After all the nerfs...

[Akhorahil]

...Pipe Blaster/Fighter Core still reigns supreme.

It's *possible* to counter with armour, but you have to be extremely lucky with your rolls. Nothing else needs apply.

[Akhorahil]

I think Steel Forger's Upgrades is a huge part of the problem - they can easily max out cores, while others can't count on Cores. There should probably be some kind of fix for this - the Upgrade kit is such a *massive* deal.

[Uthak]

I’m currently arriving at a similar conclusion, even in non-experimental mode—at least in turns 20–35. I haven’t reached turns 40–55 recently (experimenting with armor builds does that to a man, i guess :D). Back when I did, it was mostly Nugget carriers, but now I’m seeing far fewer of those.

Here’s what I’m observing:

1. Solar flare timing changes
The longer delay before solar flares massively buffs Valorian, and even more so Renegades. At around 6k–8k rating, I’m often facing 5 Renegades, 3 Valorian, and 2 Steel right from the start. Renegades dominate this range easily—missile crits hit for 60–80 damage while most ships only have 60–90 HP. This makes it much easier to reach critical turns around 15–20 with enough HP left to refine your build.

2. Bullet-based health steal overshadows all other healing/armor
Health steal tied to bullets outperforms any other form of health or armor generation by a long shot. Mid-fight damage spikes kill almost anything—except bullet healing.
I actually asked in another thread how this works, because it makes no sense to me:
- Hacks ticking for 3k instantly delete a trigger boat.
- But 3k Rust in a single tick does nothing to a 120 HP split-firing ship, because it regenerates health from bullets in apparently every update-call, all the time.
Still completely confused by this.

3. Split shots remove buffs instantly
With enough splits, you can strip any amount of buffs instantly, which makes a lot of builds—especially armor-focused ones—irrelevant.

4. Crack + Firepower + Radar stacking
Being able to stack Cracks and Firepower together massively boosts weapons.
Radar giving both Hit and Crit on top of that is another silent multiplier, especially when combined with targeting computers.

5. Radar reducing load time breaks late-game pacing
Radar reducing weapon load by 30% per 10 stacks means weapons fire instantly at around 30–40 radar.
Even with fewer radar stacks, just 2–3 heat generators can cause the same effect early on.
So after turn 20–25, weapons effectively have no cooldown—similar to how Rust Nuggets behaved before.

6. Radar = instant fire + 100% crit chance
At 30+ radar, you’re basically at 100% crit chance. So you:
- Instantly fire
- Auto-hit
- Deal double damage on every shot
- call about 1 lightning for every to ammo loaded, which then also can crit and ALSO generate HP. at 4 ammo and 500 bullets thats easy 1000 lightning strikes for another 20000+dmg and 50000hp healed, in a fraction of second, but somehow evenly spaced over whatever duration it takes for the enemy to implode to not allow spikes to ruin your day...
- clear all enemy speed, spikes and plating in one ms
- easily apply 200-1000 cracks further enhancing dmg
- generate about 200 to 300% of your damage as PERPETUAL heals per frame (which is insane). this goes up with more life-steal, as that stat is never swallowed like nearly all others.

7. Split mechanics scale far faster than anything else
There are tons of split-shot mechanics available, and this seems to be the core issue.
Once you reach instant-fire territory, all you do is reroll shops every turn for torpedo bays with splitters and lightning. Your damage and healing both scale exponentially with each upgrade—similar to how Nugget builds used to work (instant debuff + DoT).
Nothing else in the game scales like this.
Armor/HP generation through plates, tubes, medics, etc. takes a huge number of upgrades to double—while past radar-cap, one item nearly doubles DPS and healing.

To make it worse: a single Dampener round at this stage deletes any counter-strategy.
Even if you have 50+ plating and generate 300 spikes per frame, splits clean it up faster than you can produce it.

You’d need around 10 Rib Cages just to keep up—and that’s a 2×2 legendary costing 9 gold and rare to even find, let alone stack. Meanwhile, 5-gold epic ammo in 7-gold epic bays drops more often, is easier to produce, and each split counters 2–3 Rib Cages in late stages.


****


It seems as if armor/hp setups are ok in mid-tier games, but then quickly and dramatically get outpaced by lategame splitfiring.

what got me, see my other replay, is that even at perpetual maximum radiation, supposedly limiting enemy HP and REG, does absolutely nothing to limit the amt of heals going through, since life steal simply ramps and ramps, but the debuff is capped at 72% and then instantly recents due to the explosions.

****

Suggestions:

1. have radar no longer increase crit (have a similar item that does that and is not unique) to allow crit builds

2. have plating be irremovable to counteract DPS and directy corelate with CRACKS as its counter, not dampners

3. Have nuclear and cold stacks actualy put a dot/counter on the enemy at 10, rather than explode, perpetually lowering the enemies hp and regen, while the 1-9 stages work as is, but every time you hit 10 the MAX goes down permanently by eg. 10% of max hp? Or find some other way to meaningfull impact bullet-hell lifesteal? maybe at 10 charges it gets used up and you regenerate 10% hp at once? and make it a generatable stat, rather than static?

4. allow for an difficult to circumvent hard-counter. armor/trigger boats have hacks that are nay impossible to remove at number and make them implode in one tick, even with just 5-10 stacks of the dot.... you have spikes in the game that would do that to enemy gunships---> but they dont matter as they are stripped instantly and perpetually by dampener+split-synergies and way to hard to generate

5. currently a mid-to high tier gunboat does it all simply by firing one salve, it deals with every other mechanic in the game in one single shot thats released at launch. just upgrading targeting computers and stacking splitammo will take care of any other counter or mechanic in the game, which i think is to simple.

--> all this being said, the balance i think is hard to master. as i find gunboats between turns 15-30 rather easy to beat. before and after that, mainly after they are essntially scaling so massively that nothing i can think of could keep up

[Akhorahil]

I think Steel Forger/Pipe Blaster/Fighter Core might not stand up at extreme levels, but you have to get there in the first place, and it's *really* hard to counter and you meet it all the time.

[Uthak]

i thought of a comparison for splitammo torpedos:

imagine a new gem, epic, 5 gold.

if mounted it double-triggers any activation of the item its mounted on.

if not mounted it has a 50% chance to double-trigger any adjacent item.

now imagine a new item: "gem-bag" 2x2 epic item that costs 7gold and adds gems to your shop and may mount a gem... the mounted gem applies to all items activation-items with gem-slot on your ship. since a torpedo bay gives 10 ammo too, maybe the gem-bag could generate a random gem every two turns?

now mount the split gem inside.

now we would have a way to allow armor to keep pace with DPS?


sounds op, but thats essentially what torpedo bays with split+lightning let you do, but of course still being infinitely much worse as it ramps your hack-hazard through the roof. while split ammo convenietntly ignores that mechanic entirely. so having 3 gem-bag-splits would auto-delete yourself with a single hack, pretty much :D...

***

maybe a fix for splits though: have ammo-splits count as activations, or rather, activate the corresponding weapons again, and again! this may be the best idea here. That way split ammo impacts your ammo-generation, it does not scale exponentially (as each split reactivates the weapon, not splitting an already 5 times split flying bullet another 100 times) and it becomes a weakspot for hack-attacks etc....? It would still be immensely powerfull having a blaster shoot 10-20 times in one call. but this change should dramatically improve balance to its lategame impact.

[Uthak]

i think "doubling/splitting" anything in the game is a very exploitable keyword and should either be omitted, or available to everything. Double damage? double armor!

doubling an activation is way better, as it consumes resources and "activations" come in a set network of synergies (and counters). But splitting the product of an activation is very toxic, especially if it can be chained/cascaded, and, since its specifically NOT an activation, avoid the biggest threat to activation-boats: hackbombs, which breaks an already OP mechanic.

but fr it should likely not be part of the game thats all about scaling as this mechanic effectively x2`s everything youve built for each bullet mounted on fairly easy to obtain (lategame) items with no counter.

[MaximumSquid]

Are these test items / beta items? I can't find what you guys are talking about in the codex.

Edits: Found Pipe Blaster, but not Fighter Core

[Akhorahil]

Originally posted by MaximumSquid:

Are these test items / beta items? I can't find what you guys are talking about in the codex.

Edits: Found Pipe Blaster, but not Fighter Core

There's a toggle for Experimental Class Items. When you use that, the game adds a "Core" at L8 or so that modifies your ship. Fighter Core gives you *completely insane* bonuses as long as your ship is small, for instance.