Nominations for Worst Ship Ever (IV)

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, the list of winners so far includes the cutlass, the acid sprayer, the IRE, the space plane, and the vampire claw.  The re-education treatments seem to have worked and they now happily mine ore for their kind alien overlords.

More ore is needed, so let's give it another go.  This time we'll broaden it out: not just bonus types, but any human-usable ship/starship/turret/other-unit.  Which one most needs a buff?  I'll probably throw the poll up over the weekend.

[chemical_art]

The flagship line beyond the Flagship are lackluster.

I remember that while the two ships beyond it costed a ton in K they came with powerful niches.

The Zenith Starship had tons of hp and great damage at the cost of polycrystal uselessness. They were mini forts.

The spire ship had wonderful bonuses and insane range, giving it a powerful niche.

Now the two of them have the tons of K cost yet feel very "meh"

[keith.lamothe]

The flagship line beyond the Flagship are lackluster.

I remember that while the two ships beyond it costed a ton in K they came with powerful niches.

The Zenith Starship had tons of hp and great damage at the cost of polycrystal uselessness. They were mini forts.

The spire ship had wonderful bonuses and insane range, giving it a powerful niche.

Now the two of them have the tons of K cost yet feel very "meh"

I do see that the spire lost its long-range niche, yes.  Hadn't considered the significance of that with the linearization, may revert that particular part.

And the zenith's dps went down a ton, I'm realizing, due to the rate-of-fire change.  The cap-health and armor went up quite a bit, though, and now it has bonuses (but still, rof is down to about 1/6th what it was, so the cap being doubled and bonuses being quadrupled only makes for about a 33% higher bonus-dps).

So yea, charges look like they're sustained on those

[Eternaly_Lost]

Neinzul Enclave Starships 2 and 3 generally cost a lot of K for not that much effect by themselves. Well I agree that 10000 K for what amounts to the ability to build MK4 ships if you lose/don't have a factory 4 is nice. To get to them, you need to spend 18,000 K or a full 6 planets worth. I personally would like to see 2 or 3 just disappear and make that line only 3 ships longs. Ideally 2 so you can have the simple free MK1 builder that does not need supply, A mobile factory that does not need supply, and a mobile and rebuildable factory IV. As it is now, If I am going to unlock any in this line, then I am heading for 4, so I never build a single 2 or 3. I have 1s for minor building, but 4s tends to be very nice.

Cloaker Starships never seem to work that well for me, more so after shards became immune to cloaking.

The two Manufactories need a buff, unless stacks of 400+ that turn on/off so slow that I normally see that I have 999,999 +5000 metal and 1,204 -8000 crystals normally.

Harvester Exo-Sheilds... I never had a good reason to use them. Well I would like to stop rebuilding Harvesters after attacks, I can't afford to half the income of my resources to stop rebuilding them by the shields. Normally I end up far head if I let the AI kill my gathers and then rebuild them, then spend K and income on a Exo-Shield. Even if they were free, I might never use them as it is. If you have enough minerals coming in that you can(in theory) half you income, you are either playing an easy game or you need to go up higher.

With that in mind, Harvesters might need a bit of a combination buff. I get most of my income from the Economic Command Stations and Spire Habitation Centers. It rarely is worth the knowledge cost to do either lines. It comes out to 14500 K for both lines, and I get a lot more by spending 9000k for Eco 3 Stations and having 5500 for other stuff.

As for Turrets... I don't normally use them outside of whipping boys, so it hard for me to say if they need a buff or not. As all my experiences with them has been every turret that I have unlocked in a small area.

EDIT: made my suggestion a little clearer for people.

[chemical_art]

Enclave starships do suffer badly because their build rates don't scale, and they are super super squishy, and their k rates are insane considering you can get I's and II's for free but to get 3 you spend 8K total and even then they build super, super slow and the IV's are nice as a backup but you could build up three ars unlocked ships and still have K left over.

[Commiesalami]

Id like to 2nd the nominations for Manufactorums and Harvester exo-shields. 

I remember either some mentioning of splitting the Zenith & Spire starships into two seperate lines a while back, I think that separation should happen before spending more time rebalancing the current Alien Starships

[PokerChen]

- Cloaker starships work well enough for me.
- Flagship line has lost a bit of that lustre, yes, although I still appreciate the attack boost from the higher grades. We could probably re-float the idea of splitting these Zeniths and Spire starships into their own lines and own niches.

- The Neinzuls starships III and IV are difficult unlocks. With the tension of balancing its 15000K and 6000K*n for other Mark III unlocks, it's difficult to make good use of the last two starships unless you sacrifice almost everything else. I have tried this to good effect, and it's an option if the factory-IVs are very far away, but something like that is difficult to plan.
 I'm not really in favour of regrouping the tiers into supply/no-supply/mark-IV capable, unless we get 3 ships per tier. I will in general tend to unlock mark-IIs to fly around with my defense fleet and provide on-site reinforcement. Having always gotten around their slow build-rate by grouping them permanently with 20+ Eng-IIs, they don't necessarily need improvement. However, a long-range gun will be nice....

 Have we established whether Teleport Battlestations are actually a little too weak at its cap? What about infiltrators? I remember gunning for infiltrators since they were once anti-turret but are now without a good role - what are they infiltrating against?

[Eternaly_Lost]

 I'm not really in favour of regrouping the tiers into supply/no-supply/mark-IV capable, unless we get 3 ships per tier. I will in general tend to unlock mark-IIs to fly around with my defense fleet and provide on-site reinforcement. Having always gotten around their slow build-rate by grouping them permanently with 20+ Eng-IIs, they don't necessarily need improvement. However, a long-range gun will be nice....

My suggestion was more of Mk 1 with no need for supply for free. Cut out the current MK2. Have MK3 that could build upto Mk3 ships with no need for supplies and Mk4 that could also build MK4 ships. It would make the line a little cheaper K wise, meaning that you might have a chance to build some MK4 ships with that Mk4 Neinzul Enclave Starship. Given that you have to have spent K on Mk2 and Mk3 ships to then build with it... Generally, by the time I have enough K get to MK4 Neinzul Enclave Starships, I have more or less won the game. You can get to them without having the ships to build at them, or you can get the ships and not have enough K to get the Neinzul Enclave Starship MK4. By the time you have both, you generally have won.

[Hearteater]

Yeah the Neinzuls Enclave Starship is pretty bad.  Maybe:

Mark I: Can build Mark I and II units, Construction Rate 5, Repair Rate 2 (single target)
Mark II: Can build Mark I-III units, Construction Rate 10, Repair Rate 4 (single target)
Mark III: Can build Mark I-IV units, Construction Rate 15, Repair Rate 5 (single target)

NOTE: Construction Rate 15 would be like having 5 Mark III Engineers built-in.  The Mark III Engineer cap is 15.

[Cyborg]

Harvester shields should not impact income. I'm not sure what's the big deal if we just allow folks to pay knowledge for shields. I would rather it be free or cost some other resource up front.

I'm also throwing my hat in the ring for the enclave starship. It really needs a weapon to encourage us to bring it in a battle. As replenishment, it's just way too slow and engineers don't last long in a firefight. A potential solution is to have a forcefield around it so you can put the engineers underneath, among other skill-based strategies that you can do with forcefields.

The starship line is rather underwhelming. You don't get that many of them, and if you compare their value to a full cap of ships, sometimes it doesn't even compete. This is especially true if you are playing a fallen spire campaign. It's one of those relics that got obsolete when the spire showed up in the galaxy.

[_K_]

The shields also have quite a significant energy cost, which on its own might be enough to consider if its worth using them. The income should not be affected.

Cloaker starships beyond MkI - you dont really need an ability to cloak more than 20 ships when you can cloak the transports.

Starships: The tooltip should have contain a number of ships a starship can boost. Otherwise they are fine imo.

[Wanderer]

I fear I need to vote for the factory ships.  Out of every ship I could invest K in these offer the least benefit.

[Toranth]

Harvester Exoshields are top of my "Useless buildings" list.  They actively HURT the player.

The Enclave Starships cost 18000 K to get the useful one, which is the same cost as unlocking the Fallen Spire Battleships plus Dreadnaught.  It's the cost of unlocking Fortress 1-3 PLUS FF 2 and 3. (etc)

Deflector Drones.

The Space Plane and the Infiltrator are soft, weak, and (mostly) harmless.

The Warp Jammer discussion is in another thread.

The Counter Dark Matter turret.

Anything involving armor (Zernith Polarizer, Armor Ship, Tank, etc) I think should wait until the future of armor is decided.

Edit:  The Counterspy!  I planned to use this to counter AI Eyebots recently, but discovered that since Eyebots are immune to instakill, the Counterspy did nothing, not even its little normal damage.

[chemical_art]

A single bombard in a low cap game can kill a enclave starship iirc in one hit

[Toranth]

I was going to complain a lot more about the Harvest Exoshield, but then I started actually trying to do math and got a bit confused/surprised at my results.
I'm going to ignore the power and knowledge costs here for a moment, and focus just on the Metal/Crystal resources.  Also ignoring engineer boosts and harvester upgrades.

The cost for losing a harvester is 80 seconds in resources + 150 seconds lost income for each occurance.    Cost = ( 80sec + 150sec ) * x,  where x = # times destroyed
The cost for the Exoshield is 80 seconds in resources + 0.5 * income for all the time it runs.  Cost = 80 + 0.5y.  where y = time the Exoshield exists.
Setting the two equations equal to each other and solving gives
y = 300 + 460(x-1)
or
x = (160 + y) / 460

Ignore the stray +300, and you get that every destruction of a harvester is equal in cost to about 460 seconds of Exoshielded runtime.
So, if your harvesters are being destroyed every 8 minutes or so, it becomes worth it.
To make it about once per hour, the cost would need to be 7% - about 1 resource per harvester.

Even after doing the math, I'd still never use the exoshields because my harvesters aren't being destroyed every 8 minutes, even in Spirecraft - hard, Golems - hard, Fallen Spire max exowave games.  But if the income reduction were significantly reduced... then maybe.  Or if the AI starts doing some serious Harvester raiding.  (Is that a new Hybrid plot I just heard hatching?)