Nebulous: Fleet Command

[oak shell]

I could

[supple sonnet]

We could; might need a few to update our fleets.

[wicked mirage]

Just replace all your SDM-2's on ANS with these ez

[lime jungle]

SGM-212 'Dragonaster' ACM-2 is a size 2 missile that costs 7 points.

[supple sonnet]

...huh, that easy?

[wicked mirage]

It's the same price but not quite as good as old SDM-2's on ANS but that's the point of the patch lol

[supple sonnet]

I thought your Ice Spears were 8, no?

[wicked mirage]

Yeah, but those were SDM-2's, so I guess these are cheaper lol

by 1 point

[supple sonnet]

By 1 point.

[wicked mirage]

I'm in game 2 team 2 vc btw

[wet root]

Workulous ;_;

Not really an APM tax because you can just create the loadouts ahead of time, this just means you don't have to have like 20 loadouts based on different numbers of remaining weapons

It costs APM but it would only be a tax if there were a cap on loadouts you could bring

[glad aurora]

True enough, aye

[chrome forge]

Yea I am too at work rn to attend have fun though

[wicked mirage]

Heyyy

[sharp crow]

campaign was pretty fun so far

[deft current]

What new patch?

*for MP I mean

[wet root]

PTB changes got bumped to live with campaign part 1

[wicked mirage]

@oak shell Aw, you done? I'll hop out dw

[oak shell]

I am for today

[supple sonnet]

Yeah that's fair.

[wicked mirage]

Alrighty, have a good day!

[supple sonnet]

On the bright side, just got our first CC one-tap with CCKs.

Six Cyclones right down the spine.

Sadly busy at work otherwise we’d join

[wet root]

FYI for @junior heron don't turn on BSHORT while your beams are traversing in the new patch

(And now I actually go for my walk)

[junior heron]

this is awesome though, so I will ignore this advice

[wet root]

It does look and sound phenomenal

[mint sinew]

Is that a bug? I thought the change was supposed to let them stay on between aimpoints while roughly on target

[wet root]

- CHG: Beam weapons with BSHRT will continue to fire when inside the bounding radius of the target and will no longer turn on and off when shifting aim points inside a large hull like an LN.
It seems like it's failing to actually check that it's inside the bounding radius of the target

[mint sinew]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking

[glad aurora]

yep, gotta manage your HOLD even more carefully than usual

[junior heron]

Speaking of HOLD, it's fun how I'm having to unlearn some habits for the campaign. ||I accidentally left a beam BSHORT ON on the mission you get the destroyers, and now I have to live with that beam redded for a while.||

||The jammers are likewise pretty burned, but that was a little more necessary to not lose the whole ships.||

Also, you can dock with the Mercator if you include it in a Skirmish fleet.

unfortunately it costs 3k for just the hull.

[glad aurora]

I can see some really cool fight nights with the Mercator

Protect it in the great journey across Pillars, that sort of thing

[wet root]

Secret strategy there: dock two Solomons to it as armor

(Sadly I assume Levys do not dock in riot shield formation)

[junior heron]

Canyon game to whatever the max points limit is, everyone gets to bring a Mercator.

[junior heron]

You saw how little they move!

They can't move while docked.

[wet root]

I feel like that favours ANS rather heavily, given they can presumably fill it chock-full of Hybrids and try to yub the enemy Mercator

[wet root]

only mostly immobile. There's a big difference between mostly immobile and all immobile.

(Admittedly, perhaps not a big difference in this context, which is why you'll need to get a craft trying to land on one of the Solomons to slingshot the whole contraption across the map)

[junior heron]

I also don't know if OSP can use the Mercator.

[glad aurora]

yeah, I presumed this is AN trying to Silent Running their way through OSP EWR and CLN

[junior heron]

unlock team factions, someone on OSP team just gets to play 5 Mercators. I'm sure there is no problem with this idea.

I was going to say "unfortunately Mercator doesn't have a ton going on besides the 4x giant compartment slots" but actually, being able to transfer craft, I bet you could do some horrible transfer micro.

[wet root]

To double check, how many points do you get from controlling a point every interval, and how frequent are those intervals? @mint sinew @junior heron I figure one of you should know

Actually I can just check on my old clips

[mint sinew]

2 points/point/10 seconds

[wet root]

So fun fact! That's not true any more

The patch changed the cycle to every 20 seconds

(Presumably this is a bug)

(I was asking to make sure I wasn't completely insane when I thought it was every 10s before)

No, you do not get more points per cycle

[mint sinew]

Oh dear, guess that's a canyon buff

[wet root]

And a capper nerf lol

[mint sinew]

Wonder if Lys doubled a tick rate somewhere to support half time in the campaign and missed a conversion factor somewhere else

[wet root]

If it's not fixed by tomorrow we can just set victory to 500 points

[glad aurora]

capper nerf is kind of based but should've really been tested first

[wet root]

JonasIV also claims continuous weapons are dealing reduced damage but I would put limited weight on that until it's been tested in controlled conditions

[glad aurora]

jonasiv moment

he tries to do Tech a lot, which is definitely an appreciable idea of pushing the boundaries, but he's gotta learn how to do it in a replicable way

[junior heron]

I could see that maybe being the case if his beam axford isn't just an unfortunate case of the beam going the wrong way but...

[wet root]

He was the one to first observe the slowed points to be fair, I just am wary of any data on beam damage taken from combat conditions rather than tested

[junior heron]

you accidentally installed the Unfocused Particle Slowdowner
is a funny thing to say

[glad aurora]

ah, beamford?

I'd bet good money bro was firing from 5km/into LN structure/both, then

beam turret damage is a fascinating thing

[wet root]

He also was the one to report the bshort issue, so that's at least two real issues he identified

Testing beam DPS will be tough though

[glad aurora]

factions unlocked dcx levy?

[mint sinew]

I was going to suggest R Drive CLN but same idea

As long as you are posfiring something you can't break you should just be able to divide damage/firing time

[junior heron]

I'm around if you need a second set of hands for testing

I actually wanted to see if you could dock to an enemy Mercator too, for some lighthearted test material

[wet root]

RDrive CLN at max range is probably easiest, yeah, just a pain that I can't easily go back to the previous patch to verify results

[wet root]

Hmm, let me check something first

[mint sinew]

Is conquest branch still up?

[junior heron]

!!!

should be

you're a genius

[wet root]

It is, good call!

[mint sinew]

Regular LN might actually be better with the higher DR and a narrower profile relative to the drive

[wet root]

Yeah I'm going to do an LN and posfire

Also, from testing capture point cycles: The AI gets very annoyed when I give it a ship that is officially armed but incapable of actually firing any weapons

[mint sinew]

Teaching the AI to attempt to ram contesting cappers off the point was not on my bingo card

[quiet quiver]

Lorewise, tugs should be really good at it

[junior heron]

tugs should get the backwards c65 from the opening cutscene

[oak shell]

Only if all it actually does is give a boost to forward speed

[supple sonnet]

Jetpack Joyride be like-

[oak shell]

In the campaign: I braved the foul and perfidious Caltrop and still haven't lost any ships

[junior heron]

hey did you know this was a map on Conquest?

actually Conquest just looks like that

[wet root]

(Not pictured: The lightning flashing in the background of the gas platform map)

[junior heron]

this is the skybox that heaven gets in media

help

[wet root]

Extremely cursed tac view

[glad aurora]

does anyone know how searching wrecks in campaign is actually supposed to work

or whether it works at all for that matter

[wet root]

I think Skiffs can search wrecks

[junior heron]

Skiff searches an evacuated ship, and a little blue box icon appears

with a non-craft selected, if you right click that track, you'll see their ammo loads

you can dock with wrecks to take their ammo

[glad aurora]

weird, I was getting zero feedback on whether they were doing anything or not

[oak shell]

The interaction is a little awkward

[mint sinew]

The search is a contextual order and seems to be near instant once they are in range

[oak shell]

It's a bit like how you can't mark a ship destroyed unless you have one of your own ships selected

[junior heron]

though the campaign is auto-marking ships when they evacuate

[mint sinew]

That and the free Intel centre is very appreciated for dealing with the early ruttle rushes

[glad aurora]

I wish it was ruttles lol

the AI has no idea how to play those

the campaign is extremely frustrating because your ships are just built wrong

the entire enemy striking complement is either ruttles that can't hit you or jamming MMTs you can't do anything against

[supple sonnet]

Oh hey, you made it to Caltrop! :)

Perijove, (He)xagon Understander ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) In the campaign: I braved the foul and perfidious Caltrop and still haven't lost any ships

We just left Caltrop a bit ago.

[mint sinew]

The MMTs do just die to ARAD missiles, they simply choose not to emcon

[glad aurora]

yeah, so the gameplay loop is spam cruise arad in the direction of every drive flare warning or die to ACT/[CMD] you can't stop

(can't see them because they're grouped up with multiple blankets and you have no flood)

extremely frustrating.

[junior heron]

I found the SEWAC complement was pretty good for getting vision up.

[supple sonnet]

You can get a CMD jammer pretty early.
Though... sadly we've only found one.

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) yeah, so the gameplay loop is spam cruise arad in the direction of every drive flare warning or die …

[mint sinew]

That was my thinking, between sewacs and skiffs I hadn't had an issue in the early missions yet

[supple sonnet]

...the lack of customization is honestly really getting to us, though, we agree.

[oak shell]

I did manage to lose two of my SEWACs

[mint sinew]

And worst case you do get coil tantos to backstop your pd

[supple sonnet]

We got a Vauxhall and the drives are flipped. 😐

[mint sinew]

(you can also just make a tanto loadout with jammers which is useful)

[glad aurora]

drives being flipped isn't the worst part, it's that it has no chaff

or e90

[junior heron]

in-game loadout building is cool

[glad aurora]

I suppose that's what gets me, it's like

these are all very easily handleable situations if you were not given ships which are not capable of handling those situations

is this like a "we don't want you to play like MP, you should do stuff like spamming coiltos for all your ships" thing?

[wet root]

Well, yes, I would expect the campaign to not offer the same tools and solutions as MP - the campaign is presumably designed to have its own options and toolkits to offer new and interesting decisions, since it's not constrained by the design requirement of "every fleet must have answers to every missile" like MP is

You can have constraints on player options in single-player because you can control the threats the opfor is bringing

[rigid bison]

campaign would be a lot easier for me if I was Good At Planes™

good enough to beat the ruttles, guttles, jamtles, and MMTs that lurk around every corner

[wet root]

Petition to call jam shuttles juttles

And also to give them a denim texture

[rigid bison]

true

[glad aurora]

Yes, but my point is that the threats the opfor is bringing - en masse! - (a) do not have their answers in the player fleet (that is, the answers one would expect of any other ship in, say, the CL's weight class), and (b) are very common MP threats CL+frigs are expected to handle if played well

does that (and I mean this genuinely) make any sense?

because the frustration is specifically coming for me from the disconnect of how I would expect to handle a situation based on my accumulated gameplay experience versus the tools the game is giving me to handle that

[supple sonnet]

[wet root]

I won't be able to chime in much, doing a Dota, but yeah I do get where you're coming from

[mint sinew]

It does make sense. I'm still early in the campaign so in the discovery phase of: how do I solve this given the weird toolset available

[wet root]

I jsut think it's also probably for the best it's this way

[supple sonnet]

We're... geting used to it.

[wet root]

Makes for more interesting design than having it entirely teh same as MP

[mint sinew]

I'm sure by a few missions in that might get stale, but I appreciate the early game allowing things like MMT missiles to be somewhat threatening in a way they wouldn't be to a MP spec vauxhall + escorts

[glad aurora]

yeah, I think I'm going to restart and throw the last couple hours out, see if I can play like they want me to with the massed tanto escort and such

... oh, I found the strat

the MMTs can't break through all the AMMs + sarissa on the Worden

so you shove the worden into the frontline and let it eat all their missiles lmfao

[junior heron]

Unfortunately I got bloomed on the first room, so that's been scary for me to do.

[glad aurora]

oh yeah, if the worden gets bloomed the 100mm on all the tugs etc will just eat you for breakfast

have to play much more conservatively

[quiet quiver]

Tom you're like the second person I've heard of getting the Worden bloomed early on

[supple sonnet]

Our CL got bloomed on the first room too. :P

TomZero (Tommy, he/him) ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) Unfortunately I got bloomed on the first room, so that's been scary for me to do.

[glad aurora]

the use the worden to soak all the missiles + spam 20mm tantos strat worked perfectly

oh. huh

I skipped the ||acquire the frigate mission because I was low on fuel||

I didn't realize it ||gave you all the fuel (and a jammer for the growing ball of Small Ship Murder)||

[glad aurora]

invisible ||plas/100 ln. very fun||

doesn't show up until I'm leaving because I can't find it and immediately wipes my flag and a beam DD so I have to restart the whole map

[mint sinew]

Very early spoiler (mission 4) but ||the destructible geometry appears to be transparent to LoS calcs but blocks shots. This was a very durable tug...||

[glad aurora]

... so is there anywhere you can get fuel other than ||the starting stations in the first couple missions and the mercator||

because I thought "surely they wouldn't just run me out of fuel trying to do the missions normally" and they Did, In Fact, Do That

is it intended to not ||get the axford and instead push farther into the second ice field and there's fuel there?||

||because there's another shipyard to blow up but I didn't see any boarding points and it wouldn't let me dock at the berths||

[bitter furnace]

the shipyard has fuel, yes. If you couldn't dock after blowing up its factory components then that's a bug

pretty much anywhere that says it's human infrastructure and not an asteroid field has fuel, plus the replenishment ship

[bitter furnace]

the MMT missiles are stoppable in the early game by either visiting Lamplight first to get the balls device, covering your ships with enough Tanto escorts, moving Windy up so its PDTs can assist, or backpedalling on FLANK and using RPF with an offset SEWAC to provide sensor in case of jam. Going in blind, you might not come up with one of these answers, but you can tow a damaged ship along until you find enough supplies to restore it to working order in the following areas, which makes for a fun emergent story

[bitter furnace]

nonetheless I do think what you're saying makes sense and I agree it can cause frustration. I think it's definitely caused by all the accumulated habits from MP you mention, and also a disconnect from the MP mindset (always being in control of what assets you have, and always thinking about how to tweak them). But I think it's good that SP offers a different experience, where you want to try and think about how you can use the tools you're given to solve the puzzle presented

[glad aurora]

This is fair, thanks NSLW

[oak shell]

What difficulty are you playing on, Ash?

[glad aurora]

hard

no sense in anything else with the number of hours I've put into this game, ha

[glad aurora]

Yeah, I think it's interesting from a game design perspective - Neb has a cohort of players like me with a frankly ridiculous number of hours where ships Look Like This and Do This, and so putting them in a campaign where they don't is suddenly a bit of an outside context problem that can lead to frustration as things "don't work right". End of the day, as soon as I slapped four 20mm tantos on every single ship it worked and I got through the early game without a scratch (didn't lose a ship 'til ||Caltrop sacrificed a beam DD to distract the LNs and give me time to kill the tug ball||)

when it comes to the bug on Blackwall, I'll check again to see if I can dock real quick

[glad aurora]

okay, the game doesn't indicate that you have to also destroy all enemy ships as well as components to dock (to clarify: iron spindle lets you board before all enemy ships are destroyed, blackwall's boarding points don't appear until after)

[glad aurora]

except for berth A-4, which is just actually bugged

except for a mercator? I was able to dock the GSS there, everyone else had it greyed out

[elfin island]

I do think the fun part of the campaign for my group has been trying to find which part of the tool kit works for the job

[glad aurora]

other bug, hopefully going to the reach and back fixes it

[junior heron]

did you have the docking order already given to GSS? I think once you do that, other ships can't be given a docking order to the same berth

[glad aurora]

yeah, that's why I thought some others were bugged, but I don't think so in this case

you can see if you squint at the pathing in the screenshot that no one has a dock order for it

[glad aurora]

this fixed it but did expend 2 fleetwide fuel

fortunately ||there's a fuel refinery on the map so I assume that's going to give me infinite fuel||

[elfin island]

||the first "boss battle" is super fun and quite hard||

[glad aurora]

||ships chasing you|| are completely bugged out and don't attack

good thing too because that fight was utterly fucked lol

[mellow lagoon]

As someone who never played the carrier update, how does the AWACS radar compare to shipborne radar? It has a lot less power, but in practical terms at what range would it detect, say, a shuttle under optimal conditions compared to a frontline?

[glad aurora]

||return of the random invisible plas/100 LN jumpscare that wipes out an entire fleet element + CLN literally runs me out of 20mm on my CL so it dies + outnumbered by infinite cudas so all my bombers and sundials die||

[glad aurora]

it's a spyglass but slightly better

all carriers should have one or two

[mellow lagoon]

I see, neat, so it still has a long detection range even though the radiated power is less

[glad aurora]

yep

[glad aurora]

either way, doesn't matter at the end of the day - having to fix the travel bug 2h ago by traveling back and forth meant I couldn't make it to the next spot that has fuel

think I'll wait until campaign is a little more stable before playing it any further lol

[elfin island]

I do think the amount of fighters they throw at you is a bit OTT

it fits the background for the campaign but it can certainly be painful

[supple sonnet]

Do the AI even have limited fighters or can they keep throwing waves at you until you take out their carrier?

(I'd like to hope they're playing by the same rules, but at the same time, many things in the campaign feel... different.)

[elfin island]

I believe they do

they just (like you) carry alot

[junior heron]

I assume they're limited.
||On the Journeyman mission the Jman retreated after we deplaned it.||

[elfin island]

yeah i have noticed that the enemy carriers seem alot more willing to bug out when it doesnt go their way

[supple sonnet]

|| We hunted it down after clearing the Monitors and it bugged out, leaving its Barracudas to their doom. ||

TomZero (Tommy, he/him) ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) I assume they're limited.
||On the Journeyman mission the Jman retreated after we deplaned it.||

[elfin island]

yeah seen that too

[supple sonnet]

Also whew, solo campaign even on Medium is a lot.
By the end of our marathon play session yesterday our brain was melting from running a full fleet carrier while also managing all our other assets too.
Spent most battles playing at half speed and pausing often to cycle through everything and see what needed orders.

[glad aurora]

honestly OSP's heavier fleet assets hard counter the bombers hard enough I just stopped using them

great for random MNs and the nefarious and evil orbital sensor tugs, but if you go near an LN it dumps a bunch of SDMs/breadsticks into you and you die

[glad aurora]

they're limited, the mission I was talking about had 56 cudas in balls of 12

which, lol

[elfin island]

you really cant afford to do long range CAP

getting drawn into a battle of air wing attrition is not one you win

[supple sonnet]

Mhm. We've been saving them for knocking out sensors and lighter assets.
Fighter cover, on the other hand, we spend most of our matches cycling flights of eight to twelve on and off the deck to cover our frontline.

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) great for random MNs and the nefarious and evil orbital sensor tugs, but if you go near an LN it dum…

Balls of 12???
On Medium they only sent out balls of four...

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) they're limited, the mission I was talking about had 56 cudas in balls of 12

[glad aurora]

ah, yeah, I'm playing on hard

[elfin island]

even on medium they will throw out balls of 12-15

[glad aurora]

that mission got me ||ToTed by a CLN while fighting off two plas100 LNs, a regular
CVLN and a railcello

that's after I killed their other 6k of sensor assets, MNs, and 450LNs||

[supple sonnet]

...huh. We ran through it several times due to random evil rocket strikes hitting at the worst possible times and we only ever saw balls of 4 and maybe eight at one point.

|| Fucking what. ||

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) that mission got me ||ToTed by a CLN while fighting off two plas100 LNs, a regular
CVLN and a rail||…

[glad aurora]

where are you in the campaign

[elfin island]

is this the one with the named dude

[glad aurora]

yep

[elfin island]

yeah thats the mission my groups on rn

[glad aurora]

punched through them with some semblance of a fleet left but ran out of fuel after because of the bug

[elfin island]

its a good fight

[supple sonnet]

|| About to start the mission where you pick up the Axford, the ANS Nomad Giant. ||

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) where are you in the campaign

[elfin island]

quite a nice tactical challenge

[glad aurora]

oh

okay this is like four hours after that

[supple sonnet]

Ah.

Well... fuck. :P

[elfin island]

our playthrough motto has been "If theres no cut scene prepare for bullshit"

and its held true

[supple sonnet]

That's gonna be a time.

[glad aurora]

tbh it'd be fair and fun if it wasn't for the plas/100 LNs

I was fighting through that bit by bit with standoff jamming, HEKP cruise bow-on hits, sundials to find and hit their sensor assets, etc

but as I was surrounding the named guy and slowly shooting him to death they manifest two more LNs out of cover in plasma range

my train of thought went from "oh, this was really fun, nice challenge" to "go fuck yourself" in thirty seconds flat

(Which was how long it took them to kill the CL)

[supple sonnet]

Plas/100 LNs are the bane of our existence.

[elfin island]

you really got to fight them in detail

[supple sonnet]

Indeed...

As it turns out, you should not try to beam them until you're sure their weapons are down.

[glad aurora]

yeah, when they fix the bugs and I go back to this I'm probably just going to ||swing far right side now that I know where the Invisible Death Beam is going to spawn||

[elfin island]

i think spawns are slightly randomised

as well as enemy count

[glad aurora]

huh. well, makes sense

[sharp crow]

caught

[oak shell]

My Worden fired what I think was an anti-craft missile into another ship

[supple sonnet]

For us, we got that from a bomber panic firing a torp too early and it clipped the nose thrusters of our CL. :P

[elfin island]

So just did the mission me and ash were talking about

no losses was actually pretty okay once we took it slow

[glad aurora]

"slow" is rough when you're 20mm taxed, but I can just throw like 20k 20mm on the CL and that should be enough

[gentle cloud]

does boat night use any mods

[glad aurora]

no

[supple sonnet]

Mostly maps but you can download those live. sometimes the not ship limates mod gets used but that's more of a 1vmenay thing

no*

[wet root]

Map mod downloading might be borked with the update as well

So probably vanilla maps only today

[junior heron]

(Campaign Spoilers, post-Caltrop) >:)

[gentle cloud]

<@&942093958551588904> anybody up for a game now?

I can't make the normal boat time since on account of living in the UK

[supple sonnet]

We can be on in a few

[gentle cloud]

👍

[oak shell]

normal boat time starts in 30 minutes

[quiet quiver]

Better than frontline, worse than spyglass. It doesn’t have a lot of radiated power but the gain is cranked

[supple sonnet]

|| YOU CAN STEAL THEIR BOMBERS?? HELL YEAH!! ||

TomZero (Tommy, he/him) ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) (Campaign Spoilers, post-Caltrop) >:) 📎

[elfin island]

yup

[glad aurora]

||huh, is that from the jman who jumps you with pure ACT torps and then immediately retreats when you come back from caltrop?||

[junior heron]

||Yep! We also didn't expect it and were just moving along at 5x speed when the sturgeons jumped us.||

[glad aurora]

Same here!

I was like ||"oh okay I have to do a tiny half-circle course to get out of here" and then the Great Sturgeon S2H Turkey Shoot happened||

[elfin island]

had the same experience

[oak shell]

@wet root we're done

[supple sonnet]

Same experience here. :P

[junior heron]

egoposting for The Long Distant Road
-# ignore that I have named the corvette wrong

[runic torrent]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/887570/view/716780409378048113?l=english <@&942093958551588904>

[elfin island]

||2nd last fight is fucking brutal||

[junior heron]

@wet root poke

[wet root]

@junior heron here's the two bombers pushing through a three-Sarissa crossfire from 6km to 2km I mentioned

(Though the Starboard Sarissa only engages the munitions)

[oak shell]

Lark why is your FOV like that

[wet root]

Lys doesn't let me set it to 360 degrees :(

(More seriously, I like having high FoV in games in general, and I have a wide screen)

[supple sonnet]

Same, in a lot of games. Didn't actually know Neb had an FOV slider...

[wicked mirage]

So it turns out I am playing campaign after all xD

[glad aurora]

mm?

[edgy dove]

🤔

[wicked mirage]

I said I wasn't planning on it, but I'm playing it right now lol

[quiet quiver]

Have you discovered that there's quirky creature builds in it?

[junior heron]

I love the campaign creatures

yes, I think Harsh Winds Blow needs its 1 Mount Gyro for better Sarissa and Defender turn rate

[elfin island]

they are all good ships

also just finished the campaign

p good

[mint sinew]

Don't forget the single track correlator for the spyglass, just in case

[glad aurora]

the campaign axford is uncorrelated spyglass nose bullseye

my reaction upon Realizing (got bullseye knocked out) was colorful

infinite restores poured into the thing that eats random AP while bowtanking so the guy who operates alone can operate alone

[junior heron]

My theory is that it helps the spyglass correlate [CMD] validation

[glad aurora]

probably does, yeah, considering the Shuttles

ARR Frontline instead of para on the keystones is also tech alarm

[junior heron]

parallax is to expensive

also in theory the ARR lets the bullseye keep lock through jamming?

which is kind of important because I don't know how many bullseyes there are before them?

I've been playing through with @sharp crow and mostly being the backline carrier/missiles

[glad aurora]

the beam DDs have bullseyes, so do both starting frigs

[junior heron]

oh I just hand those off at the start of the game each time

makes sense

[glad aurora]

the formations I've come to most like is CL+all the frigs, Axfords, CV+cruise frig, and then the beam DDs are... honestly pretty vestigial

outside of the mission they're in, where they're necessary, I've just found them to be a liability

have to fuel them, have to use restores on them when they inevitably get their beam or PCC or jammer knocked out, and the hard AI cheats in knowing where they are so they don't ever go in beam range

[junior heron]

I think that last part is definitely not true, ||during the fight with the villainous and ominous plasma+100LN, it waltzed right in front of the beam destroyers.||

[mint sinew]

Yeah, I've only cleared to caltrop, but the AI doesn't appear to have magic knowledge of my beam positions

[glad aurora]

Did that somehow change since the AI update? Legitimate question

since I know the solution for how to make the AI competent at cruise was "it cheats and knows your position anyway on hard"

since a computer can't use any of a yubber's usual indicator cues

[junior heron]

Sure, it knows positions probably. But it isn't staying 6km away from me at all times.

[glad aurora]

Fair enough, that's the peril of anecdotes

I just can't remember the last time I got to beam something since Caltrop, and that involved charging with two beam DDs from cover in a pincer formation and still losing one in the process

[quiet quiver]

Ye, I'm fine with it myself as a rough substitute for human game sense and psychology

A human might guess there's a beam there because it knows it's where someone would put a beam

[glad aurora]

lol what the fuck

campaign save broke gg

[wet root]

Ooooh

[glad aurora]

(first boss spoilers)) ||rip benji, boosted railcello reactor detonation just to spite the beam DD that killed him. zero chance of survival||

that said I lost the ewar frig so this is probably going to be a reset in the next three hours

however I can never talk down on the beam DD again

AI randomly mega-prioritized the axford so the beam ran at their entire remaining half of the team and killed it

[supple sonnet]

Never seen this many craft in one formation. :P

[glad aurora]

the ball writhes with malice

[glad aurora]

two hours on the dot, not three hours

oh well.

[quiet quiver]

I have. (Carrier testing produced some weird fleets)

[wet root]

Wait. Stop. That's illegal.

(I wonder if this means they fixed the missile defense rating?)

Also for @junior heron, you can indeed see the Harsh Winds Blow's combat power in the post-game, and I was very wrong when I thought 6kish lol

[glad aurora]

the Infernal Missiles Device demands its toll of blood (points)

[quiet quiver]

What's the hull cost? 3k like the Mercator?

[wet root]

Yep

[junior heron]

now, can the Harsh Winds Blow clear a 1v4

[glad aurora]

no, but you probably could with a 14k Worden in general

the hull isn't half bad, that's for sure. good DR, good slots, great missile capacity, carries organic vision

[rigid bison]

Yeah if you could bring in modern meta tech on the missiles and craft it could clear a 1v4

[quiet quiver]

I'd worry about caps if playing control

[glad aurora]

true!

well, the s2h and s3h are very useful if you're not in a boss fight, everything else is just useful to add tempo to your frontline and save 450HE on a ship that's crippled and no longer capable of moving or shooting

if you're in one of the boss fights the worden is a device that brings sundials and jam+20mm tantos

[quiet quiver]

I'm assuming that to mean that boss fights bring real heavy PD

[glad aurora]

||the boss fights center around a named character in a sarissa+aurora railcello with e70, a full 56-cuda moorline, a CLN, and then at least four lineships (mixed 450 and plas/100) with breadsticks||

both of them are this just on different maps

you can put the cruise frig in a formation with the worden and then spam a lot of the EO hybrids, you can get salvo size 10 out of the formation that way, but imo it's less useful to throw them at things in the boss fight as opposed to doing it in fights that don't have fighterspam and sarissa in order to swing the tempo there

by and large the boss fights are swung by staying out of sight of ||the railcello|| for as long as possible while slowly killing ||the LNs one two-ship formation at a time|| with your frontline ball

[glad aurora]

I apologize if I'm coming off as overly negative about the campaign, I don't mean to dampen the mood and what Lys and co have been able to do is an incredible achievement (not least in making the campaign editor available for everyone). I'll probably take a step back in campaign discussions so it doesn't stifle anything.

[supple sonnet]

It's kinda nice that the Worden comes with an Intel Center.
It's by no means required but it's nice to not have to try to keep track of barrel counts and speeds and the like when we're busy managing so many assets. We can just glance over and go "yup, hi 450 LN."

[wet root]

It's also particularly nice with the Sundials, especially since the AI sometimes crawls around at weird speeds

[mint sinew]

Even with the full Intel I've still been making use of prio marking because there can just be so much on screen to track

[elfin island]

yeah even when solo doing markings has been very useful

[mint sinew]

Just knowing at a glance which tracks are LNs is a big deal for keeping safe ranges

[supple sonnet]

Just bank-shot a moving plas/100mm LN with a Sarissa-wiggled S3H HEKP missile right down the spine just as it was starting to put effective fire on my Axford pair.
Watched the pair blink off the radar seconds after impact. Think it knocked out their CIC.

https://tenor.com/view/absolute-cinema-raccoon-absolute-cinema-gif-17862327649353748812

Best strike we've ever pulled off.

[mint sinew]

Knowing LNs it probably knocked out the reactor to get that sort of shutdown

[supple sonnet]

Could have!

Though it read "NOT UNDER COMMAND", so I think it was the CIC. :)

[elfin island]

https://giphy.com/gifs/hM9zK1qvsrwek

[mint sinew]

That would say CIC then yeah

[elfin island]

was it bow on?

[mint sinew]

Just know a lot of LNs run 1 reactor, 2 CICs so it's usually more likely that they lose power than command

If they lost command, that's a bad sign for them

[elfin island]

those HEKPs could well knock out all 3 bow on

[mint sinew]

Oh yeah, it's a bad time

[supple sonnet]

Yup! Bow on to the strike, at least.

Fetus ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) was it bow on?

[elfin island]

yeah probably knocked out damn near everything

those HEKPs are great i always worry im being too conservative or too flagrant with usage

but watching an LN cease to exist after like one or two hits makes it all worthwhile

[supple sonnet]

Just finished the campaign.
...
ACT 2 WHENNNNNN...

[elfin island]

i imagine/hope it will be within the year

[supple sonnet]

Sameeeeeee.

[wet root]

Even if it takes a while, campaign editor should mean lots of community content in the interim

[elfin island]

yeah

honestly its so nice to see a game give the community dev tools essentially

[junior heron]

@wooden veldt voice?

[wet root]

Bug someone reported on the Nebcord

[supple sonnet]

Behold, the...
drofxA?

[glad aurora]

fuck you (inverts your cruiser)

[mint sinew]

"get rotated idiot"

[supple sonnet]

It seems someone other than Tom has learned how to reach in and rotate their fleets...

This time in the Z axis!

[sharp crow]

@junior heron @oak shell joke for two people

[junior heron]

thank you, this is perfect

[oak shell]

Where we're going, we don't need... roads

[junior heron]

Incredibly funny bit of lore to rotate in your mind.

[elfin island]

insane

[supple sonnet]

FIVE??

[glad aurora]

how?

[elfin island]

If they aren't fighting away from bases ig it makes sense

[sharp crow]

sending my irreplaceable supply ship straight through an uncharted hyperspace lane that may or may not explode everything going through it

[wet root]

Honestly that kind of tracks, I assume most wars the ANS expects to fight involve pushing through gates and establishing a beachhead and stable supply lines from there

This campaign demonstrates how much of an awful horrible nightmare scenario it is to try to use unstable hyperspace lanes, which is when you need a Mercator

We lost what, two thirds of the fleet at minimum in transit, and presumably significantly more, since that's only counting the ships that managed to survive long enough for us to rescue

[junior heron]

Sidenote: the opening cutscene travelling through the hyperspace lane is really really cool.

[wet root]

And of course if you're fighting defensively you've got local supply bases and the like

I hope part 2 of the campaign involves at least one (1) Sprinter

[supple sonnet]

Especially how your ships begin quietly begin disappearing one by one until there's nothing but Harsh Winds Blow and its two escorts...

TomZero (Tommy, he/him) ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) Sidenote: the opening cutscene travelling through the hyperspace lane is really really cool.

[oak shell]

I suspect there are no sprinters because they die too easily

[glad aurora]

you don't really need sprinters since the campaign is straight annihilation

yeah

a sprinter flies vaguely in the direction of any of the thirty billion 100mm sidearm LNs they throw at you and it dies instantly

[oak shell]

I also expect campaign part 2 to be told from the OSP's perspective

[elfin island]

id like to see a mix

[wet root]

I also assume lorewise they don't have the endurance for an operation like this, the frigates just barely have the fuel to make it through hyperspace and to a station

But it would be nice to see one nonetheless

[glad aurora]

iirc sprinters are actually high endurance for their weight class, per the lore block

which would be... really funny for a future act

send the spyglass pinard sprinter with twenty billion fuel units ahead to check what's going on in every battle

[wet root]

Huh, interesting

[glad aurora]

The Alliance Sprinter-class is a small, speedy warship, sacrificing armor and flexibility for a highly specialized role of fast attack and reconnaissance. While lacking space for some of the more advanced ship systems and weaponry, the Sprinter is unrivaled in its speed and agility, while also being the smallest warship to wield the VLS-3 torpedo launcher.

don't have my PC on me so I can't check Falke-Tethys's musings in the other loreblock half

[wet root]

Was just pulling up the wiki,

When the Alliance approached me with their plans to develop a new warship, they were at a loss. Our opponents were improving their armor, improving their range, moves and countermoves that was leaving their engineers far behind the competition. The Alliance explained that simply increasing the tonnage of their warships was far too costly, something I agreed with, and that their recent competition bid produced a promising result: the Sprinter-class Corvette.

Certainly a far cry from the Alliance's usual doctrine of massed firepower, the Sprinter quickly became a favorite of crews since a career aboard the corvette is seen as "comfy", something the Alliance is quick to promote when looking for new recruits. Of course, they make no mention of the thin armor separating the crew from atmosphere and the Black or the exhaustive maintenance on the oversized drive housing.

I think it's one of my finest projects and I believe the Alliance shares my feelings on the matter.

• F. Autumns, CEO, Falke-Tethys Drive Yards

Wouldn't surprise me if it's come up in some other lore blurb though, or in the old document or suchlike

[wet root]

I'm guessing it's a non-transit-capable barge, but I really hope we got a sneak peak of the OSPN oiler in this shot

(The delightfully-weird ship docked to the LN)

[glad aurora]

that's the jman without the bit in its claws that carries the hangars and launch pads

bridge is on the right side instead of the left though

[supple sonnet]

Damn, playing CLN is harder than it looks... 😔

It also doesn't help that we keep running into improbably dense balls of point defense.

[wet root]

There's a few other differences (thrusters, proportions of the parts, how far forward the bridge is), but definitely similar genre of ship

Hard to tell the exact scale but I think it's a fair bit larger too

Might be some artistic license there though since I think the tug is a bit small relative to the LN

[junior heron]

I meanwhile am going we're getting a sneak peak of the tug buff (backwards C65).

[wet root]

Comes with exactly one salvo of 450mm

[supple sonnet]

Just witnessed a gold sprinter bomber player solo the entire enemy team.
...what the actual fuck.

[mint sinew]

I was concerned that might come back with the S2H and HEKP buffs

[glad aurora]

yep

you either have a MDLN+spotting MN or you get kind of giga rolled

fragmenting mdln spotting them on EWR and then lighting them up with BH from beyond blanket range really fucks them, though

so it's net better than last patch cycle's "you don't counter them, you run LNs at them and pray you reach pinpoint range before you die"

[mint sinew]

Good to hear the theory worked at least

[glad aurora]

yeah, it's a really nice shakeup for team comp, I expect to see one in the capfleet flex slot pick

[mint sinew]

Even if it's putting a lot of a game's balance on do the bh tugs live

[glad aurora]

yeeeah

[mint sinew]

I might need to start investing in softkill on them

[glad aurora]

my orbital frigs very specifically have an anti-BH missile set, which still work just as well

in general an EO dazzler will get you through anything serious though, if it can see them

arad is "better see it coming and turn the ewr off"

[wet root]

Does emcon still kill Dazzlers?

[mint sinew]

That's where the tech went last time this meta appeared. I had yub players throwing full salvos of ACT[EO] etc. at anything that popped up on elint until they had free reign

[glad aurora]

yep

let me see if I have the Eyesore templated

[wet root]

At least ACT[CMD] off ELINT tracks is dead nowadays

[glad aurora]

nope, no template

that said, EO/ARAD

[supple sonnet]

What's fragmenting MDLN?

[mint sinew]

In the new patch mass driver rounds explode on impact

[wet root]

MD shots fragment and hit nearby ships on impact now

[mint sinew]

Splash damage to nearby light ships, a bit like bomb shell except impact fuze not timed

[supple sonnet]

Oh, huh! We were looking like "so where's this new ammo type??" but if that's just part of mass drivers now that's awesome.

And there's this weird bit with the allowed ammo types:

[mint sinew]

Yeah, original pitch was a timed airburst cone but that had issues like you being able to fire it on EWR tracks

So it got wound back to just merging with the impact round. Guess the timed flag lived because there's no harm leaving it

[wet root]

Or blindfire into cap points

[supple sonnet]

Also, what's the pros/cons of intel Monitor versus EWR tug plus BH tug?

[wet root]

I should try pitbossing it up now that mk65 has DP tag again

[oak shell]

Pros: intel

[supple sonnet]

...or, wait, is intel monitor not EWR+BH?

[oak shell]

That plus an intelligence center, yeah

[wet root]

Absolutely Perfect Dog (intel MN with BH+EWR) gets more modules, intel, durability, and is functionally immune to random gun Sprinters, and can bring random utility (Containers, Craft, lots of S2s), but is a much larger target, slower, and pricier

[mint sinew]

MN: Better TQ and light gun resistance. You can just park it on a cap point late game and gun sprinters can't move you
Tugs: BH aims much faster, redundant to missiles, can actually hunt down cappers and go capping in the late game with a C30 on the ewr tug

[supple sonnet]

Oooh, fun.

[mint sinew]

Every time I use a BH MN (commonly in a 6k to keep the hull count under the limit) I cry when I need to change targets

[supple sonnet]

3x TCs, right?

[mint sinew]

Min 2, but 3 and an ARR is the standard for a MN

[supple sonnet]

Huh, how do you get the power for everything?

[mint sinew]

Boosted + PCC I think

[supple sonnet]

Right!

[wet root]

Can always toss a JRR in there if needed as well, no idea if it's part of the "standard" build though

[mint sinew]

No, you are right. I forgot it's cheaper than a pcc

Actually you might be able to fit a light civvie reactor too which would be the cheapest option

[junior heron]

and random 35mm tantos >:)

[quiet quiver]

I actually expect the OSP to use one of the "gas hauler" designs for an oiler. (The barge here is also too small a ship to properly service an LN or CLN)

[mint sinew]

I've been thinking about the idea of adding C4 external fuel tanks and docking clamps (small ships only?) so you could supply a small strike force from the offside of an LN or two. Feels like a very OSP solution that might be easy enough to mod in before we see the actual oiler

Could obviously extend the idea to the moorline bank mounts, but at that point you're just building a full oiler

I also like the idea of being able to rearm ruttles and MMTs from a frontline asset

[junior heron]

@wooden veldt the ominous pub railford:

[low pier]

Is that painted black or has it been cooked with that much plasma?

[glad aurora]

painted black/dark green

[low pier]

Ah colour blindness moment then

[glad aurora]

plasma has a grainy texture you can see in a couple places on the lower bow

[glad aurora]

well, went back and took a last crack at getting any ships through to see the final battle

(campaign act 1 end spoilers) ||I suppose that fight makes sense in the very specific context that you're not intended to survive it with any ships or fighting capacity, it's the last fight of the campaign||

||since there, well, is no final battle against constantine, it just Ends||

||extremely comical to have the in-engine cutscene talking about how we've been killing off everyone constantine doesn't like while showing the LNs and railcello that are perfectly alive and well, barely even touched really.||

Still, I Completed The Campaign On Hard™, there's the determination satisfied

if act 2 comes out I'll just slam a run out on easy and then change difficulties so I have more than nine tantos total of fighting power to start it with

[supple sonnet]

|| The railcello bloomed in our run. :P ||

Ash And Gold ↩️

[Reply to:](#1164000873031151637 message) ||extremely comical to have the in-engine cutscene talking about how we've been killing off everyone||…

|| Both did. ||

|| Extremely funny. ||

[glad aurora]

||yup, same happened with our first one||

||second one was on visual for maybe 0.2 seconds total because I was kiting eight LNs around a rock all game||

[supple sonnet]

|| God, yeah. That final fight was rough, even on Normal. At one point in our first attempt we tried to go for a beam ambush on one and then they Manifested a plas/100mm Liner right under where our beams were. >_< ||

[glad aurora]

🤝 They Know

||How did you end up killing the LNs, I'm curious||

[supple sonnet]

|| It... wasn't optimal.
After our first few attempts went south due to giant balls of 12 Barracudas, too many assets to properly manage, and issues getting ambushes off, we decided to try A Different Approach.

Figuring that our flagship's armor was Good Enough, we pushed it up with the frontline. We hid the oiler, scooted the missile frigate up enough that its missiles could reach things, moved the beams to defensive positions in case of ambushes, and formed the flagship up with its escorts. The two Axfords paired up with our Vauxhall and the EWAR frig, for missile defense.

We kept Harsh Winds Blow near the front but a bit out of Liner range, so it could snipe incoming craft with its Sarissas. Kept some flights in the air, including some stolen Barracudas, but we mainly used them for intercepting bombers or cleaning up fighter balls once the Sarissas and interceptor missiles had cut down their numbers. The frontline ball pushed up slowly down the middle, kiting the Liners and focusing them down one by one, while we cautiously pushed our SEWACs up to scout for them. We spammed out S2 to take out sensor assets and a Monitor; thanks to our conservative play in the last few missions, we had insane amounts left and said "fuck it, use 'em or lose 'em, right?" Ended up smacking LNs until their PD was weakened and then threw tons of S2 from the flagship and escorts at them.

Got caught out by a plas/100mm LN at one point. One Axford was just starting to get chewed up by plasma when we hit an insane bank-shot Sarissa-wiggled Shipwreck Block II (S3H HEKP) shot down the spine of said Liner, knocking out its drives, reactor, and CIC in one shot. Finished it off, cleared out one last LN (there were only about 4 or 5 of them on Normal), then found the railcello and distracted it for a bit while our beams moved up and beamed the shit out of her in revenge for them both getting ambushed and dying on our first attempt. ||

[glad aurora]

ahhh, gotcha, less LNs for lower difficulty. makes sense

yup, very similar approach to me with the exception that I ||balled up early, let them suicide the MMTs, ruttles, and MNs into me, and then used the S2H and Sundials to kill their two BH tugs||

||only then did I engage the LNs at all||

[supple sonnet]

|| Smart. ||

[glad aurora]

||since the AI is programmed to keep the railcello in the back, its sensors can't really aid them, so you're being shot at off basic LN radar and skiff tracks, which can be orbit dodged at range||

obligatory asterisk of ||"you can kill the first two or three plas100 LNs but four and five will get through eventually" for that strategy, since they just charge you and you can't back up fast or far enough||

[supple sonnet]

|| Yup, we found that out quick and stayed at maximum Bullseye range and orbit dodged. ||

|| They tried to rush us; had to spend some missiles to fuck them up before they could get in range. ||

[glad aurora]

||my problem with that is that the missiles weren't terminaling on my end, idk what it was but salvos of the basic act/[eo] S2 or CMD S2 off the worden were getting cleaned up by a couple pavise||

||might have been that whoever made them just gave them too little maneuver||

[supple sonnet]

|| Ours kept getting shot down by flak. Thankfully the hybrids made it through fine, and S2 could make it through once their PD was disabled or, more commonly, when it was facing the wrong direction. ||

|| They kept rolling weirdly and giving us wide open shots where they PD turrets just... couldn't aim straight up. ||

[astral pumice]

so how was the campaign

[elfin island]

solid 8/10

[mint sinew]

I've been enjoying it

The fixed ships having notably weird builds compared to what you'd normally see in skirmish has definitely thrown some people off but I find it's contributed to the difficulty in a good way

[elfin island]

I do like all the ships we get really sells the whole hail mary aspect

[mint sinew]

For sure. I've just seen a lot of very enfranchised players shut down when confronted by a Vauxhall without chaff or comms jamming

[junior heron]

it's got guns, what more could you need.

[elfin island]

unfortunate skill issue tbh

[mint sinew]

I'm pretty sure you could sweep most of the early missions with a normal 3k Vauxhall fleet without getting hit once

[elfin island]

people are abit too multiplayer brained imho

[mint sinew]

I do sorely miss having access to a floodlight or a lockvette given the number of bellbirds floating around but otherwise they've grown on me

[mint sinew]

Hundreds of hours in the only game mode will do that to people tbf

Especially a game where the gap between a good fleet and a mediocre one is so extreme

[quiet quiver]

Technically there are other game modes. Technically

The last time I played them was at the end of carrier testing just to make sure they didn't break

[elfin island]

prior to the campaign release i think i hadn't touched the game for a year or so game had really run its course for me but this campaign has been great

[wicked mirage]

1 TC Spyglass also puts the positional error within tolerances of blast frag warheads. Ideally you want at least 2 for that, but it allows CMD blast frag to hit most of the time.

[wicked mirage]

Only hundreds?

[elfin island]

is anyone aware of any tutorials for the campaign creator

[glad aurora]

The story is fun! I'm looking forward to seeing where they go with it, I really do like Nebulous's lore and seeing more of it is a strong positive

The campaign editor/creator is fantastic, the node-based design is intuitive and the open nature is going to result in a lot of really strong community creations over the next while

On the criticism front, I'll keep to "death spirals sneak up on you and can result in having to reset back hours of progress to get back to a point where the campaign is still winnable, both boss fights are effectively the exact same fight on different maps, and ships and missiles are poorly designed by multiplayer standards"

[glad aurora]

hell, conventional trivaux could sweep the entire campaign if you're cautious about the plas/100 rush, the containers are double validated instead of having arad or hoj backup and 15 barrels of 250rpf shuts down bombers hard now

[wet root]

A Bullseye would be nice but that's what the frigates are for

[glad aurora]

yep, the best trick for the vauxhall is to keep it with all the frigs in formation

hardkill saves the axford pair, but it won't save any of the light ships, so they get the EWAR

that also means you have a formation salvo 6 of direct S2s, which is great for punching out MMTs

[wet root]

I've only done a few missions but so far my MMT answer has been mixed salvos of 3x cruise ACT and 2x cruise ARAD, lets me trade them up for better missiles

[glad aurora]

excellent choice

my strat was para brn + double bullseye lock and then jamflashing repeatedly to break their own jam since I think the AI track fires instead of point firing

after that the cmd s2 cleaned up