Hypercoils mean damage = reload

[true harness]

I'm playing Career right now, I'm in a difficulty 5-9 system, and I'm packing a 1.6m ship, which I think is well above what should be needed. But the economics of combat are getting pretty funky and here's the basic issue. If I do a simple mission that rewards 20-30k, that's 80-120 hypercoils, which is, uh, ~7-10 radiators. MRT nozzle is 30 hypercoils a pop as well as the extenders being 15 hypercoils.

Ordinarily this isn't too big a deal as the front of my ship is obviously heavily protected, but a few missiles that happen to land in inconvenient locations can do way more damage than the returns of doing the mission. Even for the more difficult missions that return 100k+, these involve multiple ships, and if you get even a tiny ship with a small cannon that comes up behind you, there's no way you're making a profit on doing this due to the engine damage. Most of what the enemy drops is just steel and ammo, and selling this for hypercoils is.. really bad (not just in credit terms but also in terms of actually hauling thousands of ammo/steel and selling it).

I think that considering that almost all advanced parts consume a lot of hypercoils, enemies drop very, very few hypercoils and it makes it very hard to come out ahead if you take any damage at all in a fight other than armour, since almost everything you can't armour is a lot of hypercoils.

The most obvious choice is to put shields covering all these weak spots, but the player needs so damn many radiators, it's hard to cover all the weak spots without blowing your crew budget. And that's not even gonna cover it if we're facing something more substantial than small cannon/HE missile.

I think that enemy ships should just drop more hypercoils when they die, at least past the starter zone. Otherwise it feels like it's just uneconomical to use the more advanced parts. And although I probably could do a bit of a better job covering weak spots, "damage = reload" is fundamentally not a great experience I feel.

[dull wave]

for you it may be beneficial to look into a hypercoil factory

[true harness]

I have a hypercoil factory, or at least, I can add one whenever I need it, but mining my own hypercoils won't be enough to make combat profitable or avoid damage=reload. It just changes what I'm losing that I can't afford to, a bunch of play time rather than in-game currency

it might be a bit different if I could build a mining ship that just went around and mined all the copper automatically

[leaden kraken]

You can use structure as armour, it doesn't block heat output from radiators

[true harness]

I've done that and it's helped a bit for random missiles, but it's not exactly armour if you get an actual ship from the side or back

[balmy bane]

You should protect your radiators better. try to armor them and use point defence to combat missiles

[ocean crater]

im on the side that actually taking ship damage but still winning should be a viable way to play the game
having to always avoid all damage in career feels boring, you cant have any interesting fights when any kind of loss on your side means you loose more than you gain

[true harness]

I can do a better job protecting them, but I think this still leads to fundamentally not that great gameplay where if anything goes wrong it's time to reload

[halcyon totem]

how do you think the need for save-summing should be fixed?

[true harness]

if the enemy dropped more Hypercoils you could conduct more extensive repairs

or it might also be viable to say that if you have a ship component that costs Hypercoils, that doesn't mean you have to spend Hypercoils to fix them, perhaps a regular coil could be used in repair

or perhaps the ship components that cost Hypercoils should just be more durable than they currently are, it seems like a pretty cheap ship coming from behind can do huge damage in short time even to expensive engine rooms, mrts, radiators, etc because they are still quite flimsy

[halcyon totem]

my issue is that these are solutions specific to your situation, which also has negative consequences for progression or balancing. In Cosmoteer one small mistake could mean loosing hours of progress, or even your whole playthrough. You could make the game easier, as to make your lost progress represent less lost hours of work, but again that'd have negative consequences.

[true harness]

well, there's certainly an argument to be made about other resources being in a similar position

if you lose some large shield generators, you're not gonna get those diamonds back if yo win the fight

it's just that the odds of winning whilst still losing some hypercoils are a lot better so it's a lot more likely to happen

and I see that in Cosmoteer a small mistake may mean losing hours of progress and that's exactly the part that I'm unhappy about, yes ;p

I don't want to make progression through the game easier, per se, I just don't want to risk losing large amounts of the progression I've already done, as it were

FTL has a system where you can repair your ship for much less than it cost to make it and I overall feel like that system works well

[fallen mango]

just mod rare resource drops higher?

[fallen mango]

it's very boring if it's risk free and encourages boring alpha suiciders even more

[ocean crater]

the risk of fighting should be loosing your whole ship, not just a part of it
if loosing a part of your ship is too much of a risk then you remove part of the game from the player's side of gameplay: they'll just never interact with the individual part destruction mechanics effecting them

[hazy temple]

Having a second logistic ship is basically free though? Don't need much crew just enough thrusters and a bunch of cargo space

[ocean crater]

why even go through that effort when you can just make the game less fun by not taking risk at all and gain more

[halcyon totem]

if loosing a part of your ship usually means loosing a vital and expensive part of your ship, you're not as good at designing ships as you are zeppelins. (iykyk)

[ocean crater]

this usually means battles in career are overall less interesting

gameplay wise loosing a part of your ship and having to ajust how you play to try and turn things around could make for an interesting battle and make the game more fun, if every time it happens you flat out loose anyways then its never going to be a standard part of the experience, making the game loose out a bit on what it could be

[halcyon totem]

personally, a lot of the game's fun comes from ship design rather than combat. so I that tradeoff isn't worthwhile for me.

[ocean crater]

maybe thats because career combat incentives never loosing any part of your ship ever way too much

[halcyon totem]

I also play as programmer in nimbatus, so I don't think it has anything todo with this game specifically.

[ocean crater]

also makes sense