Life support sabotage Hack Nerfed?

[Fantredath]

Back when the Engineer 1st came out, I would use my Hack on an Enemy ship, and it would kill a small amount of their troopers, but now it says "Reduces Trooper/Combat Effectiveness" or some such crud, and it does'nt do anything. Did they NERF it?

[Zenoslaf]

Not sure, fantredath, but I will check it out. Maybe someone else will answer with more information soon. Standby, captain.

That said, the game is now being polished and tweaked so if something seems wrong now, it doesn't mean it is permanent. :)

[Fantredath]

I'm not upset or angry, I understand that we're early Access. Heck, I bought this game before Beta. As for the Hack Ability, I think in some ways that it may have been a little OP, not by much though. Unfortunately, if all it does now is reduce the "Effectiveness" of enemy troopers during a boarding, I'm thinking that when they add Veterans, things are gonna get Really Difficult for low lvl Engineers. Essentially, all that life support sabotage will do is even the playing field slightly, and at the moment, that's not even enough extra oomph! to allow me to capture ships of "Equal" crew, I.E. I'm in the Myrmadon, and the only ship in the game I can capture is the Lyra, with it's "STAGGERING" 5 man crew. T.T

[fivemilesmile]

I seriously need to get back playing. Last time I used this hack ability, the target ship started to spin around helplessly until I blew it up...Now that was OP :-D
So you say capping is hard a bit now? Lemme see..

[Strilter]

I find that iff you use the W ability with system failure it impact the effectiveness of the enemy troopers ALOT. Like before if i had 50 peeps I couldnt take a ship crewed with 50
now its like I still loose 30 but I have just enough left to cap the ship. As for larger vessels the difference is very prolific... Then again I ALSO have the thingie that buffs troopers

[Fantredath]

Well, I've found that the Ships with Crews less than 100 are often at a disadvantage. Even with 3 points in the Trooper Strength, and as many Trooper Strength ship Officers, and additional Transporter Capacity, the best I've ever done with a Ship smaller than the Inciter is break even.
That is to say, if I have 50 Troopers, and they have 50 Troopers, the outcome is either I win with just a few Troopers left, or I Lose the boarding action on the last tick.

However, once you have a ship with 100 or more Troopers, the math changes. I've used my 200 Troopers on the Tzar to capture as many as 5 ships with maybe 50 to 80 Troopers each, before I had to Hire more. So it seems the game just gives preferential treatment to high Troop capacity ships.

Also. I normally play a Gunner class, and am still somewhat unskilled with the Engineer.
Anyway. Thanks for the help Ya'll. I just spent the last 5 hours grinding up enough credits to buy the Inciter. The rest of the game is all down hill.

[MeepdragonVII]

Another factor to consider is the teleporter's capacity - some ships with high trooper counts still have a low capacity and send only a few chaps per teleport cycle; a part of those gets killed off by automated defense and so all in all it's a more difficult task than if your ship had a capacity of i.e. 40/cycle (the Medusa).

[Fantredath]

Yep. That's why I say that ships with more than 100 Trooper capacity work better. You can keep sending more, and more Troopers every time your Transporter cycles, until you Overwhelm the enemy Troopers. However, on ships with Equal numbers, it's totally reliant on Trooper Strength, but, with the low capacity of most ships, you simply can't get enough Troopers onto ther other ship for the Trooper Strength to be a truly deciding factor.

And heck, with Veterans coming, they'll likely all have naturally improved Trooper Strength.

I see how the Life support sabotage Hack will be a Definite benifit to an Engineer later in the game, but at the very start, with low Trooper capacity, and no other Trooper Strength modifiers to speak of, it just does'nt do enough to justify putting points in it.

Now the Ability that ups your Shield Capacity and Recharge rate, that's saved my backside a few times. ;-)