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[Killer of Fate]

If a player can use them, good. But considering the amount of investment you have to make them work properly. A skill, a tuned officer, possible another skill. Then it's not really worth it? Afflictor is the most amazing basic NPC phase ship in the game. Then after that is Doom. Then Shade, Grendel, whatever. I assume some people using Gremlin, but I can't imagine using a ship that has given me PTSD with how bad it was... And most likely still is... Imo, Gremlin should have freaking Canister Flak, that way it wouldn't have to suffer so much from missiles and fighters... In spite of being a 6!!! A SIX... SIX DP COST SHIP. THIS SHIP IS SUPPOSED TO BE AS VALUABLE AS A MONITOR OR OMEN... THIS THING SHOULD BE 4 IN ITS CURRENT STATE... I suppose... But I digress.

People will always argue that Phase Ships aren't cool cause the AI isn't advanced enough. They have some sort of magical skill ceiling that exists out there, that once reached makes it the strongest ship in the universe. This is because they can easily dodge everything... Because they can move around... Because they can destroy everything in their path. This is why Harbinger is currently 18 DP. This is why Afflictor is 10 DP... This is why Gremlin is 6 DP...

But why would players choose to master a ship that has to be far more elaborately utilised than most ships in the game for it to be useful... But still counterable under right conditions?

Maybe I'm out of touch... Maybe I'm crazy... But it feels like Starsector, and many other games, have a tendency to overestimate what having skill means... There is a difference between preventing a ship from being overpowered, and making people learn a ship that can't do anything really that more enjoyable ships can.

But all of this is irrelevant...

The actual reason I write this post is that phase ships in-game... As piloted by NPCs... Are a joke. Their stats are built around the player. Their capabilities are highly overestimated. Instead of being built in a way that would make them strong unless countered. They are built in a way that assumes the counters won't appear. You are paying the price you would pay if the ship fully exploited its value. But in reality a phase ship often is just a slightly faster thing... That can disappear for a few seconds... But at the same time it is vulnerable to damage in many other ways. Afflictor and Shade are squishy as heck... And forced to fight at melee ranges. They are the strongest phase ships in the game, because they are the only ones that can flank. But they also require many factors to be fully effective. And the game predicts those factors... And makes them as expensive as destroyers. Which is why people sometimes prefer using the pirate variants. Cause they agree that these values are nonsensical, and the ship isn't worth using at such a ridiculous DP cost... Considering the many risks involved...

But that is still not the actual issue.

The actual issue is that when you fight phase ships on the enemy side of the NPC. They are useless... Because it is ridiculously hard to make one work for such a huge DP and fleet PTS price. It's a piece of crap basically that should be substituted with Enforcers, Manticores, Eagles, Falcons or Onslaughts. A Doom will often find it problematic to trigger its mines... Well... Depends on the enemy obviously. But it needs a lot of factors to actually land those hits... So, the game assumes a Doom will succeed and gives it a whooping 35 DP cost. Which was actually reduced, cause I think when I started playing, it was 40 DP. Which is like... Okay... I'll try to get that value. But this is a race against time. As always. An Onslaught with all its ridiculousness can just sit around and shoot things... It doesn't have to try hard to actually achieve anything... It can form a battle line and starve everything from PT, with its ridiculously simplistic design. It's a ship that is basically the most boring option in the game. And for being boring it gets the best stats it can... Because boring ships are always supposed to have higher stats than interesting ones, cause in the end the price of being interesting, is being impaired...

Too many ships in Starsector with their amazing conceptual, gameplay and visual design are left to rot... They can form an extremely important of Starsector's combat. But they don't. In Starsector you only really remember Hegemony, Remnants, Omega... Now I guess the Persean League. But the Persean League is a one trick pony that can only spam DEM missiles which tend to be ineffective against a serious fleet composition... Due to them having low anti-armour damage, kinda easy to be shot down... And Midline ships overall tend to perform horribly when most of their OP is spent on missiles that don't really achieve much except hunting down Wolves and Furies...

We have so many amazing ships... Gremlin, Grendel, Retribution, Scarab, Hound, Vanguard, Odyssey, Apogee, Doom, Rampart, Bastillon, Berserker, Hammerhead, Vigilance, etc. These ships... They could form an integral part of Starsector's combat narrative. But they don't... They often die very easily... You find them in the hands of absolute moronic lvl 2 captains, and blow them up. Or you find them in the hands of lvl 7 captains with 2 s-mods, but then you defeat them easily anyway... Cause their ships are just awful... Very often both. Why not tap into all that... Why not pierce the veil of the unknown and twist the meta into an incomprehensive image...

There has been something... Out there beyond this place. There is this funny game about shooting aliens in space, it's called Helldivers 2. And over there the priority was skill and challenge for a long time. And so the game bled and bled. Bled players indefinitely, until the developers finally admitted that it's time to stop making things weak and miserable, and actually buff forgotten things. Can we do that? Can we do that too? Can we make Gremlin actually scary to the players when they are in the enemy fleet? Can we make Derelicts horrifying when we find them guarding a station in the early game? Can we make Persean League not just shoot missiles that don't do anything, and have a Conquest that patrols and murders everything around, until the core in the middle is torn to shreds by a barrage of EMP beams and missiles? Why not?

I had a friend I recommended this game to, and he picked it up and told me that he knows it's one of those games that expects them to master everything before being even able to understand what a rock is. And to be honest, he was absolutely correct... And here I am asking myself now... After a year of toying with stats and thinking about everything... Is this really necessary? Do we really have to be so convoluted about ourselves? Can't we just make a fun game? Well, not me... I mean, I do mod it a lot... But whatever...

I mean, the point of doing that wouldn't even be to make the game easier. The actual point of making ships stronger is to make them stronger... In NPC hands... To have pirates, LP, PL, Hegemony, scary... To have a Grendel appear from the shadows and instead of us going "omg, it's Grendel, whatever". We go "omg, it's a *** Grendel, we're ***!". And then it comes in and unleashes a torrent of projectiles or something... And not just awkwardly wobbles itself behind an Onslaught until it runs out of PPT... I mean... That's one way to have this... Incredibly amazing asset operate. It kinda underlines to us... The fact that reality is miserable again...

End of rant.

[Phenir]

I don't think you can really compare the balance of a multiplayer pve game where you don't get to use the enemies tools to a singleplayer pve game where you do.

[Thaago]

You are right that they require several skills, and a good officer, and a good loadout, and good orders. With only a few of those things, they struggle. With all of them they are excellent even when piloted by the AI. Best bang for buck ships I've found except maybe endgame supported spam gryphons/Conquest combo (I still haven't gotten around to making a combined phase + missile fleet, I really should do that).

When I was doing my phase run, my AI phase frigate ships were routinely out-killing (as measured by detailed combat results) 3-10 times the amount that my (quite good and essentially unkillable) Medusas were, especially in fights where I was heavily outnumbered/DPd (I never bothered scaling the fleet beyond ~120 DP because at that point I was taking on single alpha Ordos/endgame faction fleets and I got excited about another build concept so did a new run).

Build: phase anchor and AM blasters/light needlers/phase lances. Ballistic phase ships should use weapons with either cooldowns or charges to exploit phase time dilation/recharge (light needlers, Heavy Maulers, HVD, Thumpers believe it or not). Weapons that deal continuous damage are right out. (Hilarious but ultimately not very effective fact: Salamanders linked into PD fire ~6x faster on a phase anchor phase ship than normal.)

Officer: Elite Field Modulation mandatory on all. System Expertise (and Elite is great because 10% damage reduction, but this isn't mandatory if other options are more exciting) is excellent on many of them, mandatory on Harbinger (for range) and Doom (because holy wow so many more mines!). Harbinger and Doom want Elite Helmsmanship as both need all the speed they can get.

Officer personality: aggressive or reckless. Both work but give very different styles. A reckless officer will perform better without orders, frequently launching the kind of attacks that will net kills and disrupt formations. But because of this they will take attrition a lot more, so might not be available later in the fight due to popping. Aggressive officers without orders will only engage either with lots of cover from nearby ships or if they think they quite overpower their target, so are more passive and will take very little attrition without orders. They can be left un babysat if the player is busy and be relied on not to die in 95% of cases, but also won't contribute nearly as much if the player forgets about them or runs out of orders.

Orders: use as packs to kill targets of opportunity with eliminate. Or move to rapidly take objectives and get in a flanking positions with a 4 press "Objective -> Capture -> Phase Ship Control Group -> Right click" command sequence. Without movement commands they will often travel in "real" space despite there being no enemies around to make phase space cost more PPT, but commands fix that. Always use either in packs of 2 or with allies: they can be "suppressed" into phase by an enemy ship that manages to get a stream of fire on them, but if 2 phase ships attack a target with eliminate, one will kill while the other is suppressed and the AI ship will change target frequently.

[low]

Can we make Gremlin actually scary to the players when they are in the enemy fleet?

They actually are. If you are fighting 30-50 DP against 100-150 DP of pirate fleets, Gremlins are similar to Vanguards or rocket Kites, where you can't always instantly kill them and they might just send missiles your way when you really don't want them to. Pirate Shades also migh get that moment of glory, sometimes disabling the engines with a stray arc. I'm yet to employ gremlins in my fleet, but I've only started using Hounds from salvage as a way to deal with Ventures, Eradicators and the like. Now that I have seen how well the Hounds work, thought of recovering Gremlins and using them as a tool to deliver torpedoes wherever I want to doesn't seem that crazy anymore. The LP Gremlins specifically are both fast and capable of getting racks, autoloaders and some useful ballistics.
On Grendels I think they suffer quite a bit from being a little slow. My own officered (non-SO) Grendels struggled with chasing Falcons or Eagles, and sometimes had to sit there and endure punishment a lot like Furies. I think the ones in Hegemony fleets suffer from a similar issue. I haven't yet tested it either, but i think SO makes a lot of sense on the ship - you can't have range as is with DFC, reliance on armor discourages prolonged combats to an extent. But I did have quite a good experience with them facing the Hegemony and Church fleets - as long as they don't have to trade fire with the Onslaughts, they get to park next to their capitals, Dominators and Moras and endlessly unload their weapons. They also seem to get crushed by Plasma Cannon Brilliants though and require a lot of management.

[Doctorhealsgood]

Gremlins aren't that bad. I had great success by having a bunch of them loaded with Gorgons and let them go nuts, they were generally effective against most things. Well there was this one fight against a invictus where they were unable to do much and they died miserably. But it was an invictus.
Gremlins having canister flak would be great because unlike any other ship with that system they have the speed to use it offensively and the image of that little rustbucket popping up from phase space dropping bombs everywhere and then poofing again is very appealing
As for grendels they aren't bad as you might think. All they need is a distraction for them to get close enough and once they do so what is in range is pretty much dead.

[Candesce]

They actually are. If you are fighting 30-50 DP against 100-150 DP of pirate fleets, Gremlins are similar to Vanguards or rocket Kites, where you can't always instantly kill them and they might just send missiles your way when you really don't want them to.

Have to agree with this.

In the early game, Gremlins are one of the ships I don't want to see in the enemy lines - they're disruptive, dangerous, and unlike the other fast harassers, don't die immediately if you can just find a moment to focus fire on them. To make them go away permanently requires sustained fire, which can be scarce when you're fighting a sufficiently big pile of pirate scrap.

[TaLaR]

But Afflictor is the best player ship in game.  A 10 DP ship that can easily clear hundreds of enemy DP.

Show me another frigate that can wipe a Paragon in under a minute. Of subjective time! Which is actually less in global combat time, meaning it has even more outsized influence on flow of combat. And then have enough PPT/ammo remaining to repeat that at least 5 more times, if not more. Afflictor-D and Shade are lesser versions of same concept, the rest can't compete.

My only problem is that after I got good enough at using Afflictors, the game is 'solved' for me. Other ships in my fleet are there only to serve as distractions/small enemy cleanup to make operating an Afflictor more convenient, or for non-combat logistics.

[Killer of Fate]

i don't think you guys understand, I know Gremlin, Grendel, Afflictor can be good... Well in case of Gremlin functional... In player's hands... But what if I want to see these ships fight me... Tooth to nail and ***. You know what I mean? In Starsector very few fleets are actually challenging to fight. This is because most ships are balanced around the player being good. But NPCs aren't smart and/or have good enough variants to use these ships properly... Also considering they only have 2 admiral skills at their disposal. I want these ships to be buffed not only for the sake of new players trying out the game. But for the sake of wanting pirates to not appear threatening only when you have 50 dp vs 150 dp... For the sake of Core World factions having proper tools to appear intimidating. After all what's the point of making these incredibly complex compositions, if in the end LC fleets barely pull their weight cause Retribution has the durability of an Eagle without shields.

[Spyro]

So what you want is either godlike near to impossible to create AI, or a pvp game.

And buffing enemy fleets to the point of being broken just so some players have a real challenge also doesn't seem feasible and good for the game.

[Doctorhealsgood]

Non-[Redacted] Factions probably need some help in being intimidating outside of colony shenanigans.
At the very least in key worlds that should be defended tooth and nail. Like you know those having a pristine nanoforge.
As for LC fleets. They have Invictus too and that ship is scary to fight against.
Maybe sprucing up the variants if they don't have enough as you say could help.
But yeah coil stress really messed up Phase AI. Guess the people complaining about having to chase phase ships for days got what they wanted. Despite them being slippery bastards is the entire point of phase Maybe it will get better eventually with some work on it? Hopefully sooner rather than later.

[Megas]

So what you want is either godlike near to impossible to create AI, or a pvp game.

And buffing enemy fleets to the point of being broken just so some players have a real challenge also doesn't seem feasible and good for the game.

If factions become more competent and lethal all-around (they should be if the game had better support for it), then rewards need to be much higher to replace the fallen.  Currently, the game is balanced around the power fantasy or easy victories because later rewards are nowhere near enough to pay for new ships of appropriate sizes.  Having colonies and production is nice, except now it is not as useful as it would be for earlier releases because the ships in the fleet feel more like distinct jRPG or webnovel characters in a long saga where "Raise Dead" is cast at worst (got to get the dragonballs) instead of disposable heroes to be buried and replaced with fresh meat when fallen.

In older releases, replacing ships and weapons that were not in Open Market was hard.  Now, most ships and weapons are easy to replace late, except there is little need anymore because of s-mods (more convenient to Restore), officers custom-built for ships, guaranteed recovery, and other features that encourage permanent use.

I would like a more meat-grinder game, but the game as it is balanced does not support that.  It is a bit of a shock to play a game that expects near flawless performance from the player's fleet and calibrates the game toward that, which means easy fights but low rewards.  It is like the game expects players to easily crush the enemy, so the rewards are deliberately set low.  If the player cannot perform well enough, then he gets into a death spiral where he bleeds money and/or ships after each fight, and it is better not to fight at all.  The player's endgame fleet is worth a least a few million credits, no way you want to risk it for 250k to 300k credits unless you are certain you can kill the enemy without casualties.  Meanwhile, NPC vs. NPC with two similar fleets (usually?) do not autoresolve with one fleet completely intact and the other shrinks or disappears.  Both fleets get cut down in size.  It is jarring that the player can make fleets disappear while NPCs mutually kill each other.

[Killer of Fate]

So what you want is either godlike near to impossible to create AI, or a pvp game.

And buffing enemy fleets to the point of being broken just so some players have a real challenge also doesn't seem feasible and good for the game.

Okay, remove Remnants

[Spyro]

Afflictor is more broken than any Remnant ship.

[Killer of Fate]

Afflictor is more broken than any Remnant ship.

Afflictor should be 8 dp
And Shade should be 6 dp...
And Gremlin should be 5 dp, and have Canister Flak.
And Doom should be 30 DP. And it probably should have 15 more OP for Integrated Targeting Unit.
And Grendel should be given a Burn Drive, and given the ability to put on ITU...
And Harbinger should have 5k hull dur, and 800 armour... And cost 14 DP...

And AMB should have 500 range... And PD Lasers should have 600 range... And IR PD Lasers should have 1k range... And when dev fixes the hardpoint bug... Afflictors should have... A Light Needler variant. Because Light Needler Afflictors are really cool...

And also IR Pulse Laser should have 600 range, cuz it's half a Pulse Laser... And you should feel fine about putting 3 IR Pulse Lasers on a Shade...

 

[Spyro]

Afflictor is more broken than any Remnant ship.

Afflictor should be 8 dp
And Shade should be 6 dp...
And Gremlin should be 5 dp, and have Canister Flak.
And Doom should be 30 DP. And it probably should have 15 more OP for Integrated Targeting Unit.
And Grendel should be given a Burn Drive, and given the ability to put on ITU...
And Harbinger should have 5k hull dur, and 800 armour... And cost 14 DP...

And AMB should have 500 range... And PD Lasers should have 600 range... And IR PD Lasers should have 1k range... And when dev fixes the hardpoint bug... Afflictors should have... A Light Needler variant. Because Light Needler Afflictors are really cool...

And also IR Pulse Laser should have 600 range, cuz it's half a Pulse Laser... And you should feel fine about putting 3 IR Pulse Lasers on a Shade...

 

Chat is this real?