Subset Games Forum

I think Tele is a bit OP because ...

- it's cheap
- it's easy to find in shops
- use low power— Ion storms has very little effects on you...
- use no consumable, unlike missiles/bombs
- using it allow you to get tons of everything easily— scraps, crews, guns, drones, consumable, ... everything!
- can be precisely controlled— even what square your boarder should stand on can be control!
- crews is common and easy to get and we can have lots of them on board at once
- plus the fact that Mantis + Rocks, the boarders of choice for obvious reasons, are also very common and cheap too ... and you absolutely don't need the broken Crystal dudes to successfully use Tele...
- as greetingsfromoslo mentioned already: it's a separated system and can be use in concerts with others systems when needed
- not only that, it can even work by itself in many cases, unlike weapons or drones where you have to use a combination of them, which require lots of upgrades
- and once it become 'usable', never stop being 'usable'— as I said earlier, it can evan be use on an airless ships to good effect ... and there's no events that prevent it use
- enemy AI is not exactly smart when it come to defending their ships from human-controlled boarders
- require little tactical decision and sense of timing (which made the game rather boring to play IMO); even if it won't going to do anything much if you decided to send boarders over, it's still a good idea to do it because it's inherently more advantages to send boarders over rather than not to send them... in large part because it's ...
- reliable and has no systematic risks; every faults involved the use of Telepad is due to Human errors, which can be eliminated entirely with a bit of know-how and experiences and being mindful
- tons of very good blue options; it's worth the scraps buying it solely for this reason alone even if you're not using it even once
- etc etc ...

Telepad will not be OP (imo) if doing any one of the following ...

Disclaimer: this is not a request (since I think the current Telepad brokenness is done on purpose and for a good reason... not to mentioned that I also have my own solution for it— I don't buy it), it simply just for the sake of discussion.

- Using Telepad to sent boarder over to kill crews has no bonus rewards ...
- Cut all crew's attacks damage at least by half; both to systems and to each other, player and cpu alike— I kinda like this idea actually!
- Regardless of the lv of Telepad used, only Crystal crew can survive the trips to an airless ships
- Add some type of negative random events (with texts to give a hint or warn you about it before battle) involved Telepad :—

• • maybe an on-board trap that tracked the frequency signature of the incoming signal and BOOM! Shields only has 50% power and the Telepad room is now on fire!
  • similarly, maybe a some sort of tripwire-like trap that locked the room and warped some sort of bomb into it
  • or disable it outright before battle...
  • etc etc ...

- Crews, especially the one that's good as boarder (or any non-human for that matter), are much more rare and expensive... and not having, like, 3 of them to buy in a single shop— in fact, it might as well just stop selling (exotic-type) crews in the shop... we get more crews than we needed already from killing enemy crews using pads...

** Noted that I didn't propose any change to the Telepad itself at all— it's deliberate.

One thing you all are forgetting, you can't defeat the flagship with a teleporter only, and that's often half the challenge in a typical game.

I like some of the nerf ideas I've seen on here. I think the Teleporter should cost around 120 scrap and the rewards for killing a crew should be different and not necessarily better. More crewmembers and weapons but less scrap for instance.

Also, it should be mentioned that using the Teleporter is probably the most fun part of the game.

GCP wrote:One thing you all are forgetting, you can't defeat the flagship with a teleporter only, and that's often half the challenge in a typical game.

You can't only because stage III has supershield. Add any weapon capable of damaging that and beating flagship with TP is doable and actually quite easy.

Drones need to be equally viable vs teleporter. Killing the crew gives more scrap/fuel which is a huge advantage. Theres nothing that is strong vs droneships (which boarders are typically weak against). I feel like drones should be a kind of counterpart.