[Ship] Stolid (A ship that can take a beating!)

[Madagascar]

Most ships use shields, drones, engines and cloaking to avoid damage, how about one that is just good at coping with hits?

First time modding, so feedback welcome.

The ship:


Download (Mediafire)

Description
A Bulkwark with a few changes:

1 Power shields. You'll hate droneships
3 Power engines. Slightly better than average, can avoid a few more shots and escape if things get tough
4 Power weapons. A single hit won't knock out your breach missile and you can repair other systems (even that breached Oxygen!) instantly
2 Power drones. A Hull Repair supplied with 12 drones, should keep you alive until you can shield up
Explosive Replicator. Combined with a 4 damage missile this means you won't have to worry (too much!) about ammo
Two rocks and one engi. Seeing that rocks moving glacially all over the place was too agonizing

Gameplay/testing observations
No shields, so it has to rely on a Hull Repair drone and a Repair Burst to survive, at least until some can be bought.

The Breach missile will likely be your primary offensive weapon til the midgame.

It's very tempting to switch out the Repair Burst for something else around Sector 3, but you may regret not putting it back again at Sector 6!

Seems slightly more powerful than average as far as difficulty goes, around Fed A level (I can win on hard more than half the time). Quite fun to play though, makes for lots of tense moments and decisions.

Can end up a bit tight on both missiles and drones in Sectors 3-4.

Surprisingly not that luck dependant. You're quite hard to cripple completely and can generally run away if things look too bad. With all the drones you have the equivalent of ~100hp which can cover for a lot of early game bad luck/mistakes/drone carriers. Not needing to find a shop that sells shields keeps the RNG demons at bay. Your starting weapons can take you most of the way through the game and aren't too hard to find good combos with.

TODO/possible improvements
Switch the layout. Copying the Bulkwark is just lame, even if it does work as a proof of concept.

Might start out with too many missiles.

Tweak the ship coloration a bit?

Gameplay experience

I did my first ever run of Captain's Edition in this ship. It went about as well as could be expected.

Shortly before a hard victory against a randomized flagship (so many missiles , would have died without Repair Burst):

[stylesrj]

Only one missile weapon?
The Bulwark had two in case of Defence Drones and you can't find a real gun.
And Captain's Edition has a lot more Defence Drones on more than just Engi ships.

I'd say I'd do a video run, but missile ships are not exactly my style and you'd either see a string of my resetting the game in Sector 1 as everything goes completely wrong, a string of me running out of missiles on an enemy ship that shouldn't be evading so much and having to keep running away, or I find a new gun or two and use them and the ship becomes a regular run where the gimmick is forgotten and I sell all those missile weapons, augments and drones for the stuff I like.

[Madagascar]

@stylesrj: Ah, I haven't tried Captain's Edition, just vanilla. Defence drones are an automatic "Run away!" (kinda like autoships to a Crystal B), so if they're common in CE this ship might not be CE compatible. How common are they?

I do think you might have misjudged a couple of things though (not that I'm demanding you playtest it or anything! ):
The ship is very good at getting out of "Everything's going wrong!" situations (considerably better than any other ship I've played), provided you carefully consider which of Repair Burst or Breach you can afford to lose when your weapons get attacked and Repair Burst critical components.
I also greatly doubt you'll run out of missiles in sector 1, the ship can fire around 40 without any refills thanks to Explosive Replicator, and most things in sector 1 die to two hits. One of the main points is that unlike the Bulkwark which uses 3-5 missiles per encounter (out of 28 total), this one uses 1-2 missiles per encounter (out of 20 total) and is thus far less likely to run out.

[stylesrj]

@stylesrj: Ah, I haven't tried Captain's Edition, just vanilla. Defence drones are an automatic "Run away!" (kinda like autoships to a Crystal B), so if they're common in CE this ship might not be CE compatible. How common are they?

Common enough that you don't have to be in an Engi Sector to be subject to the Defence Drone BS.

The ship is very good at getting out of "Everything's going wrong!" situations (considerably better than any other ship I've played), provided you carefully consider which of Repair Burst or Breach you can afford to lose when your weapons get attacked and Repair Burst critical components.

The RNG can be very, very cruel. Especially when it comes to fires being started by a Basic Laser in your Weapons.

I also greatly doubt you'll run out of missiles in sector 1, the ship can fire around 40 without any refills thanks to Explosive Replicator, and most things in sector 1 die to two hits. One of the main points is that unlike the Bulkwark which uses 3-5 missiles per encounter (out of 28 total), this one uses 1-2 missiles per encounter (out of 20 total) and is thus far less likely to run out.

Yeah, but there are runs where people get to Sector 3 and still haven't got a real gun to supplement the liability weapon. And enemy evasion becomes a nuisance. You could try and stop it but you've only got the one gun which means a miss can be costly, especially since there are no shields and any shot can be crippling (again, I refer to that time when a Basic Laser hit me in Weapons and it started two fires which lead to the enemy ship getting away because I had no guns in which to shoot)

[Madagascar]

So I tried Captain's Edition for the first time ever while using the Stolid: Imgur

The RNG can be very, very cruel.

While everything else in your post was off-base as far as my run was concerned, this here? Completely accurate.

I think the main reason I lost this was because of my unfamiliarity with how CE works, how resource poor it is and a couple of silly mistakes.

Observations:
Defence drones were pretty rare.
As I expected, crippling attacks more or less didn't happen thanks to the extra power bar on weapons and the Repair Burst.
Hull Repair drones are awesome, especially when combined with drone manufacture (which I foolishly didn't actually get til sector 7). Missile manufacturing was a waste of scrap.
I could generally compensate for most types of attack and rarely had to retreat, ship performance was never the issue.
I got mixed luck with the only two alternative weapons I found, the charge laser combos quite badly but the heavy missile drone was pretty useful the three or four times I used it (I was rarely able to use it due either to lack of energy or lack of spare drones).
Missing lead to enemy ships getting away 4 times total in the game. Not too much worse than normal really.
Running out of missiles only started to become an issue around Sector 4-5. The lack of resource drops in CE means either some store purchases, a complementary weapon (such as a 1-2 power laser or beam) or the missile manufacturing augment may be called for.
FUEL. WHERE IS THE FUEL?

[stylesrj]

Missing lead to enemy ships getting away 4 times total in the game. Not too much worse than normal really.

Normally, you don't let any ship escape. Unless it's one of those cowardly AI ships whom always get away because you never have the firepower to get past their insane evasion...
Having 4 ships get away because you only have one working gun is a sign that maybe the ship needs something else...

FUEL. WHERE IS THE FUEL?

You should have bought as much as possible... but then you wouldn't have any money for missiles.

Maybe I'll give it a try... or hand it off to Missile Master Melia. That Rockman loves those sorts of ships

[Madagascar]

You should have bought as much as possible...

I did.
Throughout the entire game every single time there was any for sale I bought the maximum amount.