Design Question: Unlocks Purpose

[morrokain10587]

To keep it brief, are the unlockable ships, modules and weapons meant to be sidegrades or upgrades?

I get some are designed for small ships and others are better on larger ones due to how they scale, but if I was going to give feedback at some point I'd like to know what the target design is supposed to be.

I haven't played enough for it to be obviously apparent but I have noticed weapons that seem like direct upgrades to existing ones I've unlocked or had from the start.

[Thomas]

Originally posted by morrokain10587:

To keep it brief, are the unlockable ships, modules and weapons meant to be sidegrades or upgrades?

I get some are designed for small ships and others are better on larger ones due to how they scale, but if I was going to give feedback at some point I'd like to know what the target design is supposed to be.

I haven't played enough for it to be obviously apparent but I have noticed weapons that seem like direct upgrades to existing ones I've unlocked or had from the start.

Technically they're all sidegrades. However by combinging them with modules and other modifyers you can make a lot of changes and more exotic designs.

For instance things that reduce cooldown are obviously a lot stronger on weapons with very long cooldowns. Modules that increase the projectile count are better on weapons with lower-projectile-amounts-per-volley.

[[BFs]Karaya 1]

Originally posted by Thomas:

Originally posted by morrokain10587:

To keep it brief, are the unlockable ships, modules and weapons meant to be sidegrades or upgrades?

I get some are designed for small ships and others are better on larger ones due to how they scale, but if I was going to give feedback at some point I'd like to know what the target design is supposed to be.

I haven't played enough for it to be obviously apparent but I have noticed weapons that seem like direct upgrades to existing ones I've unlocked or had from the start.

Technically they're all sidegrades. However by combinging them with modules and other modifyers you can make a lot of changes and more exotic designs.

For instance things that reduce cooldown are obviously a lot stronger on weapons with very long cooldowns. Modules that increase the projectile count are better on weapons with lower-projectile-amounts-per-volley.

How does it work then, does 15% of 1 make it 2 ? Ive had the thought that the increasing projectile count things are actually better on things that have more since 15% of 10 is more than 15% of 1, i wasnt sure how it worked and if it was then 2.

To be fair, I also hadnt thought to test it out.


What i would like to know if there was an option to show
1. What ships and weapons are new since the last time you looked. If im having a long mission, i sure cant remember which of the 30 or more weapons or modules it was that i picked up
2. Weapons and modules you dont have yet? I can see all the hulls available that werent picked up yet, but weapons i basically have no clue. That also means i dont know what to expect when enemies have them equipped.

Like yesterday in the Ship Test there were enemies with a...i think it was railgun artillery equipped. Now it looked really cool and like something i want, but i have no clue about its stats other than what i could observe for that short time.

[morrokain10587]

After a fair amount of testing, I'd say that its an interesting design that has been a lot of fun to tinker with.

Balance wise, it seems far more important to understand the RTS mechanics and how to increase your economy/defend your resource nodes than it does how you've built your fleet.

That's not to say that how you build your fleet doesn't make a significant difference in how you approach a match. You can focus on many different strategies or create generalist builds. All seem to work well enough to me.

Dev Feedback:

The only thing I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around is some of the modules. The ones that increase health or shields based around initial hull health seem optimal for larger ships compared to anything else like weapon range/damage or ship speed.

For instance, using 3 modules for 15% more damage to my weapons seems like a bad trade compared to an extra 750 shields on a 5000 health capital. And when I tried that build out on a ship with lower health but lots of hardpoints I didn't notice as much of a combat impact as I did the shields. Maybe that's just my playstyle factoring in though.

It could be that its not as good on projectile weapons (which I generally prefer asthetically) since they have a decent chance to miss. It might be a better loadout for a full beam or missile focused ship.

That said, I could see how easily that could pendulum shift by making the damage/range 5% on the combined module and 7.5% on the focused module. Then it might feel like its always better to take offense modules instead of defense ones.

Minor nitpick:

Similar to weapon stats, it would be great to also get a stat card for built in weapons such as the cruiser hulls' built in CWIS. I don't really notice it in combat and basically I'm just assuming it performs the same role as the real life version. I'm not seeing its effects due to the chaos of battle and presumably the graphic is tiny like fighters. You have to pay close attention to see fighters attack bombers.