• Congrats on getting a complete test version out.
• Coincidentally, I couldn't sleep and decided to check out the forum after a long hiatus (I'm pretty much off ES).
• Glad to see you ended up agreeing with most of my previous claims. (eventually)
• Still not convinced engines are worth their weight and cost.
• I've forgotten how the math on power unit bonuses turned out. I think I wrote up my conclusions on it in one of the combat mechanics threads.
• I'd had better luck with more mono or dual defense (1 module or so of each) on some variants of the small and medium hulls. As it stands the ships I looked at are very vulnerable to the super cheap 5 LRK + destroyer hull defense.
• Fighters and Bombers will suffer attrition without repair and quickly become ineffective if they have to fight against bombers.
• Bomber damage is obscene, and the only effective solution is to stack armor modules and have fighter protection.
• Modding Fighter and Bombers to have a fixed weight would go a long way.
• It would be better to also remove the special module limitation, but the engine can't handle that. It really struggles with large fighter/bomber battles. I made a post about this one a somewhere too.
• Fighters are only worthwhile to stop bombers.
• Point Defense Modules were pretty worthless, but cheap and light. Fighters were a better bomber stopper.
• As much as I hate the ES Combat, the post formatting BBS is nice.
  
  

thuvian wrote:

Glad to see you ended up agreeing with most of my previous claims. (eventually)

thuvian wrote:

Still not convinced engines are worth their weight and cost.

thuvian wrote:

I've forgotten how the math on power unit bonuses turned out. I think I wrote up my conclusions on it in one of the combat mechanics threads.

thuvian wrote:

I'd had better luck with more mono or dual defense (1 module or so of each) on some variants of the small and medium hulls. As it stands the ships I looked at are very vulnerable to the super cheap 5 LRK + destroyer hull defense.

thuvian wrote:

Bomber damage is obscene, and the only effective solution is to stack armor modules and have fighter protection.

Modding Fighter and Bombers to have a fixed weight would go a long way.

thuvian wrote:

Fighters are only worthwhile to stop bombers.

• Isn't 1.1.42 latest? I couldn't find any more recent updates or patch notes. I did some major tests with Gwydion5 on that patch. He was going to post it but I think he lost interest like it did.
• By bomber damage being obscene, I meant that bombers did a large amount of damage. Well, level 1 & 3 bombers do. Level 2 bombers are worse than level 1 bombers. Fighters do poor damage, but are one of the two things that can deal with fighters.
• My best anti-GC tactic was medium hulls with just enough defense/armor to last past killing more than its $ in Low/Little Glass Cannon Destroyers (LGCD). So LGCD kills GCD. LDGCC (Light Dual Defense Glass Cannon Cruisers) kills LGCD. GCD kills LDGCC. Then large ships as GCD-killers, with all mixture of LR Kinetics/Beams/Missiles and MR Beams(and bombers), with enough armor to survive just long enough to pay for themselves in GCDs. A secondary class of large ships were the invulnerable ships they don't have the DPS to make much progress, but are only really weak against Bomber GCDs. They key is to keep rotating in fresh Bomber GCDs with full bombers. Attritional really neuters the damage they do, and then your opponent can cheese the repair card. (Not that the AI does).
• I think I posted my last designs back in the old thread. Harmony mediums have a decent trait which allowed the variant I described above. I'm not sure about the others.
  
  

Uncle_Joe wrote:
Thanks for the input. I did try these ships but ultimately it felt like the game just came down to LR Kinetics (since the AI with these templates heavily uses them, I had to follow suit). So I tweaked the damage down on the LR Kinetics in my own mod (posted here) and stuck with the standard AI templates which has resulted in a more diverse game.