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Author Topic: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?  (Read 3187 times)

Linnis

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Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« on: January 13, 2022, 12:23:47 AM »

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:

Quote
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.
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Serenitis

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #1 on: January 13, 2022, 01:51:39 AM »

In the early game simply recovering a Vanguard or Cerberus will cost roughly 8-10k credits in supply and crew cost alone.

Nah. You're way off with this.
Cerb needs 20 crew, @40cr ea. = 800cr.
There's no way any frigate needs 7.2k (aka 72 supplies @100cr ea.) to recover.
A busted up low-end frigate costs somewhere around 10-20 supplies to salvage and recover from 0% CR. So 1000-2000cr.
(You can salvage the Wolf @ Tetra for 10 supplies. And the Lasher for 13.)

Treat Rugged Construction as a soft encouragment to never repair/restore those ships.
The d-mods reduce recovery costs, and it's not hard to end up with frigates that have single-figure recovery costs. No skills of any kind required.
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Gergin

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2022, 03:22:05 AM »

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:

Quote
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.
The Luddic Path Cerberus is one of the best frigates in the game if you build and officer it correctly (officer is not strictly required).  At 4 DP each, you don't use Derelict Operations but Hull Restoration.  With Hull Restoration and Rugged Construction, there's a very good chance that disabled ships are recoverable with 0 hullmods and any that do get put on there can just sit until they get auto cleared.  You absolutely want Field Repairs as well because it's just free supplies for CR recovery and repair.
You can deploy these things in huge swarms to completely overwhelm targets or you can mix just a few of them in with other ships to act as a force multiplier.  They make one of the best officer training platforms available as well.  Against many fleets, you can deploy just 2 or 3 of them for massive XP for the participating officers.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #3 on: January 13, 2022, 03:28:58 AM »

I have been using Hounds to capture points. I try to retreat them afterwards, but it's fine if they don't make it because (with Hull Restoration) they almost never pick up d-mods.
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Draba

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #4 on: January 13, 2022, 03:50:55 AM »

My main problem with the rugged construction concept is that it doesn't boost repair speed in any way.
If a ships gets blown up it still has to be sidelined for quite a while, even with field repairs.
That really gets in the way of the nice early system bounties, and reduces overall QoL/usability a lot.

The Luddic Path Cerberus is one of the best frigates in the game if you build and officer it correctly (officer is not strictly required).  At 4 DP each, you don't use Derelict Operations but Hull Restoration.  With Hull Restoration and Rugged Construction, there's a very good chance that disabled ships are recoverable with 0 hullmods and any that do get put on there can just sit until they get auto cleared.  You absolutely want Field Repairs as well because it's just free supplies for CR recovery and repair.
You can deploy these things in huge swarms to completely overwhelm targets or you can mix just a few of them in with other ships to act as a force multiplier.  They make one of the best officer training platforms available as well.  Against many fleets, you can deploy just 2 or 3 of them for massive XP for the participating officers.
That's really surprising, to me Cerberus seems like one of the worst ships in the entire game to put officers in (or for combat use in general).
400 armor/2500 hull with absolutely no other defenses, no missile slot on a frigate, just all around awful.

Yes, d-mods aren't a problem and restoration isn't that expensive.
Still more expensive than just fielding SO brawlers that'd do the same thing much better and have SO-boosted shields on top.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2022, 03:53:41 AM by Draba »
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Gergin

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2022, 06:37:22 AM »

My main problem with the rugged construction concept is that it doesn't boost repair speed in any way.
If a ships gets blown up it still has to be sidelined for quite a while, even with field repairs.
That really gets in the way of the nice early system bounties, and reduces overall QoL/usability a lot.

The Luddic Path Cerberus is one of the best frigates in the game if you build and officer it correctly (officer is not strictly required).  At 4 DP each, you don't use Derelict Operations but Hull Restoration.  With Hull Restoration and Rugged Construction, there's a very good chance that disabled ships are recoverable with 0 hullmods and any that do get put on there can just sit until they get auto cleared.  You absolutely want Field Repairs as well because it's just free supplies for CR recovery and repair.
You can deploy these things in huge swarms to completely overwhelm targets or you can mix just a few of them in with other ships to act as a force multiplier.  They make one of the best officer training platforms available as well.  Against many fleets, you can deploy just 2 or 3 of them for massive XP for the participating officers.
That's really surprising, to me Cerberus seems like one of the worst ships in the entire game to put officers in (or for combat use in general).
400 armor/2500 hull with absolutely no other defenses, no missile slot on a frigate, just all around awful.

Yes, d-mods aren't a problem and restoration isn't that expensive.
Still more expensive than just fielding SO brawlers that'd do the same thing much better and have SO-boosted shields on top.
LP Cerberus has built in Safety Overrides and the Burn Drive is replaced with an Accelerated Ammo Feeder.  You've got 1 medium and 3 smalls all with almost 360° for each.
You slap as much armor onto it as you can, put an aggressive or reckless officer in it and turn it loose.  Without a shield, they will be extremely aggressive which allows them to leverage their extremely high DPS.

Here's an example of it in action with the most barebones skills.  With maxed armor skills, elite target analysis and helmsmanship, you've got a fast, tough, and extremely hard hitting frigate that you don't even care if it dies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMejWiFkmzY
« Last Edit: January 13, 2022, 06:40:16 AM by Gergin »
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Draba

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2022, 07:10:54 AM »

LP Cerberus has built in Safety Overrides and the Burn Drive is replaced with an Accelerated Ammo Feeder.  You've got 1 medium and 3 smalls all with almost 360° for each.
You slap as much armor onto it as you can, put an aggressive or reckless officer in it and turn it loose.  Without a shield, they will be extremely aggressive which allows them to leverage their extremely high DPS.

Here's an example of it in action with the most barebones skills.  With maxed armor skills, elite target analysis and helmsmanship, you've got a fast, tough, and extremely hard hitting frigate that you don't even care if it dies.
AAF is very good and SO is all kinds of silly but no matter what you do with unshielded 400 armor, it just melts the moment HIL/phase lance/mauler/heph/heavy blaster/plasma/whatever looks at it funny.
Dunno, just don't see how it's anything but a bloodbath against anything slightly stronger than pirates.
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Gergin

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #7 on: January 13, 2022, 07:16:17 AM »

LP Cerberus has built in Safety Overrides and the Burn Drive is replaced with an Accelerated Ammo Feeder.  You've got 1 medium and 3 smalls all with almost 360° for each.
You slap as much armor onto it as you can, put an aggressive or reckless officer in it and turn it loose.  Without a shield, they will be extremely aggressive which allows them to leverage their extremely high DPS.

Here's an example of it in action with the most barebones skills.  With maxed armor skills, elite target analysis and helmsmanship, you've got a fast, tough, and extremely hard hitting frigate that you don't even care if it dies.
AAF is very good and SO is all kinds of silly but no matter what you do with unshielded 400 armor, it just melts the moment HIL/phase lance/mauler/heph/heavy blaster/plasma/whatever looks at it funny.
Dunno, just don't see how it's anything but a bloodbath against anything slightly stronger than pirates.
You can either bring lots of them or just mix a few of these into a fleet with ships that can take attention for those weapons.
They're dirt cheap to crew, run and repair.  Against most fleets, they're just gonna shred it and against ones that inflict losses, your gains should easily make it for it.

There's a bit of an issue with the AI right now with this particular setup that causes them to disengage low health enemies.  Should be fixed in the next release.
Even with that bug though, I was having success against Redacted fleets.  Once they properly finish off targets, I think a swarm of these will be endgame viable.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2022, 07:18:03 AM by Gergin »
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Draba

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #8 on: January 13, 2022, 07:26:55 AM »

You can either bring lots of them or just mix a few of these into a fleet with ships that can take attention for those weapons.
They're dirt cheap to crew, run and repair.  Against most fleets, they're just gonna shred it and against ones that inflict losses, your gains should easily make it for it.

There's a bit of an issue with the AI right now with this particular setup that causes them to disengage low health enemies.  Should be fixed in the next release.
Even with that bug though, I was having success against Redacted fleets.  Once they properly finish off targets, I think a swarm of these will be endgame viable.
Don't doubt that they can shoot up most enemies just fine, just don't see how they do it better than something like a bunch of Brawlers or Scarabs would.
Those smash through the same fleets much easier and rugged construction really doesn't do much if you have hull restoration and take ~no losses anyway.
Guess it comes down to
Quote
The Luddic Path Cerberus is one of the best frigates in the game if you build and officer it correctly
part, have a really hard time accepting that :)
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brroleg

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #9 on: January 13, 2022, 07:43:29 AM »

Rugged Construction is for those who dont want to invest into industrial skills.
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Gergin

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #10 on: January 13, 2022, 08:37:50 AM »

Rugged Construction is for those who dont want to invest into industrial skills.
I disagree, I think it layers on top of them.  It definitely has a niche application but works well if you actually leverage it.
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Kinsume

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #11 on: January 13, 2022, 09:13:45 AM »

Rugged Construction is for those who dont want to invest into industrial skills.

Hull Restoration is so nice if you're not doing a d-mod build. Just fought the Z in the story-line, had my wolfpack fleet and had to bring my Dominator, 2x Hammerheads and 2x Sunders out of storage to actually bring it down. Lost atleast 20 ships in the fight, they were all recoverable at the end with no story points, and only 2 of them had a single D-mod on them which repaired itself after a while.
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Draba

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #12 on: January 13, 2022, 09:23:49 AM »

Rugged Construction is for those who dont want to invest into industrial skills.
Field repairs makes frequent recovery much less of an annoyance, I would never run ships that routinely get blown up without it.
(the hull repair bonus is nice for most fleets, overall good skill IMO)

And yep, hull restoration is good at all stages and makes early combat much more convenient/fun.
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Linnis

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #13 on: January 13, 2022, 12:47:04 PM »

In the early game simply recovering a Vanguard or Cerberus will cost roughly 8-10k credits in supply and crew cost alone.

Nah. You're way off with this.
Cerb needs 20 crew, @40cr ea. = 800cr.
There's no way any frigate needs 7.2k (aka 72 supplies @100cr ea.) to recover.
A busted up low-end frigate costs somewhere around 10-20 supplies to salvage and recover from 0% CR. So 1000-2000cr.
(You can salvage the Wolf @ Tetra for 10 supplies. And the Lasher for 13.)

Treat Rugged Construction as a soft encouragment to never repair/restore those ships.
The d-mods reduce recovery costs, and it's not hard to end up with frigates that have single-figure recovery costs. No skills of any kind required.




59 supplies, 5.9k + ~20 crew lost, 1k. thats 6.9k at base price for supplies and crew, without TAX.

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Linnis

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Re: Rugged Construction Missed its mark?
« Reply #14 on: January 13, 2022, 01:09:28 PM »

You can either bring lots of them or just mix a few of these into a fleet with ships that can take attention for those weapons.
They're dirt cheap to crew, run and repair.  Against most fleets, they're just gonna shred it and against ones that inflict losses, your gains should easily make it for it.

There's a bit of an issue with the AI right now with this particular setup that causes them to disengage low health enemies.  Should be fixed in the next release.
Even with that bug though, I was having success against Redacted fleets.  Once they properly finish off targets, I think a swarm of these will be endgame viable.
Don't doubt that they can shoot up most enemies just fine, just don't see how they do it better than something like a bunch of Brawlers or Scarabs would.
Those smash through the same fleets much easier and rugged construction really doesn't do much if you have hull restoration and take ~no losses anyway.
Guess it comes down to
Quote
The Luddic Path Cerberus is one of the best frigates in the game if you build and officer it correctly
part, have a really hard time accepting that :)

This is right. Why would I use a Cerberus or Vanguard when I can just use a scarab or tempest that if desotryed, I can recover with about the same cost. Repair skills recover d-mods anyways.

Its suppose to be good in early game, in combat early game its fine, problem is outside battle it sucks.
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