My thoughts so far.

#11

I just played through the campaign from start to finish on Legend and absolutely loved it. You have made yet another fantastic game.

I really like how you tied in lots of the requests the community made in Harbinger (namely boarding). It's awesome that you take suggestions from the community so seriously.

The balance here is excellent, and it's truly an excellent game.

I've been thinking a lot about the constructive feedback I've read here, and it seems to fall into a few buckets:
1.) Research is less than ideal
2.) Marines need a tweak

First, research. I don't like using the word "fix", because doing so implies it is broken. However one interesting tweak might be allowing each sector you capture to let you unlock one specific research item. As long as you keep that sector, you keep that item. If you lose the sector, you lose that item.

To balance the whole "well what do you do with research units in-game" question - perhaps you could make those apply only to repair, or some other creative use?

Secondly, marines. I'm playing through a second time trying to focus more on boarding. I'll let you know if anything comes to mind as I didn't unlock the marine clone the first time around.
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#12

Thanks, Forty in red! Glad you liked the game Smile

You have an interesting idea about linking some items to the map, will keep that in mind.
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#13

It would not even need to be every sector necessarily. Each campaign could randomly have a certain number of nodes that give you a certain tech at the start of the game as long as you hold them. It would be another way to randomize the campaign, even in a small way.
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#14
(This post was last modified: 11-27-2017, 02:40 AM by Forty In Red.)

So I've played through a few times now focusing on boarding/marines and I have to say that the "Marine Clone" ship is absolutely fantastic. Against everyone except for the Unknown, Boarding can be an absolutely awesome tactic to turn the table on your opponent quickly. If you are able to focus on enhancing marine research, which is absolutely critical for this strategy, and have 2-3 Marine Clone ships sitting around to replenish, you can amass quite the fleet quite quickly.

In so doing, I noticed that research for the "marine boarding shuttle" doesn't seem to work super well. For obvious reasons, you can't upgrade the weapons on the shuttle, but it would be nice if you could upgrade other things, namely the armament, ECM, and drive speed.

Also, I'd be completely down for scrapping the boarding shuttle hangar concept entirely in a future game, and simply buying a pair (or threesome) of boarding shuttles for a set fee that appear and cause hell like the computer does. Getting infinite, free (after initial purchase) marines with the Marine Clones is very, very powerful, and almost feels a little overpowered to me. Sure, they're really expensive, but the though of free marines for the rest of the game (assuming you keep it alive) doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

Lastly, I've also done a comparison of the various super weapons. In all the games I've played, Nukes beat everything else (even boarding) hands-down. A fleet with 10+ nuke launchers is nearly unstoppable.

For comparison, I maxed out a fleet with a bunch of super lasers (aka Death Ray icon) and got totally annihilated by four, yes four, nuke launchers on a pair of enemy ships. When the situation was reversed, I cleaned the floor with some Unknown battleships.

Anyhoo, still really, really enjoying things.

The one "path" I haven't been able to win with is the point defense path (gatling, energy gatling, etc). Now granted, I only play on "legend", but it seems that I can't generate enough firepower quickly enough. Furthermore, I haven't found a situation where you want a point defense weapon other than a laser, because they are truly fantastic when upgraded.
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#15

Tips for Point Defense path. Energy Gat PD is extremely powerful on faster ships such as Afterthought,Cloudsave. If going with this path, you generally would have 25 pilots and go with Gatling Fighters which are very strong. The large Energy Gat is so-so and comes pretty late in the game, so I typically either grab Orb or whatever, or even stick with Laser, focusing on maxing the gat fighters and the PD Energy Gat first.
Note that you really need to set the PD Energy Gat target to LARGE, so all that firepower is not wasted on shooting fighters if something big is available to blast.
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