Verdant Life - Ships OP

[starmage21]

Is it just me, or are the ships for the Verdant life forms (plant people) that use Sinew as a control provider OP as all get out? You pretty much cant destroy the things. This makes them probably 1-5x tougher than the rest.

[Lellasone]

That has not been my experience, but if you give me the name of a ship in the community tab I would be glad to test it out.

[starmage21]

I'm talking about their default ships. Give them a late-game ship ~1K Heavy Carrier for example, with support, and face it off against other ships. They are super sturdy.

[IllyiaSvara]

The difference is the rest of the races have ships that are pseudo-randomly genereated ships and while they function they are very very obvioulsy much wore than a ship designed by a person that the oko use.

The AI would normally spin upm a lot of possible designs, and try and find one that matches whatever it decided it likes to the look off currently attempting to adapat towards being able to try and counter what you or another may be fielding. at that time in their fleets. This random generator however often leaves some glaring weaknesses in the ships.

Verdant ships however can not be randomly generated so they get premade deigns.

Now you are corect they are more sturdy overall, they can't be sniped apart as easily however this comes at a tremendous cost in availale hexes and overall actually make their ships weaker compared to a player. This is before getting to their problems with trying to stack things such as morphics and fulrate to give their economy a boost giving them a potentially worse economy when handled by an experienced player compared to the others (dependant on luck in planets/resources but generally weaker)

[ouch67]

What I've found is that the AI just plays the Oko very well. If you put say an Oko as the AI in a match with Terrakin and Nylli AIs. Once you get to the end game screen what you will find is that the Oko is almost always going to be ahead of the Terrakin in terms of money, research and most everything else. While the Nylli is going be very behind the Terrakin in terms of money, research and most everything else.

This tends to make the Oko appear OP but really they are usually quite a bit farther ahead of everyone else.

[starmage21]

That could be the difference i'm noticing. I will have bigger fleets than them, and they'll stomp me on medium AI.The difference would be tech and stuff.

[dolynick]

The AI does tend to do well with the Oko but I don't think they're ships themselves are particularly OP. If anything I find them to be somewhat "squishy" when you're able to go up against them on equal footing. The base sinew designs have no armor on them whatsoever sinew is not particularly strong in terms of DR. Basically, the Oko ships have good damage but are also giant HP marshmellows. They may also have a favorable cost to damage ratio, which would help the Oko AI overpower adversaries.

[Lellasone]

For what its worth, size isn't usually a good indicator of ability. I have seen 15k fleets stomped by .455k fleets because the smaller fleet was configured for close assault, and the larger for long range bombardment.

[starmage21]

Its not just that theyre HP marshmallows, you pretty much have to clear every hex on the ship before they die due to sinew providing control. I would not want to play against them in MP.

[IllyiaSvara]

Starmage perhaps try playing as the oko.

Their downsides are massive and honestly make them terrible for MP. I am yet to encounter any highly experienced player use them in MP.
The loss of 20 hexes is massive.

The extra survivability does nothing when you consider how it comes at the cost of massive weight increase which in turn mean if you want armour you have to make do with some terribly slow ships that you can't solve due to the loss of hexes without sacrificing masivley in other areas.

They can not realistically use hyperdrive or jumpdrive without further removing hexes which they are already limited on. This forces them into either slipstream (risky) fling beacons, meh due to their loss of speed or gates.

Shields are worthless on them. End of, they are the only race in the game that can not use shields without gimping themselves because of their hex loss they can not afford the 20 hexes on extras and insttead must get the bare neccesities.


Just because they can't be sniped doesn't make them strong. You well rarely be able to snipe an enemy flagship without a fair bit of planning in advanced in MP since almost everyone uses shield behaviour on supports for that exact reason. Something AI does not do.

They can not build metropolis or megacities which is a major loss in being able to stack up morphics and fulrates on budget/research or using megacities to supercharge a T3 cosnumer planet or Cylium/Allondium planets.

They have far to many downsides to be competitive in MP at a high level. Much like how mono are very strong vs the AI but absolute terrible in MP against people who are experienced.

[Itharus]

I'd still like to see some premade ship lists implemented for every race... might be a good way to increase difficulty?

See some of your own designs used by the enemy, lol :)

[starmage21]

I havent played them in MP, just SP against the default 2 medium AIs. I rocked socks that game due to being able to retreat my ships and resupply their support ships without them dying even with little supports.
Honestly, I have a hit or miss strategy against the medium AIs as I'm still trying to figure out their patterns. I've had this game since it went beta because I play the piss out of Star Ruler 1, and I'm just now playing with it.

[IllyiaSvara]

Yeah any race can pull back and resupply their ships that doesn't make them OP at all.

All I'm going to say is refer to my above points as to why they are the opposite of OP.

The AI in terms of its tactics for fighting is fairly simple. It will follow the trade connections between stars and only attack a system bordering one of theirs. It won't attack any other location in your empire. If you stack stations in the few systems that are connected to the rest of the galaxy they won't even bother to try and attack it so they might declare war but never do anything about it. One of the few downsides in the AI is its combat. It's reasonably good at managing its empire (doesn't get any cheats on any level unless you give them to it) but it's not so great at actual war and combat.

The oko seem strong against other AI's because of their extra survivability. Generally if you loose a ship in the late stages esepcially for the support heavy fleets the AI often uses (it does not use destroyer hulls or carrier hulls) you generally can't rebuild at all in time to stop a huge swathe of your empire being eaten by anyone who's agressive.

[starmage21]

I'm convinced theyre not OP at this point, just tough as nails. About your point on support-heavy fleets, I recently noticed that issue, and my capital ships usually mount large torpedo bays now as a result.

[IllyiaSvara]

Torpedo bays should only be considered usable if either your opponent is silly and is just spamming super small support ships which in the majority of situations is something you should not do or on a fully dedicated ship, preferably destroyer.

Torpedo's use up far to many supplies for their damage and well often not do much to damage an enemy fleet that has been scaling up their supports to a reasonable degree compared to your other options.
Primarily Flak cannons or if you want to hardcore troll self destruct device dedicated ships.
Might take some research but generally in a path your going to take anyway due to the damage, health, armour and factory upgrades down this way