Had a couple of tries. Here's feedback.
UI stuff:
1. "100% Armor penetration.
100% Hull and Structures Damage. (no hard flux)"
For energy beam weapon, this sentence pops out of text box which is eh
. And it didn't mention shield absorbtion.
So it could be:
"100% Armor penetration.
100% Hull and Structures damage.
100% Shield damage. (no hard flux)"
2. Hovering on some tooltips like "Armor" on topright of ship modification page, it still says max 85% min 5% stuff that needs a change.
3. Seems you changed Integrated Targeting Unit to realistic targeting, which is nice but I didn't see much difference (though I aim manually quite often).
4. Hullmods like Advanced Targeting Unit on Paragon is still range extension which is wierd.
5. Advanced Optics only increase range of 200, which is like 2% over 10000, nope
.
6. And Scatter Emitter is not working (blank). Maybe this is ongoing work? I think reducing range is actually fine, as it says, tunes frequency range so it behaves more "particle" rather than "wave" and deals hard flux. So to say this shouldn't decay (at least not too much) over range. But, since it's still instant, cut range in half (5000) is pretty fair.
Mechanism stuff:
1. AI is subpar. Try assign "Harass" or even "Rally", or any command with cautious or even timid. Toolstip says commanders should control ship according to enemy & self weapon range. Seems like AI is still following the vanilla range. Also, phase ship commanders still try to sub & float behind enemy for a "backstab" which fails completely. Phase ship AI prob needs a redo. They should now be real submarines, not phase-ninjas. Their AI should submerge as long as possible (at least in an intermediate range, doesn't matter whether being attacked). For firing, it's getting just about into range, float, fire and quickly submerge. For venting, it's getting out of range asap, float, vent and quickly submerge. I wonder if there could be a cooldown for both submerging and floating which extends the weakness window (and maybe 2x longer), then reduce the flux generation of phasing to balance out AI behavior.
[Modify: Just come up with another idea, if sub & float both have cooldown, then overloading is possible (Subs out of oxygen that needs to float), which is good fun for tactics.]
2. 200% For penetration is probably too high for Kinetic, or 50% and 12% being too low for HE and Frag, either way.
For example: Take shield in account and use energy (bolt) as a reference 100%/100%/100%, Kinetic is 200%/50%/?%.
My personal expectation is:
Kinetic 200%/50% /100%;
HE 75% /125%/125%;
Energy 100%/100%/100%;
Frag 15% /100%/25%;
Beam, just add (no hard flux), and decay with range, I think it's quite fair.
The reason HE needs scale up, since Kinetic penetrates too good and it still has some high damage one shot bolt weapon. Like Hypervelocity Drive etc., they can take down heavy targets with mid-slots alone. Then what's Gauss Cannon for? Also, many HEs are fast small bolts that won't penetrate heavy armor at all. Then they can only deal with small crafts. HEs both mid- & small- slots are all for the same role
? Why not making mid-slot HE & K deals similar damage to heavy armor?
Then shield scaling on HE, it's for balancing maximum Kinetic damage. HE is GOTTA be good to penetrate something, or it's dealing ZERO below corresponding kinetic threshold and the only HE left is hellbore. Cuz no HE below that threshold is irreplacable by a Kinetic. But if it presses harder on shields then there are trade-offs.
Frags are mainly for low flux PDs or some crazy damage low flux cryoblasters, so 12% (id say 15%) sounds fair, not much to say.
Still, overall a nice mod
. Cheers.
