Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hiruma Kai]

I wonder if in addition to the Omega + Remnant bounty, if there shouldn't be some high end, one of a kind bounty fleet for each faction.  With the bounty provided by military contacts of other factions (i.e. Tri-tach could give any high end bounty except the Tri-tach themed bounty fleet).  Imagine them as bounties being put on successful independent mercenaries that have been commissioned by a faction (or maybe just a part of the military that has plausible denability).  And once done, they don't repeat.

With said ships in these fleets not only getting s-mods, but also hand picked loadouts and officers for maximum synergy to produce something akin to an Ordo difficulty, at least for certain fleet types.  This is in contrast to most fleets which tend to have at least somewhat RNG loadouts and officers.  It would an interesting way to show off the variation one can get in the game in terms of player fleets. 

A Hegemony capital heavy fleet that is virtually immune to missiles and fighters through sheer density of Devastator Cannon, Flak and Proximity Charge Launchers.  A Persean Conquest, Gryphon, and Heron missile and fighter focused fleet that requires you to have decent PD or else drown in flux free damage boosted by officers.  A fast Tri-tach Safety Override fleet (with officers with Combat Endurance, Hardened Subsystems, and Wolf Pack tactics on top) that hit and run with the best of them.  A plausible deniability Sindarin Diktat Lion's Guard fleet with their experimental weapons on complementary Tri-tach hulls.  A Luddic path fleet with each ship having 5 hand picked d-mods, with a leader with derelict operation and support doctrine skills.

Being one offs and only available via contact would make them an optional challenge that could make for some interesting end game variety with already existing ships and fittings, so less need for development.

[BigBrainEnergy]

I love this idea, but it sounds like you're gonna need a contact in each faction if you want to do all of them, although I guess you don't need to do all of them.

[llama]

I interpreted it as needing only two contacts, as in a single contact would offer the entire list minus one.

[Alex]

Pretty into the idea, I gotta say!

(I've been idly kicking around something similar - it'd be fun to introduce the player to some ship loadouts that e.g. have a bunch of Harpoons linked with a kinetic weapon battery, or just once that link a bunch of Reapers together; that sort of thing.)

[WhisperDSP]

Pretty into the idea, I gotta say!

(I've been idly kicking around something similar - it'd be fun to introduce the player to some ship loadouts that e.g. have a bunch of Harpoons linked with a kinetic weapon battery, or just once that link a bunch of Reapers together; that sort of thing.)

I’ve been kicking around an idea of an LP Brawler with Assault Chaingun, HMG, and two Annihilator Rocket Launchers - all linked. Add an officer with Missile Specialization. (IIRC the universal mounts don’t benefit from Expanded Missile Racks? Because the missiles would be in universal slots.)

[Hiruma Kai]

I’ve been kicking around an idea of an LP Brawler with Assault Chaingun, HMG, and two Annihilator Rocket Launchers - all linked. Add an officer with Missile Specialization. (IIRC the universal mounts don’t benefit from Expanded Missile Racks? Because the missiles would be in universal slots.)

Expanded Missile racks affects all missiles, everywhere.  The yet to be released Missile Autoloader only affects missiles in small missile mounts exclusively.

I suppose if people want to make hand crafted ships, officer and fleet suggestions we can collect them here for Alex and worst case they give other players ideas of what to try.

[WhisperDSP]

I’ve been kicking around an idea of an LP Brawler with Assault Chaingun, HMG, and two Annihilator Rocket Launchers - all linked. Add an officer with Missile Specialization. (IIRC the universal mounts don’t benefit from Expanded Missile Racks? Because the missiles would be in universal slots.)

Expanded Missile racks affects all missiles, everywhere.  The yet to be released Missile Autoloader only affects missiles in small missile mounts exclusively.

I suppose if people want to make hand crafted ships, officer and fleet suggestions we can collect them here for Alex and worst case they give other players ideas of what to try.

Thanks for clarifying, I’d gotten the two mixed.

So, a strike force of say 5 LP Brawlers that rush in and immediately unload a total of 50 missiles into a target at point blank range. EMR + Officer giving a total of 30(?) salvos in a battle - that sounds somewhat brutal.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Would the enemy commander have fleet-wide skills as well? If so, what level would they be? It would be kinda cool to see the enemy flagship roll in with the level 15 captain.

[Hiruma Kai]

Enemy fleet leaders can already come with some fleet wide skills, so I presume these new fleets would have picked fleets skills as well.  Not sure if all player fleet skills interact well with NPC fleets offhand, as I haven't played around with it.  Specifically, I don't know about Support Doctrine, Hull Restoration and Derelict Operations. I don't think NPC fleets care about Automated Ship limits, and Neural Link doesn't make any sense really for NPCs.

I know Kanta has wolfpack tactics, although I don't think she ever leads a fleet.  Although I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere.  I've seen crew training, coordinated maneuvers, flux regulation, electronic warfare, fighter uplink and carrier group.  Then there's the fact many fleets seem to have extra officers and of higher level implying officer training type skills.  S-mods can just be piled on to simulate Best of the Best.

[Zsar]

Mmh. Problem with all things "Hand designed": After the first time they get old. There would have to be at least a small selection of these, only one of which actually shows up.

I think it would be better to generalise the Tesseract capability to spawn ships specifically countering the player fleet. The game already has an auto-fitting mechanic, so it does not seem far fetched to collect player fleet stats and translate those into dynamic weights for the different weapon types. Less random I think it would be sensible if the game could copy the player's layouts (after some sort of "trial by fire", e.g. a faction has to be beat-with-survivors by the player fleet, before it will copy designs observed in that battle).

Some kind of "variant registry" for player-crafted variants might be a good compromise? It would have to be bundled with the game at release to avoid having to maintain a server for it (thus limiting the game's lifetime), though. Or maybe it could just be put onto Github and be polled at game start, similar to how the Version Checker mod polls mod versions. That way it will be easily archived and redistributable even after all company presence vanished from the internet.

(Of course, there is nothing saying that any of these options have to be mutually exclusive. Anything manual just happens to have a poor gameplay-to-maintenance ratio - and the wait for new releases is long.)

[Hatter]

Hand design half a fleet and combine halves to make a fleet.

[BCS]

I just want to point out that putting minmaxed fleets in the game to fight would decrease number of viable builds, not increase it. The harder the game the better your build/fleet needs to be so the less room is there for personal preference and variety. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where the community arrives at what is mathematically the perfect fleet composition and it's then put in the game - then to beat it you must use the exact same composition(since we know it's the best) AND pilot a flagship yourself to break the stalemate between the two.

The main reason why Ordo is the benchmark isn't because Remnants are the toughest enemies(though they are) - it's because they're the only enemies worth "farming". If you want Alpha cores, you need to fight the Remnant. If you want bucketloads of XP, you need to fight the Remnant. If you want to get Omega weapons... well you fight Omega but they have same ship profile as the Remnant(high tech, shield based) so it's largely the same thing.

Non-Remnant endgame fights already exist in the game. You have Hegemony inspection fleets, you have Derelict bounties, you have elite Mercenary fleets, etc. In fact, many fleet compositions effective against the Ordo would fail in these fights(good luck using Wolfpack Tactics against a station for example, and I have doubts about how well Gryphons would do against Tri-Tachyon carrier spam) The difference is, there is never REALLY a reason to fight them in the first place because they don't offer anything unique compared to the Ordo. It's all just money and you can get money from elsewhere.

So my idea would be, just give the player incentive to actually bother with something else than the Ordo. Derelict bounties could spawn with a mothership and drop a colony item for example. Elite mercenary fleets could actually reward you a ship with S-mods(to my knowledge that's currently impossible, all the S-mods will be conspiciously missing from salvaged enemy ships) As for stations, these are largely missing from the game at the moment - there are Pather and Pirate station fights that are mandatory but they're almost universally low tech and never go beyond Battlestation in size. Maybe some new type of bounty on a Tri-Tachyon rogue research facility where you can actually try your luck against high tech Star Fortress?

[BigBrainEnergy]

I just want to point out that putting minmaxed fleets in the game to fight would decrease number of viable builds, not increase it. The harder the game the better your build/fleet needs to be so the less room is there for personal preference and variety. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where the community arrives at what is mathematically the perfect fleet composition and it's then put in the game - then to beat it you must use the exact same composition(since we know it's the best) AND pilot a flagship yourself to break the stalemate between the two.

How would 1-time bounties as optional endgame challenges decrease fleet variety? Why would you assume Alex would choose to put in the perfect fleet and then force you to use the same thing to counter it? The point is that most enemy fleets are weak, even AI inspections are fairly trivial compared to ordos. It would be cool to fight a decently optimized high-end fleet that's still thematic to each faction, with strengths and weaknesses you could plan for if you're familiar with how each faction typically fights.

[Draba]

And once done, they don't repeat.

Repeating would be nice IMO, tinkering with loadouts is half the fun so IMO they'd be fine even with 0 reward.

I just want to point out that putting minmaxed fleets in the game to fight would decrease number of viable builds, not increase it. The harder the game the better your build/fleet needs to be so the less room is there for personal preference and variety. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where the community arrives at what is mathematically the perfect fleet composition and it's then put in the game - then to beat it you must use the exact same composition(since we know it's the best) AND pilot a flagship yourself to break the stalemate between the two.

There is no hypothetical perfect fleet composition, too many soft rock-paper-scissors mechanics for that.
Same for the suggested bounty fleets, since they are different factions and styles different ships are strong against them, no single fleet can be best against all (or even most).

I have doubts about how well Gryphons would do against Tri-Tachyon carrier spam

Gryphon has 5 S and 1 M ballistic slots and no need to put anything but PD in them, +an ocean of squalls/breaches/harpoons whatever coming from the front.
Can also get elite PD without giving anything important up, it's the default for me on them anyway.
Fighters don't even slow them down.

[llama]

The OP calls for "maximum" synergy fleet compositions but I think balanced compositions (still with character and snygery) would be interesting as well. Anything to make equal-DP fights more "symmetric" than they currently are