Tried out Vanilla for a little bit.
1. Agree that Cerebus lacks toughness; it has a halfway-decent bite, but it's just not cutting it; 200-300 more Armor is probably enough to make it vaguely viable.
2. Racked up $400K in 2 hours, no Supply issues, on full damage. Had nothing to spend it on, as there just wasn't much point until it was time to buy a serious fleet and end-game. If people are still complaining that they can't make money, they are totally doing it wrong.
3. Flux Shunt can't be obtained in the Campaign, which is too bad, since it would make a lot of smaller ships considerably more viable (and the Paragon a terrifying tank, but if you can afford a Paragon in the first place, the game is over anyhow).
4. The Heron is fun.
5. Hermes would be a lot more fun with the rear mount on a 360; it can't do enough PD to be worth using atm and it's neither fast enough to be a valid interceptor (or just flat-out run away) nor is it quite potent enough to be a real combatant, even in player hands. That other shuttle remains terrible; now it has three things that drain its very limited Flux, which is not an improvement, given that it neither has the speed to ever Vent safely nor the ability to take any damage at all. At best it's a throw-away missile boat or storage box that could be thrown into battle by the truly desperate, but it's never worth buying.
6. Level grind is sooooo sloooooooooooow. I'd forgotten just how slow. Meh, I got bored and rich before even capping one Aptitude.
7. "The Ultimate challenge" test-thing is actually kind of fun (took me six tries to even get to battle with my lamed shuttle).
8. The Monitor is cute, but it's almost like a tease; if we don't have double Vents, it's pretty useless... if we have that and the Combat capstone, it's a moderately useful ship, but by then, we won't want to bother with it. It's cute but honestly, I'm not sure it's ever really worth it unless you're late-game and you just want a Frigate that's very nearly invulnerable... to a few other Frigates, or a Cruiser if you're one on one and it doesn't have quite enough firepower and you feel like slowly bashing it to death with your shield.
It's kind of a solution in search of a problem, tbh, and the AI doesn't use it well. Flux Shunts would make a great capstone for the Tech / Capacity upgrade path, though; I never ever take that otherwise, since Capacity just increases Vent time, and it'd be nice to have something so genuinely useful that it'd be tempting.
