i've been playing/following the game since .53a and was really looking forward to this release, and it did not disappoint
i've spent the better part of the day playing & having fun, and I just have this to say:
you're nerfing safety override, right, alex?! I see you talking about it in the thread, even implying how good it is, but it's not just good: it's amazing.
I was actually having a bit of difficulty getting started, getting plowed by 2-3 frigate pirate fleets... that was until I took the harpoon pods off of my starter wolf, threw on SO, and proceeded to obliterate any and all pirates near effortlessly.
You just get so much flux/mobility/kiting potential that it really kinda makes any (early, at least) challenge the game can throw at you a complete joke, especially since bounties seem to scale with the player's progression.
I stopped turning my transponder off or going dark because it didnt matter if a fleet surprised me. just "attempt to disengage" and "full retreat" and then just do whatever, make a sandwich, knit a sweater, watch some TV... it almost doesn't matter what you do, because you will most likely be able to retreat.
like, really, with a very slight modification to your starter ship you can take a single frigate almost as far as you want; you just go
so much faster than virtually every other ship you'll be up against. oh, and it can teleport. i'm level 30 now, and have 750k creds, and have pretty much exclusively used my newbie pulse laser wolf with safety override.
yeah, occasionally I ran into cargo issues, so I tried a buffalo. Unfortunately, that won't allow you to escape unscathed from surprise lovin' fleets in the same fashion that I outlined above. So, what did I do? Of course: more frigates with safety override! In fact, I just tested this by attacking the biggest, meanest faction fleet I could find in 2 minutes on the world map. One of my AI's SO wolfs actually kept getting hit in the ass by salamanders, but since it can frikin teleport and had the initial velocity from SO/flux bonus, it still managed to escape with basically no hull damage, along with my other ships.
Why use anything else? Once I get enough friendship with tri-tachyon to buy my aurora, I'll be able to go from starter frig—directly to unstoppable, faceroll, sector-crushing-mega-fleet.
Sure, 1v15ing a bunch of frigates might be difficult even with the insane mobility, but here's what you do: disengage. the enemy fleet will try coming at you from the sides of the map and this gives plenty enough separation from the blob of frigs/fighters that are actually able to become a threat. pick off a few ships, finish your retreat, and then use the invincibility you get after retreating to kick on emergency burn(if you even have to) and GTFO/prepare to re-engage
you might lose more CR as a result of fighting + disengaging rather than fighting outright, but it's trivial to repair & whittle down much, much larger fleets than yourself this way. I mean, I guess you could say it's player choice to play so cheesy and do stuff like this, but, at least in the last version, I needed a hyperion to progress this far and kill so easily with just one frigate. Not to mention, the game kind of invites you to do it, considering how getting started can be a bit of a sticky situation with just the one ship, no skills, and limited credits to buy supplies and fuel.
tl;dr safety override OP plz nerf