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[Grievous69]

Only thing I order for my slow fleet is what to attack. That said I'm running Hull restoration so I don't care much if a cruiser or 2 destroyers die. There's definitely a point where you invest too much time and effort into commands and in return basically make no difference. With proper officers for each ship you shouldn't do much else once the fight gets going, except what to focus.

[Igncom1]

Yeah ultimately you can only herd cats so much. You learn in the end which ships in which situations are capable of taking orders, and which ships are totally "crowd controlled" and will not obey.

[Voyager I]

Alright, to post a bit more constructively: ballistic weapons typically have 100-200 more range than equivalently sized energy options, and fast ships (at least, the ones that are strong enough to risk being oppressive - we are definitely not worried about the Hound here) are given ballistic hardpoints incredibly sparingly. The only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the two small universals on the Medusa, which are indeed quite strong since they let it mount 700 range kinetics. That said, the Medusa still needs to get closer than that to actually finish a kill or threatening meaningful armor damage, and other fast ships have to start out there since they don't get ballistic weapons.

The only long-range options for energy weapons are beams, and while 1,000 range is nice they generally fail to do anything as a primary armament unless you have a way to generate hard flux, which we've already established that the roster of fast ships can't do at that range. The Kiting Beam Medusa is viable only in the sense that the game will not exit the application and uninstall itself if you create one.

[DirectionsToL3Please]

There's room in my heart for a ship system that slows other ships down, a weapon with a slowing effect might be too generally useful to implement in a way that can be balanced.

There's already something like a mass or inertia system in place - even if it's just a hard-coded table - for the gravity beam, so a tractor beam shouldn't be any harder to implement, right?  Just reverse the direction of applied force, so it pulls targets in.  The smaller the ship, the greater the effect. Even ~20c/s on light frigates and shuttles would be a significant change in their ability to run after hitting, plus it would make the teleport for the Wolf potentially even worth using in the "hands" of AI pilots, which at least in my experience aren't too clever about their teleport use.

[SafariJohn]

There's room in my heart for a ship system that slows other ships down, a weapon with a slowing effect might be too generally useful to implement in a way that can be balanced.

Roider Union's Wrecker-class cruiser says hello!

Spoiler

[close]

[Nightstrasza]

Everyone defends fast ships bcs they pay in other stats or something, however.

Phase ships say hello, only Harbinger can counter them (which is a phase ship itself), otherwise even with beams or strike craft have to wait for them to run out of flux, player phase ship is even unbeatable since well, they won't stupidly unphase inside hell.

Hyperion, a frigate that can destroy capital ships.

Then the worst abomination of all, the doritos which are only cruisers but can take on multiple fleets by themselves with speed of fastest frigate, tripled by their system so imagine a battle station worth of fire power crossing entire battlefield in like 3 seconds, there's 2 of them and there gonna be probably more and worse when the game releases. All the strategy, ECM, cap points, ship roles, weapon types, trading speed for fire power, trading shields for armor, flickering shields for big hitters and so on, all of that thrown out of the window bcs you better bring an enourmous amount of 1 second at worst burst of kinetic firepower and surround the damn thing from literaly every side or it will just take a dump on your fleet, instantly zoom off screen, 1 second later come back with 0 flux and do it again. Did I beat them? yes, on multiple occasions and with different fleets, once with onslaught and a balanced fleet of having some carriers, cruisers, destroyers and frigates, once with conquest, a bunch of champions, omens and monitors and once with odyssey and a bunch of some ships I forgot which already. I still hate them, they break everything the game teaches and is about, dorito high tech zoom zoom where shield and emp damage is the only thing that matters I guess.

EDIT: Ah, also forgot, another thing they throw out of the window is stalling game of which side runs out of CR, there;s no stalemate and so on, they have infinite CR, not sure if the normal redacted have infinite CR too but with them it's not a problem, they are balanced with the rest of the game.

[TaLaR]

Hyperion, a frigate that can destroy capital ships.

Even Wolf, pretty much commonly accepted as underpowered, can defeat skill-less sim Onslaught without issues. Onslaught is just that vulnerable from behind. Hell, there was a video of someone doing it with a Buffalo mk2, though exact method used involved exploiting slowing down terrain, which isn't present in current version.

Doritos are meant to be an overpowered boss. Though I don't particularly enjoy their design as well. Templar faction mod had more interesting boss faction ideas.

AI can't pilot phase competently, so i don't see the issue there, but player piloted Afflictors are the most OP thing ever. To the point I don't want to pilot anything else because Afflictor is the obvious optimal solution to every problem, but having done so for quite a while, piloting Afflictor is already boring for me, so I've just put the game on hold.

[Nightstrasza]

I'm not talking sim ships, I sent my AI hyperion during my first playthro as an assasin against something I wanted dead, now, it would die sometimes, sure, if the target was surrounded by escorts and stuff, but it pretty much could fight a paragon solo, even more competently against things that don't have a fortress shield and most of the time it would take down few high priority targets set by me before running out of CR or dying.

Doritos, yes, they are meant to be bosses, I just don't like where it all leads.

As for phase ships, check that triple S modded phase fleet from the story which can be easily avoided but in case you choose to fight it, enjoy being perma disabled, bonus dmg, zapped and flying thro a mine field, it was a "blast" to pilot a conquest with my champions and monitors back then and somehow defeating them... after multiple save scums bcs I refused to run away. Every time they are included in any fleet, I don't wanna fight it, especialy if it has a doom or a harbinger, unless I'm an onslaught or have full shield I don't like constantly having a mine ptsd and harbingers/shades just "haha, your ship doesn't work anymore" and in case of that particular fleet (very rarely they all get together in any other fleet) when they combine all of their abilities I just want to mouse over them and type "delete".

[TaLaR]

SO Hyperion is a 15DP ship that barely has any PPT. If it wasn't OP during it's short window of opportunity, why would you ever use it?

Player piloted phase is best counter to enemy phase. All 3 ships have methods to screw other phase ships quickly and efficiently (catch them with pants down when they uncloak using Afflictor's speed, force out of phase + triple Phase lance, put mines when/where they are about to unphase).
Other than that giving AI ships 360 shields and very strong PD counters Dooms (stacked PDAI + PD skill + massed Ir pulse or flak/vulcan).

[Ibudoto]

SO Hyperion is a 15DP ship that barely has any PPT. If it wasn't OP during it's short window of opportunity, why would you ever use it?

SO only decrease Peak Performance. It actually doesn't make Combat readiness decrease faster. And then there's skill and hullmod that make CR decrease slower which allow you to last like 7 minute which is enough to last longest battle.

Phase ships actually has shorter time due to phase decrease CR AND Peak Performance by 3 times which is far worse. If you feel like SO is too short you shouldn't even use phase ships.

[TaLaR]

CR decline after PPT was definitely much faster, I'm not sure how much changed, didn't use short PPT ships for a long time.

Phase has exactly as many seconds PPT as as stated, in subjective time. In other words phase does regenerate it's PPT worth of flux, it happening faster in global time is only a bonus. As long as you actually use it productively, rather than wasting as AI does.

[Drazan]

Fast ships have their place, but in general (by design) they are less powerful both offensively and defensively than slower ships.

They way ai manages flux level this is simply not true.
My biggest problem is that when a slow ship is getting overfluxed it starts to retreat even if they have no chance to do so, instead of armor tanking and shooting their big guns. The same happens during attack, if a slow ship feels like it can kill a fast one it goes after it, even tho there is no chance to do so.
The lack of anti-fast ship weapons also doesnt help. But again the main problem is with the ai and again everyone ignores it.

[DaShiv]

SO Hyperion is a 15DP ship that barely has any PPT. If it wasn't OP during it's short window of opportunity, why would you ever use it?.

The window of opportunity isn't much shorter than other ships - PPT time is vastly outweighed by CR decay time, especially for SO ships.

The simple oversight is that Hyperion is missing the Delicate Machinery hullmod that phase ships also have to make CR decay time meaningfully different. The recent Wolfpack Tactics nerf to PPT was clearly aimed at Hyperion, without considering how minor the impact is when post-PPT CR decay rate is so easily countered by Combat Endurance + Hardened Subsystems without Delicate Machinery.

Without Delicate Machinery, the SO malus is simply not significant enough to outweigh the disproportionate gains for Hyperion compared to other ships with SO.

The other issue is that despite being described as a "hangar queen" in the Codex, Hyperion actually takes the same to recover CR as high tech ships like Astral or Apogee (5 days to recover from a single deployment, compared to 17 days for Ziggurat). In fact, Hyperion recovers from being reduced to 0% CR far faster than those ships as well, which only further rewards running the Hyperion deep into CR-decay territory. To be more consistent with the Codex description, IMO Hyperion's daily CR recovery rate should be reduced to 5% (8 days to fully recover), which would still be much closer to other high tech ships than to Ziggurat.

I don't think the performance of the Hyperion is a problem at all - it's just not being properly constrained by CR mechanics right now.

[Ibudoto]

CR decline after PPT was definitely much faster, I'm not sure how much changed, didn't use short PPT ships for a long time.

No it doesn't. And I don't think SO were ever buffed.

Phase has exactly as many seconds PPT as as stated, in subjective time.

Phase ships has Delicate Machinery which decrease CR by 50% which is actually 150% thank to phase. that's 4.5 times faster CR degrade. Also unless you're shooting non stop it does not generate flux.

Just accept SO is op hull mod. Imagine you're shooting a gun, but you never have to reload because it spawns infinity of bullets out of thin air, that's basically SO is. downside is that the gun last shorter but there's too many skills increase PPT and CR that you'd have more CR and PPT after SO installed if you have officer. and then there's obvious factor that infinity of bullets will kill things vastly faster than having to reload(vent) every time you shoot. SO also heavily benefit from skills that increase vent because +10% vent is now +20%, +2 vent per OP spend on weapon is +4, etc.

Phase ship is also op for the same reason. If you use phase your ship vent 3 times faster, and if you phase anchor it's around 6 times, it's only balanced by not having shield and AI being completely useless at handling them.

[Grievous69]

I legitimately haven't touched SO since like 2020. since it makes the game so boring. It removes half of the decision making in combat, makes everything so one dimensional and every single fight is just you racing against the clock which isn't even that hard. It's making me so annoyed seeing all the new player threads and every other suggestion is "just use SO roflcopter". Cool playstyle idea but ultimately bad for the game.