Now come back to the game from a long absence. I really love the huge universe, the factions, the danger in space. It's not just fly around empty anymore, place is hella dangerous, enemy, cvs...drones, space stations. all things i voted for in the features survey excellent. One thing i am wondering though, with everything so dangerous and shields being a minor stop gap, hull armor and I mean LOTS of it is the only way to survive combat with meaner enemies, if not in a group. Not saying your small ship SHOULD be able to 1-1 a dreadnought but.......what role can a small ship play now? I was/am hoping that they add something which makes it harder to lock homing weapons on small ships etc. because no matter what ya do homing rockets still wreck your day no matter how maneuverable you are. hoping for point defense and things like flares maybe, or ECM? to stop enemy from being able to get locks. etc.
SVs can actually be quite large and also be used for combat if they have shields, if they are built with armor steel and with plenty of turrets and weapons loaded. There are some good examples on the workshop of such types that easily fit in a hangar bay or landing pad on a CV. Small vessels have only warp capabilities inside a system, an important difference to CVs. Usually the role of small ships is the quick exploration of a planet, other bodies in the system or asteroid fields, all this mostly for mining operations (with mounted laser drills if you can), and to go visit space stations for doing some trades and buying stuff etc., all this by avoiding combat, especially whithout shields installed. You then have some mounted weapons installed to shot down drones, but every other enemy is too serious an adversary to engage in combat, you hit your speed trigger and fly away.
CVs have kind of had that issue since the beginning of time. They're a do it all ship class that does almost everything well. Why build a base that's stuck on a planet when you can build a base that you can take anywhere? There's not much a base can do that a CV can't. Smelters and deconstructors are really the only advantage they have unless you play on a PVP server. In space CV weapons absolutely wreck everything. If you have a shield, it's god mode. For anything that you're for some reason afraid of , just use artillery and outrange it. I mostly use SVs for planetary stuff outside of the early game when you can't build a CV yet. I usually leave my CV in space so the only thing that's ever at risk is my SV and not my mobile home. They're faster than CVs, cost less fuel and have more focused firepower for POIs since most CV weapons don't work on planets. Like CVs, if you have a shield you are invincible. Anything that's normally dangerous to SVs like missiles do basically no damage to shields. Missiles can actually be dodged reliably with strafing if your SV is agile enough though. You basically fake out the missile. Strafe one way then when it gets close strafe in the opposite direction + up or down and it will miss.
@ArticPrism, I cannot confirm your god mode theory in 1.4, they must have nerfed the shields or made the enemy weapons more powerful, one of the 2. I have currently a stock Merc ship upgraded to T3, with shield, 4 rocket launchers, 4 gatling guns and going against a simple POI in space like a zyrax shipyard will deplete my shields in about 30 seconds after which I must put distance or I have tons of repairs to do afterwards. You will say, ok, the Merc is a toy, get a serious ship. I then have taken a Skaar T4 with 6 miniguns, 4 plasma guns, 4 etc. etc., all with armored steel, and still the shields don't last for more than 30 seconds after which I take damage even with armored steel. So bye bye god mode at least... Then, speaking CV, in the tutorial 1.4 I've seen how quickly you can lose your UCH Severance (a copy of a stock transport CV) which has a good nr. of turrets, but in vain if you don't have shields, you are scummed really fast against a destroyer, and I doubt the shields now do that much for you.
It's possible that I gave outdated info. I haven't played since like. 1.1 or something but I haven't read any patch notes that stood out about increases in difficulty. In my experience, you can strafe around and avoid most damage the game throws at you. The projectile speed of most of the enemy fire is pretty slow so if you aren't flying a ship with the agility of a brick you should be able to dodge most of it. I'll reinstall the game and see what things are like now and report back to you.
when you try it also try reforged and/or reforged eden lots of people are using those scenarios and than discussing behaviour on here sometimes not clearly stating which game they are playing.
What I didn't say is: I'm rather a noobie with 320 hours of gameplay only, so I didn't cut the edges of my bad tactics or similar, all in all I find the game quite challenging in difficulty. And I play at Medium only (CPU + volume off).
I played vanilla for the most part with my friends. The only community content I had on my game was ravien_ff's Project Eden but none of things like Reforged Galaxy. I kind of liked what the mods but I wanted to make the game more difficult without changing how the game is fundamentally played. Reforged Galaxy for example lets you put HV turrets on SVs which is a huge game changer. I did eventually make my own mods but it was basic number changes like increasing projectile speeds by 2-3x for enemy turrets as well as significantly increasing damage dealt to players or convenience changes like larger stack sizes for 02 bottles. The last time I played vanilla enemy missiles did like 10-20% to SV shields and in my mod you don't have a shield anymore(until it regens) if you get hit by one. I play on whatever the hardest is called + CPU and Volume off. Oh my god. I have 903 hours in this game. I didn't realize I had played that much!
