering your own mobility make it so smaller ships could kite you with impunity?

I do like having HSA affect movement but why not have it affect enemy movement by creating particles that produce drag on the target. Coding it should be easy, copy the rifts from the rift lance set damage to zero on the rifts but have them be high gravity like a giant star or black hole. Since the rifts don't last long to pin down a ship you have to keep hitting them and naturally the strength of those artificial gravity wells would scale with the damage of the beam so a tactical lasers gravity well would be tiny compared to a tachyon lance's as far as intensity goes. Also the larger the ship the more resistant it would be to those effects so more beams would be needed to achieve the same slowdown.

Would probably want to make sure it didn't hamper turning though to prevent being able to lock down a target in a spot where none of it's firing arcs can reach you. But I Don't think high gravity affects turning.

Could rig the effects to only apply while shields are up so the hard counter is to drop shields which is what the goal of HSA is anyways. Keep shields up and end up slowed or drop shields and take hits to armor and hull. Assuming you can't escape while keeping shields up. But that would be a bit more complex to code.

"Wouldn't hampering your own mobility make it so smaller ships could kite you with impunity?", yeah, that's the point. You gain hard flux damage on regular range beams, and in return you give up mobility so that you can't kite enemy capital ships with impunity, and enemy frigates can harrass you more easily.  It's something you give up in exchange of getting the range back and getting the beam to feel "unique" again. making them slow enemy ships would just buff them even more which was not the point anyway, since the buffing part was the hard flux damage. 
It also could be interesting build wise as it would push you towards not going full beam build, as shooting them always slows you down to a crawl, you might want at least a couple of weapons that you can use on the move to deal with escaping frigates or faster ships.