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[Borgoid]

If you're all quite done waving your respective genitalia around about unrelated nonsense...

There's plenty of room for supply costs to be tweaked and given that the majority of the ships have identical supply costs/repair times/deployment costs it's fairly safe to say that they're either placeholders or simply a starting point.

Frankly, I enjoy the short downtime nature of the current Neutrino ships. It would be nice to have their supply costs brought in line with other ships of similar classes while still maintaining the low downtime but I'm not sure it's viable given the way Logistics is counted against the supplies/day rather than the total cost of deployment.
As it stands Neutrino ships are typically the hardest to actually incorporate into your - Note, YOUR fleet - due to their large base supplies/day + logistics hit and this also has the side effect of their non-combat maintenance being much more costly though possibly not costly enough.

It's unfortunate that logistics is based on the supplies/day stat , it makes low downtime but high cost to deploy ships practically impossible.
If you want to have something take half the time to recover lost CR then you need to have it cost double the supplies/day but... that literally doubles the logistics cost of the ship

[valefore]

Don't worry about it valefore, I don't think there's any true hostility in Uomoz's corv comments and there's no reason (for me at least) to feel attacked by them. We're discussing a topic that we consider controversial so it's natural if one comment seems a bit harshly worded.

That's what I think too...

If you're all quite done waving your respective genitalia around about unrelated nonsense...

There's plenty of room for supply costs to be tweaked and given that the majority of the ships have identical supply costs/repair times/deployment costs it's fairly safe to say that they're either placeholders or simply a starting point.

Frankly, I enjoy the short downtime nature of the current Neutrino ships. It would be nice to have their supply costs brought in line with other ships of similar classes while still maintaining the low downtime but I'm not sure it's viable given the way Logistics is counted against the supplies/day rather than the total cost of deployment.
As it stands Neutrino ships are typically the hardest to actually incorporate into your - Note, YOUR fleet - due to their large base supplies/day + logistics hit and this also has the side effect of their non-combat maintenance being much more costly though possibly not costly enough.

It's unfortunate that logistics is based on the supplies/day stat , it makes low downtime but high cost to deploy ships practically impossible.
If you want to have something take half the time to recover lost CR then you need to have it cost double the supplies/day but... that literally doubles the logistics cost of the ship

I'd say this is a Great comment if you omitted the first sentence. And you had to say 'Genitalia' and join in.

Anyway, that is too bad that low downtime+high CR costs don't work well. But even if it was possible, it would effectively double the maintenance costs too, right?
I don't know whether Neutrino ships deserve that kind of penalty in maintenance. They do not particularly excel in combat (except the Unsung) and if they were that expensive... for example twice as more expensive than Tri-Tachyon, I think there won't be much sense in buying Neutrino ships. Maybe doing that and reducing hull repair costs as FlashFrozen said would work by keeping average supply costs reasonable. I don't know.

I'm going back to observer mode. Sorry to bug you guys and good luck.

[FasterThanSleepyfish]

I know this is crazy, but perhaps some bigger Neutrino ships could have a combat timer? They would be very long, of course, as not to make them totally useless. I just think it might be a interesting combat feature. No more infinite beam destroyers smacking you behind your 270 front shield forever.

[Borgoid]

Yes the only way that I can see to have low downtime and balanced supply costs involves very high non-combat supplies/day since the CR maintenance cost is 10% of the supplies/day which would have to be high to compensate for the low downtime ( High repair % per day)

Not sure I agree that they don't particularly excel in combat, most of the time I have to build anti-Neutrino specific ship loadouts to capitalize on their weaknesses and while that isn't inherently a bad thing it's a pretty jarring transition.
Not to mention that when it comes to actually using them they punch well above their weight, a Hacksaw(Or Vice) can tank an Onslaught for an ALARMING amount of time, long enough for the Onslaught to run out of ammo in fact.

There really isn't a ship (modded or not) that doesn't struggle when using a standard loadout vs a Neutrino ship in a 1v1 situation. At least none come to mind.

[Griffinhart]

In a simulation battle, a properly fitted Unsung piloted by a level... I think I was around 35 at the time? Character can take on (and win against) an Onslaught, Paragon, Astral, and the one other low-tech capital whose name escapes me at this moment. Autopilot has slightly worse performance (I think it went 2 for 3, mostly on account of the AP being really bad at focusing its shield against the Paragon's Tachyon Lances, so it eats a lot of EMP), but it's still doable. The only things you really need to do is primary the Onslaught ASAP, maintain shield against the Paragon's Tachyon Lances, and don't let the other low-tech capital get close enough to sneak torpedoes past your shield.

It's not just a 50% difference or so but like a 300% difference, including weapon costs. Same goes with CR and supply usage.

No; weapon costs are only relevant if you are buying and using Neutrino-only weapons and comparing against vanilla weapons. Many of the fits that suit my playstyle rely on vanilla weapons (e.g. an Unsung with 6xTachyon Lances, 6xPulse Lasers, and as many TacLasers as possible can essentially win fleet engagements without ever being engaged with the right hullmods - Optics, ITU, and Integrated PD AI at minimum; although, admittedly, a better fit replaces the Pulse Lasers with Antiproton Beams and the Tachyon Lances with Neutron Lances).

CR/supply costs are entirely different from ship buy price cost, which is what I was referring to. Even then, a half-way decent pilot can easily win engagements where they're outmatched (but not obscenely so; there's a limit to how much player skill can accommodate for overwhelming odds), regardless of vanilla or mod, and most engagements result in a net profit of supplies, even after accounting for repair costs (which ideally are 0) and resupply costs at a station, and even travel costs to go from station, to a fight, and back again.

I wasn't talking about how vanilla balances it, I meant that as a general rule in the world high tech is better than low tech.

Real-world balancing has exactly zero relevance to Starsector in general (and the Neutrino Corp. mod in specific). If you want to bring real-world mechanics in, then we should first address the fact that Starsector has two (nontrivial) spatial dimensions, but the real world has (at least) three observable spatial dimensions. That seems like a much more significant issue re: balancing Starsector as a whole, since it affects the entire underlying gameplay mechanic, and should be fixed before going forward with any other mechanics or adjustments.

-- Griffinhart

[Turdicus]

Ah, clever girl. Blocked the ability to add extended shields...thought I'd outsmarted you haha

Edit: On a serious note the Heavy Pulsar Beam weapon does not function properly; it just does the firing animation and achieves a cooldown, but doesn not fire or generate flux. Not sure if you knew yet.

[FlashFrozen]

Ah, clever girl. Blocked the ability to add extended shields...thought I'd outsmarted you haha

Edit: On a serious note the Heavy Pulsar Beam weapon does not function properly; it just does the firing animation and achieves a cooldown, but doesn not fire or generate flux. Not sure if you knew yet.

Hehe, you can still take off the neutrino upgrade to add the extended shields if you want,
But for the heavy pulsar beams, make sure you actually have over 2520 flux available to shoot them, they won't do anything if you don't meet the minimum, a secret weakness of neutrino ships, they all have fairly low flux capacity for high burst flux usage

[Turdicus]

Cool beans. I got a chance to play extensively with Neutrino for the first time and it is a very interesting set of ships to play with. At first glance the ships seem very overpowered (my maul could 1v1 anything in the game, 3 heavy pulsar beams OUCH), because the small shields are so powerful; however, the moment a second ship enters the mix those shields are only 50% effective, and less and less so the larger the fleet action. Still powerful, but actually quite limited in that power. I didn't get to play with all of the weapons though, but I find them to be perfectly fine. Alpha strikes are really strong, but its all burst with no staying power, gotta take one ship out at a time.

Overall I love your faction, super fun. The Maul with armor mods is sexy, and the Singularity (or relativity? whichever frigate gets 2 medium energy slots) with particle beams is really cool. Keep up the good work dude!

[Durendal5150]

The Causality is a piece of work. It chews up pirates and doesn't afraid of anything.



I'mma go hunt down a venture next and see how it fares.

[Uomoz]

The Causality is a piece of work. It chews up pirates and doesn't afraid of anything.



I'mma go hunt down a venture next and see how it fares.

AAAAAAAnd that's why Alex added th CR degradation 

[Silver Silence]

The Causality is a piece of work. It chews up pirates and doesn't afraid of anything.



I'mma go hunt down a venture next and see how it fares.

AAAAAAAnd that's why Alex added th CR degradation 

If the iterated degradation (only decreases with general flux usage, weapons and shields) is fully moddable, it could be made so that the Causality degrades during cloak use (seeing as the cloak has only a enter-phast cost and not a phasing upkeep cost). Combine that with... I dunno... a minute, minute'n'half of CR time after which the ship starts to fall apart with continued phase usage.

[Uomoz]

The Causality is a piece of work. It chews up pirates and doesn't afraid of anything.



I'mma go hunt down a venture next and see how it fares.

AAAAAAAnd that's why Alex added th CR degradation 

If the iterated degradation (only decreases with general flux usage, weapons and shields) is fully moddable, it could be made so that the Causality degrades during cloak use (seeing as the cloak has only a enter-phast cost and not a phasing upkeep cost). Combine that with... I dunno... a minute, minute'n'half of CR time after which the ship starts to fall apart with continued phase usage.

That's a fair solution.

[Gotcha!]

The Causality is a piece of work. It chews up pirates and doesn't afraid of anything.

Whoah. I think something deserves a nerf here. ^_^'
Incredibly fast, like Silver Silence said: no flux increase while cloaking, missiles that corner like crazy, long range laser...
CR degradation won't cut it for this ship, in my opinion.

[Silver Silence]

The missiles are very finicky as they're aimlessly sprayed in the general direction in front of you and like annihilators, they inherit your momentum so if you're ducking and diving around enemy ships to avoid getting hit, then entire volleys of phase missiles can disappear into the ether. Not helped by the fact that until they unphase, you can't see the "+" that marks your own missiles. And the Repeater is not all that long-ranged. (650 range, 500flux/s, ~300 dps, medium mount). The PBC has 850 range and fits in the same mount, albeit it can't turn, but in the Causality, that's something of a non-issue anyway.


Causality is something like the Neutrino answer to a Hyperion with it's manueverability and fragility, compared to other Neutrino frigates which are a bit hardier (or at least feel a bit hardier) and handle like bricks compared to the likes of the Lasher, Omen or Vigilance.

[FlashFrozen]

I'm still a bit undecided at CR, I've got new a basic CR use for the faction atm, but I'm not sure How balanced it is.
As a personal preference, I kinda dislike adding timers of of get it done or get out for everything frigate-y. It feels a little odd that a non-prototype *cough hyperion* ship that has been cleared for production, can't last more than 2 minutes of actual combat use.

Doesn't mean it's a bad balance parameter, it just.... feels off.
More importantly unlike shields, you have to tank hits with if you want to FIGHT BACK, that limits the longevity of any extended engagement.


Just as a counterpoint, I think the biggest drawback with the causality is that you'll overload yourself pretty often using the phasecloak from it's high upfront flux cost, even Durendal (good job though ) did it to himself like 2-3 times. It's especially troubling when you really needed that cloak.
Though the bug of it having two phase missiles has been squashed.

For the (atm) no cr degradation, you get: more hitpoints, more armor, no flux upkeep, slightly less speed, less maneuverability, no pd, less flux dissipation, at the cost of +1 deployment point and twice the credit cost.