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[Unfolder]

Alex have you ever considered just taking the mods and integrating them whole cloth into vanilla cause they are kind of awesome and vanilla is kind of boring now that I've played the mods hue hue

[Wyvern]

@Argh: Short answer: Yes, they've considered it.  No, it will not happen.  If you want the long answer, see relevant posts here.

[WKOB]

As brilliant as many of the mods are, there are only a couple that I think would fit into vanilla, and they are pretty small.

[Tartiflette]

More relevant question: Would modders be willing to give for free their mod in witch they often invested hundreds, if not thousands, of hours? And completely give up on the creative control over them?

[Velox]

My observations on the patch so far are:

- Salamanders, autofire.  Good for fighters, good for enemy ships, good for what ails you.
- if you have less than 330 degree shield coverage, you're a drifting target most of the time.
- playstyle without ammo constraints is way, way different.  in exchange for what you got out of ballistics, you had to take care not to miss, maneuvering to fire at downed armor patches and stuff, and effectively using the right damage types were important.  Used to be energy was about flux management, missiles were about timing, and ballistics were about aim/dmg type - they definitely feel much more homogeneous now.
- for weapons that reload, a "reload: <x> sec until next <n> rounds" indicator of some kind would be nice.  That said, good riddance to the whole clip mechanism - infinite ammo removes some depth, but it's way better than the massive annoyance.
- with the new beams, taking a ship without shields into battle is just a longer, more complicated "scuttle" button.
- energy PD weapons are a great visual indicator that one or more missiles is/are about to hit your ship.
- the falcon/eagle seem to be vastly more viable than they were before.  hammer away with autocannons until shields are down, then phase lance.  rather fun.
- the vanilla skill tree is awful - I know it wasn't a focus of this release, but it needs help bad, especially around the burn speed thing.  More viable upgrade paths would really drive different playstyles (I certainly found it did with the SS+ remake) but with the vanilla one there's pretty much just one way to go.

** an aside here, isn't the skill tree still very much an alpha/stub/work in progress?  I know a lot of intense consideration around balancing missiles centers on the combat missile/10 skill, which seems a weird waste of time if the tree is due a massive rework at some point?  **

I'm only up to a early/mid-era destroyer fleet with a falcon and eagle so far, but the game does seem to play rather differently so far. 

[SafariJohn]

- if you have less than 330 degree shield coverage, you're a drifting target most of the time.

I was doing some testing of a Brawler vs. the sim Lashers (one of which has two salamanders) for general viability, and it did an okay job of catching them on its shield. With Extended Shields the AI handles it even better. The Lashers were generally able to deal with the one Salamander from my Brawler with their PD, but they didn't seem to try to catch the missile on their shields like the Brawler did.

[Thaago]

...
- playstyle without ammo constraints is way, way different.  in exchange for what you got out of ballistics, you had to take care not to miss, maneuvering to fire at downed armor patches and stuff, and effectively using the right damage types were important.  Used to be energy was about flux management, missiles were about timing, and ballistics were about aim/dmg type - they definitely feel much more homogeneous now.
...
- the vanilla skill tree is awful - I know it wasn't a focus of this release, but it needs help bad, especially around the burn speed thing.  More viable upgrade paths would really drive different playstyles (I certainly found it did with the SS+ remake) but with the vanilla one there's pretty much just one way to go.

** an aside here, isn't the skill tree still very much an alpha/stub/work in progress?  I know a lot of intense consideration around balancing missiles centers on the combat missile/10 skill, which seems a weird waste of time if the tree is due a massive rework at some point?  **

...

For point 1, I agree that the game is more forgiving with misses than before... but its still much better to be careful with aim. Better aim is better flux efficiency is more killing power on each pass. I've found that I'm mainly playing the same with ballistics, though with less worry about my PD running out .

I agree that the skills need a big balance pass. I'm on the "level 10 skills are overpowered" side myself.


On that note: I think the recent rapid pace of release, feedback, and balance fix of the last week or so was very nice. Perhaps thats a bit selfish of me on the consumer side, but I feel like we had a lot of good discussions on the forums stemming from it.

[Alex]

Thanks for the feedback re: weapon combinations and save file size!

@Megas: I'll probably look at the Tachyon Lance eventually, but not particularly soon.

@Serentis:
Briefly - players try to figure out how to do well in a game, right? The problem with the kiting strategy is that it's really, really good, to the point where it trivializes other strategies. It's also very time-consuming. So, a player would feel like they have to kite in order to make good use of their resources. Peak performance puts a hard cap on that, and so opens up a lot of other tactical possibilities. There are other ways one could deal with it, but they'd involve massive changes to overall balance/combat feel.

I don't think "no ammo" is in conflict with the peak performance mechanic, either. It's more that peak performance does part of the job that ammo did, and so having it allows the experiment of taking away ammo as a common mechanic for ballistics.

Alex have you ever considered just taking the mods and integrating them whole cloth into vanilla cause they are kind of awesome and vanilla is kind of boring now that I've played the mods hue hue

More relevant question: Would modders be willing to give for free their mod in witch they often invested hundreds, if not thousands, of hours? And completely give up on the creative control over them?

Yeah, it always rubs me the wrong way a bit how it just seems to be generally assumed that modders would jump at the chance. That aside, though, I don't actually *want* to do that, and beyond that, it would be an absolute logistical nightmare. There'd been some more in-depth discussion about it at some point, if someone cares to look it up

** an aside here, isn't the skill tree still very much an alpha/stub/work in progress?  I know a lot of intense consideration around balancing missiles centers on the combat missile/10 skill, which seems a weird waste of time if the tree is due a massive rework at some point?  **

It's only partially based on that, really. I think it's more of a case of regenerating ammo causing the Pilum to get another, more careful look.

On that note: I think the recent rapid pace of release, feedback, and balance fix of the last week or so was very nice. Perhaps thats a bit selfish of me on the consumer side, but I feel like we had a lot of good discussions on the forums stemming from it.

Me too! It's great for this sort of immediate balance feedback. I do suspect it'd get a bit old having to download new builds if it kept up, though, and wouldn't work for any kind of larger feature work.

[Unfolder]

- with the new beams, taking a ship without shields into battle is just a longer, more complicated "scuttle" button.

aka, hounds are target practice

[SafariJohn]

Definitely in the next release cycle, and no hints

Onwards and upwards!

[Reshy]

So why the sudden hot fix?  Seems to have suddenly threw out a lot of the changes in 65.2a.  Ballistics having clips and other things; as well as capitals originally not having a deployment timer.

[Serenitis]

Briefly - players try to figure out how to do well in a game, right? The problem with the kiting strategy is that it's really, really good, to the point where it trivializes other strategies. It's also very time-consuming. So, a player would feel like they have to kite in order to make good use of their resources. Peak performance puts a hard cap on that, and so opens up a lot of other tactical possibilities. There are other ways one could deal with it, but they'd involve massive changes to overall balance/combat feel.

I get you. I still can't agree though.
Maybe its because I don't have the same mindset as your min-max gotta win folks, I just don't value the 'win' as much as I do the 'fun'. And that hard cap is an obstacle to fun as it forces you to back out and repeat the battle (sometimes more than once), which seems like a really convoluted make the player do something just for the sake of having them do it mechanic to be honest.

Yes kiting and hit/fade is time consuming, but it is also really really fun. On the flipside as you've said its time consuming, which is in itself somewhat of a decent balance (no-one has infinite time).
Personally what I think would be a better idea is instead of penalising something, reward behaviour which you'd prefer to see.
Make the player feel like they're getting a good deal out of what you want them to do rather than just stick a barrier over this other thing. The carrot rather than the stick.
eg: For finishing a battle quickly you could have one or more of the following.

• Loot drops
• Experience
• Reputation / Bounty payouts
• CR Recovery
• Increased chances of 'Special' item drops if such a thing is implemented later

Thus you 'pursuade' the player to do the things you want by offering incentives, while still allowing them to do whatever else if they feel so inclined.

What'll be will be. Keep up the good work, just try to think of carrots less than sticks!

[TJJ]

CR drain proportional to deployment time might have the desired effect. So kiting ad infinitum would be possible, but would mean you left the battle with 0 CR.

Conversely, rushing a battle might cost less CR than the current fixed amounts.

[Megas]

I underestimated Salamanders after their fix.  After trying them with a frigate horde (because I was too lazy to swap missiles from all of the ships), they are still powerful.  Missiles are constantly flying, and despite their lowered damage, I have seen them deal the killing blow to crippled enemy ships at least twice.  If anything, Swarmers are not useful enough to compete with Salamanders.  (Swarmers are not useless, just not good enough.)  Annihilators are still good for burst damage and remain useful enough.

[WKOB]

I usually refrain from making mod related suggestions, I know that it's not really your focus in your development, but actually I'm going to make one now, and kind of a funny one for it's being necessary at that.

Please, make future patch designations more disparate. The 0.65 - 0.65.1 - 0.65.2 - 0.65.2a branching has really confused people. I mean, there's always people who have the wrong versions and complain about it, but the amount of this in each thread has actually kind of exploded.

Just maybe, as you find reasonable for your own concerns, consider making the patches have a more obvious textual difference. Seems silly but what can you do?