I'm not around a lot these days, but I still like reading those blogposts, especially when it's about a new ship. I couldn't help but frown when reading about the Design Compromise hullmod. Creating a custom hullmod to prevent a ship from becoming overpowered is one thing, creating a custom hullmod to do that AND shoehorn it into a distinct role with a specific weapon in mind... Alright, this is going to be interesting.
Thanks to ymfah's mod, we can beta test the thing and see how it works.
At first glance, the three large mounts and the temporal shell system makes the Anubis seems quite frightening, even with the poor flux performances. Beyond that, the stats are looking really good. It's cheap, fast, a damn good shield, high maximum burn and whole lot of OPs. All in all, the Anubis looks like a real bad motherf*cker of a cruiser.
But then comes the Design Compromise hullmod, which makes it nowhere near as scary as it first appears. In some funny way, it's a bit of scam ship. You expect some absolute monster cruiser, and then you buy/salvage it, try it, and... Oh, you did you not read the fine print at the bottom of the ad? Sorry, no refund.
Alright, so let's try to make it work. I did some relatively extensive testing both as a flagship and as an AI wingman to see how it fares.
Unless you're willing to fly some franken-build with empty mounts, you'll have to use Paladins. More than one "big gun" can pretty much cripple the ship's generators. Hell, even one tachyon lance will perilously spike its flux capacity in one shot. I often saw my Anubis venting mid-burst of a Tachyon strike because of this. I managed to build some half-decent frontliners by downsizing the weapons, but it's definitely not a role it can comfortably fullfill without resorting to unusual builds. For some reason it's very reluctant about using Autopulses, only firing them in very small bursts. I got much better results with Plasma cannons, or even Giga cannons.
So, a support ship then. It took me a little bit, but I eventually managed to get something satisfying out of it.
The greatest strength of the Anubis isn't the ship itself, it's what it allows other ships to do when it's around. Thanks to the Paladin's ability to overshoot friendlies, and its whole suite of range extending hullmods, this Anubis variant only exists to cover its allies from missiles and fighters, and an unexpectedly solid frigate flyswatter on top of that. This, allowed me to build my other ships differently.
Some people would call me a madman for doing this but... Have you ever tried to pilot an Onslaught without any point defense? Because I did, and it's glorious. With my little high-tech buddy following me around I don't need PDs anymore. When a League Pegasus mag dumps its Dragonfire torpeodes into my venting butt, and not a single one reaches me, that's thanks to my escort and its three Paladins. My Onslaught could happily waltz around without fear of fighters and missiles, focusing all of its flux on killing things. Even my carriers had no need for interceptors. One thing that doesn't appears in my build's screenshot is the hardened subsystems hullmod. You'll need that to handle the large battles, as temporal shell will munch through the Anubis's CR distressingly fast.
One thing of note, I did put two Pilums at the prow. Not because it's a good idea, but because those two hardpoints can be tricky to be properly exploited, and fire and forget weapons were an easy solution. Energy weapons? It can't afford the flux. Ballistics? The lower range is a dangerous prospect for such a vulnerable ship. Missiles? The ROF penalty can be painful, even if it's somewhat compensated by temporal shell. It's a difficult ship to build because of Design Compromise. Sometimes I feel it got pigeonholed too hard into being a Paladin boat. That does make it quite painful during early game when large energy weapons can be relatively difficult to obtain. It's definitely not a beginner friendly ship in its current form.
All in all, it works. But it's undoubtedly the jankiest Starsector ship. It's especially noticeable when fighting an enemy Anubis,
as autofit have a chance to absolutely doom it. For me the highlight of this new addition isn't the ship itself, but what having a dedicated PD boat does to fleetbuilding as a whole. I had a lot of fun trying funky builds without PDs thanks to this.