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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); In-development patch notes for Starsector 0.98a (2/8/25)

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Author Topic: Anubis-class Cruiser  (Read 21587 times)

Ripmorld

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #60 on: December 20, 2024, 08:00:23 PM »

This looks like a really good ship to put omaga weapon on , mainly rift torpeado since it is considered a missile weapon it would not be affected by the energy flux nerf penalty. And it have a really short refire delay so the missile penalty is basically a nothing on it.
Normally you get like 1-2 rift torp per game on average and I can see this ship being a really good fit for it. and 1 slot left for a paladin to have it some PD ability. And toss on some dragonfire for the medium universals.

And also there are modded aspect for synergy missile weapons like from VIC that can really benefit from this ship.
Missile expertise with temporal shell and you have a small dorito in your disposal
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Twilight Sentinel

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #61 on: December 20, 2024, 08:19:40 PM »

Are we going to get anymore previews of other ships?  I've been waiting for a somewhat boring pirate cruiser since we were discussing such a thing like a year ago and have been waiting to see if it went anywhere since.

Ahh, I only vaguely remember this! (Do you happen to have a link handy?) Wasn't planning on adding any more ships for this release, but we'll see.

This thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=28594.0

Discussion about ship ideas starts around the end of page 3.

Basic issue is that pirate cruisers tend to be too strong on average compared to the rest of their fleets, so having more low quality cruisers would help fix the problem.  We discussed adding more combat freighters to the game in the cruiser category that the pirates could have a converted version of to add to their fleets.  The design that got the most attention/work was a midline asteroid miner / ice hauler with lots of small nose missiles, broadside medium energy mounts, and a salvage gantry.  The name I gave it was the Harpy.  The civilian ship system was a missile autoforge that slowly trickled missile ammo back while it was on at the cost of hard flux.  Pirate conversions were suggested that they could swap the missile forge for a termination drone forge, a single fighter bay with rapid rearming for bombers, or have a single large missile slot.  Something to make it dangerous in one specific role but that folds under pressure from a solid fleet composition.
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Alex

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #62 on: December 20, 2024, 09:23:44 PM »

I love asymetric ships! And the ship looks great. But will this ship win a place in my fleet, or are there others that will still do its role better. Can't wait to try it out.

I'll be interesting to see :)

Why not take the experimental vibe further to make it the experiment to remotely time affect its fighter

It's a neat idea! I'm not sure offhand that having temporal shell wouldn't break some kind of fighter ship system (perhaps a modded one), and it might not be so good for performance, but a neat idea nonetheless.


I dunno, man. You want this to be "the ship you put Paladins on" but then ya slap it with one of the worst debuff hullmods in the game and a built-in no less. People are already gonna be majorly turned off by how bad the debuff is and now they'll associate it with Paladins in the back of their minds. That is just how people be.

Ah, but you're missing one major point - it's not a d-mod, so the ship has no orange stripe next to it :)


Seems awfully convoluted compared to just not having the arcs of the side larges converge with the hardpoints.

I talked about this pretty early in the blog post! The tl;dr is it felt terrible and doesn't even work anyway, unless the arcs are so poor that no pair of arcs overlaps at all, since 2x TL is enough to make it ridiculously OP.


Alex,

"Scythian" -- Extremely fast dedicated Pilum launcher next.  :)

Not going to lie, kind of love the name and the vibe.


I also think it's a few too many lines of text just to make paladin OK on 1 ship.
Not even sure it'll be that attractive here, stats+mounts+temporal shell = gigacannons+reapers+some PD fighter to me.
Have to try ofc, and making gigacannon decent on something is also a win.

So it's my fault for over-focusing on the Paladin, perhaps, but I did mention that other weapons with similar profiles (e.g. the Gigacannon) also factor in here. So if that build works well: mission accomplished.


So, will WEAPON FLUX/SEC reflect the actual FLUX produced by the weapon now?

In the past, modifications to weapon firing rate and direct to weapon FLUX will not be reflected in this number, which is weird.

It won't, or at least it doesn't now. And I realize that's considerably more awkward in this case than it normally is.


I don’t know if this is useful information, but in 0.97 ive been using Paladin in only two not-joke ways,

Paladin Sunder bruiser, Paladin Sunder support for paragon tachyon spam and the companion to a plasma cannon on the Prometheus2.

For the Sunder, I find it’s really potent to fit it with paladin, 2 light needlers and 2 phase lances. Its still not a particularly durable destroyer but it’s a very cheap to setup independent build (no smods or officer needed)for the early game which also severely bullies any and all frigates, destroyers and shieldless ships. And then for paragon beam spam it’s just nice to have a whole lot of paladins focus on 1 flanking frigate and see it evaporate.

For the prometheus2, it’s got a surprisingly high top speed so it can be built with a plasma cannon playstyle. Paladin just happens to suit it nicely in that case, it gets the same EWM bonuses (if any) and it’s not like the prometheus2 can afford much else at that point.

I’m not sure the paladin will be used for a true PD role in any further cases with the 0.25 buff - it might see some new hybrid uses, such as a fun HSA SO Champion and heavy blasters? Goofy idea, idk. Either way, it’ll make builds that enjoy the paladin feel even better, which is nice. And obviously it’ll fit the Anubis very well. Interested to see how it plays out.

That was an interesting read, thank you! Not sure I would've thought to put a Paladin on the Sunder if I had anything else available, but in the early game context, that does sound like it'd be effective.


I’ll echo that this does feel like a convoluted way to showcase Paladins but I’m not sure how else you can do that without making them built-in. That said, this is a unique design that obviously doesn’t overlap with anything else. Oddly enough, despite all the one-off modifications, immediately struck me as a jack-of-all-trades. Excellent PD, kinetic pressure via ballistics, some Large Energy that is either a generalist or HE and a fighter bay? Temporal Shell also acts as a damage multiplier.  Dare I say this a high tech Eagle?  ;)

(Obbligatory comment about the post perhaps over-focusing on the Paladin.)

Let's hope it generates at least half as much controversy :)

Maybe I missed it: what’s the DP cost for this? Please don’t say 20.

It's 18! Right now, anyway.


Put your bets in now, I'm guessing 18 DP!

Ding ding ding.


But the picture for the hullmod says "the rate of fire for missile weapons is reduced by 50%", with similar wording as the one for EMR's S-Mod penalty ("Reduces rate of fire of missiles by 20%"). In other words, it's just increasing the refire delay for missiles weapons by 50%, not 100% - which is what "halving" would presumably mean in the context of nerfing. Is it intended to be a 50% penalty (i.e. 50% longer refire delay) or a 100% penalty?

Like the EMR s-mod penalty, it's a multiplier to the rate of fire, so a "50% reduction" is in fact halving the rate of fire.


Unless you've changed how the script works, then the paladins explosion doesn't. The script (at least currently) specifically doesn't do any damage to the target of the beams, so a paladin is only a hardflux source if you install High Scatter Amplifier, and that feels more like a "meme build" than something standard/serious to me.

Ahhh, thank you for the correction! I'm mixing it up with a few weapons (including some new ones) that *do* work this way, but you're totally right about this.

I think if the goal is "make people use the paladin more" then rather than cutting flux/damage from 0.75 to 0.25, it might be better to only go down to 0.4-0.5, but increase the damage it deals by somewhere from 20-50%.

Well, the goal (or, rather, one of the goals) is to do that without turning it into more of an assault weapon, right.



One thing I'm a little worried about that other people address is that Xyphos is almost always going to be a more appealing option, since it's such a fast ship. Bombers would theoretically work for a dedicated support build, though - it'll be interesting to see whether anyone builds it as a 'super Sunder', escorting capital ships with a set of HILs and Advanced Optics to force shields up and finish off fluxed-out targets, with a Paladin and TS mitigating its usual vulnerabilities.

I don't know if it's *that* fast; it's just fast for a cruiser.


I would love to see an option for it to get another bay (eg, adding a line to design compromises that allows it to use converted hangar to take it from 1->2, similar to how the invictus has vast hangar) so it could *potentially* function as a light carrier or a defensive targeting array skirmisher. I'd also love to see some support fighters that actually wield gravitons.

That's a really interesting idea! Hmm. I'm going to take a look at that tomorrow.


You also have to consider that the Temporal Shell system generates 25% of base flux capacity as soft-flux every time it is used. At the Anubis' base flux capacity stat of 12000, each system use is 3000 flux, which translates to it using a little over 40% of the Anubis' 7200 nerfed flux capacity. And due to the Anubis also having a 40% penalty in flux dissipation, it has a harder time dissipating off the soft-flux burst from Temporal Shell, limiting the burst potential further.

(It actually only generates 25% of its *reduced* based capacity in this specific case; as you note the increased generation was too much.)


I’m on the camp of the ship trying to push paladins/gigacannons so much that it ends up becoming limited in the number of fits in the attempt to not just spam 3 tactys.

I been thinking on a possible alt way of getting the same result without limiting it so heavily

I think lowering the OP of Large Energy with the Point-Defense tag by 5-10 and raising the OP of other Large Energies by 10 with reducing the flux generation from double to 50% while keeping the other 2 debuffs would get the same result

Though you would have to reduce the amount of op it has because idk if 170 is the final amount but that’s an awful lot with so few slots

I'm not sure about the 170 OP; we'll see! And I mean, arguably it'd be *more* limited in the number of fits if being able to spam 2-3 TL is possible? Since that'd be the thing to do if you at all care about making your fleet stronger.

I did think about almost this exact thing - reducing the OP cost of large energy PD weapons - but that actually feels too much like being directed at the Paladin even for this ship :) And I'm not sure this would do the job. Thinking about it this way - if it succeeds and you can't support 2 TL's (which is enough to make the ship very OP), then it's not actually any more variety than the current case. And if it's not enough and you *can* do a 2-TL build, then that's obviously a problem, too.


And also there are modded aspect for synergy missile weapons like from VIC that can really benefit from this ship.
Missile expertise with temporal shell and you have a small dorito in your disposal

Oh wow, that would get a little crazy, wouldn't it.


This thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=28594.0

Discussion about ship ideas starts around the end of page 3.

Basic issue is that pirate cruisers tend to be too strong on average compared to the rest of their fleets, so having more low quality cruisers would help fix the problem.  We discussed adding more combat freighters to the game in the cruiser category that the pirates could have a converted version of to add to their fleets.  The design that got the most attention/work was a midline asteroid miner / ice hauler with lots of small nose missiles, broadside medium energy mounts, and a salvage gantry.  The name I gave it was the Harpy.  The civilian ship system was a missile autoforge that slowly trickled missile ammo back while it was on at the cost of hard flux.  Pirate conversions were suggested that they could swap the missile forge for a termination drone forge, a single fighter bay with rapid rearming for bombers, or have a single large missile slot.  Something to make it dangerous in one specific role but that folds under pressure from a solid fleet composition.

Thank you! That rings a bell and I actually have a note about this, to have another look at some point.
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BigBrainEnergy

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #63 on: December 20, 2024, 09:54:06 PM »

Let's not forget this little tidbit:

Quote
"This led to a second realization, that while the Paladin is indeed already a strong weapon, it’s strong against threats that either don’t exist or exist so rarely that it’s not as appealing. If every battle had you facing off against massive swarms of missiles and fighters, sure, you’d want to trade some Tachyon Lances for Paladins, even on ships that have few large energy slots – but that’d be a different game."

Would that be a different game? Or are you just avoiding spoilers here? Because this post seems to imply that we may need the paladin soon enough:

Spoiler
[close]

Invictus with systems expertise, locusts, and 6 devastators screams "I am dying to fighter spam, oh dear god help me!" On top of that, your choice of frigate is omens? I can practically smell the fighters.
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bowman

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #64 on: December 20, 2024, 09:56:11 PM »

I'm seeing a lot of posts about how convoluted it is so I'm just going to chime in that I understand why you made the choices you did and I look forward to playing with the ship.

Something some of you might want to keep in mind is that this is, quite specifically, an *experimental prototype vessel*- it is not intended to be a mainline run-of-the-mill design for "normal" fleet use. Added on to that, Tri-Tachyon in general is one for having very niche and weird vessels because they are the High-Tech bleeding-edge faction. As a result, I don't think it's really all that out there for it to have some specific caveats to its use (which are exactly why it isn't widely used otherwise). It's also likely to be relatively rare, and any new player who sees it for sale will both need high rep and commission with Tri-Tachyon in order to purchase it (most likely; maybe independents will have it as well) and should thus be fairly used to Tri-Tachyon's other lineup of strangeness and will simultaneously immediately see the flux stats having a permanent red subtraction in the overview panel which they can then just look at the codex to understand why before even buying the ship. Even further, as Alex pointed out earlier, most of the lines of text in the hullmod are just flavor- it literally only does very straightforward modifications to the ship. Frankly, I think any worries about new players not understanding how to make use of it are sort of irrelevant: there's plenty of other options for them to use anyway and half of the game is designing loadouts individually and for your fleet as a whole (the other half is combat  ;D).


all of that aside, I need my *Starsector Fix*, Alex.. I'm going into withdrawl!
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Ripmorld

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #65 on: December 20, 2024, 10:11:22 PM »

Maybe I missed it: what’s the DP cost for this? Please don’t say 20.

"It's 18! Right now, anyway."

Oh my it is actually 18 dp, that interest me as well as it might actually be viable as a spam cruiser due to its cheap cost and fast maneuver. There is this funny property of paladin of it being able to shoot over friendly ships. While it may not seem much at first glance its quickly apparent that its one of the only non missile weapon in game that can overcome the damage/surface area limit (where you will not be able to inflict more damage per your fleet formation's surface area due to your own ship blocking your line of fire). Alterantively toss in HSA and built in adv turret and you might have a high burst damage cruiser that can be really efficient at wiping out smaller ships of your opponent. As well as the medium universal which might have some good uses against armor that will be its major barrier.









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Tranquility

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #66 on: December 20, 2024, 10:47:31 PM »

...

Like the EMR s-mod penalty, it's a multiplier to the rate of fire, so a "50% reduction" is in fact halving the rate of fire.

Oh wow, does this mean that the EMR's S-Mod penalty is effectively a 25% increase to refire delay the whole time!? I was under the assumption that the penalty just increased the delay time by 20% (e.g. making a 10 second reload into a 12 second), but it being actually a 25% penalty (from dividing the refire delay by 0.8, so a 10 second reload would now be 12.5) does change my perception of how worthwhile S-Modding EMR actually is! Granted, that 5% difference is rather small to begin with, but the Anubis having only 50% missile RoF reduction is much more misleading as a stat because it's actually a 100% increase to the missile refire delay, which is way more detrimental than if it just increased refire delay by 50% - which is what you'd get if you took "rate of fire" to mean "refire delay".

Maybe this confusion could be cleared up if all instances of "rate of fire" were replaced with references to "refire delay", which is the wording that's actually shown on the weapon stat cards? Then again, S-Modded Armored Weapon Mounts does use "rate of fire" to describe the 10% increase, and the effect on DPS for that is intuitive (10% faster firing rate = 10% more DPS), while the actual change to refire delay is less obvious (since it's dividing the refire delay by 1.1). So, I'm not really sure if there's a better way to clearly describe changes to the "refire delay" stat...

(Edit: Actually, the 50% rate of fire reduction also makes sense if you view it in terms of DPS - e.g. 50% less fire rate = 50% less DPS. It's still kinda confusing though, especially for missile weapons where refire delay matters a bit more than raw DPS [e.g. the 25% increased refire delay from S-Modded EMR is about enough to prevent Harpoon/Gorgon Pods from overloading a target and then firing another burst at them while they're still overloaded].)

...

(It actually only generates 25% of its *reduced* based capacity in this specific case; as you note the increased generation was too much.)

That's nice to know! I was worried the soft-flux burst from Temporal Shell would be a little too much, but now it looks the Anubis won't need to worry as much about its flux capacity getting maxed out before it can make full use of the time dilation.
« Last Edit: December 20, 2024, 11:34:07 PM by Tranquility »
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Caymon Joestar

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #67 on: December 21, 2024, 12:37:26 AM »

This thread: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=28594.0

Discussion about ship ideas starts around the end of page 3.

Basic issue is that pirate cruisers tend to be too strong on average compared to the rest of their fleets, so having more low quality cruisers would help fix the problem.  We discussed adding more combat freighters to the game in the cruiser category that the pirates could have a converted version of to add to their fleets.  The design that got the most attention/work was a midline asteroid miner / ice hauler with lots of small nose missiles, broadside medium energy mounts, and a salvage gantry.  The name I gave it was the Harpy.  The civilian ship system was a missile autoforge that slowly trickled missile ammo back while it was on at the cost of hard flux.  Pirate conversions were suggested that they could swap the missile forge for a termination drone forge, a single fighter bay with rapid rearming for bombers, or have a single large missile slot.  Something to make it dangerous in one specific role but that folds under pressure from a solid fleet composition.
Thank you! That rings a bell and I actually have a note about this, to have another look at some point.

I rather see pirates get ships on the level of the pirate erad (or Falcon) in destroyers/frigs/capitals rather than making them weaker in the cruiser department tbh, I think it would be more interesting for them to be able to have actually decent ships that could hold their own rather than taking away some of the precious few they currently have so you dont just ignore their entire existence once you out of the earlygame outside of bounties
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FooF

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #68 on: December 21, 2024, 01:11:18 AM »

@Alex

The “give it the option to have 2 fighter bays if you add CH to it” is a wonderful idea. I’m not sure if we’ll get a dedicated High Tech carrier below the Astral so a pseudo carrier in the Anubis would be fine. I’d say if there was a way to drop a Large Energy in the exchange (rather than add CH), that would be really interesting. Experimental indeed!
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Princess of Evil

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #69 on: December 21, 2024, 01:21:25 AM »

I would much rather have the ship have one big overarching nerf and then a couple one-line specialized buffs to direct it to specific weapons, rather than what it tries to do at the moment. Medium energies are already terrible without costing double the flux on a flux-choked ship, so the slots might as well be medium composite. Or hell, medium ballistic - most large energies are a very good medium missile replacement.

Something like: even more -flux, but energy weapons get +60% range, ballistics get +X% (smaller), PD weapons cost less flux/have more range, no ITU. It would hurt the Gigacannon, but that's the problem of the Gigacannon being very meh even on ships that want it.

(2Alex: no, huge chunks of damage don't make a weapon good over other downsides. People don't even wanna use the Hellbore and Hellbore is actually a good gun.)
« Last Edit: December 21, 2024, 01:23:32 AM by Princess of Evil »
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TheLaughingDead

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #70 on: December 21, 2024, 01:56:06 AM »

I would much rather have the ship have one big overarching nerf and then a couple one-line specialized buffs to direct it to specific weapons, rather than what it tries to do at the moment. Medium energies are already terrible without costing double the flux on a flux-choked ship, so the slots might as well be medium composite. Or hell, medium ballistic - most large energies are a very good medium missile replacement.

Something like: even more -flux, but energy weapons get +60% range, ballistics get +X% (smaller), PD weapons cost less flux/have more range, no ITU. It would hurt the Gigacannon, but that's the problem of the Gigacannon being very meh even on ships that want it.

(2Alex: no, huge chunks of damage don't make a weapon good over other downsides. People don't even wanna use the Hellbore and Hellbore is actually a good gun.)
I dunno, medium energies are in a pretty good spot imo. Graviton and Ion Beam feel a tad low-impact but they are also dedicated support weapons with 1000 range so that makes sense. The Heavy Burst is already getting a buff. Every other medium energy I'm happy to mount (or at least consider) on most ships.

Also, Hellbore is a beloved weapon! It was absolutely used by people all the time until HAG got some buffs and people started talking about it! The HAG practically had to pry the Hellbore from the cold dead hands of players when it came into some power! The Hellbore still has its place, and people definitely still give it the respect it deserves. It just doesn't get brought up all the time because it is a budget weapon, but so is the Thumper and that weapon slaps (don't @ me)

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Shinr

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #71 on: December 21, 2024, 03:11:47 AM »

The blog and the thread reactions reminds me of the Buff HBL for the next release suggestion thread, and my own impression back then:

The impression I'm getting here is that it would be easier for devs to create a new useful high tech ship with built-in HBL as an extra than to make HBL worth taking on its own.
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Sabaton

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #72 on: December 21, 2024, 05:22:08 AM »

So the Anubis is basically a high-end escort for aggressive, poor defense ships like Hyperion, Fury, Harbinger and Afflictor? I wonder what else the other ships can do if this niche thing isn't considered a spoiler.   
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nathan67003

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #73 on: December 21, 2024, 06:50:11 AM »

Me proceeding to put 3 tachyon lances in distinct fire groups:

On another note, surprised you said the Paladin doesn't get much use. Sure, it's pretty situational and can't deal with large amounts of fighters or missiles as well as weapons with AoE to them but last time I played (alas, in 0.95) and got my hands on a Paragon as my, like, second or third salvage (and then proceeded to frantically chase credits for the rest of the save to make ends meet, right up until I had dozens of colonies solely existing to generate income), its main role was defensive. Sure, it had a fusion laser and a plasma cannon and heavy blasters but its main purpose was using its barrier shields, Paladin and flak cannons to remove as much damage as possible from other ships while handling it easily.
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prav

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Re: Anubis-class Cruiser
« Reply #74 on: December 21, 2024, 07:50:53 AM »

It's very effective against things you beat handily with less specialized weapons.
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