A lot of the players here forget that flux dissipation gives diminishing returns. Sure, you can maximize DPS on your flux-heavy weapons and have very short venting time. But the fact of the matter is: your shield is no better than before! It may sound like a great idea to stick SO on an Enforcer and reap endless power, but then you realize that its shield is made of paper, you've got no OP to spare for Heavy Armor, and the time limit is ticking fast.
This could get ridiculous on larger ships. I don't even want to think about what an Eagle does with SO.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Without extra OP to spend, though, something like an Eagle is very starved for OP once you put SO on.
Man, I really hope the new patch will release soon as I'm really getting anxious to play with all the new STUFF! But Alex, would you say early game is harder, easier or about the same as it currently is?
I'd say the early game is... a bit of both. On the one hand, you can join ongoing battles and have an easier time with that. On the other, it's harder to avoid unwanted battles - you might get caught off by pirates that went dark and that you spot when they're literally a few seconds away, or you might just get chased down by a well-timed emergency burn. It takes a lot more care to avoid engagements.
So, assuming one of the new large weapons is a rack of the "Hammers" and the other fill the former role of the Hurricane, we are still stuck with a single weapon for support on larges missile mounts like the Astral's. Also with this fire-rate, it sounds like a guaranteed kill if anyone but an Onslaught or Paragon vent or overload near that new Hurricane.
Well, you know what they say about assuming
Oh, right. Same question then: Absolute or probability modifier? Does this affect the officers of the faction's own fleets, too?
Could be quite a handicap if e.g. all or most Tri-Tachyon officers are cautious, but interesting to fight against (or with! )nonetheless.
Each faction has a set of probabilities for officer personalities, set up like so in the .faction file (this one is for the Hegemony):
"captain":{
"timid":1,
"cautious":5,
"steady":10,
"aggressive":10,
},
This is used both for picking officers to command faction ships and for picking the personalities of mercenaries available on their markets.
Sounds good, although quite some frigates rely on small weapons already (Lasher, Shade, Afflictor, Sheppard, Omen). I'd like to see some destroyers do the same.
Good point on the Shade and Afflictor; for the Omen and the Shepherd, I'd say that small weapons aren't really their primary armament - it's EMP and drones, respectively.
...Oh. It won't be very useful then.
I imagine bribes will be quite useful, considering that you'll have much less information about the position of enemy fleets than now and will be more likely to run into otherwise fatal situations.
"Tithes" are Pather-specific; it's not a generic "you can now bribe anybody" thing.
Also just a little suggestion, I think the expanded magazines hull mod should be changed to buff ballistic weapons in some way since it has no use at the moment.
Yeah, it needs a tweak at some point (probably, as Gothars said, a renaming, since it's only useful for energy weapons, outside of mods).
One more question: Does the peak time multiplier from Safety Override speed up CR decay?
It doesn't. But then once you get to that point, you're paying extra supplies to keep the ship deployed, and you get to that point much quicker with SO.
When soloing the enemy with a ship, smaller ships get more time post peak-performance, especially with Hardened Subsystems. For example, take a Wolf, 180 seconds (or 270 seconds with Hardened Subsystems) of peak performance. With 60 points of CR to burn through, it is about 240 more seconds (or 360 with Hardened Subsystems). If it is my flagship, I probably have 100 CR, and 20% more CR is another 120 seconds with hardened subsystems.
This is why Hardened Subsystems is good for any ship that solos fleets, or any frigate in endgame fights.
Hyperion might benefit from Safety Override. Even with max flux stats, it spends A LOT of time venting due to how much flux blasters (and frequent teleporting) generate.
Hmm. I hadn't been thinking about the "CR decay speed" bonus from HS; sort of dismissed it since its +peak time bonus isn't very useful with SO. Let me reduce this down to 25% - thinking about it, it's a bit much at 50%. It was actually doubling the time, so you'd get 360 instead of 180. At 25%, you'd get 240.
I also think the Safety Override mod is too extreme in both bonuses and penalties. If you were to halve the buffs and shave a bit off the negatives, you'd still have a functional mod.
Edit: To be clear - I very much wanna try it as it is, but I predict it's going to have to be mellowed down a bit.
I wouldn't be surprised if you're right. On the flip side, if it's on the powerful side, it'll get more playtesting!