I been trying out the Vanguard and Cerberus more due to them having the Rugged Construction hull-mod, what I have noticed that its... nearly useless...
Here is the snipped from the Devblog:
The first piece of the puzzle is accepting that if we have an attack frigate like that, it’ll be lost in battle at times. So, instead of trying to prevent this, the approach is to make it hurt a lot less. Enter the “Rugged Construction” built-in hullmod, with the following properties:
– The ship is always recoverable if lost
– It has a 50% chance to avoid d-mods (those are debuffs from being destroyed and recovered, i.e. “compromised armor”, “glitched sensors”, etc”)
– And the effect of any d-mods it has is reduced by 50%
By itself, this isn’t enough – if a ship is destroyed all the time, it still hurts – it takes supplies to fix it back up, and you lose crew. But this *is* enough to make an occasional loss and post-battle recovery acceptable. It gives us enough wiggle room to make the rest of it work.
In logic this sounds good, a frigate with no shield is bound to just randomly die. In some cases, consistently die. Therefore a hull-mod that makes the frigate incur less D-mod penalties and takes less D-mods after being destroyed. Then paired with derelict options will make these ships viable. The problem comes when contemplating at what campaign game-stage this is actually useful?
In the early game simply recovering a Vanguard or Cerberus will cost roughly 8-10k credits in supply and crew cost alone. Losing one or two in a fight its a huge cut to profit margin, the early game for many is balanced on a knife's edge in terms of profitability of combat.
In the mid game ships like Cerberus and Vanguard are ships that become a resource hog, be it exploring, bounty hunting, or just trading. Operation cost / combat power becomes important, most low tech ships fail in this regard. Also, I found on multiple occasions in the post battle ships recovering screen I thought to my self: "Why waste 8k on recovering this ship that I am just going to trade it in for something else more efficient when I dock?"
Finally in the late game, who cares about losing a frigate? Ship printer go brrrrrrrr. Cerberus and Vanguard can still be useful in combat no doubt, especially you can build in 3 green hull mods without worrying about losing them. But still... with 3 built in they are still fighting for deployment points, which in late game is the premium power scale.
I can see rugged construction becoming important and beloved is when roleplaying a pirate or campaign being changed so ships become super hard to get.
The current problems could be worked out by making the recover costs of ships with Rugged Constriction cost less, or perhaps add in another hull mod that does it. This way Vanguard and Cerberus will have its place in early-game.