The issue is that remnants don't just require "better ships or weapons", they require specific strategies.
Remnants is endgame. Do you think any game's endgame accepts throwing any random party and any random strategy at it to win?
The excessive advantage they have forces the player into a tiny subset of working strategies, requiring them to drop their favourite ships and playstyles and adapt the "meta" approach.
Highly disagree. Yes, you can't just do random strategies, you have to come prepared and know how to handle them. But there are tons of different strategies to handle them, and it's easy enough to look on Youtube and find all sorts of different strategies that players have come up with to farm Ordos fleets. I haven't bothered with content mods since 0.95a simply because I still haven't explored all the various ways to beat Ordos in vanilla, because there are so many different ways to try.
From a game design standpoint, arguing that it's a player's favorite ship or playstyle as a basis for game changes is not useful, because these can be completely arbitrary. A player can go on the forums and say "I really like spamming Cerberuses with vulcan cannons, how come I can't beat triple Ordos with them, this game is bad and needs to cater to that" etc. Also, these types of arguments deceptively assume that a player's favorite playstyle etc. is not effective (i.e. "favorite" implies "not good at endgame"), when generally speaking players like doing what's effective, not what's not. It would be more persuasive to actually present what the favorite playstyle is and examine why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets (and why it should), instead of relying on some vague notion of "I can't use my (unspecified and undefined) favorite playstyle therefore the game should change".
The fact that most of these strategies boil down to spamming a monofleet of overpowered ships, all with the exact same "optimal" loadout doesn't help the fun either.
Highly disagree. I don't think I've ever used a monofleet for any of my Ordos farming fleets (although Drover spam way back when was pretty close to one, except my flagship was a different ship, and multiple types of fighters were used). Monofleets are generally not as effective as having different types of ships because different ships have different roles, and a single ship is not going to fulfill every possible role effectively. Chances are a monofleet could be improved by having a different ship in it. My LP Brawler fleet was much improved with the addition of several Falcon XIV's to provide Xyphos cover and help against larger targets, not to mention me as the player in a Medusa to jump around to different hotspots.
So it is not just pigeonholing ships, but skills too. (Want QoL skills like Helmsmanship, Industrial Planning, or Containment Procedures? Bad player!) Just about every video that kills Ordos, aside from those featuring Omega Ziggurat, have BotB (and officer skills) and thus Leadership 5.
It's funny that you perjoratively call taking Leadership 5 as pigeonholing, when you undyingly choose to take Hull Restoration and then complain about how you don't have enough skill points left over to take the other skills that you want. Have you considered that maybe it's because people generally find BotB to be very useful for a large variety of different skill layouts and that it complements other skills very well, and that generally people can just get rid of d-mods using credits which are essentially infinite, and thus don't have to use valuable skill points for that? Maybe people aren't as concerned as you are about losing that 3rd s-mod from respec'ing away from BotB because they don't see any reason to ever not use it.
Or quit and wait for a better release if it is not fun anymore. I made a better fleet to defeat a double Ordos, but the game became unfun because I used what I needed to instead of what I want, and if I wanted to change the fleet, I would need to fire all of my officers and spend at least a day to hire and train new ones. Not doing that! So far, the easiest way to avoid that nonsense is abuse Omega Ziggurat and map size if I feel like grinding Ordos.
Yes you keep saying this in multiple threads. Apparently:
1. The game is fun and you get to do what you want how you want to do it until you get to Ordos.
2. All fleets capable of defeating (double) Ordos are categorically deemed "unfun". There's never any discussion of just what your preferred playstyle is or why it doesn't work against Ordos fleets, or why you don't like any of the many different ways to defeat Ordos fleets, but any possible player fleets are automatically considered "unfun" if they can beat Ordos fleets.
3. Non-Ordos fleets don't give enough XP to fuel your desire to put improvements on all colony structures despite the 2^n cost, whose purpose is intentionally to dissuade players from trying to put improvements on all colony structures.
4. Therefore, Alex should make it so that regular fleets give millions of XP or you'll quit the game. Oh, and the skill cap should be increased because you want to be a fighter who can also cast spells like a mage, heal like a cleric, and sneak around like a thief.
You know, you can always just go into \starsector-core\data\config\settings.json, and edit "xpGainMult" to 10, 100, or whatever you want if you want to get millions of XP from easier fleets. You can also set "playerMaxLevel" from 15 to 40 if you don't want to deal with the burden of actually have to decide between skills. But these are set the way they are so that the game provides an adequate amount of challenge for the typical player.
Putting 12 Gryphons on autopilot requires zero skill, yet is one the best anti-remnant (anti-everything really) strategies.
I haven't played much with missile ships, what is your Gryphon fleet build that can autopilot through Ordos fleets?
I would argue that remnants should be beatable with ANY 240 dp combination of ships, as long as loadouts/officers/orders are employed well.
I don't see why Alex should guarantee that the player can beat endgame content with any arbitrary set of ships that total 240 DP. Different ships serve different roles, and there's no guarantee that any arbitrary set of ships will be able to cover all the roles for a fleet. The player is supposed to figure out the right tools for the job, not assume that any random tool would work for any job, especially the hardest in the game. This is endgame content here. When you look at the endgame content for any other game, do you also assume that they can be beaten with any arbitrary party composition etc.?
Although...as an aside, this sounds like a fun mission if someone wants to code it in. A random enemy Ordos fleet is generated, a random player fleet is generated, and then the player has to figure out how to beat that fleet with the given ships.
2^N Story point for things is absolute agony. I really wish it capped at some point.
It's a not-so-subtle hint that you should only use a couple of them per colony and not try to spam them. It's a soft cap instead of a hard cap. Besides, for colony improvements, most of the improvements just means the colony makes more credits. So you're trading SP (which are harder to acquire) for additional credits (which are easy to acquire). That's generally a bad decision, especially since once you have colonies up and running you essentially have infinite credits (you have more credits than you can use).
Getting colony improvements vaguely reminds me a bit of item farming from Diablo II. Got to have that +1.
You know, maybe you should consider "just because you
could, doesn't mean you
should." Alex seems to be moving toward soft caps rather than hard caps for some of the game boundaries, so that players can "slightly exceed" those boundaries cheaply but going far beyond them quickly becomes painful. For example you can fly around with a 100-ship fleet now if you want, if you want to eat that additional supply cost. But just because you
can, doesn't mean it's something worth doing. That's just part of good decision making, deciding what are the things that are more valuable to do.
XP and story point gain is slow unless bonus xp is at or close to max. Single Ordos, while harder than high-end human fleets, is beatable with anything that can win against said high-end human fleet without casualties. But single Ordos does not give much more xp than the humans. That is why I am interested in double Ordos if I want to use a fleet instead of lone Ziggurat.
I get around 3 million XP (i.e. around 3 SP) per Ordos fleet with my current LP Brawler fleet, and it takes around 3.5 minutes of game time according to Detailed Combat Results, but roughly 10 minutes of actual playtime total, since I pause to give commands during the fight (this also includes collecting statistics on the Ordos fleet, i.e. recording number of ships, cores, etc., which also involves reloading the game to record the fleet's FP). So in my current playthrough that's around 18 SP per hour of play. My fleet is intentionally oversized to collect XP data so it should be 4 million XP per fleet if I were at max XP bonus. From some previous testing, my fleet would also get through Ordos fleets around 30% faster if I did it as double Ordos instead of single Ordos (fighting two fleets together took 70% of the time of fighting each fleet one at a time).
So if I did my math right, this means that if this fleet were farming double Ordos, it would be gaining over 34 SP per hour (over because I wouldn't be bothering to record all the Ordos fleet statistics). And I'm sure this isn't the fastest Ordos farming fleet possible. That's enough to put 2 s-mods on every ship in the fleet within 2 hours of play. In my current playthrough, I've already put 3 s-mods on all 30 ships in my fleet (including logistics ships), have multiple ships in storage with 3 s-mods, and have over 100 SP saved up, and I'm less than halfway through my target in terms of gathering statistics on Ordos fleets. All my previous playthroughs also ended up with plenty of SP left over and nothing particularly useful to spend them on.
Gaining enough XP for all the player's SP needs for regular use is pretty trivial, unless the player does a lot of frivolous or unnecessary SP use. At that point it's a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
A single Ordos fleet gives around 55% more base XP than level 10+ (i.e. max level) deserter bounties (692k vs 445k from my most recent testing, assuming doubled XP from SP bonus), and has around 66% more DP for XP bonus purposes (1105 vs 666 from my most recent testing). So a single Ordos fleet will give more than 2.5x the XP than a max-level deserter bounty for all but the largest or the smallest player fleets. That's a big difference. For a medium-size player fleet, deserter bounties would give around 750k XP each while Ordos fleets would give around 2 million XP each.
