Thanks for the mod, It was alot of fun. I had a blast going through it.
WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD
I did a 240dp low tech only vanilla only run, you weren't kidding with the difficulty being set higher than vanilla, I barely cleared the content on normal, don't think I can on hard. There's a couple of ships that hard counter dakka spam, which was my entire fleet, the fights with them were basically a coin toss. Never before have I wished for a HIL so badly. The last story quest took me 5 tries, every ship in the fleet got blown up except the invictus, lost 1800 crew in one fight. I really did pile up a mountain of corpses. At the end of that fight I played run around the Onslaught with a Minokawa that kept skipping to the other side when I orion drived over to it, we were like kids running around a table, it was hilarious, well not for the onslaught crew but they died 15 seconds later to an Eternity. They got to see the Minokawa break up first atleast. That eternity wiped out the Onslaught, then myself in a Retribution rapidly (I regretted not taking accelerated shields something like a dozen times that game), it just barely outkited the shield arc. Then it took out the fleet survivors, up till it came up to the Invictus, which being a big dumb armored brick was able to take it out with devestators after several passes. Devestators beat supermaneuverability, honestly didn't expect it to go that way. Gotta wonder if the Eternity can solo an entire Heggie task force on its own under ai control, might console it in later to test. The Invictus stood alone, proving its name amidst the outgassing wreckage of my fleet and the enigmas. Those Minokawas are crazy good at protecting flanks, they turn quickly when officered and the dmg when moving with the system and their own stats means picking off the juicy smaller ships is often too risky, I played around with it in the sim just destroying ships with only the jump system. What exactly does final protocol do? Aside from the one second phase and reducing some of the flux (the biggest danger of it imo), I noticed a few low cr destroyers, think they might've had that triggered and failed to die.
The phase bounty was similarly really tough, who knew afflictor+'s with the harbinger's system would be so deadly. That and the other ship with a system that hard counters shooting at it without beams, the arc from that would jump across half the fleet disabling weapons and wiping out armor and health. One shot from that and my poorly armored Retribution would lose armor on half its sections and the horrible shield arc wouldn't protect it. The dmg from that gets reallly high if you keep firing guns at it, and my Retribution is all machine guns+ devestators. The best tactic for that fight was for me to just run away and fight everyone else while the fleet hopefully dealt with it. Again the invictus was the answer being the only thing tanky enough. Still took a bunch of tries. Also that harbinger+ system got me mid orion burst, I got flung spinning wildy across the battlespace at 600su/s with an afflictor+ doing its best to chase me down.
The hardest fight was void commander Umbra, mostly because the much higher fleet size. Got lucky on the Eternity this time, it wiped out my Onslaught with ease but the invictus overloaded it near me, so I was able to orion drive over and kill it, while being nearly killed by three destroyers. A strange thing with this run was how useful the Invictus was, thought it was just a useless dumb brick with horrible logistics that costs 50k just for the crew salary, but it kept outshining the Onslaught. Now I look at it at and wonder how the Onslaught got outclassed in both frontal firepower and being an armored brick, poor Onslaught. Invictus isn't even as weak in the rear as an Onslaught. This was the first fight I've ever had where I was unable to pursue cuz the enemy killed too many of my ships, didn't know the enemy got clean disengage. On that note why do the Enigma retreat? Other ai don't.
I have a suspicion the Enigma are just a bunch of chuuni ai cores. They've spent the 200 years post collapse watching anime and decided to larp as treasure guardians. Really feels like they selected the chip as a treasure specifically because the post collapse sector would view it as the highest value treasure one can find. I dunno what the domain would use one of those chips for either, they're the corps biggest customers, they have access to all the bps without stuffing them on a single flash drive. Someone got lazy and didn't wanna reach for the individual bp chips or something? They didn't need to guard the chip, coulda tossed it into a sun somewhere. They clearly didn't want to use it. They even left breadcrumbs to find the thing and challenged you telling you to dare to take it from them. I bombed their home and built my own house on the ashes. I wasn't gonna do the colony game this run but that system has the best music in the sector, and surprise surprise the music stays even in the colony screen. I now have the chillest refit music ever.