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[Megas]

That's what Phase Anchor does.

I tried cloaking immediately after decloaking.  Did not work.  Ship still had cooldown delay.

[Megas]

The question becomes "Why would I use [Insert Frigate Phase Ship] instead of a tempest?"

Because AI throwing Tempest's drones away willy-nilly for moderate damage guts its PD.  AI treats drones as missiles to spam instead of important defenses it should not throw away until is it about to die anyway (but by then it probably has max flux and cannot use the system anyway).

Tempest was nerfed too much by AI misusing its new system.

P.S.  This is not a case for using a phase ship instead of Tempest.  It is that Tempest was dragged down with the phase ships to sub-optimal by gameplay changes.

[Bummelei]

I think the only problem with phase ships was in 0.91 is the AI stupidity.
In 0.95 the AI became much more proficient with them, and finally became useful (Shades were in mostly balanced and beautiful state).
The only thing in 0.95 was of concern is zeroflux speed boost (Afflictor 400su speed) which was a complete overkill, and AI was able to be not an OP, but simply good even without it.
But now AI again broken and don't know how to play it. Do we really need phase ships in such state? Now they just bellow average at best, and straight up bad at worst.

[Sly]

This is a current patch demonstration of what TaLaR is talking about.

WARNING: This video contains ships not optimized for their role. You have been warned.

Spoiler

[close]

I tried spinning. It wasn't much of a trick, but maybe it's better outside of time dilation?

I love phase ships, I almost exclusively fly phase ships as my flagship. Naturally, I love [REDACTED PHASE SHIP]. I'll fly non-phase ships regularly too to mix it up, but not with as much gusto. The AI doesn't attack on oblique angles to bypass shields like I did, but it doesn't really matter. I'm pretty sure the AI being slow on the draw for raising shields is intentional? Lets you do stuff like that, anyway. Fun is good. Really satisfying to clip a frigate's wings like that.

The enemy AI's handling of phase ships is borderline suicidal in most cases. They really need to hang out near friendly ships and attack when an opportunity presents itself, not become cut off and run down. There are serious limitations to what it can do, and operate alone is not one of those things. I love going deep into the enemy's flank or rear to blow stuff up, but the battle ends faster when I start slashing apart the enemy on the front for my allies. If the AI for phase ships does anything, it should do that.

You can see a ... slight improvement in allied phase ship AI by setting them to defend a ship, but they will absolutely not use their cloak well when equipped with something like Phase Anchor, and rarely/never choose to back off and vent. They love to eat PD fire and fail regularly to use dumb fire torpedoes.

The AI needs 10-15 seconds of time set to be aggressive, where it uses cloak to blink in and out (with an emphasis on cloaked), and then return to a nearby friendly position and recharge weapons, flux 0, etc. The AI will almost always blunder badly with phase ships if they have free reign to attack. If the AI hid behind nearby allies as a rule when it wasn't on a short attack run, it would probably do a lot better. The phase frigates in particular, but the Doom is probably the best non-[REDACTED] phase ship to have on a beefy battle line in general. Even *while* on an attack run, it should hang around allies.

In terms of phase ships and handling, for me:

Afflictor: Best phase frigate for players, like everyone says, great foundation. If the AI hung back and focused its system on targets under heavy allied fire, it could be trouble. Obviously fantastic in a strike role. My favorite ship right after early game.

Shade: Best phase frigate for AI. The EMP Emitter is wonderfully versatile. If the AI used it aggressively while escorting (flanking around attackers) or defensively in the case of fighter and missile attack, it would shine.

Gremlin: This will never be good. It doesn't need to be good. But in a player's hands, it has about 30 seconds of glory in early game fights with SO, UI, and torpedoes. I didn't use it for long, but it honestly wasn't THAT bad for a quick play in a small skirmish before I brought in another ship. Disclaimer: I always choose random start, and ended up with one. I would never buy one on purpose. After the first wave of bounties, it was immediately scrapped.

Harbinger: It's in a weird place right now. If the Quantum Disrupter generated a small percentage of temporary flux, it might just be perfect. The system would function normally when the target isn't near maxed out on flux, but it could push a target with high flux over the edge into an *actual* overload. Real assassin material if it had a medium universal slot.

Doom: It's fine now. It can't just sail across the entire line of battle carelessly anymore, but that's a good thing. Really brutal in a fleet supporting role, way better than a Shade. Again, AI defensive, so on.

Spoiler

Ziggurat: Almost totally unstoppable, it's so deliciously good. You can cloak, you have a flexible array of weapons, and you have FRIENDS! I use this *almost* exclusively after I salvage it, d-mods and all. With Phase Anchor you can level truly awesome firepower. For me, best flag capital in the game. The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't appeal to me aesthetically. Naturally, I would never allow the AI to pilot my murderchild. That would be a colossal waste. Goes surprisingly well with neural link and another capital (like an Onslaught) when you need to do battle with Geometry.

[close]

EDIT: Didn't really talk at all about my overall feelings on the 'State of Phase'. I think it's in a good spot, judging by the sample of comments in this thread (for players, specifically).

I think the Phase Dive effect from Phase Anchor should probably be a ship system for a new phase ship. Some kind of midline-style design, where it's just totally CR crippled instead of destroyed, and there's no limit to the number of ships that can Dive. I could absolutely see the Persean League fielding a phase ship like that in the face of a Hegemony invasion. Phase Anchor doesn't need it, it's plain good even without it.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

The Harbinger exists to be player piloted and shred things with 3 HSA Phase Lances and Phase Anchor, and maybe do dumb things with butt-reapers. Any other use is a waste. It's in a bad spot where the player can use it to punch really hard with a very specific build, but trying to do anything else with it might as well be throwing away 20 dp.

[float]

Yep that went from certain death if unprepared to just another big battle. I was suprised how easy I won, since i didtnt read to much in the patchnotes this time.
I think the nerv at least for AI is a bit to hard and as a player I don't like phaseships very much.
But the Ziggurat gained some usesfulness, since its fleet buff (I think how it works now is new) and the removal of the "everyone knows who you are!" debuff

But as a player beeing phased with reduced speed feels slower than flying an Onslaught with disabled engines. (Only piloted the Ziggurat)
A fix could be that the time diliation adepts to lost speed at the same ratio the spd is reduced so its still "x1"

Huh, what fleet buff did the ziggurat get? Also, I’m pretty sure the unique ship debuff is still there, since I’m still getting that “knows who you are due to the presence of unique ships in your fleet” blurb. It’d be nice if it were removed though, since it’s a rather annoying way of balancing the ship’s power (and, in terms of consistency, why can a fleet recognize me by a unique ship, but not by my fleet composition that hasn’t changed in 10 cycles and is also unique, considering there are about 50^30 possible configurations?).

On topic: update made dooms and harbingers much easier to deal with. The smaller phase ships are still annoying to deal with, just a bit less so. As for piloting phase ships, I didn’t enjoy it in 0.95 because the time dilation slowed the pacing of battles so much, but I’ve found that phase anchor helps offset that somewhat, since it actually increases real-time DPS (6x game-time rift cascade emitters are hilariously OP, same probably also applies to tach lances). It also feels better phasing to recharge weapons and dodge projectiles than it does to spend an eternity in real-time flanking an enemy ship. One thing that hasn’t changed from 0.95: without the proper skills and hull mods, ion beams and ion cannons seem to disable every weapon within a few seconds, and they take ages to repair. This is really frustrating against remnants that also have +100% weapon and engine damage from elite target analysis — one radiant with ion beams and the phase ship is nearly instantly disabled, and with the hard flux changes flanking with a slow base speed isn’t an option.

I agree that there should be a way to control the time dilation factor. For some ships (e.g. scarab) slowing down time is necessary in order to have proper control over the ship in its sped-up state, but for others, like ziggurat where I’m just sitting in phase waiting for my weapons to recharge and soft flux to go down, the time dilation isn’t really necessary. Perhaps we could have controls to adjust the dilation factor, e.g if [player has same real-time speed and everything else is slowed down] is 1 and [player is sped up and everything else has the same real-time speed] is 0, left bracket could, say, decrease the factor by 0.25 and right bracket could increase it by 0.25. Something like that.

[Vind]

So i was under impression speed penalty is relative to whole flux bar but actually it is much worse. At 50% flux you already get your max speed 33% of "double" - on harbinger without phase skill ship will be crawling at ~30-40 speed. Basically ship is dead then at 50% flux due to insane amount of reaper/hammer torpedoes on enemy ships. I cant see these ships viable at all even with additional hull mod which shifts max speed penalty to 75% flux -ships just dont have OP for this.

[Supraluminal]

I've only been playing Starsector for a few weeks or so now, so I may be lacking an appreciation of the history of phase ships and the role they play in the game. That said, I disliked them from the moment I saw them and that opinion hasn't changed. It may be better in the latest patch (only upgraded recently, too early to have an opinion) but I have found fighting them to be hugely annoying and piloting them to be not much fun either.

I really, really don't like glass-cannon alpha-strike enemies in most games. Glass cannons can be fun in a player's hands, but they are usually frustrating to fight against in any game where the player's units/character/resources have persistence, like they do here.

I don't like they way they fit mechanically in the battlefield, and I don't like their aesthetics to boot. Phase ships and the Scarab - all the time-dilating ships - jitter around the field in a way that makes them look weightless and bizarre, totally out of place with the momentum that characterizes regular ship movement in Starsector. And phase ships look like bits of Gothic architecture that someone put jets on and flew through the blacklight section of a Hot Topic, very goofy for my taste. The regular ship designs are varying degrees of fantastical too, but in a way that mostly feels more well-crafted to me.

All of this is to say, if I had my druthers, phase ships in their current iteration would be scrapped and taken back to the drawing board. If it's so hard to balance them, maybe there is a fundamental problem with the way they're conceptualized.

[snicka]

Phase ships are obviously overpowered in skilled hands, no significant changes here.

But boy oh boy do i LOVE the changes from perspective of playing against phase ships. Would send a jar of cookies to developers if i could.

I'm a salty person. And my sodium chloride levels soared every time a phase heavy fleet approached. Couldn't do anything about those without proper preparations. They'd probe you rectally. Outplay you like some bunch of ultra instinct hummingbirds on crack, with literally machine reflexes. Almost untouchable, uncounterable, un-outplayable.

The new changes made them able overextend. To be rushed down. Brought balance and counterplay to the universe. Showed them fear.

These are good changes.

[Thaago]

I've gotten some more experience playing against high phase fleets and with some afflictors in mine:

Enemy phase ships are still the most dangerous enemies - massed Dooms (3+) in particular pop frigates so hard that it almost obsoletes them (why hello D mods on 3 omens, a wolf, a tempest, and a brawler), and Harbingers routinely score kills (or enable nearby ships to score kills) against my ships (RIP my afflictor that got pulled out of phase right into a phase lance burst. You died awesomely). In terms of threat level that I'm seeing, a 35 DP doom still exceeds enemy 40 DP capitals. Just not by such a huge margin as before, and they are much better countered by well PD'd ships that pressure them with range/missiles.

In my fleet, an unofficered bog standard Afflictor (2x AMB, 2x dual atropos, hardened subsystems, reinforced bulkheads, 10 caps, 4 vents) is doing well against ~250k faction bounty fleets, getting somewhere between 10 and 25 pro rata DP of kills in not counting the benefit of it activating its system enabling other ships to get kills. I haven't experimented with the new phase hullmods yet because it hasn't needed it and I haven't found them yet this save (and I have no fleet skills other than coordinated maneuvers and crew training boosting this ship - no leadership capstone or flux boosters or phase tuning).

So for AI ships, it seems to me that phase ships are still good. They are just so much less annoying to fight against and are no longer utterly dominant as player fleet assets.

(I still don't like piloting them though.)

[Vind]

     Im not enjoying piloting phase ships because seeing 2% of speed drain per second then phased is driving me crazy. Usual phase game play now - phase -> vent -> phase -> vent to sustain the speed before an attack can be made. This phase bunny hopping is boring and bad for mouse and keyboard

[SethMK]

The constrain draining of speed and how the AI is still trying to play assassin with what are now supposed to be evasion style brawlers has me storing all the phase ships I get since I can't get them to a build I like. And I haven't seen the AI use them well yet although I may experiment a bit more with the ships when I have time, which is why I still collect them instead of just scuttling or salvaging them.

Right now I just can't find a build for them that makes me want to drop a ship from my current lineup for them.

[Timid]

I think maybe a good change to phase ship is that you get a buffer before speed starts draining.

So if you phase at 25% flux then you remain at the speed (or go faster if for some reason the flux gets lowered while phasing) that was 25% flux until the buffer ends and then transition into the speed loss.

[Negitive]

I'm not super impressed by it to be honest.

It kinda gutted phase ships but in a subtle way.

Since phase ships are both: High Tech, and, Lacking Shields, they rely on their Phase to avoid damage, but with the newest update, it's fair for maybe the afflictor, but the harbinger and doom have both been cut in half. They are inheritly slow ships, being Destroyer and Cruiser, who relied on phase for more than damage mitigation, but for mobility as-well.

I'll get to my point now: Without speed (And no, adaptive phase coils does not give you your speed back as of now), Phase ships can't get to an enemies weak spot, which is where they belong, given they have no shields. Without the ability to avoid damage, they are pigeon-holed into the worst kind of playstyle for phase ships: Long range harrassment.

You sit in the back with long-range beams, and if you start getting pestered by frigates or the odd destroyer, you just phase and leave, rinse, repeat.

There's little else to do unfortunately. My previously favorite strategy, hyper-hit-and-run (Phase, fly behind the enemy, unphase, blast with Lances, re-phase) doesn't work because you can't to the run part of hit and run, so unless you kill your target, you're just stuck with too much hard-flux to escape before you cap out.

Here's how I would do it differently: Change nothing about Phase as a concept (For now), and completely overhaul Afllictors. The harbinger hasn't been, and won't be a balance problem, and the Doom fails to function in the hands of the AI, which means there can only be 1 good doom in the sector at any time, gremlins are annoying, but not unbalanced. All the support phase ships don't need to be combat-balanced anyway, but the afflictor was to fast and too deadly. So why, oh why, did we fix the afflictor by nerfing ALL phase ships?

[Krazykat]

Newer player here, but Dooms are my absolute favorites to escort my Flagship (Conquest). With some tactical lasers on their front they don't feel the need to jump ahead of me or overextend and instead just pop every frigate and destroyer that enters our postcode with the mines and just jitter about me dodging fighters and missiles for my PD to eliminate. I like them, a lot, but could not imagine trying to send them out to 'assassinate' anything like it seems you could in the past. That said I'm only really in the midgame, they might get sidelined for more Champions or Heron Spark spam as these fights get harder.