Subset Games Forum

I really like a lot of the new augmentations. They make it feel more like you can plan your ship for a specific cause. Like, in the vanilla game, it was basically a choice between spending all your scrap on weapons, boarding, or drones. Now, you can do a lot more, and even make your ship more defensively oriented, if you want.

My rundown on the augments:
Explosive Replicator: Effectively doubles your missile count, or drops the price by half. Very useful if you want more than 1-2 missile-type weapons.

Defense Scrambler: Very useful if you rely on drones (including hacking drones!) or missiles.

Emergency Respirator: This one is one of the weakest, I think. I usually sell it, since it doesn't even have any blue options. It could have its uses, but between crystal dudes, lanius, and the clone bays, I don't ever have a use for it.

Fire Suppression: It's kind of OK, but the only times it would be useful is if you haven't spent enough scrap on defense, if you're fighting at a sun, or if the enemy has fire bombs. Situational at best.

Backup DNA Bank: Pretty much a convenience feature, for me anyways. I mean, it would protect you if your clone bay gets damaged, but the other time, when you don't have enough power? Yeah...you can cheese that. Just power and de-power the clone bay with a single power, and the timer on your dudes dying gets reset. Maybe patch it, so you can't manually de-power it if there's clones waiting, and you don't have the augment? :S

Distraction Buoys: I thought this would be useless at first, but a single jump is probalby worth 20-50 scrap on average, depending on the difficulty, and if you have scrap recover arm(s). So, it'd probably pay for itself within a couple sectors. Not as useful as the scrap arms, though. I think it should be buffed to 2-3 jumps, but that might be too much.

Zoltan Shield Bypass: Useful if you don't have enough weapons, but...you need those anyways. :P

Reconstructive Teleporter: This one is really cool, especially for boarders. The even cooler part, is you can use it to get a "free" system slot, by foregoing a med bay or clone bay. Unfortunately, the Slug B is the only ship that you can do this with, as every other ship starts with a clone bay or a med bay.

Overall, I really like the new content. The extra flavour-text encounters are also really good. Too many in vanilla were just variants on "there's an enemy dude; fight their ship!" :P

gamjuven wrote:The main thing I don't like is how you pretty much have to have mind control to beat the final boss. You need it simply to negate their use of it on you.

You need Mind Control exactly like you need Cloaking - which is to say, you don't need it at all. It's nice to have, but far from mandatory. Hacking can negate their Mind Control just as easily. You can have Slug crew on important spots. You can also simply have a large crew and mostly ignore it.

LastDay wrote:

Enkrow wrote:The patch notes say that tweaks were made for the UI to be more "user friendly", and I can see why some of the tweaks such as the entire block lighting up green may be useful for a tablet player, but for a PC the massive color change just doesn't need to be there.

That's weird...
I don't see any changes to the UI on the PC version, aside from the save/restore crew positions buttons.

one change i like, when your using a beam weapon trying to trace the line to target it,every room its going to hit will be highlighted with a yellow border, it helps especially on the tablet version.

of course, i like all the added things.
i was skeptical about mind control and hacking and i thought i would never use them...i was wrong.
the vulcan gun is awesome
i hate enemies that use the flak gun mark 2 : 7 shots with a very fast charge time and a low energy cost, wow imagine having 2 of those!, i frequently run into shipes with both the flak gun 1 and a burst laser 2 in the first 2 sectors on normal, its fricking brutal

Really disappointed the ships weren't balanced. Engi B is still absolutely useless. Same goes for Stealth B and a couple others. SHIPS THAT REQUIRE THE PLAYER TO REPLACE THEIR ENTIRE EQUIPMENT TO MAKE THEM USEFUL ARE BROKEN.

I unlocked Human C which appears to be Lanius A sans the Hacking system.

Currently in the process of figuring out how I unlock Engi C without having to play the atrocity that is Engi B.

ain wrote:Really disappointed the ships weren't balanced. Engi B is still absolutely useless. Same goes for Stealth B and a couple others. SHIPS THAT REQUIRE THE PLAYER TO REPLACE THEIR ENTIRE EQUIPMENT TO MAKE THEM USEFUL ARE BROKEN.

The ships are not meant to be balanced. They are meant to provide unique gameplay. If anything, they're intended to be HARDER than the A and B ships, to give those who want it more of a challenge.

And if you're selling off the Glaive beam on the Stealth B, I think I know why you're having so much trouble with it. I don't think I've ever met the flagship with that ship withOUT the Glaive as my coup-de-grace.

ain wrote:Currently in the process of figuring out how I unlock Engi C without having to play the atrocity that is Engi B.

You can't. I would suggest 2 things:
1) Play on Easy and play sectors 1 and 2 normally, except put all your money into fuel and engines. From sector 3 on, just b-line to the exit beacon.
2) Don't bother. If you hate the B ship you probably won't be too happy with the C ship.

5thHorseman wrote: The ships are not meant to be balanced. They are meant to provide unique gameplay. If anything, they're intended to be HARDER than the A and B ships, to give those who want it more of a challenge.

Being unbalanced is not the same as being utterly broken. Some ships serve no purpose within the game. Arguing they're meant to be challenging is moot when a ships game plan is utterly defunct.

They're so defunct they might as well start without an O2 system and then people like you would go ahead and defend it as sound game design. It's mindboggling.

I can come up with a dozen ways to make a one-man Drone ship or Stealth setup that would be challenging and unique to play and not get screwed by the RNG a majority of the time. If to you getting screwed by the RNG is 'unique gameplay' then this discussion is over.

I actually tried Engi B for the first time just a couple of days ago and the game legitly just wanted me to win. I was given 15 crewmembers in total (did not buy any, on easy mode though). At some point, I was actually frustrated that it kept throwing crew at me.

My scores are also very strange to me. My top scores for Stealth B, Engi B, and Slug B are in my top 5 overall scores, beating out all my other B ship scores despite nearly all the other B ships being regarded as top tier ships.

ain wrote:

5thHorseman wrote: The ships are not meant to be balanced. They are meant to provide unique gameplay. If anything, they're intended to be HARDER than the A and B ships, to give those who want it more of a challenge.

Being unbalanced is not the same as being utterly broken. Some ships serve no purpose within the game. Arguing they're meant to be challenging is moot when a ships game plan is utterly defunct.

They're so defunct they might as well start without an O2 system and then people like you would go ahead and defend it as sound game design. It's mindboggling.

I can come up with a dozen ways to make a one-man Drone ship or Stealth setup that would be challenging and unique to play and not get screwed by the RNG a majority of the time. If to you getting screwed by the RNG is 'unique gameplay' then this discussion is over.

I'll give you the Vortex. The only viable strategy is to sell those two weapons for better alternatives as quickly as possible. But the DA-SR12 is NOT a bad ship. It's a powerhouse that can totally own most every ship (yes, it has a bit of trouble with drones but not as much as everybody thinks) in the first 2 sectors, and can even muddle its way through sector 3 without a single upgrade or purchase. Assuming (like you must with all other ships) that you can get another weapon and pick up shields (they're extremely common) before sector 4, you're essentially guaranteed a win.

Well, in Normal mode of the old version you were. In Advanced Edition's Hard Mode you're guaranteed to lose just like you would with all the other ships

Actually I managed my first hard mode win with engi b. I had another heavy ion and a glaive beam in the end. Not any cloaking or fancy stuff either. Just shield drone, hull repair drone and full upgrades to shields and engine.

Mendel wrote:...Not any cloaking or fancy stuff either. Just shield drone, hull repair drone and full upgrades to shields and engine.

Uh huh, no "fancy stuff," right.