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[Amoebka]

Odyssey seems more like an indie capital to me. It has exploration-related logistic hullmods and trades raw combat power for better campaign stats.

Altair Exotech licensed the Odyssey class to several frontier development corporations, including Eridani-Utopia, to provide admirably armed mobile survey headquarters and operation platforms

Diktat will probably become the exclusive owners of Conquest.

[Jackundor]

Odyssey seems more like an indie capital to me. It has exploration-related logistic hullmods and trades raw combat power for better campaign stats.

maybe, but Indies are the only (human) faction that doesn't have a cap, and that's probably for a reason

Diktat will probably become the exclusive owners of Conquest.

When Alex announced the Pegasus he specifically said that it would lead larger League fleets, so either they would go mostly cruiser school with a Battleship for their large fleets (which doesn't make that much sense) or have another new cap...

[Amoebka]

maybe, but Indies are the only (human) faction that doesn't have a cap, and that's probably for a reason

Indies have Conquest blueprints, they just rarely use it because they prefer cruiser spam.

[Draba]

The main thing missing for me was some ship variety, having extra hulls is very welcome.
The 1 nitpick I have is Invictus basically being a bunch of rule exceptions stacked on each other: Distributed fire control, LIDAR, Ablative armor, Vast hangar beyond the shield/canister flak switch.
Fine enough if that's what's needed to make the concept work, just seems like a minor usability problem similar to Ballistic rangefinder's arcane rules.

Also wanted to mention the Orion drive on the Retribution, just a "go forward" system but it was worth every second of development time.
Looks really cool.

Speculating on relative power seems a bit pointless without knowing more details details.
Something like a HIL Paragon probably eats any Invictus setup alive so wouldn't be too worried about it. HIL in general is the bane of shieldless ships.
Heph also gets another good use case.

I'm mostly curious about the problem Invictus could have:
it needs support for blocking/against flankers, but it's also a clumsy ship with forward mounts and burst firing windows in which it really, REALLY doesn't want allies to get in the way.
Will have to wait and see how that works out.

[Megas]

The thing I am most concerned about Invictus is not the ship itself, but (assuming the ship is good enough to compete with other powerhouses) it probably wants an officer specialized for it, and only for it given its unusual properties.  Get Polarized Armor, Damage Control, and maybe Impact Mitigation.  Then, if I want to swap out the ship for an extended time, I probably want to fire the officer and get a new one with more useful skills for it.

Indies have Conquest blueprints, they just rarely use it because they prefer cruiser spam.

It makes it the easiest capital to steal the blueprints for because New Maxios has the worst defenses of any industry world (low defense, no patrols).

[Alex]

Thanks for the blogpost Alex. I love the nod to the Orion project! Uniquifying the faction is a worthwhile goal, looking forward to it. Will it only apply to combat, or are also changes outside combat planned? The dialogs with the various generic commanders and fleets of each faction seem like a relatively easy way to show more of each faction's flavor, for example. Some variation in fleet behavior might also be interesting, like the TTs sending out tech mining fleets, or the church missionaries to other faction's planets, or the league having occasional in-fighting.

There's some stuff we're very much looking at that's along these lines! But, it's not something I want to commit to ahead of time, and it's not really part of this effort at least as far as development goes, even if it would be part of it conceptually.

We can't forget Invictus gets 100 OP refund from Heavy Ballistic Integration.

(Not sure what aspect of this you're getting at here, but, just to make it very clear: it having HBI is a straight up nerf compared to it *not* having HBI; it started out minus HBI and plus 100 OP.)

The 1 nitpick I have is Invictus basically being a bunch of rule exceptions stacked on each other: Distributed fire control, LIDAR, Ablative armor, Vast hangar beyond the shield/canister flak switch.
Fine enough if that's what's needed to make the concept work, just seems like a minor usability problem similar to Ballistic rangefinder's arcane rules.

I get what you're saying, yeah. I try to be conservative with built-in hullmods in particular for this reason. The nice thing in this case is that some of the hullmods, at least, you don't need to really know the fine details of - they just smooth the rough edges so the ship "works". And it's a major combatant, so learning about it is more worth it.

Also wanted to mention the Orion drive on the Retribution, just a "go forward" system but it was worth every second of development time.
Looks really cool.

Cool! I wasa little on the fence about it for just that reason, but, just had to do it

I'm mostly curious about the problem Invictus could have:
it needs support for blocking/against flankers, but it's also a clumsy ship with forward mounts and burst firing windows in which it really, REALLY doesn't want allies to get in the way.
Will have to wait and see how that works out.

I think the improvements to ship AI - that are already in the current release, as far as ships trying harder not to get in your way - will help here. I'm sure it'll happen *some*, but just out of curiosity, I did a quick simulator test. An Invictor plus 8 or so frigates, with a "defend" order on it, vs a bunch of cruisers and other support ships. Just in this one test, it didn't get its firing lanes blocked even once.

[Grievous69]

I think the improvements to ship AI - that are already in the current release, as far as ships trying harder not to get in your way - will help here. I'm sure it'll happen *some*, but just out of curiosity, I did a quick simulator test. An Invictor plus 8 or so frigates, with a "defend" order on it, vs a bunch of cruisers and other support ships. Just in this one test, it didn't get its firing lanes blocked even once.

Forget the actual blog post, this right here is huge news.

[Twilight Sentinel]

Diktat will probably become the exclusive owners of Conquest.

Agree with that.  The Dictate is currently the warship only faction.  The Odyssey fits the PL much better, as it's a battlecarrier ship.  Heck just making the Odyssey the PL's only capital ship and restoring their 3/3/1 breakdown for warships and carriers would do a lot to make them feel more unique.  Maybe increase how much they use hammerheads, sunders, Shrieks, Furies, and Apogees so the core of their fleets are those plus the herons they already prefer to field.  A mix of specialist, fast, and tanky midline/high tech ships backed up by strong carriers is a solid identity for a faction.

[Dri]

Hopefully Part 2 comes quickly, this type of content really gets me going and excited for patch release.

[Amazigh]

don't make another midline cap to make the Diktat more Unique, just give them the Odyssey
...
or alternatively make them go really hard on cruiser school

Currently in game we have one midline capital, compared to two for lowtech, three for hightech, and then one pather and one pirate (i consider those two different enough from the "standard" tech trees to be considered separately)
With the upcoming capitals (including the pegasus), that'll be 2 for midline, 4 for lowtech, and 3 for hightech.
That leaves midline as the clear option for where to add more capitals tbh.

And Alex flat out said that each faction is going to have distinct capitals, so that they will at least have a capital (be it new or old) will be a given tbh.

-----

In regards to the update, both of the new ships look really cool, and i really like the idea of each faction having more identity via what weapons they use.

One interesting thought i had, is that the Invictus is going to interact with Breach SRMs (and other "flat" armour damage weapons) in an interesting manner, as it will effectively be "resistant" to their bonus damage, and it might actually be (somewhat) more effective to use a more standard HE weapon to strip its armour than Breaches because of how the ablative armour works.

[Dri]

I think the Odyssey is best kept as an Independent ship, it really doesn't scream hardcore military like the Diktat.

I'd like to see an elite battleship leaning more towards high tech for them, a powerful ship that would explain how they've managed to keep the Hegemony from crushing them thus far.

[Dread Pirate Robots]

Looks amazing, I'm especially excited to get my hands on the Invictus... that said, is all this new weapon/ship content you've been showing off for a relatively small 0.95.2 release, or are we being tortured by something we won't be able to play with for over a year? (Of course I understand if this isn't an answerable question!)

This post has me hyped and I need to know how much I need to suppress it.

[TaLaR]

@Alex
Invictus seems to stress test target ship's ability to time system use (as in, if target doesn't use mobility/defense system exactly right, it's dead or at least so massively disadvantaged, it will be soon). Any improvements to AI in that regard?

I'd particularly like to see AI's defensive use of Plasma Burn (turn at least partially broadside to threat it in advance, time PB to dodge). Otherwise AI Odyssey is just a big fat target.

[Grievous69]

This is quite random for this blog post but it could kind of tie in somewhere. Reminded myself in another discussion that large energy slots only have 2 non beam options. And ships not meant for hit and run tactics pretty much just mainly need Plasma Cannon. Which is fine and all, great weapon either way, but having so few options after a plethora of ones in medium mounts feels awkward. I also thought large missiles were lacking some more interesting options and we know we're getting a bunch of them in the next patch, so that's taken care of. I just wish there was another thing that isn't a beam (I don't hate them or anything, but there's only so many things you can do with a beam loadout).

[Amoebka]

What would a third hard-flux large energy even look like though? We have high-flux high-damage plasma cannon and "budget" autopulse. Seems hard to come by with something third that doesn't feel like just tweaking numbers. Sharing the general purpose energy damage type naturally means less variation.

Might be interesting to make Mjolnir a hybrid weapon though.