Prompted by this:
At this point I feel like I should make yet another new thread, but for Eagle. Then again I'd surely be detected by the system as a bot or something.
Caveat: I am incredibly biased. I do not like the Eagle. Like, at all.
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So, Eagle thread. Feel free to try and convince me (or anyone really) the Eagle is cool and good.
What's my beef with the Eagle anyway?
Well, it's not that the Eagle is specifically bad per se, it's more that it's just not good. It doesn't seem to have anything it can do that another ship cannot do better.
It has many attributes, some of them are even fairly good. In a vacuum.
However, unlike any other ship in the game Eagle has all it's attributes conflict with each other in what is a
perfect storm of disappointment and mediocrity.
It's the exemplar of
Jack of no trades, master of none, Eagle just is.
Eagle has a very underwhelming speed. But it also has a mobility system. Cool!
Unfortunately, even with this system active it is not fast enough to chase or run away from things.
It's weapons are... Confused tbh.
Short-ranged energy weapons are mounted towards the back of the ship, away from targets.
While long-ranged ballistic weapons are mounted in the nose,
and fixed so they cannot be aimed without turning the whole ship.
Since it's a cuiser, Eagle's turn rate is not stellar. But it has a mobilty system that fixes that!
Neat. But that system can't be active all the time, so Eagle spends a significant amount of time not being able to use arguably its most useful weapons.
Cool.
Missiles. Eagle has 2x small missile mounts. Which for a cruiser is effectively zero.
Eagle cannot meaningfully do flux-free burst damage
at all.
Which is huge. And not in a good way.
In order to use all it's weapons Eagle needs to not only face it's target, but stay within range of it's gimped energy guns set far back on the hull.
Which means that in order to do any damage to anything Eagle must always create flux close to the enemy.
So it's always getting flux built on it from 2 sources.
And since it cannot rely on missiles this means it cannot "reset" fights to create openings to attack/escape.
Eagle has decent armour. But not enough that you'd want to use it as a primary defence.
So it must rely on shields to defend itself.
When it gets attacked, it will raise shields. And hits will raise flux.
Okay. No different to any other ship, so what's the problem?
Here's where the confluence of compromise takes effect...
Eagle has to create flux to attack.
And create more to defend.
It can't reset the fight to vent.
It's armour isn't strong enough to use in place of shields.
And it can't run away.
So what happens is the Eagle will attack, and if it can't defeat it's target in that initial exchange, it will stall.
It will get fluxed out and start flickering it's shields while it's armour and hull gets pecked away.
And then it dies.
In every version of the game I have ever played, the AI Eagle behaves like this. I stopped using them entirely because they're so... Disappointing.
Even as an enemy AI Eagles are one of the easiest targets, simply because they can't cope with being shot at, can't meaningfully hurt you beyond thier opening volley, and can't run away.
Even in a fleet setting where most of these issues are mitigated to some degree, Eagle is a consistent underperformer because it just cannot get damage onto targets fast enough to be worth the effort of fielding it.
I will take any other cruiser (and a few destroyers) in preference to Eagle any day of any week.
In most situations I'll take a pile of supplies and fuel in preference to Eagle
Some (maybe most) other ships in the game have one or more of these "issues".
But Eagle is the only one that has them all, and it suffers badly because of it.
And that is why I don't like the Eagle.
How can Eagle be improved?
More speed?
More missiles?
Less awkward gun layout?
Apparently this is important:
And please include in your OP that the deployment cost is currently 20 in the dev build. I think that's crucial for this type of discussion.