Wow, that is gonna be a change! Why the change of heart? Are you adding a new skill with the burn speed boosts in it or are they gone forever? Also why have the burn speed meter goes up to 20 when most likely 16 IIRC is the highest with all of the boosts?
Gone for now. Why? It makes terrain a bit more important if you're really trying to either chase someone down or escape, where the flat burn level boosts were just a bit too good, even lowered as they were. I'd like forcing/avoiding engagements to heavily come down to ability and terrain use rather than purely having higher numbers.
You still *can* get a bit of a boost with tugs and Augmented Engines. Combined with Navigation, it just felt like too much.
Are any variants going to have SO in them? It seems like the AI wouldn't be a good user of it because once it overloads, it will most likely die
A few. The AI is pretty good about not overloading when it's not about to die anyway, and the variants are very deadly.
Does this mean that a small fleet can theoretically get away from a faster big fleet (say.... an armada of pirate frigates) by ducking into a hazard and shaking sensor range?
Yes! Though the pursuing fleet will keep looking for you for a while, even after they lose you.
I'm SO looking forward to putting SO on things!
Oh, you.
Ah okay, that makes sense. I always use the speed bonus as more of a thing to be gamed rather than a simple bonus that mostly just applies to the pre-combat stage. But I guess the removal of the flux speed perk from the skill tree now puts it firmly into that noncombat corner.
The perk that allows its use at up to 25% flux is still there. But, yeah, without that the primary intent for the bonus is "help ships move about the battlefield outside of combat". Plus to game it, yes, but having to lower shields is part of the tradeoff there.
Hey, even Alex isn't immune to the quote mishap.
Thanks, fixed