Postby ledtim » Sat Oct 31, 2015 3:38 pm
Hi, I've been playing FTL for a while, and recently came across your mod.
I have an odd hobby, in that when I get into a game, I spend about as much time thinking and analyzing games as actually playing them.
I've made a spreadsheet for myself analyzing DPS and DPS/Power for drones, artillery, and weapons in the game, and been doing some other random analysis and thought of some suggestions.
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I think it's perfectly fine for some weapons and equipments to be better than some others in the vast majority of situations, but I think even "bad" weapons need to have something going for them that makes you choose it some times. Here's some I noticed that have nothing or very little going for them compared to their competitors.
1. Adaptive Effector
Fully charged, it is 3 power, 18 cooldown, 3 ion damage.
Compare the heavy effector (which has same cost in shops and lower rarity). 2 power, 26 cooldown, 4 ion damage.
The ion DPS is very similar, and that's AFTER adaptive effector fully charged, and heavy effector uses the 1 less power. Fully charged up, up 3x from it's initial values, adaptive effector still has the lowest DPS/power out of all the effector weapons.
I had to double check the numbers, because it's the only weapon that's blatantly horrible in the mod compared to others in the family. Even chain ion which isn't too great, has superior DPS and DPS/power compared to most other ion weapons when fully charged up.
2. Hadur Mine
Compare to Frigg and hull missile (the one that does 4 damage to systemless rooms). Hadur is inferior to a hull missile that hits systemless rooms in every way in combat. Hadur is a lot cheaper in shops, I'll concede, and it has some empty beacon utility (which I don't think really makes up for the inferiority). But also, compare to the Frigg, which costs 1 power, and has 12 sec CD compared to hadur's 20, which means that Hadur actually has less DPS than Frigg, while using more power. Of course, Hadur is bit more efficient in missile use, but it's only the difference between 4 damage/missile to 3 damage/missile.
3.
Defense turret mark I seems to be just worse than Mark II?
It's an old outdated model, so it makes sense it'd be inferior, but shouldn't it at least cost less in shops? Clearance sale, 50% off?
4. Swarm missile drone
-10% fire chance, -10% breach chance, -1 system damage, , -1sec stun, -15 crew damage for -10 store scrap cost (-12%) compared to the heavy-antiship missile drone, to which it is identical in all other aspects.
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Kestrel C.
I don't get this ship really. It was one of the lackluster ships in vanilla, but it became quite possibly the worst ship in the game in CE, and it doesn't exactly have a fun gimmick either.
Its weapons seem to just not work together very well. Baton beam is a very odd choice on a ship that doesn't start with other crew killing weapons or a teleporter. It takes forever to kill any ship and it gets boring, even in sector 1. Some ideas to change the ship, not all of them are meant to be used together:
Add the augment that disables enemy life support. Already takes forever to kill a ship, might as well as try to wait them out while stunning the crew and disabling the ship. Kinda themey with the lanius on board, who's otherwise just there.
Give baton and bo beams some sort of buffs? Longer stun? Breach chance? I find that I rarely end up using those weapons if I have any other choice. I didn't list these up there, because they do fill a unique role, but in my experience, there are almost always better choices, whether for crew killing or system damaging. For example, compare baton beam to hasta beam. Only thing baton beam has over hasta is 1sec less cooldown and 5 sec stun on crew hit. Hasta beam has 35 length compared to baton's 25 length, chance for fire, 1 hull damage per room hit, the same crew and system damage. One radical change would be to give baton and bo some shield piercing, and replace the flak with a light laser (and maybe add a basic laser), turning the Swallow into the second non-boarding crew killing ship other than the slug A.
Replace flak with a weapon like a dual laser that can hit specific rooms reliably, so at least the enemy crew can be whittled down faster and more reliably.
Add a 2nd baton beam so crew can be killed a bit faster, or ships can be more disabled throughly.
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Bloated shops and crew killing weapons
I find that in CE, it's much harder to find useful stuff in shops compared to the vanilla game. I think one of the prime culprits is anti-crew weapons. CE added more than 10 weapons (maybe 20 if drones are included, I haven't done an exact count) that mostly do nothing but damage crew, compared to vanilla's single very rare anti-bio beam. Thing is, only a fraction of typical runs need or want crew damaging weapons, and they don't need too many of them. And fire weapons tend to serve the same purpose of damaging the crew without damaging the ship too much and have the same weaknesses against auto-ships [I suppose the one time anti-crew weapons and fire weapons have different strength/weakness pattern is against Lanius and hologram crew ships, when fire is ineffective while anti-crew remains effective, especially so against holograms. But you only run into those ships quite rarely].
And the light laser series are all quite similar to each other (is there really a need for light Scatter II that has 1 second higher cooldown while doing 15 more crew damage than light scatter I? Or for that matter, is there really a need for the light scatter series? Compared to the light laser series, per salvo, they effectively do little more breaching and have a little less cooldown in exchange for 1 less shield piercing.), and anti-crew drones tend to be not great since they hit random rooms. I find most of the crew damaging weapons and drones I come across to be dead spaces in shops for these reasons. I think the problem of cluttered shops would improve a lot, if some of the similar weapons in the light laser series were pruned. Another less drastic change would be to raise the rarities of crew damaging weapons and drones considerably (I wouldn't mind if all the light laser and light scatter laser series to have 5 rarity. So many of them and they are very similar) so they appear in shops less.
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Oh, and a minor suggestion to close it out. The laser charger that can charge up to 3 times has the identical long and short name as the one that can charge 2 times. Maybe they can be given the "Mark #" treatment.
People are super smug about the Pirate store fight event alone, so I probably won't push that further.