Hi.
Every time I come onto the forum it's to complain about something being broken with a mod. I'll have to post something nice to balance out my karma.
I have a pretty big problem with a one of your REDACTED ships called the Vrita. I included your mod in this playthrough for the first time and somehow managed to not noticed it in the first 10 or so hours of my save because I was busy nuking hedge and pather planets. In what little exploration I did I didn't notice it either because I was lucky and it never spawned in the tiny REDACTED patrols that spawned or because I was running a wolfpack build and my frigates managed to kill it by surround without me noticing. Anyways I am trying out a somewhat unorthodox build of automated ships + support doctrine + derelict operations in order to fit 3-4 ai-core free Radiants. In my quest to get my fourth Radiant I started to hunt red beacon systems and encountered this thing for the first time properly. As others have pointed out this thing is insane. It easily tanks not just double or triple its DP; I literally cannot kill it by focusing it with 2 paragons 2 radiants and bomber support plus me spamming phase mines with my doom.
I think the problem is that in this system I am in almost every single enemy ship has an alpha level AI core captaining it. This particular Vrita had an alpha core pilot and I am almost certain that it had field modulation + helmsmanship because it was incredibly fast and manoeuvrable and it kept the shield up for like 3 minutes straight while firing and tanking 3 or 4 capitals the whole time. Eventually it got high flux (more from killing like 3 of my paragons virtually single handed rather than me causing damage to it) and it just ran away behind 2 alpha core Radiants, vented, and then cam back to fight. I wanted to rip my hair out when I saw that.
My doom phase mines did like 70 dmg to the shield on a direct impact. The only way I found to even remotely kill this thing is to spam phase mines and sometimes the AI will back its ass into one which still takes 3-5 mines to even kill it. But potato - you might say - clearly it has a glaring weakness in having a fixed shield with an exposed rear arc! Clearly this ship was designed to be beaten by surrounds from nimble frigates! Well turns out when there is a literal wall of alpha core brilliants behind it, and given that with an alpha core pilot itself it is extraordinarily manoeuvrable AND that the rear arc hole is like what? less than 90 degrees? Its just not possible. Any time my frigates try to attack it they get toasted by overwhelming firepower because these damned things like to spearhead a massive blob of alpha core piloted ships that absolutely annihilate even my omens. The shield arc is so massive that it can be 80% surrounded and still have 100% shield coverage. Trust me I tried and got it just almost surrounded several times but its just so fast it can back up just enough to never expose it's rear arc. Maybe because this thing is being piloted by a super skilled alpha core, but I have never seen the AI make a mistake with it.
In terms of design the only other ship from vanilla comparable to this is the Monitor frigate. I have a monitor in my fleet. The monitor is an incredibly powerful ship but it has many many many glaring weaknesses. First of all, the monitor is not immortal. It can tank impressive damage but it's flux reserves are not infinite! It actually has pretty crap flux stats for a frigate so its sustain is not great. A monitor surrounded by a handful of frigates will die eventually if they keep the pressure up and don't give it a chance to lower it's shields and vent. Yes a high level officer with lots of S-mods can make a pretty ridiculous tank and lets say for arguments sake that a monitor can tank similar to the Vrita; the vanilla game devs clearly thought about this and first of all made the Monitor a *** frigate with crud stats (except for peak performance) compared to other vanilla frigates (lower OP, less flux, a little over half the top speed of all the other competitive frigates, extremely bad weapon mounts [not that it would have the flux to use them anyways] etc.) The limitations of the loadout mean that realistically in vanilla the deadliest weapons you could run are maybe 2 reapers but even with build in expanded missile racks and a missile spec pilot you would get a whole 3 shots with each launcher before the ship becomes a non-threat. I haven't tried it but maybe at worst you could somehow fit an antimatter blaster but even then each shot would cause you to borderline flux out and cause you to become vulnerable to being destroyed by damage. I think the deadliest loadout you could fit on the monitor while keeping reasonable tank and sustain is like 2 small mortars, the built-in flak cannons are trash and barely even do anything for point defence. On top of all of this (as if it wasn't blatantly obvious the design intentions favouring defence rather than offence from the build in flak cannons) the game devs decided that when the fortress shield was active the ship couldn't bloody shoot!!! WOW imagine that! The only other ship that is comparable is the Paragon but that ship ALSO CAN'T SHOOT while fortress shield is active!!!! And has TRASH speed (noticing a theme here?)
If I were to summarize everything wrong with this ship in one nutshell it would be this:
- waaaay too fast for such a tanky ship: Honestly if it can beat a paragon in a 1v1 it needs to be as fast as a paragon lol.
- waaaay too much damage: The way this game is balanced that short ranged weapons are generally the highest DPS and most flux efficient compared to long ranged damage. This ship can do comparatively very high (and very flux efficient) DPS because range is a non-factor for it because of its insane speed and tank.
- Shooting through fortress shield is INSANE: adding on to the above points like throwing gasoline on a raging forest fire; this ship can move in, dump its damage, tank probably millions of points of damage over a fight, and then if SOMEHOW it gets high flux it simply moves out and vents and comes back in. The fact that it doesn't have to chose between doing damage and being a rule breaking tank unlike every other ship in vanilla is clearly designed to is bananas.
- Shield arc is waaaay too big: Combined with it's speed and manoeuvrability flanking this ship is a pipe dream when there are several dozen angry alpha cores behind it that it can EASILY point its exposed ass towards and anything that tries to even phase behind it would be instantly destroyed. If you change nothing else about this ship, the shield arc needs to be reduced to like 70 degrees fixed frontal. Seriously this ship should not be able to spearhead a swarm of angry alpha cores and take concentrated fire from 2 Paragons and 2 Radiants at a total angle of 200+degrees. If it's tanking one Paragon from the front the second one should be able to attack it from at least 90 degrees for Ludd's sake! You have to be so directly behind this ship that your antimatter blasters could miss because the AI pivots and the blast hits the very edge of the shield instead of his engines!
This ship is a joke. If it cost 60 DP it would still be overpowered. Once I salvaged one I realized that I would have to pivot from my initial plan and dump all my Radiants and replace them with this because they are useless trash compared to this ship.
When endgame redacted fleets both outnumber any fleet a player could reasonably field, and have dozens more alpha core officers that have level 7 or 8 with all the skills being elite AND I see that they have 3 or 4 of these things in them (with alpha core pilots) it just becomes unreasonable. I found a way to basically cheese them with my doom and I guess I could fly to the core worlds and buy a harbinger but I don't want to pilot a bloody harbinger (and I don't really have faith the AI will be able to use the ship system very effectively anyway). This thing is just not fun to play against and building an entire fleet/player around just fighting these things is garbage and I want no part of it.
Seriously these things are 100 times worse than fighting the bloody doritos who were clearly also designed to be flanked and are arguably the most powerful ships in the vanilla game and also don't have a 280+ degree shield arc unlike these garbage piles AND they don't have 20 alpha core brilliants covering their backs preventing flanking.
I've uninstalled your mod and given up on the save I've been working on for like 2 months now because knowing I'm in the same sector as these things is giving me conniptions. I would highly recommend anybody reading this to save yourself the trouble and NOT install this mod until these garbage piles are outright removed.
Other than that I like the rest of the mod quite a lot. The phase ships it adds are very cool. Shame about one ship ruining an entire mod.
