Just finished my Neutrino campaign and have some feedback. However there's so much stuff to say... I'll probably forget a few. The big question is obviously "are they too strong?" which for me is definitely yes, i managed to take down all the SS+ boss bounties without teching the combat skill. The three things that stand out the most were :
-Their armour, better than low-tech ships.
-The hidden mounts can't be disabled, which make them really deadly in brawl.
-The very low crew requirement, which allow for bigger fleets.
Anyway, let's start with the frigates.
The Singularity is probably the best Neutrino frigate for every scenarios. Two hidden hardpoints that can't be disabled, more armor than any vanilla frigate, pretty good mobility, inexpensive to maintain and of course the 0.4 shield. Its only main weakness is its expensive deployment cost of 7, but that's not really a problem during early game and for late game you rarely deploy frigates anyway. Oh, and no peak performance limit too!
The Relativity is less impressive. Not quite as fast, armed and armoured (but still more than a Brawler). It's actually quite a bit more fragile than its brother, it have a wider profile that the small shield can't cover. My Relativities rarely lasted for long in campaign, the Singularity felt surprisingly more resilient as it survived for almost the whole campaign. It's not completely inferior though, the arc surge emitter makes for a terrific point defence system and can even threaten bigger, unshielded ships. It's probably one of the few Neutrino frigates where its heavy armor is kinda justified.
Flash compared the Criticality to a Hound in his changelog, and i feel the same. While it's dirt cheap to maintain, it is ridiculously expensive to field at 10 DP. It lack the large cargo of the Hound. On the battlefield, i had a lot of trouble to make it works. It doesn't have a shield and have 25 less armor than the brawler. Its system make it ridiculously mobile as long as it works but otherwise it's as slow as a buffalo. The triple medium mount could in theory allow for some interesting builds but its weak flux stats (the weakest of all Neutrino frigates) make it quite difficult. And given the boosters system consume flux, that ship rapidly become a death trap for the pilot. While the ship's whole idea is good, it doesn't really work in practice. Oh, it's also a massive missile magnet, making its already short life expectancy even shorter.
The Causality is a strange one, i loved it before but now i'm not so sure. It's the only frigate with a peak performance timer, which is needed given the nature of its cloak. The huge phase cloak activation flux cost make it quite easy to catch it with its pants down after an attack, which make it better in the role of a long range harasser. I don't really like the cloak upkeep at 0, which mean it can stay cloaked as long as it want and it can lead to some infuriating situations where a Causality refuse to un-phase. It need an upkeep, even if tiny, to avoid those situations.
For the destroyer, the Hacksaw is more or less a high-tech Enforcer, but with roughly the same armor as an Eagle. It's an awesome ship of the line, and while it doesn't have the "optimal" firepower of the Enforcer, it's much more tankier and with the 4 hidden small missiles slots that can't be disabled, it will bitterly fight to the end.
The Sledgehammer is another weird one. Its numerous missile mounts can make it whatever you want it to be, but not in an excessive way. It suffer from the same problem as the Hacksaw in the sense that it is ridiculously hard to kill. Its big weakness is the outrageous deployment cost, 15, as much as a Dominator. The numbers feel a bit extreme. Otherwise, i noticed that the AI wasn't able to use the built in siege fusor, probably due to the very long charge-up.
Then there's the Piledriver, directly competing with the Vice for the same role. I made a post about it long ago and while Flash indeed made some balance changes, i still feel there's only one place for those two. And the stats of those two ships kinda feel... Weird. Technically speaking, the Piledriver is a cheaper vessel with better all around stats while the Vice is crappier but with more guns. I feel one of those two should need to fill its own role.
I know that a while ago, the Piledriver used to have a launch bay, which was very, very powerful considering it also have a large hidden energy hardpoint. But at least, it filled the role of destroyer carrier that the Neutrino still lack today. I think changing the Piledriver back to a carrier could be interesting, with of course many tweaks to weaken its stats to make it not broken. This way, the Vice could finally assume the role of dedicated long range fire support of the fleet. Honestly, i'll leave this decision up to you. I personally think this would be more interesting.
Otherwise, same nerfs as above i guess, evening some of the stats, mostly the armor. The Vice might possibly need the hybrid mount treatment in the future, two medium missile and one large could end up ugly.
Now for the cruisers... The Grinder is probably the most balanced one in the bunch. It is a *light* cruiser, but given it's Neutrino, it's more of an analogue to the Aurora than the Falcon. It's very fast, faster than a Falcon without maneuvring jets. It's also quite tanky, right between the Eagle and Dominator if you ignore the shields but is otherwise surprisingly average. At first i had trouble finding a proper build for this ship, the weapons layout is pretty strange and the weak flux stats doesn't allow much diversities. It's a weird ship, but once you can get it working it does surprisingly well.
The Nirvash was the huge surprise of the campaign. Previously, i couldn't make this ship work for anything but i know realize how incredible it is. It's almost as tough as a Dominator, faster than an Eagle and with an absurd amount of firepower, with 90% of it being hidden and immune to EMP. The main trick is that it is a broadside ship.
The common mistake i made was to try to make use of the frontal large energy. Once i understood that it was a "trap" mount (it eat an unnecessary large amount of OPs and flux that you desperately need), i decided to go with an asymmetrical build similar to what i usually do with the Conquest. 5 pulsar repeater on the left side, nothing else on the other one, maximum vent/capacity, and unleasing hell on everything that came too close. It worked well, frighteningly so, especially since the maneuvring jet allowed me to reposition all the time. It works okay-ish with the AI as well, but then it's better to fill the other side with guns too, even at the cost of lower flux stats. I think it's a good ship, which will probably become even better with the new broadside AI that'll come with 0.7.
The Maul is the biggest, toughest Neutrino cruiser but also the least mobile and most expensive, it cost nearly as much as a capital ship to deploy. Its obvious role is med/long range fire support with the 3 large energy and 3 medium missiles. I didn't used it much in my campaign as it had some trouble keeping up with the rest of the fleet in combat.
TheEND is currently the only "small" carrier of the faction. Compared to the heron, it's obviously more expensive but also have quite a bit more firepower. Like the Causality, it have a big phase activation cost but no upkeep.
Overall, not much to say about the cruisers. Only the Nirvash may require a little bit of rework in its design. For the capital ships however, there's some issues.
I had a problem with the Colossus and somehow managed to lost its drone even though the ship was still alive. I'm not sure what caused this. Also, when the said drone is destroyed, this happen :
The explosion is for some reason absolutely gigantic, not sure if it's intended.
Then i tried the Jackhammer, and unsurprisingly, the phased array cannon and its 16.000 burst damage is ridiculous. Its ability to instakill a destroyer at 1200 range is just too much.
For the Banshee, it will probably require the hybrid mount treatment for the next update, maybe. A buff to the broadsides energy firing arc like you did to the Nirvash would also be welcome.
Another problem is about the Drache bomber and its graviton inversion device. In my campaign, it could overload any shield it reached, which is kinda overpowered. Another strange side effect, the bomb explosion push away the targeted ship. Not very practical for the rest of the bombers.
My last issue will be about the sapper srm. The missiles will slow down reaching a certain distance, even though they haven't reached their "maximum" distance. Which mean the AI will often fire as far as possible and they'll stop just in front of the target.
Oh and a last thing, some weapons weren't available in any stations in my campaign, the neutron lance and pulse cannon battery, don't know why.
That's mostly it, even though there's probably more stuffs that i can't remember. The most important would to even the stats about armor compared to vanilla. Neutrino can (and should) have above average armor, because of the nature of their shield system. Just not
that much. It would also be very good to find a solution to the hidden weapon problem. Obviously, those can't be "normal" mounts, because they'd show and would looks very goofy on some ships. Can't help much on this one, i'll let the coders say what they think about it.
The last problem, probably the biggest one about the faction, is the small amount of crew required. Currently, the crew is a huge part of the logistic rating of the fleet. And because Neutrinos ships don't need much crew, they can field absolutely massive fleets. It's true that the very high deployment cost prevent them from flooding the battlefield, but they can still send waves after waves of ships. At max level (vanilla SS) and without going past 100 logistic points , i was able to field 22 Grinders cruisers compared to only 11 Eagles. 0.7 will change quite a few things about the number of ships you can have, so i'm not sure how this will end up but right now that's the biggest imbalance about the mod.
That's all. Even though the faction was clearly too strong, it was still fun to play, which is the most important after all. Just need another balance pass and it should be on the same level as vanilla.