mothballs wrote:-Most importantly, with the array of new weapons and ships out there, the player dies (often), but usually not knowing exactly why. (...)
-This is compounded by some poor audio/visual choices regarding the weapons. Seems many or most of the new weapons have extremely loud reports and/or very fast projectile speeds. This leads to situations for the new (or experienced!) player where all they hear is a loud BANG and a flash of light, and suddenly their pilot is dead and their shields are totally down.
Experience, experience, experience. With enough (personal) experience gained, those are nill-issues (and, in fact, you learn to use them for your own good!).
mothballs wrote:-The player should be in absolute control of himself, his ship, and his crew
No, why should he? Hes the captain, he gives orders, but crew have "mind of their own". They're not mindless drones.
mothballs wrote:CE adds a bunch of mid-fight events where your ship just powers down or catches on fire for No Damned Reason, which is deeply insulting to the player's sense of agency.
Just like with random events between fights, random events in-fight can happen to BOTH you and your opponent. Sometimes i't just lore-text, sometimes it helps you a little (when enemy burns his reactor), sometimes, you get a little "minus". Who said that that equipment can fail *only* outside of battle (in events)? Expecting that seems like getting used to game limitations, and being irritated, when those limitations are lifted.
Not to mention, that those effects are really, really negligible, if they happen, at all.
mothballs wrote:This extends to the piracy / diplomacy gameplay as well. The player shouldn't even be given the option to go through with an act that'll cause crew to revolt. If he has a piracy-enabling item, show the blue dialogue. If he doesn't, don't show it. Leaving the piracy option is a false choice (you'd be dumb to ever take it without a blue option) and just further instills in the player the sense that his crew are not his to control, undermining his sense of agency.
And it is as it should be - you have OPTION to do something morally ambiguous, but you don't have permanent mind control over your crew members, so you can't know if they will feel the same. CE clearly communicates, when such action can disturb your crew.
In game-mechanics terms, it's all risk vs. reward. You can get nice reward (for example, in case of piracy, which otherwise would give you a wasted beacon), but there is risk. Certain augments or blue options mitigate the risk.
mothballs wrote:-Extend this further to certain combat augs, especially Targeting Jammer. The jammer itself seems to jam more often than it works.
This irritates me too, but only because i think that risk/gain ratio is screwed here. Using those external artillery batteries of targeting jammers is "expensive" enough (cost of getting them, power cost), and if they have random, quite-high chance of fail, it's simply better to invest the resources (scrap and power bars) into straight weapon/drone/whatever. Cost of failure is simply too high, for the "reward" when it works.
mothballs wrote: In CE I sent mining drones ahead to mine an asteroid for me (blue choice that sets a quest marker). When I went out of my way to get there, I'm greeted by zero rewards, automatic hull damage, system fires and an interminable wait game as my crew fix the engines and my FTL charges.
I must say that I never got this outcome (so I think it's quite rare). If it would happen often, I agree that it would be a little over the line. If it happens very, very rarely... Well, you just have stepped on wrong foot of RNG
Also, some augments mixed with those possibilities give even better results (for example, having both beam drones and drone recovery arm, give you free scrap AND your drone parts back), so I guess that low chance of catastrophe might be there for balancing reasons.
mothballs wrote:Or, another time when I visited a shop and was immediately greeted by a gang of four Rock thugs that pulped my slug crew into slug juice. That's not a challenge. That's just spite.
Nope - you just visited a "shop" in pirate-infested sector. They spawn in addition to normal shops, and are meant as a traps. BTW, if sole shop-spawned boarding event mopped you, I don't think you would get much further, really...
mothballs wrote:-Trading is enough bother already, clogging up an aug slot with no guarantee of payoff if you can't find a shop that'll buy. Getting a rebel fleet advance on buying AND selling trade goods unless you have ANOTHER near-useless aug that enables instant trading, just makes the whole process unappealing in the extreme.
Complains about trading are often, and always based on lack of experience. Check Biohazard's videos of CE Hard attempts, to see ridiculous amounts of scrap it can give , if used properly. BTW, I must say that I almost never buy trade goods myself - I just don't like being too dependent on shops - but I can't pretend that other players are getting coconuts from it.
mothballs wrote:[/b]There is a lot of pointless fiddling-around in written events and game descriptions that conveys a sense of meddling ineptitude, frankly. For instance, I encountered a slaver event where "drawing straws" was changed to "drawing cards." Nothing else about the event seemed to have changed
(...)
But someone had to put their finger in that pie and swirl it around, just because they could. Another example: "Stealth Weapons" augment changed to "Advanced Cloaking Field." So, an augment that tells you what it does right there in its name has been changed to something you have to read the description for to find out what it does.
Lack of experience, again. The things you've mentioned were changed VERY extensively - you just lacked certain pre-requiments to experience alternate scenarios. All changes things have good reason for changes, trust me(tm). In some rare cases it is for consistency, in all others - they just got additional uses. The slavery thing you mentioned gave me especially good laugh, cause meetings with slavers is one of MOST changed vanilla-events, in CE
mothballs wrote:[/b]I think even beyond the emergent RPS issues with all the new ships and weaponry, the starting zone has gotten buffed across the board? All I know is in vanilla or smPK, I can at least survive zone 1 in Normal mode nine times out of ten (unless I'm playing one of THOSE ships, like Stealth B). In CE, I'm luckily if I don't die in zone 1 nine times out of ten. And that's a reversal of fortune I don't think I can entirely blame simply on getting blown out of orbit by new enemy weaponry.
Learn to adapt, ye scumvy dog!
Seriously though - CE *is* meant to be harsher, and *is* meant to require thinking outside of "rock, paper, scissors" box, that you may get used to. It is like complaining that - upon switching from "rock, paper, scissors" to chess - you get overwhelmed by possibilities.
/Estel