Unbalanced ships

[Ghaleon]

I agree about Rock A being a drag because it flat out requires you to find some offensive replacements and FAST. Sometimes I finish an entire game without ever getting a new weapon (rare but it has happened a couple times...not with Rock A though fortunately). However I also agree about liking a range of balance from good to awful ships.

One of my fave strategy games is advance wars (the series), and part of the charm imo is that each CO isn't remotely close to being balanced with each other.

I kinda think FTL should have a range of balance like Advance wars, and they kinda do that already. However I think they should try to make this range of balance as per race. For example, every ship family should have a really good ship, an ok ship, and a bad ship.. one each. Not like Engi which kinda has 1 awful ship, 1 not very good ship, and one decent ship.

Of course now that Advanced mode is out, I don't really expect them to make new ships anytime soon if ever. But whatever.

[featherwings]

@Jerjare: I don't really want to turn this thread into a talk about my mod, especially when my mod already has a perfectly fine thread.

But I'm going to disagree with one and a half points:

The Engi B is a gunship. It starts with a lot of drones, yes, but it wins its battles by shooting holes in things. It's vanilla layout has three defensive drones to make up for the lack of crew; you can try to make it into a drone ship but you'll still be limited by the 6 drone parts. If you mod it into a drone fighter, you just make it step all over the Engi A while simultaneously taking away the thing that made it unique, the drone crew.

The problem with the Engi B is that it is the worst gunship. I like how it can go in any direction though; my last run wound up with me getting a bunch of early mantises and turning it into a boarding ship. (worked up to sector 7 when my defense drone got shot down twice in a row and I got hull missiled to death)

I think there's a bit of a role left for dedicated drone fighter, but I think you'd be hard pressed surpass the Engi A's ion II when it comes to supporting weapons. If you took strength out of the ion weapon and put it into drones, you'd be left with the same problem as the rock A: running out of a limited material. (No weapons works for boarding ships because you can keep boarding indefinitely, except for the slug B which has the same limited material problem and - surprise surprise - is one of the worst ships)

As for the Stormwalker suggestion, that's just making it into something that's not the Stormwalker. Have you tried the lanius B? It has the bonus of being able to teleport mind controlled enemies onto its own ship which is awesome.

[project_mercy]

The Engi B is a gunship. It starts with a lot of drones, yes, but it wins its battles by shooting holes in things.

I'm not seeing it.

It's exactly the same ship as the Torus, except worse. It has 3 weapon and 3 drone bays and worse guns, worse layout, worse crew, worst augment and worse drones. In fact, it's tied with the Taurus and the stealth ships for being the winner in the "most drones" camp of 3. All the other ships are 4/2 (except the mantis ones at 3/2)

So, I would say by definition, it's a "drone ship". It's just not a very good one. It is actually somewhat odd that it doesn't have a 4-drone bay, given the fact that many AI riggers have 4 drones. It would make the ship a lot more interesting.

[Jerjare]

I see your point featherwings. I think think the issue is the metagame. Ships that work well within the metagame will do well. This includes:

-Reliable ways to generate hull damage
-The ability to reliably tank or avoid damage
-Ways to neutralize/kill enemy crew
-getting enough scrap in 8 sectors to defeat flagship

Most ships are good in one and weak in others. Boarding ships like Mantis B struggle vs autoscouts. Engi A is countered by anti drone. Stealth B is countered by undodgeable beams. But all these ships, with most of the rest, have elements that let them prevail in the metagame: Mantis B has a great starting kit for boarders. Engi A's starting weapon has great synergy with any other weapon. Stealth B can demolish many early ships if it can get a shot off.

Engi B, Rock A, and Slug B rely on limited quantities of resources. Imagine how much worse boarding ships would be if a round trip on the teleporter cost 1 fuel!

Engi B's niche falls far outside the metagame. Drones are a poor replacement for crew. The augment is worse than mantis pheremones, and simply there because drones are as slow as rocks and stuck running laps in a donut of a ship layout. You say it's a gunship but has only 3 weapon slots and one of the worst combinations to penetrate 1 shield and deal 2 hull damage.

[Captain_obvious]

The Stormwalker is unbalanced because it doesn't really have any great advantages to compensate for its drawbacks. Having a heal bomb is not really a great substitute for a medbay or clone bay, and it has the Rock A problem of being missile hungry.

One of my highest ever scores was actually with Engi B, but oddly enough I didn't end up beating the game because I still hadn't found a weapon to replace that godawful Heavy Ion and the first stage of the boss was just a stalemate. If only they'd give it a better cooldown or replace it with a charge Ion or something, it wouldn't be so bad.

[featherwings]

The Engi B is a gunship. It starts with a lot of drones, yes, but it wins its battles by shooting holes in things.

I'm not seeing it.

It's exactly the same ship as the Torus, except worse. It has 3 weapon and 3 drone bays and worse guns, worse layout, worse crew, worst augment and worse drones. In fact, it's tied with the Taurus and the stealth ships for being the winner in the "most drones" camp of 3. All the other ships are 4/2 (except the mantis ones at 3/2) (snip)

(the stealth ships are actually 3/2)

The Engi B is actually really cool because it can turn into any playstyle - but this is because it starts horrible at everything and you have to latch on to whatever you can grab as early as possible.

But if you try to turn it into a drone fighter like the engi A, you're actively hindered by it's starting loadout - all three slots are already full. It's entire drone system starts out dedicated to being crew. The best option is still to sell what you have at the first store, but I'd still argue that if you're going to spend at least a sector and a half shooting holes in things you're at least part gunship.

For what it's worth, I go to four drone slots in my mod and it feels very fitting because it lets you grab a combat drone and still run a full compliment of accessory drones.

[Iranon]

Engi B tends to earn well - it can usually achieve crew kills and gets a few blue options. Lack of manpower is a surprisingly small problemin a ship-to-ship shootout if you know which system you need to man at which time.
Doing very little if the Heavy Ion misses and being flummoxed by 2 shield bubbles put it squarely below average though.

Stormwalker: It's a boarding ship with 4 weapon slots and good layout (being too large for defense drones hurts less in AE), Artemis is a fine weapon, I'll take it over Mantis A.
This and Rock A require careful resource management, but it's far from "find good lasers early or die". One of a variety of weapons/systems/augments will make them self-sustaining and one usually has plenty of time.

[Bloody_Lemon]

I don't see how you are comparing Stormwalker to Vortex and Bulwark.

Stormwalker requires 1-2 (if you want to feel safe by disabling weapons) missiles for a fight against no-medbay ship and 2+ for med-bay against manned ships. Bulwark requires truckload of missiles if you start missing all the time.

Sure, buying Med-bay/Clone-bay is a high priority target, but it can survive well without it for some time. Unlike Bulwark, which starts to chug all missiles at such alarming speed, that you simply won't get enough to sustain it by sector 2-3.

With teleporter you still get more stuff, more crew (which will allow you to further reduce missile consumption) and more free weapons. When I've first played it I thought it was total junk. Now I've slightly changed my mind - tt is certainly tough, but better than other low-tier ships.

Vortex is bad, but giving it better weaponry (switching to Ion Blast/Ion Charge) will make it beastly overpowered with one of the lowest charge times of Heavy I, 2 system damage and breach/fire possibilities. Just look at the Red-Tail, which completely obliterates first several sectors.

[Jerjare]

Honestly there are a lot of 3 power weapon combinations I would rather have than Ion Blast and Heavy Laser. The only good thing about it is that if you time it right: Fire ion, disable shields, fire heavy laser into weapons for 2 damage. Then you can squeeze off another Heavy laser shot before their shields come back online again, and use the ion to bring down their shields again. The problem is this weapon setup is contingent on hitting; any damage to your weapons system will cripple you. Stealth B has this problem too, but Stealth B at least has greater survivability with popping stealth at strategic points. Engi B has no way of protecting yourself; 1 shield bubble and only 10% evasion is quite poor, particularly in AE where you will likely be up against many enemies in sector 1 armed with Leto missiles.

For 3 reactor power, I would prefer Heavy ion and:
Dual laser (more reliable than Heavy Laser, can penetrate 2 shield bubbles)
Minibeam (just great)
2 basic lasers (more reliable)

Or just:
Halberd Beam (could easily handle sector 1 and 2),eavy Pierce , or Burst laser II.

Stormwalker at least has a very useful asset: the teleporter itself. Sure teleporting slugs+heal burst isn't optimal (though its funny, honestly) but having a ship with slugs+teleporter means you will get more blue options; when you find the crazy dude marooned the slugs can tell if he's gonna murder you or not. The teleporter can help you get stranded crew events in nebulae. Having a teleporter that gives more opportunities to gain crew via random events is good synergy, and means you're likely to get progressively better boarders as time goes on.

[Jerjare]

Been working with Engi B for a few games. Still dying, but doing a little better each time.

Some good things: Hocking all the drones and augment feels like a waste, but that 80 scrap can go toward a ton of things, giving you a weird kind of flexibility. You can also "upgrade" the Heavy Ion by selling it and replacing it with ANY of the other Ion weapons. Any beam weapon is a huge step up too.

The lack of good drones hurts but if you can replace them with a fire or ion intruder drone it's worth it.