Finally done with the stardust ventures campaign. Or rather, ready to start a new one, after I uninstall arma armatura and the hivers mod. Arma armatura doesn't play well with the realistic combat mod; the gallant class mech fighter lags the game to death with its rangefinder gun, whilst the mech melee-swords become 100,000 range and annihilate every ship from across the map. Which is a shame, because it's a nice mod. The hivers meanwhile I've just grown tired of them. Their ships are obnoxiously hard to kill, with high armour, flux and regeneration. There are times when I'm just watching my ships use one of their battleships as target practice for five minutes or I find myself asking "who would decide giving a phase ship high armour, teleportation, high flux and regeneration was a good idea?" To make matters worse, their home world system is ridiculous. It's like fifteen planets with maxed our industries and habitable planets. I'm trying to have a fun game where I RP as a unscrupulous copper trader, instead I'm playing as U.N. Peacekeeper swatting the bugs and stopping them from wiping out every core world planet. Finally I reached Mansa Musa money and just purchased endless invasion fleets from the Ea Nasir Copper company, Sindria and the Hegemony. Ideally I would've continued until I had mapped out the sector and acquired a pristine nanoforge but got to restart cos of the arma armatura bugs.
Nevertheless, stardust ventures has been a hell of a lot of fun. There comes an awkward transition phase between "making money off of exploration" and "funding your own exploration trips" which I managed to make cleanly by finding a bounty fleet full of stardust venture ships :
DDDD
Saved up, got myself a storm bringer and equipped it with some rare weapons I found in deep space. A titanomachy laser (some kind of ultra powerful beam weapon), two gravitons, a paladin (MVP hull blaster), one anti-armour gun and one general mjolnir cannon. And a VOMIT of torpedoes. Mainly harpoons, stardust lithobreakers and a reaper torpedo launcher I replaced with a rift torpedo launcher when I found the doritos. The storm bringer is so much fun. But special mention to the storm herald and vortex hunter light cruisers.
This was all just storm heralds and vortex hunters. These light cruisers are just MINTY. They are made of aluminium foil, fly on wings of steam and feel like high tech frigates with the missiles fetish of the Persean league.
On their own, they tend to just fly into the enemy at high speed and die. But by chaining escort commands onto a "point man," they tend to very naturally reach a combat cruising speed, pick their target priorities, and when they run out of flux cycle back - to be replaced by someone in the rear with flesh flux. Rinse, recycle, reduce the enemy to a hulking mess
And they can fly in V-formation!
One of the big surprises I found with the stardust ships, is that their tiny frigates excel at dealing with pirates (or running away from those they can't), but struggles to deal with remants. Meanwhile for their cruiser-sized hulls and up, you get the opposite effect. They tear through remnants with their sudden bursts of damage, but when it comes to dealing with a giant armada of low tech junk blasting dakka and missiles at them, it gets overwhelming very quickly. To compensate I did later on add an onslaught, an oddyssey and some weird giant drone ship thing I found in the wastes of deep space, which may be haram for the purity of a stardust only run, but the hivers drove me to desperation. On the flipside, kudos for a well balanced mod design Meph
The storm herald is a fun, well-designed mod ship capital. This is a praise I can heap lots on this mod. Nothing feels broken, and a few ships like the stardust battle-carrier might even be underpowered compared to a legion or astral. Putting maneuvering jets on a capital ship is mind blowing fun. You can fly right into the centre of a bunch of frigates, activate maneuvering jets, and all the frigates who think they're flanking you just get OVERLOADED and annihilated by a capital ship capable of swinging 180* in a second.
Can an all-purpose specced storm herald beat a paragon suppported by an astral on its own? No. Maybe if you specced it for anti-high tech you could. Or you got real close and your reapers didn't get shot down by PD. What it can do is annoy the paragon whilst your light cruisers eat the astral, before surrounding the paragon and eating it too. Very well balanced ships!!!
[amusingly, I found the storm herald is also really good at flying at ramming speeds into smaller ships, before activating shield right on top of them to instantly peel away all their armour, often one-shotting the smaller ships]
In the end, the most important thing I found on this playthrough was stardust adding a bunch of double-thumpers.
I did what seemed necessary
May ludd have mercy upon the cosmos
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Topic: Starsector [TopDown Sandbox RPG on Space] (Read 369762 times)