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Author Topic: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2  (Read 37959 times)

Drazan

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #120 on: May 01, 2022, 05:15:00 AM »

I also agree with the sentiment that LG ships should have Solar Shielding for free especially if Special Modifications is already a negative. Why do they need two negatives? One should be enough flavour-wise, and also make them more of a small sidegrade (in case you actually want Solar Shielding) rather than just a straight downgrade (less flexibility + a negative hullmod).

100% percent agree. There should be disadvantages that add flavor thats nice. But solar shielding should be free in exchange for the D-mod. Just as LP ships get SO for free but have Ill-adviced.
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Igncom1

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #121 on: May 01, 2022, 05:16:25 AM »

XIV skins being (mostly) upgrades is also an instance of questionable design, but at least they follow the expected "more expensive/rare = better" logic. Diktat skins are both more expensive (over double the price because of the restoration), more rare, AND they are worse than base ones.

You will sometimes use base Enforcers because you haven't found enough orange ones yet, but you will literally never use purple Hammerheads.

I will but I like doing themed fleets and games  ;D

If the Solar Shielding didn't have a cost and came free I think it would be fine to pair with the penalties.

Bonus operating near stars or enemy energy weapons vs top down micromanagement from our great and glorious leader.
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Amoebka

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #122 on: May 01, 2022, 05:19:10 AM »

I mean, I also like themed fleets, but I'm not doing LG when it comes out. It doesn't provide any meaningfully different experience, it's exactly like playing full midline but with worse numbers.
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Big Bee

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #123 on: May 01, 2022, 05:24:15 AM »

Initially was pretty disappointed that the LG ships didn't have any upsides in the modifications and didn't even come with free Solar Shielding, but I guess it makes sense.

For the most part, the disappointment probably came from it being juxtaposed with all the other actual 'extra content' stuff, like the new battleships for major factions and all that. It's not meant to be the same kind of content as what the other factions got, but since it is listed right next to those, it's easy to misunderstand and then feel underwhelmed.

I do wish the Executor did differ from the Pegasus at least *slightly* more in appearance than a cool paintjob. It does make sense lore-wise for a megalomaniac to repaint it and call it a new class with some mount changes, but from a player perspective, it might still be a little disappointing. Oh well. The weapons look pretty sick, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Diktat will get in the future that was hinted at, and can't wait to try out all the new battleships, especially the Retribution.
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Haresus

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #124 on: May 01, 2022, 05:25:48 AM »

Great blog post. Really enjoying the lore and environmental storytelling for Sindria, definitely a bold choice.

Gameplay-wise I have some concerns (why would I want to use one of these LG ships myself, beyond maybe the paintjob?), but I love the idea of the Supreme Executor's paper tiger military and blowing them up to put their fancy guns to proper use.
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Megas

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #125 on: May 01, 2022, 05:27:54 AM »

I will add though that in my experience, the Scintilla is currently the rarest of the Remnant ships - it's quite common to run into big full-strength Ordos (max strength high danger) without any Scintillas at all. For example, looking at the largest 7 Ordos in a high danger system in my current run, here are their fleet compositions:

Hmm, weird - some quick poking around just now, I'm not seeing that, so I'm tempted to say it's just luck - no-Scintilla fleets are certainly possible, but also not predominant, and plenty appear to have a bunch of them. I was specifically looking at higher-end Remnant bounty Ordos.
DaShiv is right!  I just checked a red system, and out of eleven full-sized Ordos fleets, only two of them have Scintillas.  At least one Radiant were in most of the fleets, and several Brilliants, Fulgents, and frigates were in all of them.  Brilliants would be the primary source of fighter LPC drops.

I rarely use contacts, and when I did recently just to get at the Omega bounty, I did not get any Remnant or Derelict bounties, just a bunch of pirate and pather bounties, plus one Tri-Tachyon deserter bounty, and, of course, the Omega bounty as my reward for grinding up to 100 relations with Rayan Arroyo.  If player wants to grind Ordos for whatever, he will go to a red system where they can spawned quickly like monsters in Gauntlet and farm them, not waste time gambling at contacts and traveling.

There needs to be another ship that can use Remnant fighters (like Brilliant keeping its fighter bay, or Apex getting another free bay), or at least have variants that use Converted Hangar.  (Would be funny having a Radiant with fighters, even if it is a nerf to killer Radiant.)


Regarding Fulgent: it has the same speed as Hammerhead but generally lower weapon range. That implies a heavy reliance on dual Sabot pods for the Fulgent to achieve anything. Fulgent is also comparable to Sunder, trading a large energy mount for better shields. That's a mixed bag trade. From a long-range energy beam perspective 3x Gravitons + HEF is ostensibly good, but the Sunder can top that by trading one Graviton for a Tachyon Lance. So we could pessimistically say the Fulgent can't brawl as well as a Hammerhead and can't do beam support as well as a Sunder. More optimistically, we might say the Fulgent is the perfect use-case for the Energy Bolt Coherer.
Not just trading large energy mount for better shields, but also trading large energy AND Railguns for better shields and maybe more missiles (at the cost of energy weapons on a swivel).  Railguns with Ballistic Rangefinder or elite PD and IPDAI are near perfect compliments for Tachyon Lance or HIL on Sunder.

Speed of Fulgent is 85, midline ships (which have ballistics, even Sunder) are 90, and high-tech are even faster and/or have mobility system.

Ordos are tough mostly because of Radiants and AI core spam making their ships tougher and fleets having inflated max DP and ECM counts.


Re: Solar Shielding
Solar Shielding is practically standard on player's loadouts for anti-Ordos.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2022, 05:56:14 AM by Megas »
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Ahriman

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #126 on: May 01, 2022, 08:57:18 AM »

I really like the new Persean stuff, however I am also not sold on the Sindrians. Lorewise, yes, they are a dictatorship- just like the Hegemony is a military dictatorship operating under martial law, the Tri-Tachyon also not very democratic, the Persean League a mix of everything, the Church being a theocracy... only one of those being incompetents with no positives whatsoever is just off for me. Even the pirates have at least certain ships that are not simple downgrades, even if they are not always easy to use efficiently. If they at least excelled in one thing, at the cost of being far worse in something they did not prioritize, that would probably be more fun imo.
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Candesce

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #127 on: May 01, 2022, 09:16:18 AM »

Lorewise, yes, they are a dictatorship- just like the Hegemony is a military dictatorship operating under martial law, the Tri-Tachyon also not very democratic, the Persean League a mix of everything, the Church being a theocracy...
Mmm.

All the factions in Starsector are authoritarian. Only the Sindrian Diktat is a personalist dictatorship.

If the leaders of TT, the League, the Hegemony, or the Luddic Church act out, they demonstrably get removed, even if that removal process isn't democratic. It's a very big difference.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2022, 09:19:30 AM by Candesce »
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FreonRu

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #128 on: May 01, 2022, 09:30:07 AM »

Thank you so much for this wonderful game. I'm waiting for a new update to plunge into this world again.
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Megas

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #129 on: May 01, 2022, 10:19:06 AM »

One thing I just noticed on Executor:  It has five heavy needlers, so it has at least two hybrid turrets.  Question:  Does the Pegasus have hybrid turrets up front too, or is it exclusive to Executor?
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Grievous69

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #130 on: May 01, 2022, 10:21:00 AM »

It has hybrids as well, you can tell from one of the screenshots. The 2 IR Autolances near the front don't have a blue circle outline.
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Megas

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #131 on: May 01, 2022, 10:23:28 AM »

It has hybrids as well, you can tell from one of the screenshots. The 2 IR Autolances near the front don't have a blue circle outline.
Those outlines are barely visible!  I did not see them first time around.
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Alex

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #132 on: May 01, 2022, 10:44:01 AM »

One thing I'd like is the ability to set faction doctrine to completely exclude a type of ship like the LG.
IE if I don't want my faction to use phase ships, but right now i am forced to keep at least one pip into phase ships, so even with none unlocked in doctrine i see my captains bringing out gremlins now and then despite otherwise having many many better choices to fly

I think I actually changed it a little while back so that when the player's phase doctrine is set to one pip, there are no phase ships - and likewise for the other two settings.

How much of a concern do you think that will be? XIV Lowtech ships are substantial upgrades over the base models on some of the most prevalent line ships in the game, but people are still perfectly happy using a baseline Onslaught if that's what they can get their hands on. For comparison, half-price Solar Shielding is a fairly minor 7-8 point rebate on a capital, roughly in line with the value of just the flux from the XIV bonuses, and with "special modifications" almost certainly leaves the hulls worse off than baseline until they're restored. I don't see that being the kind of bonus that people are going to feel pressured to pursue. Even if the player has reached the point in the game where they have unlimited resources to pour into inane gameplay loops crafting their ideal Dorito Fleet, farming and restoring an Eagle that saves 5 points on Solar Shielding is probably not what's on their mind.

Though to be honest, having crunched the numbers I've mostly just talked myself out of having any strong opinion just because the difference is so small either way.

That's a fair point, yeah. And to turn it around, if someone wants to use that skin for the looks and is willing to pay to restore it, they'd probably also be ok with the minor downside of built-in solar shielding.

Beautiful new ships and weapons, making the factions less samey when you go and beat them up for whatever reason is most convenient for the player.

Thank you!

I'm also very happy for new remnant content (I did ask for possible new ships to add some variety to remnant farming some time ago, after all). I only have one very minor disappointment, and that is that the Nova very much resembles a hightech Retribution; both battlecruisers with similar weapon layouts and ship systems. In the modiverse, there are sometimes attempts to make "X lowtech/midline/hightech ship but another tech", and the relationship between these two ships kind of give off those vibes when IMO every other ship in SS has been succinctly distinct from the rest. This does not mean that I don't like either ship or that they are bad by any metric, but it is just an observation.

Hmm - I feel like the weapons layout is actually very different. The Nova has to keep pointing towards its target, which really changes how it plays. The Retribution has a much easier time skimming around the edges, while the Nova has to commit more and is also very vulnerable from the sides. The systems are I think also different enough - for the Retribution, the movement bursts are smaller and there are enough charges/charge regen that there's pretty much always one available. For the Nova, the charge regen is low, but the amount of movement is much higher - so, again, using the system is more of a committment. Hopefully that adds up to enough of a difference; I didn't personally make the connection between the two ships until it was pointed out here.

(Never mind that the weapon slot types are different! That's kind of a big deal, too.)

As you mentioned, you can restore the dmod out, but the LG skins are probably going to be the least interesting ships for the player to obtain in the presence of more common and frankly superior standard versions. You lose your OP to Solar Shielding and you get a nice paint job. That's the new toy the player gets.

I think just fundamentally looking at this as a "ney toy for the player" isn't right. It's a d-skin for a subfaction you can't even trade with.

... but it isn't giving that much of anything to the player, frankly speaking.

So with the above in mind, my answer is just "yes, and it's not trying to", if that makes sense.

At least the Executor gets a slight mount change to allow players to have something that fights a little differently than the Pegasus (possibly tach lance and HIL combos with medium kinetics).

Yep! And the Executor *is* a ship that's meant to be something interesting for the player, and incidentally you can buy it from the Diktat with a commission, while you can't buy the other stuff.

Could be nice if the whole line of LG had some minor mount changes (like the executor; in terms of its own uniqueness compared to the other skins, it will be the only ship to be allowed to have the Diktat superweapons, after all) to spice things up...

... and now I'm tempted to convert some of those ballistic hardpoints on the LG Eagle/Falcon/etc to energy :) But no, really, hmm.

I mean, I understand the appeal of fulfilling multiple goals with those skins, but I also don't want to undermine the primary goal of having those skins in the game. I mean, if it helps, you might think of these as a bunch of pirate skins being added; it's the same sort of thing.


Is the Brilliant getting its sprite changed to reflect it losing its deck? Are the weapon ports getting shuffled?

Yes and no.


Well, there is still a monetary downside of restoring in that case, so I think strictly worse is fair: no matter what you do, you are worse off in some way than if you used the normal hull.

Fair enough, yeah.

I guess if it is coded as a normal d-mod so that it reduces recovery cost and interacts with all the d-mod skills, then I would agree it's not strictly worse. I'm actually curious if hull restoration would remove the special modifications?

It doesn't reduce recovery cost - it's not significant enough for that - but it does interact with anything else that's dmod-related, including hull restoration. Though offhand I forget if that removes built-in d-mods? I want to say it does, though.

Also, I think it would be a bit more palatable for me if the hull mod didn't increase crew casualties (or slightly reduced them) even if it has other downsides. To me (as an engineer), engineers implementing something that they know has the opposite of the desired effect paints the engineers as incompetent, which doesn't seem to be the intent.
...
Drawing a parallel to the diktat, I would expect the engineers to actually fulfill the requested constraints and features: cover the exposed conduits and improve crew safety, or at least not harm it. Then maybe there are some side effects of that which they ignore/accept since it is more important to meet the demands of Andrada than make the best modifications, but they should at least meet those demands.

The way I'm thinking about it is, the engineers did their job - if a conduit explodes, nearby crew will be much better protected than otherwise. But the corridors are harder to navigate, repairs are harder to make, medics take longer to reach the wounder and get them to sickbay, and so on - nothing you could point a finger at and say "this casualty was caused by the blast-proof paneling", but increasing the casualties on average. And you could easily point at cases where the paneling did save crew, so it'd be a hard sell to remove it even to someone interested in listening - assuming someone was even collecting the data to analyze this, which, given the LG's lack of major action, is very unlikely.

It seems much more plausible that the engineers make a design that did what he asked for with some unintended side effects that get swept under the rug.

Exactly, yes.

This actually reminds me of the whole 737 max debacle that Boeing had:

Interesting, thank you for posting that!

I imagine Andrada would be pretty *** if he found out the design the engineers made for him did the opposite of what he asked for.

Even if it was clear-cut, who would tell him? With a certain type of leader, this type of behavior happens - it doesn't even require a dictatorship that shoots people, not by a long shot. Just a situation where saying something the higher-up doesn't want to hear sometimes has adverse consequences.


First off, love the new ships and the new weapons, both art- and design-wise. In particular, four large missile slots and Fast Missile Racks on the Pegasus gave me a laugh - truly nothing is off the table. ;)

Here's hoping I don't regret the Pegasus :)

minor quibble with this: the marginal value of missile weapons increases the more missiles you have - it compounds. :p

Yeah, I can see that, but it's kind of... both. It compounds in terms of being a finishing blow. But if you're looking to just deal with armor, then the drones do a good enough job of that, so e.g. you wouldn't want Breaches or (probably) Annihilators as much.

Still, it seems like it'll be interesting to see, although I'd like to see more than one ship class with the Energy Bolt Coherer to feel a little less gimmicky (then again Monitor uniquely has Flux Shunt, so it's probably not an issue)

I'm pretty ok with those kinds of mods being one-offs, but do want to look at the Fulgent as a candidate for it!

Some dumb ideas I thought of off the top of my head, as examples:
- Different systems like the LP Cerberus/Brawler
- Give Solar Shielding a downgrade (maybe shuffle over something from Special Modifications, even), so that it being built-in for free isn't an issue
- The above, but also make Solar Shielding non-modular. Diktat engineers invented the hullmod; if it stayed in-house it wouldn't be too out of place I don't think.

Thank you for the suggestions!


Less "Supreme Executor, someone raised issues with your proposed improvements yesterday and we told them to shut up." and more "Supreme Executor, we neutralized three more traitors in engineering yesterday."

(Haha!)

(I guess that's Andrada's leverage depicted in game mechanics?)

Yeah - it's interesting how it translates to the player, as well, actually.


Just kinda feeling weird about the name "Apex"
I mean, the other remnant ships' name concern about "light" or something "shiny", but Apex seems not that bright?

Kinda running out of cool light-based names tbh, so something to do with being a pinnacle felt close-enough.

But I'm much much more interested in Apex (agree with others on the naming, I propose "Twinkle")

See what I mean? :D


Now that I've thoroughly read the post again, I can continue the feedback. First when I read everything, for some reason I thought only the Gigacannon is locked behind killing Executor speficially in Lion's Guard fleets but it seems Kinetic blaster is the same. You're telling me the only kinetic energy weapon is not available anywhere, and I must precisely kill a capital and hope to RNG that it drops? That's extremely disappointing. At least the smaller ships can have it, like Eagles and Falcons. I doubt weapon dealers in bars will ever give you those but that's my last hope.

I'm kind of waffling on giving some KB's to the Falcons and Eagles, too - don't want it to be too easy to get a bunch of, though, hm.


I'm not that upset about Sindrians like others, but I understand where they're coming from. ... Give their ships something not completely ass and the player would actually have to decide if recovery would be worth it. I'm sure all of us here want varied gameplay and interesting decision making.

I can understand it, too. But to me it's also not a big deal to have a few ships that aren't player-centering and just have another role.


Executor being a literal recolor with 2 different mounts is very peculiar to me. We got a plethora of new ships, some factions got TWO, and then here's a faction having a single capital, one that looks exactly like the original. Doesn't matter that it's a minor faction, it still seems weird to an average player. Not a big deal since we're getting a bunch of content, just mentioning the incoming feedback this would probably get.

Hmm - I guess I'd just, personally, disagree on it being a minor faction mattering or not. To me it feels very appropriate.

You know what's the biggest bummer in the whole blog post? God danged Ventures... Pirates finally got a cool cruiser to fight and now we get another brick that takes a bajillion years to penetrate. The variants are cool and got me interested, but I'm honestly not looking forward to fight a boulder with guns that has duct taped adamantium plates all over itself. I'm probably overreacting btw.

(There's not going to be *too* many of those in pirate fleets.)

Can we know the DP values of new ships? Ones that you're open to talk about of course.

Ah, I'd rather not get into that too much, beyond what was already in the screenshots.

P.S. Sorry for the negativity, I absolutely love everything else I haven't mentioned here so if I included that, this post would probably hit the character limit (if there is one).

All good! And thank you :)


I notice the Derelicts don't have anything new, not even a different kind of drone cruiser. Any particular reason, or is it because their identity is already solid enough as it is? (I mean, shieldless, extremely rugged, mass-produced drones is pretty unique to begin with, but it was a thought that occurred.)

I wasn't thinking about it too much! They don't need the help identity-wise, yeah, and they're more of just a punching bag than the Remnants, so it just didn't come up. I could see coming back to it at some point, though.


Extremely happy with the described changes, new weapons and ships - thank you, Alex and David!

Thank you!

I gave the blogpost a thought and finally found the part that didn't work for me: the Supreme Executioner didn't order to "install plates". He order to "install plates to improve crew survivability". And it would make sense for him to ask later: "how much did the plates installed on my behalf improve crew survivability?"

(Please see my response to intrinsic_parity in this same post!)


This is going to be the best Starsector update ever. Release when?

When it's ready, of course :)

> Energy-damage missiles (looking at Gorgon, but also Hydra) are not finishers - they are openers. It's either free hard-flux on the enemies' shields, or a gash in their armor, particularly with how PD-resistant these missiles are.

I could see that, but it *is* also soft-flux damage, so you'd really have to make sure to overwhelm.

> There are relatively few Midline ships with Medium Missile mounts to fire Gazers and stuff. There's Conquest, Gryphon, and... Vigilance? At least it's cool that the Vigilance is useful now. But there's a niche here for, say, an Elite Midline Destroyer with medium missile capability.

Hmm, maybe? We've already got the Manticore, though; I'm generally hesitant to have "the same thing, different tech level" so it'd have to be significantly different.

The Sindrian Diktat ship skins are a bold move, but I'm with you on this one. It is good for lore, and cosmetic-only ship skins already exist so nothing new there. Aside from D-mod (that can be repaired with cash, so whatever) and the forced Solar Shielding. Well, I put Solar shielding on 100% of my ships anyways, so having it forcibly build-in doesn't look like a downside to me.

*thumbs up*

As for "base hull is bad": It kind of already feels that way to me because of XIV variants. Their only downside (aside from acquisition) is speed, but for all XIV ships besides *sometimes* Falcon the speed drop feels insignificant. I mean, I would never even consider using baseline Onslaught or Enforcer, for example.

They do at least have the speed penalty, though; that's a prime stat so this is *something*. If I had another look at them, I'd probably make the tradeoff more pronounced, though; might end up doing that at some point.

Regarding Fulgent: it has the same speed as Hammerhead but generally lower weapon range. That implies a heavy reliance on dual Sabot pods for the Fulgent to achieve anything. Fulgent is also comparable to Sunder, trading a large energy mount for better shields. That's a mixed bag trade. From a long-range energy beam perspective 3x Gravitons + HEF is ostensibly good, but the Sunder can top that by trading one Graviton for a Tachyon Lance. So we could pessimistically say the Fulgent can't brawl as well as a Hammerhead and can't do beam support as well as a Sunder. More optimistically, we might say the Fulgent is the perfect use-case for the Energy Bolt Coherer.

Yeah, it's kind of sounding like it.


For the most part, the disappointment probably came from it being juxtaposed with all the other actual 'extra content' stuff, like the new battleships for major factions and all that. It's not meant to be the same kind of content as what the other factions got, but since it is listed right next to those, it's easy to misunderstand and then feel underwhelmed.

That's just a really good point.

I do wish the Executor did differ from the Pegasus at least *slightly* more in appearance than a cool paintjob. It does make sense lore-wise for a megalomaniac to repaint it and call it a new class with some mount changes, but from a player perspective, it might still be a little disappointing. Oh well. The weapons look pretty sick, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Diktat will get in the future that was hinted at, and can't wait to try out all the new battleships, especially the Retribution.

Personally, I really like how the Executor looks, but I can see where you (and others who have mentioned something similar) are coming from.

Gameplay-wise I have some concerns (why would I want to use one of these LG ships myself, beyond maybe the paintjob?), but I love the idea of the Supreme Executor's paper tiger military and blowing them up to put their fancy guns to proper use.

You pretty much wouldn't, yeah. Though all this talking about it is making me think about how to maybe do that while still achieving the narrative goals. Well, we'll see. Worst case, they're just - fairly clearly, in terms of stats - "not a ship meant for the player to want to use".

Thank you so much for this wonderful game. I'm waiting for a new update to plunge into this world again.

Thank you! <3


One thing I just noticed on Executor:  It has five heavy needlers, so it has at least two hybrid turrets.  Question:  Does the Pegasus have hybrid turrets up front too, or is it exclusive to Executor?

Both have the two hybrids.

It has hybrids as well, you can tell from one of the screenshots. The 2 IR Autolances near the front don't have a blue circle outline.

(Oh wow, good eye!)
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Ruddygreat

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #133 on: May 01, 2022, 11:01:41 AM »

(posted the last one accidentally!)

I'm going to buy the biggest stack of kinetic blasters the moment I see them on the market, btw.
Unfortunately that seems impossible since both Kinetic blasters and Gigacannons only appear in Lion's guard fleets thaf have an Executor. And then you have to get lucky so the weapons actually drop after battle.

I doubt they'll be this exclusive, the weapon just don't sound good enough to be combat drops only- the only other weaps in that bracket are the omega weaps and while they seem to be related, they're nowhere near as good

Now that I've thoroughly read the post again, I can continue the feedback. First when I read everything, for some reason I thought only the Gigacannon is locked behind killing Executor speficially in Lion's Guard fleets but it seems Kinetic blaster is the same. You're telling me the only kinetic energy weapon is not available anywhere, and I must precisely kill a capital and hope to RNG that it drops? That's extremely disappointing. At least the smaller ships can have it, like Eagles and Falcons. I doubt weapon dealers in bars will ever give you those but that's my last hope.

I'm kind of waffling on giving some KB's to the Falcons and Eagles, too - don't want it to be too easy to get a bunch of, though, hm.

... and as I was typing this, drat!
making them this exclusive really doesn't sound like a good idea, if the only way that you can get them is by fighting the fleets of an "elite" subfaction- that only spawns around a star with a massive corona, in a heavily fortified system- they'll either never get used or they'll have to be incredibly good (possibly even outright OP) to be "worth" trying to pick up for most players.
 

Megas

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Re: Uniquifying the Factions, Part 2
« Reply #134 on: May 01, 2022, 11:05:42 AM »

Re: XIV ships (aside from Legion)
The speed penalty feels insignificant for all of them except maybe for Falcon.  Thus, I consider the choice between XIV and standard a no-brainer every time, and I choose to build a XIV version over standard every time.  The OP and flux bonuses are too good.  XIV ships should be like Legion where their mounts are not the same.

... and as I was typing this, drat!
making them this exclusive really doesn't sound like a good idea, if the only way that you can get them is by fighting the fleets of an "elite" subfaction- that only spawns around a star with a massive corona, in a heavily fortified system- they'll either never get used or they'll have to be incredibly good (possibly even outright OP) to be "worth" trying to pick up for most players.
If kinetic blasters are optimal, then that means Askonia becomes like a red system to farm, except farming Diktats instead of Ordos.  That is why I called them possible "purple pirates" - a faction to kill for loot.
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