Let me quickly rephrase the following with a less whiny tone of voice.
Partially off-topic, and beating an old horse, but I'm quite tired of the nebula rubber-banding. I have one champion on difficulty 7, normal ship cap... and unfortunately, EPIC game speed.
My first champion mission, with the three factions, and I went in with Shields 2 unlocked. The first thing I did (mistake?) was take down ALL the small starbases. I did so quite successfully. I suspect this was the mistake that caused them to primarily focus on my guys.
However, going from a strong lead position, to rapidly losing with my large starbase going from near 100% to 25% is just painful, especially when I'm perpetually outnumbered 2:1, consisting almost entirely of heavy hulls that take forever to go down even with all mk2 lasers. Going after the spire starbase itself with dual missile modules - even with circular kiting is also an ineffective proposition, perhaps again because of epic?
I suspect that if I played this on normal, I wouldn't be bothering to complain. It hasn't irritated me enough in the past. It's been considerably better since the last time balance has been changed, though not at my personal sweet spot.
Frankly, at this point I'm tempted to either give up on Champions in this game, or suicide my frigate a half-dozen times to bring this to an end, all the while hoping that my starbase outlasts theirs.
I've played with champions a lot in co-op with teammates on normal game speed. There have been some complaints about the scenario, but all in all it works well. In fact, for most of the missions the AI nebula might not be scaling up enough to prevent a challenge. Perhaps during the faction vs faction matches, starbases and large starbases get something like 1+0.5
n-1 health, where
n is the number of players. With eight champions, the starbases would go down in roughly half the time, rather than 1/8th the time.
Alternately, might it be something as simple as adjusting the nebula reinforcement spawn frequency to compensate for the epic speed, if it isn't already.[/s]
While we're on the subject of champions, is the game properly compensating for the number of champions and game speed in nebulas? Specifically, does it reduce the spawn rate of ships in faction vs faction matches appropriately? A Human Shadow Frigate on Epic in the three-way battle with mk2 lasers, missiles, and shields has an unusually difficult time clearing that mission, even coming from a commanding position with 1 large and 3 small starbases to two remaining large starbases. Taking down one of those large starbases (albeit with incoming retaliation wave, CPA, etc) took my large starbase from around 100% to around 25%, and I was consistently outnumbered 2:1 in heavies
per faction, which seems a bit extreme as far as rubber-banding goes, being outnumbered 4:1 overall.
In addition, the nebula playstyle differs dramatically with multiple champions. With 8 champions in co-op, it is quite feasible to head straight for each starbase and take them down in short order, without covering the allied ships or bases other than the series of shields directly on the champion. Perhaps an additional 50% health (similar to asteroids) for each additional champion (solely for large and small starbases), to curb the change of pace without eliminating the advantages of teamwork.
Edit: After reloading the game, it looks like the ship counts straightened themselves out somewhat? My starbased stopped spawning just heavies, at least, I might have some lights to escort on a final run now. Edit Edit: Ah yes, they didn't last long enough for me to escort.
Edit
3 And this time another wave spawned in enough numbers to break past the line of 14 heavies. Won. I guess the RNG just got stuck on a bad streak?
