I have to agree, boarding pods are very, very strong right now. In my last playthrough all I did for weaponary was boarding pods and strikecraft and managed to steamroll very strong fleets, no matter their manpower percent.

YertyL wrote:

Both pros and cons have obvious problems, and IMHO anything that is a very hard counter to a very specific thing makes for bad, "randomized" gameplay. 

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2. But make them immune to flak

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5.Fighters could hard-counter pods to give them a further role.

I honestly can't tell if fighters even do anything against pods right now, so this would be very cool. What if instead of making pods short range, they launch at the end of the long phase and arrive at the beginning of the short phase. That would give fighters time to intercept, because right now it looks like pods move very fast.

Im not sure about making them immune to flak though. Like you said, hard counters lead to bad gameplay, because the player only has one effective way to react to their opponent. If flak stays, players have another "lore-friendly" way to deal with pods.

...while being especially vulnerable to rockets and fighters. 

Do rockets already counter pods? Or where do they fit in?

The range profile would make a sole boarding pod focus much riskier, ecouraging you instead to either invest heavily into defensive ships, or use them in combination with conventional crew killing weapons/tactics, hopefully buffing both indirectly. Immersion-wise, boarding would happen at close range, and boarding pod only fleets would be rarer, both of which I would appreciate.

I like this. It's much more accurate to devestate a fleet and then board their ships. However there might need to be a battle tactic that kills crew, but your ships switch targets when the enemy ships are low, otherwise you'll just destroy the ships most of the time.

Pod protection modules are too specialized for me to ever use. Manpower module serve better as a softer counter that has other uses. Together with an overall damage nerf to conventional weapons as suggested here to make short range battles a bit easier to force, I believe this would give pods a much more interesting and balanced role than they currently have.

I have to disagree with ditching protection modules for manpower. If boarding pods were a big issue for me, I would definitely use protection modules. If not, I just use the normal manpower modules. Having only the manpower modules, or a module that does both, gives too much of a one size fits all strategy, which is boring. That's what happened in ES1 with armor spam.

I honestly can't tell if fighters even do anything against pods right now, so this would be very cool. What if instead of making pods short range, they launch at the end of the long phase and arrive at the beginning of the short phase. That would give fighters time to intercept, because right now it looks like pods move very fast.

Im not sure about making them immune to flak though. Like you said, hard counters lead to bad gameplay, because the player only has one effective way to react to their opponent. If flak stays, players have another "lore-friendly" way to deal with pods.

...while being especially vulnerable to rockets and fighters. 

Do rockets already counter pods? Or where do they fit in?

My idea was to make "blow them up before they get into range" the standard way to deal with pods. This would introduce a rock-paper-scissors between rockets, projectiles, and pods: Rockets counter pods as specialized long-range damage dealers, projectiles counter rockets via flak, pods counter projectiles via boarding at their optimal (close) range. I don't really care for the current trend of projectiles as "useful only as a counter weapon, but counters half of everything".

The (in my eyes) additional benefit of having to get into close range to board would be that you would always risk losing some of your own ships to capture enemy ones.

I have to disagree with ditching protection modules for manpower. If boarding pods were a big issue for me, I would definitely use protection modules. If not, I just use the normal manpower modules. Having only the manpower modules, or a module that does both, gives too much of a one size fits all strategy, which is boring. That's what happened in ES1 with armor spam.

My impression was that most people share my sentiment that a module that only counters one specific weapon is too specialized to use; I also think manpower modules are not exactly too popular currently (repair, damage, siege are IMO standard), so this would in my eyes combine two pretty useless modules into one moderately useful one.

Although I did never play ES1 or multiplayer, so feel free to correct me on this one :-)