Tried the new weapons a bit, some seem to be nice.
The Ion Cannon:
Like this weapon, love the reaction of voids being identified with it 
void rays in star battle were nerfed by having two voids firing at the same time reducing their cumulative damage effect by a percentage. however, the problem there is that you dont need to aim Like the idea of that weapon.
Since it’s my favourite SB ship, I should definitely equip that somewhere.
Blaster:
RFP was already hard to use on ceptors against serious enemies. Now it basicly increased damage but introduced a short overheat, and the firing speed is well, crap. The Blaster is utterly useless and complete crap. Higher damage? fine. but only EM.
Crap.
–
Missiles: It is true, that Nukes wont be spammed this way. Because now you really have to bring it in tactically. I did like the old system and found nothing wrong with it. You had to bring em in strategically.
Having only one sort of missile - this is not a game where this will work out for the best, especially the disadvantage if you try to use special missiles.
This reduces small ship’s worth a lot. I am really thinking about whether I even should equip a primary weapon in future. Seems to be easier to fly with a blob and press the other buttons sometimes.
Oh. And now they all are homing. How nice.
–
Weapons removed? Everything seems to be now even less adjustable to play style. Ships get streamlined to their purpose. Some might say “Yay!”, but it’s not what is good for them. This is not, how you adjust mechanics, to compensate for problems in balancing, it will NOT make you balance easier, because this is a revamp. Yet again.
Balancing is an art in development, or “how to balance is constantly under balancing”, no single human being knows how to balance right, otherwise we would not have to make games; balance is a co-production of players and game-makers.
What we DO know from history, is, that systems which do not rely on a very atomic base balancing, will hardly be balanceable if extended or result in a precalculable game. You just made a lot of weapons out of a smaller amount of weapons, while reducing the actual weapons per unit available. Of course, this solved the issue of having only basic multipliers (2, 4, 6) for each weapon on each ship being hard to balance, but in the end, it only opens doors for a lot of new balancing concerns, and now is even harder to compare.
Good luck. I really think, the dev team is not aware, what they just changed (even they believe they do). This will have crazy effects in the aesthetics of this game. I feel the next month will be interesting indeed.
I was using RFR on some of my fighters. I flew Frigates with speed - short range laser fit pretty successfully 2 patches ago as front line support, and saw a lot of funny fits on the way and how people used it. Stuff like that is the real deal. Not every weapon has to be used excessively or in the same amount. If only mainstream weapons are available, little flexibility is left. You can only bend a bit now. It is if it was reduced to the playstyle of a number of people, and dang to be in the creative minority.
This part of the game has to be re-expanded, after you dear sirs follow up with the balancing.
Any chance you could write a dumper now which exports all values as json structs or xml or something? Now, number crunching really starts to become interesting.
–
Weapon modifiers. now well, the weapon mods made me use my thumb mouse buttons the first time in my life for something really useful, instead of just assigning a knife. I whished you would have fixed the toggle ignoring empty slots back then, but otherwise, it was fine as it was.
Now this mechanic made fighting a Rapid fire plasma ceptor really still fun, even if RFR was clearly superior on the long run, if my evade and aim were 50% Pro and the enemy had only one of them less than me, and I swapped damage types correctly, I could win a fight, without being the best aimer or dodger, even against a superior aimer or dodger, just by simply combining those skills with this weapon, and be also pretty good against bigger ships. Removing the damage changers for Rails is fine by me, since they seem to be useless as thermal weapons, but Plasma… especially Rapid Plasma, lived through it. It got worse with the overheat being introduced. This is a major gamechanger for me.
Plasma could need a damage type toggle without any other additional bonuses to get it’s strength back.
Of course without laser having an opt-in for EM damage, that would not work balancewise.
Maybe there is a comeback, if people stop using plasma and therefore others stop using EM resistance. Who knows. But being the Fox in the loophole will only mean, the next patch could take it away again.
One thing less to switch in mid battle makes it only more boring. Learning how to deal with weapon mods was until now something interesting to master in this game. Even if it sounds so incredibly simple, it added a lot.
–
Renaming ships - Fine with that. Some of the ships however do not have very distinctive attributes, which caused actually some of the names really to become “memorizable”. So it’s not just the names, the ships make names. There is not enough customization in the ships themselves, way too many similar ships, so a few have memorizable names, but not all. But the new names sound good. However since the new system reduced one more typical “speciality” of ships, like missile slots in combination with which kinds of missiles they can carry together, it seems that even more ships become redundant now, invisibly.
Free Synergy - I like that. So it’s definitely not a bad patch in every detail. I can’t complain about something, which also affects a golden ship so positively.
Cleanup of Hangar view - so I dont see my Reputation Progress anymore, except on my profile. Well, I am okay with that. New players now will ask new types of questions. Maybe easier for people who didnt understand the sub factions.
You introduced a new tier - nice. For anyone who needs it. Adjusting the models to be customizable in T3 and T4 would have been more logical to go. I thought this step (T5) was planned for release. Are you panicking?
Colors still for time? Listen. Really. Before you return Luascripting, think about which customers you serve. We don’t like renting online stuff. Pay per Repaint? Fine. Having to redesign all ships each time every month? No-Go. It is, as the Centauri say, very inconvenient, it’s not just the price. However since T3 got no paint option yet anyway, and all permanent stickers are still available, I guess its okay for now. But this is not a solution, this is only a compromise between a bad idea, and how it should be done.
I only tried one battle, because I immediately lost any fun in that one.
Racial bonuses removed. Well, now we are all the same. Some of the bonuses, especially synergy gain, do not make much sense in T5 so late, but I get the principle, it’s okay. However, it is very likely, that by the time reaching T5, these bonuses become somewhat unneeded. Can I buy loyalty with my synergy? Then maybe.
I will try more, maybe I overreact a bit, but given the reactions other people have, mine seem to be calm anyway.
Overall however, this is even a worse sign, than me being a barking dog.
If every patch is going to be accompanied by decisions of monetarization, before the game even launches 1.0, I feel like I am an investor, not a beta tester.
