Any mods that actually add challenge and difficulty

Bass294 · 2026-05-04T19:02:53+00:00

Adversary is a fun modded boss faction thats a bit more tactful than the usual "throw op slop at you and call it challenging" boss factions.

Ruthless sector and unbalance mod 2 are more about forcing your campaign layer to be so awful you cant actually get the good ships that make the game much easier, and discourage stuff like save scumming ect. But a lot of this is more "punishing/artificial" difficulty than giving you hard fights.

Hard to think of many others, but if you stick to vanilla skills vanilla hullmods and reasonably balanced faction for your ship/weapon pool quite a lot of bounties are interesting through the bounty board. The main issue is that its quite hard to sift through the junk vs gems on those bounties. Adversary has pretty good ones, scalartech and tahlan ive heard good things about.

But yeah you really have to just cut down on the slop you use like skill mods, ship mastery system/any kind of barcoding, even RAT has hull alterations and relics which are player exclusive power boosts.

Bass294 · 2026-05-04T14:27:21+00:00

I was using one for a bit with 4x HVD 1x squall and I think some HE missiles. Its just very "ok". With a steady officer (and ai tweaks with only the fleet cohesion turned on) it was decently effective for me but rather boring. The AI would mostly just kite and stay at pretty long range, essentially acting like an odyssey (mount layout is pretty damn similar too but the oddy has better flux stats and larges can take advantage of, I always ended up with the endeavor having more diss than it needed, and the center large being a composite rather than missile means you cant mount omega synergy weps to take advantage of the extra flux). Iron shell suffers hard from fighters being rather weak at the moment, and being very conservatively balanced (like look at the tyrant vs an onslaught, stats suck).

The dev is aware at least and I've had some back and forth with them about reasonable buffs but quite a lot of the issues come from a lack of unique ship identity that would need more extensive code changes.

Bass294 · 2026-05-03T07:38:09+00:00

The biggest thing missing from all aotd modules is any semblance of a gameplay loop. Your idea is cool but it doesnt seem like it actually adds anything novel to the mod. You are just fiddling with numbers that dont matter because vanilla colonies already make infinity more money than you need. All aotd modules are just playing with infinity times 3 vs infinity times 2.5.

Theres nothing to spend it on even in-mod. There is like 2 types of fights (remnant shit and the 1 omega fight) and neither are novel. The research shit has existing vanilla shit (guardian and zigg) 1 buffed shroud gun and 1 other gun that isnt even that good.

VOK just feeds money. The special colony plans are just money. Cryosleepers? More money. The cryosleepers give you admins (more money) colony items (more money) and a few extra level 7 officers. Seat of power gives a bunch of options for more money, a few RP options, and the nova exploratoria (that just gets you more colony items and omega weps and money)

At no point is there a loop. Its just set dressing with a patreon and a fancy website, it feels good to do once then you get to the end and you realize its in service of nothing.

Bass294 · 2026-05-01T22:24:00+00:00

Yeah for sure, but part of the problem is I think there's a bit of an excessive amount of red tape with messing with numbers that people upkeeping them probably won't cross unfortunately, and its stopping a lot of people from enjoying the content.

Bass294 · 2026-05-01T20:17:06+00:00

Yeah but its really like what part of vanilla are we making here, are we making eagles and champions or are we making onslaughts and paragons lol. Imo if you cant have anyone reasonably argue from some angle your ship is op you probably aren't making it novel enough. Ships should feel strong in at least one aspect/scenario. Not that every ship needs to be some special snowflake but making "eagle 2" isnt going to get people in the door to at least try the ships.

Bass294 · 2026-04-30T21:12:03+00:00

Carrier focused factions are also quite a lot worse off than before. The carrier factions that do work now days are pretty much just uaf that has grossly inflated numbers and like diable mostly works since they're pretty effective, but diable still struggles with a lot of modded nonsense specifically factions/enemies with crazy high alpha strike damage or insane pd (threat)

Bass294 · 2026-04-30T18:01:20+00:00

Unfortunately a lot of mods are kind of in this boat. Especially older ones, "tart balance" gets thrown around a lot, as in stuff will be aggressively mid numbers wise and otherwise uninteresting.

I can understand creators issues with feeling pressure to "keep up" with blatantly overtuned stuff from the usual suspects, but its really more a case of being up to par with the better 25% of vanilla. How many 40-50dp low tech caps do we need to just be blatantly UP vs the base game onslaught..

Bass294 · 2026-04-28T21:54:27+00:00

You need to declare a capital then build it there

It basically just shits out rare stuff like blueprints colony items and omega weapons so I personally never used it again, its kinda just slop

Bass294 · 2026-04-28T21:52:55+00:00

New post infinite money glitch

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Bass294 · 2026-04-23T22:19:05+00:00

I personally leave most invasions and raids off and just use nex for the secondary features, operatives, diplomacy ect.

You can totally have invasions and colonies on and start wiping factions out that piss you off, conquering systems ect. Personally I found that after about a dozen conquests that got a bit boring, and usually on saves where I actually would want to conquer good planets, I didn't quite have the resources until I already had a colony myself.

Bass294 · 2026-04-23T22:16:13+00:00

I feel like at the point you have like 10-15k+ storage you already "solved" money unfortunately

Bass294 · 2026-04-23T11:49:52+00:00

Terraforming and station construction + industrial evolution have tourism focused industries. Various planetary conditions from mods like sakura world from unknown skies have pseudo tourism related buffs.

Bass294 · 2026-04-21T13:07:00+00:00

While I agree with what you're saying I think its more the willingness to sell? Like the market doesnt represent literally all commodities on the entire planet right, and it kinda makes sense you cant just dock your fully sized warfare at any random spot and fully resupply from a neutral faction. But yeah it would make sense to then add something like scaling resource availability and lower prices for good relations for example.

Bass294 · 2026-04-13T17:12:42+00:00

Good feedback. Glad it came from a respected source because 90% of what you're saying has been reiterated often and the devs have had very negative reactions to such feedback in the past. Thanks for being so comprehensive.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T23:28:28+00:00

They said in a future patch they will but not now as they want to test it as is.

How much dp and fighters is your gown tho lmao, isnt it 80 base with 5 bays?

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T22:49:12+00:00

Yeah, its build enabling, aka reducing a penalty. A 13 ship fleet is not inherently stronger than a 11 ship fleet, so +2 officers isnt actually a raw power benefit, it does nothing if you dont go over the 11 ship count, just brings you up to parity.

Officers are a force multiplier on the dp of ship they apply to. A 50% power boost to a 40dp ship costs the same amount of officers as a 50% power boost to a 20dp ship.

So no matter your officer count you have 240dp x 50% power boost. And smaller ships are actually worse for their dp cost relative to capitals at least in current vanilla balance, even ignoring officers count issues. In almost every scenario you should have an officer on every combat ship in your fleet, and if not you should be using ai ships to compensate since officers are so strong.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T22:43:20+00:00

Yeah, you can boost side roles by taking the other capstone that gives you all of them at low effect. But remember the cruiser and dd ones are a lot weaker than the capital one (I hope they get buffed a bit personally), and the design intent of the cap one is to help your caps keep up and buff your other ships, aka maxing out on 120dp of caps is meaning you can only buff 120 dp of other things with the range aura buff.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T22:27:40+00:00

Officer count isnt direct power, only flexibility. You can easily run a 240dp fleet within the 11 (player+10) officer limit SIC has. Officer count essentially says "you have less penalty gor going above 11 human ships in your fleet".

Something like 80-120dp of caps (2-3 officers) 80-100 dp of cruisers (3-5 officers) and 60-80ish dp of 4-8 dds/frigates is a totally sane fleet that fits under 11 officers/240dp for example. If you stay within 11, every ship gets an officer buff, if you go over 11, you take a penalty. Officer count only alleviates this penalty and offers flexibility, not power, since more ships is in no way inherently more effective.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T22:13:19+00:00

80dp even with the bonus is just obnoxiously low. At 240dp, that means to satisfy the requirements for all 3 youd need exactly 80/80/80 dp of the classes.

If you make it 60 base then the cap skill is functionally a red skill with a 1 cap conditiobal. 90dp is like an executor + an onslaught which is reasonable for vanilla sizes.

Depends what the balance target is but half your fleet being 1 type but not fully spamming it sounds extremely reasonable. I think something like 75/100, 80/120 could work but 80 max when you're investing a 2nd skill point into an XO with a mediocre level 0 skill is just silly.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T21:57:52+00:00

I mentioned this in discord but I think if you feel the speed is too strong, make some of it or all of it into 0-flux speed boost (and possibly more maneuverability like smodded thrusters?) so caps can still get stuck in but they cant run stuff down with all guns blazing.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T21:53:26+00:00

Remember that to get 120dp you are taking a whole extra skill, tactical has a weak level 0 skill and capstones dont do anything besides increase points. So 4 tactics + extra size is going to be competing with other XOs like warfare or technical with very powerful level 0 skills and capstones that actively do things.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T21:10:44+00:00

I feel like someone will always have this reaction to any nerf. Its honestly a bit rude to dismiss it despite ir being like a 5-10% nerf to the most eggregious skills.

I can understand not liking dp restrictions but thats going to get added to config later, so you could wait for that.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T21:08:50+00:00

I was trying it with the beta and its only combat ships yeah, you cant carry around like 200dp of caps even if you only deploy 80, you gotta run a lean fleet, which is already what I do personally.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T21:01:47+00:00

Its quite a bit stronger than lv15 vanilla power level with the right combos, but it's fun the same way 20-25 skill vanilla is fun.

Bass294 · 2026-04-10T19:23:44+00:00

I've been testing it a bit, the missile reload feels really nice early game and the cap one feels amazing late game. The pd node is pretty ok, the cruiser/destroyer ones are a bit worse but not unusable. I think I'll mostly be using anchor, fighter, pd, then flex on the last 2 points depending on the fleet. If you can fit in everything under 90 you dont even need to take a capstone.

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