And in addition to that I believe, on his own accord, he tested it on three different versions of his ship. The same basic design but Mk 1, 2 and 3 kinda thing (but all with block limits turned on). Each one with different strengths/weaknesses but wasn't using some exotic weird design like how some are built.
If you do remember what ship the other tester was flying, I would be quite interested in checking it out as well. Assuming it's on the workshop somewhere, of course.
It's not on the workshop as he wasn't the workshop type Every ship has a weakness, every ship has a strategy that can work, but the most important thing is the right kind of ship for the right enemy. the tianlong isn't the only tough ship out there. In vanilla at least (as that's all I play), the ship is one of many that can spawn and they all vary in difficulty. I am not joking when I say I've seen people go hunting for it for hours trying to find it specifically and failing. So to come across it in the first place means you have to be lucky, or unlucky depending on your point of view. That in itself in my view is a form of balance. It's not a ship you'll find everywhere, you have to either spend a lot of time looking for it or simply get lucky.
You can kill anything in this game by exploiting your ability to fall back and repair. If you can break a shield, you'll eventually win. It's just a matter of applying enough materiel to the problem. You can kill most things through maneuverability. OPVs and POIs don't dodge or pursue. You can fly simple patterns that bedevil most turrets and make you very difficult to hit. Once you've opened up a safe angle of attack, you can move in for the kill. What you can't do it have a knockdown drag-out battleship fight between armored pier opponents hammering away at each other. At least, not with block limits on. Turn them off, and you can make ships that can handle those sorts of fights. I recommend you come up with other rules for yourself if you do, such as forgoing dodging and withdrawing just to recover shields.
Some good info here. I appreciate that. I'll try to bring up my continuing concerns without being insulting. I guess the main thing that bothers me now, is that the testing phase for a new ship, or at least the testing phase of the Tianlong (admittedly a sample size of 1, but) unless I'm wildly misunderstanding what Escarli has said, seems to be: • Can the person who designed it and literally knows every weakness defeat it with a ship that does not follow all the difficulty rules? • Can another, unnamed person defeat it with a ship that ostensibly follows all the difficulty rules, except maybe it doesn't because we cannot see either the ship being used or the fight itself? • If yes to both, put it in the game without any further testing, or feedback of any sort. • Blame the players if they have trouble with it. It just feels like not a whole lot of thought goes into balancing the game in general, whether it be FPS combat or ship combat. I guess that comes with the territory when you crowd-source most of the content for your game. A few rounds of QA before scattering the ships randomly across the game map would be nice, but I suppose with such a small dev team, and such a small player audience, such tactics would yield very few results. There should certainly be difficult fights in the game. Raid-boss level enemies and ships should absolutely exist. But perhaps they should be confined to special specific systems, so those looking for them can find them, and those who try to avoid them can do so as well. Having it be 100% RNG as to whether or not you can find a specific enemy ship seems a bit silly to me. Why not confine the most powerful of warships to the territories of their factions, where they would potentially have the greatest strategic (and gameplay) value? From a military perspective, are the Zirax really going to be patrolling backwater systems, which have almost no resources or strategic value, with their most expensive and powerful warships, completely at random? Does that not seem a tiny bit illogical? I get that they're trying to oppress a whole galaxy, but one would expect an empire of this sort and ambition to be at least a little bit more efficient with their military assets. But then again, maybe I'm just being too picky here.
Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, I have no reason to lie. I know precisely what ships he used because he used to stream. He did a number of tests for me on a number of things. I would not submit something that could not be defeated. The tianlong is a warlord ship, it has no faction area but it's also not a ship you'll come across that often either. It frustrates me when I see people say nothing gets tested, that it's impossible because for stuff I do at least I know I test it the best I can. But not only that I'll look out for feedback on twitch, YouTube, discord, these forums etc and make updates accordingly. I'm not interested in building impossible, frustrating, not fun things. Now one thing that's not clear is if the OP is playing RE or not because that might very well have a factor into things. The Tianlong was a player ship I took from the workshop and did a conversation for vanilla. What others have done with it for their scenarios is up to them and nothing to do with either myself or Eleon. I actually had to change it a couple of patches ago because it was too easy. Even with those changes, it still has weak spots, and if you really want to know the person who tested it said yes whilst it does have a lot of firepower it's not as robust as the Tovera, a testament to Vermillions design. Edit: It's also worth mentioning that its been in the game getting on for 1.5 years now at least, it's not a new ship and there are many people who can tell you the best strategy to use to take it down.
As far as RE is concerned the entire warlord patrol group is pretty much unchanged from vanilla. If anything it would be easier in RE due to shield upgrades which aren't present in vanilla. I assumed the OP was playing vanilla because they didn't mention anything else. If they are playing RE there's far worse ships out there.
The ship being used was an extremely poor choice. It's a multi-role combat vessel, AKA a mobile base. It's a ship to be lived out of, with full constructor setup, farm, hangar and habitation. It was not a single-role combat vessel (Dreadnought killer). It's a ship whose combat effectiveness is built and equipped to take on unshielded POIs on planets (hence why it's equipped exclusively with low-damage planet-functional weapons). There is no situation where that ship could beat the Tianlong, even with the best pilot in Empyrion and M/V turned off. It wouldn't even be able to beat an Imerat, even allowing retreating and repairing it does not have the weapon TYPES let alone the firepower to beat a dreadnought-class patrol vessel six times it's size. As for the target: The Tianlong isn't as strong as it appears due to the massive blindspot at the rear. Fixed weapons and a fast ship shoved right up it's butt and you can core it with minimal effort. It's not an impossible fight. It can be done multiple ways but every way requires a skilled player with a dedicated combat vessel. As it stands, the Player chose to attack a ship that was visibly superior in both size and firepower, did not retreat the instant he saw the (significant) first salvo leave the ship's turrets.
OPVs (AI ships) drift along at a leisurely pace. They do not even achieve the same max speed as players. Your scanner does to like 30km or something, so there's no reason you couldn't see that thing way before it could even get to you. That's a terrible choice of ship for any type of serious combat. And as others have said, the Tianlong is the single hardest ship in the main game. If you want to slug it out with the Tianlong, you need a PvP class ship. LiCorp ships by NaStral remain the best publicly available ships in that class for the vanilla game. Find something not too expensive and try it. The point of a PvP ship is that it won't die the second its shields go out. They're designed to have tons of physical armor. AI ships have more turrets than players, but players can have more armor. Player weapon limits will let you have 10 rocket turrets, 10 plasma turrets, 4 manual rockets, 2 artillery turrets, and 12 projectile turrets. You can skip everything except the rocket turrets and still do tons of damage. The ship you linked doesn't even have the max of anything so it's very under gunned. Even still, the Tianlong has a ridiculous amount of turrets. Look for a blind spot. I killed one myself in about six minutes and didn't lose a single weapon on my ship. That was taking advantage of the blind spot. Other times I've killed it with PvP class ships both big and small. Twice I've taken it on with a group. It can be done many ways. See above, I can confirm it can be done while being well within vanilla limits. I'd wager if you play things right you might be able to take it down with a T3 ship.
it really is a pretty cool ship. jrandall did an awesome job. i'm playing vanilla. i have downloaded reforged eden but haven't tried it out yet. i only have 500 hours or so in vanilla so i didn't feel like i've exhausted all of what it has to offer yet. i was only 17.1 LY from the starting system. i wasn't expecting to get jumped by the stupidest thing imaginable that close to the start. shame on me i guess. i had added a few laser turrets as well. 4 or 5 i think. it's been a couple days since i touched the game so i forgot. didn't really make a difference. no matter how i dodged and weaved i never got that stupid thing below 80% health before my shield was gone. there's just no way i can see to dodge 80 missile barrages every 3 seconds.
this is my second playthrough where one of these is within first jump distance from the starting system. they're all over the place.
ok fine i definitely wasn't prepared. but i feel like you're wrong about a blindspot. i got hammered by missiles when i tried to get behind it. maybe my mobile base ship was too big to fit but if there's a blind spot there i couldn't find it. i turned AI off and had a peek around it in godmode to see what i was up against and what i found was this stupid thing has 3 cores. even if i could get the shield down long enough to try to core it i'd have to bore all the way to the front of the ship to get the third core.
Then you have been doublely unlucky. The tianlong is in a group of ships which means it gets to chose from that group when deciding what to spawn. It's pot luck if you have it or not. I watched one streamer try and find one for 3 hours once before he finally found it. Edit: It changed slightly in 1.10 as the Tianlong is now in a group on it's own, however the way it's used in the space orbit playfield is it's also lumped in with the other warlord groups, meaning it's a 1 in 44 chance of spawning.
this is exactly my point. this kind of bs ship should be a modded in thing, not vanilla. or at the very least it should be a unique ship in a known location so it can be avoided if you chose. not some random patrol ship that you have to know the name of. i had seen the name floating around but until it showed up and vaporized me i didn't realize what it was. i understand people wanting a challenge, but as you say not eveyone wants to fly a cheese cube of death. i picked the ship i picked because i liked the look and featiures of it. i didn't go looking for the cheesiest killer available.
The sheer size of the ship and that it was covered in turrets are a pretty clear warning that it's not something you want to mess with. You shouldn't try to fight any patrol vessels at all in the ship you were using, let alone something so big and mean looking as the tianlong. Please take responsibility for your own mistakes and choices. This wasn't any fault of the game or the patrol vessel itself. You chose to fly a non-combat ship in a place where hostile patrol vessels were, you didn't check your detector to see it coming up on you very slowly, and you didn't properly scout the sector to find out if it was clear or not. This is on you, and you would have been destroyed if it had been any other patrol vessel too given your description of events.
I've killed OPVs worth nearly ten million CPU and armed with almost fifty turrets using a T2 destroyer with only four fixed lasers and four rocket launcher for antiship weaponry. All it took was some fancy flying to stay inside turret shadows and a nearby waystation for shield recharges. Difficulty is barely even a factor. What matters most is having the methodology, designs, and rules that allow you to find and win the the sorts if fights you DO want.
Most of the comments highlight that skill and experience can prepare you for encounters with POIs like this. Most of the comments also highlight that RNGesus can completely change the gaming experience. One player not prepared for or looking for this ship finds it, and many players wanting to find this ship must spend hours. RNGesus has to promonient a place.
Trust me, there's very little pilot skill involved. Anybody can yo-yo a POI to death. It's the situational awareness that comes with experience that gives you a real advantage. Experience is what lets you build ships that are powerful, maneuverable, and efficient. It's what lets you read and understand the weaknesses in a target and how you might exploit them. And the only way to get it is to go out there, build stuff, fight stuff, and see how it all smashes together.
Which might include losing a ship or two to start with but then that's just part of the learning experience.
Seed-based random numbers are used to distribute resources, poi, and encounters but the outcome is strictly deterministic- 30 players share a seed and they all have the exact same universe. The patrol vessels appear to function in a station keeping or sentry role around where they spawn in. The only time you don't know what to expect is the first time you encounter it. It's already been said but you need to adapt strategies and abandon expectation for what actually happens if you want to avoid getting caught in a frustrating death loop. Don't curse the use of dice to establish info that a Terran invader wouldn't be privy to- you have to kill a lot of trees if you don't want the Zirax to shoot on sight.
