make the boss fight a real challenge?

[the Scientist]

just make all gun rooms 2x2 and connect them to the rest of the ship

[Gorlom]

just make all gun rooms 2x2 and connect them to the rest of the ship

HAhaha most other people with a post count of less than 10 usually complains about the boss being too hard :p nice to see that not everyone is like that

why do you want the boss to be harder? I think a lot of people will have trouble understanding that bit since they feel the difficulty curve spike tremendously on the boss.

[Szyszkojad]

I agree, once you learn how to destroy the flagship it ceases to be a challenge. Although I think it would be a good idea to change the layout for the Normal difficulty while keeping the old one intact for easy. Maybe even make a couple of different layouts and permute through them ? This way each run will actually feel different then the last. Also does anyone else feel like the second stage of the boss fight is WAY more difficult than the third ? The drones literally tear my ship apart, the rockets are useless since they get shot down easily and the boarding drone constantly kills my crew members, not even mentioning the suffocation hazard.

[Zaffre]

I think the boss is hard enough as it is, but I could just not be very skilled. If you have a teleporter you're pretty much set for taking out the missile launcher, which is by far the most dangerous part of the ship excluding the drones in the second phase. Just send over some Mantis to damage it and you're fine. Ion bombs on the shields can easily bring it down to two layers of shield. Therefore, the ion bomb makes the fight much easier.

Still, I think it's hard enough on its own; on my latest run, it damaged my weapons to an extent that I would've died. Only my artillery beam saved me, which destroyed its final phase. Without the artillery beam, if I had, say, the Kestrel, I would have not survived. Basically: The fight is hard enough, but some tweaks could be made.

[Eji1700]

I'd be fine with this if there were more ways to affect the boss. As i've learned more and more i've figure out what kind of weapons combo's do and don't work, but realistically there are some runs where I feel I can get to him, but I just can't kill him. it'd be nice if rather than just have sector 8 slowly be eaten by rebels with some repair points if you could do sabotage missions or something to weaken certain aspects of the mothership. Hell you could even scatter them throughout the sectors and thus give more incentive to not just green sector your way through barring ship unlocks/randomness.

Once you have more ways to control how strong he is, you can certainly start screwing with just how strong he can become without locking out more and more playstyels. I'd really like to see a glass cannon approach be more feasible(low shields and engines) or builds designed to whittle him down slowly(high def and ions with minimal drone support). As it stands both of these have issues. Conversely if you build towards the standard(just do the shied math+crew tele+cloak+max shields and the rest in dodge) i'd like that to be more of a challenge. Maybe just change how it handles crew since that seems to be one of the more unintuitive issues with the fight(YAY I killed all the crew on stage 1. Oh...crap...)

[the Scientist]

why do you want the boss to be harder? I think a lot of people will have trouble understanding that bit since they feel the difficulty curve spike tremendously on the boss.

once you realize that the gun rooms are seperate from the rest of the ship, the boss fight quickly becomes trivial routine.
but i was just putting that out as an idea for a future implementation of higher difficulty.
or for example prohibit teleporting through shields (or only at the "risk of desintegration" ^^), then it would require a little more tactics and timing than now

[Drasha]

It would be nice if there were multiple different layouts for the boss to keep things fresh. For instance if you opened up the weapon rooms to the rest of the ship maybe remove or make the med bay smaller or isolate another section of the ship likes drones, engines, or cloak.

[Hissatsu]

In any case, having random boss layout is always great. Especially if boss could be procedurally generated itself (so it is not one of x templates, but completely random - built from modules). That would be cool.