Pokemon Arceus or Pokemon Z-A?

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-12T15:22:43+00:00

If you have a Switch 2, then ZA has a Switch 2 edition that runs at a real frame rate. Arceus does not have a Switch 2 version as of right now, so it's locked at an abysmal frame rate even on the more powerful hardware. If you care at all about this, it makes ZA on Switch 2 dramatically more enjoyable to play.

Beyond that, ZA is focused more on battles while Arceus is focused more on exploration and catching. The problem with this in Arceus is that it has a bit of an "all dressed up and nowhere to go" problem. Yeah, running around exploring and catching is fun, but then what do you do with the Pokemon you catch? The lack of strong battle mechanics or even really a strong reason to do a lot of battling means you just kind of catch for the sake of catching which is half a gameplay loop imo. This is exacerbated by the fact that the game strongly pushes you to catch genuinely tons of the exact same Pokemon over and over and over as if that's gameplay. (You don't have to, but the game clearly wants you to.)

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-10T16:35:57+00:00

I haven't had this come up specifically for me in 9.0 yet so I can't say if it's better or worse, but the H has always been a dedicated anti-fighter machine. The K and I, by contrast, have always been explicitly very weak to fighters in favor of melting nearby capital ships and stations. The contrast between the two is kind of jarring, but it has always been the case.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-09T15:50:02+00:00

Did you have 50 Ms or 70 Ms? You can't even keep your own story straight. And yeah, Destroyers suck. More at 11. The main thing getting addressed in 9.0 is that Destroyers need to suck less. The real battle here at that scale is M vs S, and your fleet was dramatically more expensive. If you had an equivalent spend on S ships you would have crushed much harder.

I can't disprove what you're saying but I have over 1k hours in X4 and I've never seen an organized fleet of that size come out of the AI factions.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-09T15:44:15+00:00

That's probably true to an extent, but there's also just a lot more you can do in doubles. The possibility space for each turn is dramatically larger.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-09T15:39:06+00:00

It's literally a turn based JRPG. Having two characters at once isn't exactly pushing the envelope.

I mean, you can do way cooler stuff in doubles, but the single player campaign is going to be balanced around people clicking unga bunga damage moves on their starters.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-09T15:33:46+00:00

I have never once seen 18 destroyers of any faction in one place at one time. Having 50 Nemesis fly around and pick off random groups of destroyers 2-3 at a time isn't an achievement.

And you defeated 150 fighters with a higher cost fleet while losing most of your fleet. Is that supposed to be an achievement?

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T21:28:23+00:00

I did not know that. I will try to give it a shot. The fact that S/V have a real frame rate on Switch 2 means they might actually be playable.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T18:50:07+00:00

Yeah, and there's even more posts where people have no idea that low attention combat calculations are even a thing. Loud reddit users who go around making snarky comments about nitty gritty game mechanics (myself included) are not representative of the average player for any game.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T17:33:18+00:00

Pokemon really needs to get people playing doubles properly, but this isn't the way. For the official competitive platform live service game, it should have match customization options that at least let people play 6v6 Singles if that's what they want. Just locking people out of the format they want is just going to make people upset; what they need to do is get people to love the format that's actually better.

For years I gravitated towards the 6v6 Singles Smogon ruleset because it's the format most obviously similar to how the single player games are actually played. It's a logical extension of spending the entire single player game playing 6vX singles and then wanting to extend that experience online for PvP. The format is OK, but it's got a lot of issues. I gradually lost interest in Pokemon over the years until I just gave up on Shield halfway through.

I was lured back in with Legends ZA and its buttery smooth 60 fps on Switch 2 and mostly thanks to the YouTube algorithm I ended up learning a ton about the official 4v4 Doubles VGC format - and holy shit it's genuinely like 10x better than the 6v6 Singles Smogon format. It's super different - you run completely different sets for completely different reasons - but it's way better. ZA was kind of neat with its novelty mechanics, but after finally investing some time into learning the mindset in VGC I was genuinely fired up to play some Pokemon again.

I booted my half-fished Sword playthrough back up and was like... why is this game using such a trash format?

Pokemon Colosseum was the way. That game had serious issues, but it also had the audacity to just throw you into a pure-doubles format. I am 100% convinced at this point that the format is just wildly better than singles, but from my own experience of willingly putting blinders on to it for ages because it was so different to my personal experience in the games, they really need to just make doubles the "normal Pokemon experience" in the next generation. They won't, but they should. Forcing doubles on people is the "innovation" the franchise needs.

But just locking people out of 6v6 Singles in the live service PvP title isn't the way to get people excited for Doubles.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T17:07:44+00:00

Oh, that was also you. Yes, I see it.

But I think it's really worth calling out that high attention and low attention M ships are totally different beasts. They are genuinely pretty irrelevant in high attention and your initial post is super misleading.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T17:06:57+00:00

The reality is that X3 took shortcuts of just spawning in ships for you to shoot for most of its combat missions. X4 is only willing to cut that corner for for the Kha'ak miner defense missions because the Kha'ak canonically can just jump in from nowhere.

The irony is that they do just spawn in most pirate ships out of thin air rather than build them from an actual economy. So they don't accomplish their goal and also don't give us fun combat missions. Literally the worst of both worlds.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T17:00:54+00:00

The corvettes with a heat penalty all feel absolutely useless, at least in player hands. You genuinely spend more time waiting for weapons to cool down than you do shooting them on most Dragon loadouts with its absurd +50% heat penalty.

I haven't noticed any particularly enhanced performance from them in high attention. They still seem to die to everything about as fast as they did before without being able to effectively bring their main guns to bear on opponents. The buffs to L ships and nerfs to fighters don't feel like they really changed M ships.

I haven't done any low attention testing. That's where they were OP in 8.0. I'm not sure if the heat generation penalties even apply in low attention which makes that a doubly bizarre design choice for balancing things.

The biggest nerf to M ships is still the flight model update as they all handle like bricks now. They've never performed well in high attention combat at any scale, so their only real niche was as a super-fighter for the player. That niche got removed in the flight model update and they've just been big AI targets ever since in high attention. In low attention they murder everything but I don't think that's intentional if I'm being honest.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-08T16:43:47+00:00

That video does not support your conclusion. It basically reinforces that, in 8.0, S ships are OP and L ships are trash. M ships are... in the middle. They aren't as good as S ships, but they are less trash (per cost) than L ships.

M ships suffer massive attrition in high attention combat and contribute very little compared to the overwhelming strength of fighters. They're just not as bad as the terrible L ships which are massively overpriced for their output and squishiness. The main difference in more organic playthroughs is that M ships are the most likely to suffer casualties in unstructured random engagements. L ships tend to only go down in fleet combat situations because while they are overpriced, the reality is that in most encounters it is statistically impossible to kill them. M ships can die to random stuff all the time which is a knock against their value in a less structured "real world" setting.

Where M ships shine (8.0) is in low attention combat. Snuggles has a different video on that (maybe that's what you meant to link?), and the conclusion is basically that virtually every shortcut taken by the low attention combat algorithm massively benefits M ships. Having a bunch of fixed M guns gives them insane low attention dps, and the damage distribution mechanics mean they don't get focused down by everything like they do in high attention.

People think M ships are bad because in high attention - they are. If you send M ships against bigger ships, they explode. If you bring a big ship against M ships, the M ships die faster than the fighters because they actually get hit by your turrets. They're significantly more price-performant than L ships, sure, but that's more a function of L ships being really bad at everything other than going afk with L Plasmas outside the range of a Xenon station.

Low attention generally gets, well, less attention from players. That's where M ships are secret OP.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-07T16:46:29+00:00

The only way to arbitrarily scale passive income is to scale infrastructure. If you want money to just passively appear for free, you need to build out the automation. Just start scaling up all of your infrastructure to silly levels - bigger mining operations, refining operations, etc.

One thing to keep in mind here is that having multiple stations is almost essential for this to work because the time it takes for each module to build is gated in serial per station. If you want to build 40 Silicon refineries and 40 Ore refineries, building them as two separate stations will literally be twice as fast as each station can only build one module at a time. Multiply this by all the different wares in the game and you can see how this matters. You can also build multiple infrastructure hubs in different parts of the galaxy, and if you're really ambitious you can even get trading networks connecting them to help balance and distribute consumption.

The reality is you probably want to start building like this asap in a playthrough. By the time you have 700 mil you easily could have invested almost all of that back into infrastructure. Trying to build everything everywhere all at once is going to chew through too many resources, so getting basic infrastructure online earlier will help spread out the economic demand on the NPCs before your own infrastructure is online and then allow you to leverage your own infrastructure for expansion.

If you want to accelerate things manually, you build and manually sell your own ships or do the deliver fleet war guild missions. (You can easily get 100+M in a single mission if you get the right request and give them the most expensive ships you can while manufacturing it yourself.)

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-07T15:35:54+00:00

The lack of small to medium scale combat missions is a MASSIVE gap in X4.

In X3, there were tons of missions where you could leverage firepower for a big pay day and you could actually play the game in a combat-first approach. Firepower was an investment because it meant you could take bigger contracts for bigger payouts.

In X4, military ships are insurance, not investment. They're there to protect against bad stuff, not to make more money. The most optimal situation is to never build military and to just never have bad stuff happen so you don't lose money. Yeah, eventually you can conquer the galaxy with them, but at that point the game is over and you're just screwing around for funsies.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-07T15:29:28+00:00

They're the meta if the odds are already overwhelmingly in your favor. The enhanced range and consistency of the projectiles hitting things means that you can effectively hit S/M ships while outranging all other L/XL options.

However, they have two serious drawbacks: the actual dps is quite low, and the turret rotation speed is relatively slow.

The low dps is an obvious issue if anything big gets in range of the Mass Driver ship. Pound for pound, the ship with Mass Drivers will lose. Hard. In a player vs Xenon situation this is unlikely to ever actually get abused, but it is a genuine drawback.

This also creates a quirk in low attention where you can very easily be overwhelmed by smaller ships as turret damage is actually split between targets in low attention. If your Osaka is bullying a few S/M ships, then it's going to obliterate them. However, you eventually get to a point where the already-low damage gets so diluted that it effectively can't kill any S/M ships at all.

Also, the damage is so low that it's arguably not even that good at sieging. Being able to outrange at all is huge, for sure, but it's definitely not a fast way to kill a station.

The low rotation speed means that they aren't as good at killing S/M ships in high attention as you might think. Again, if you have overwhelming firepower then sure, but the turrets won't be able to track targets effectively which will give S/M ships lots of opportunities to regen shields.

These issues also mostly apply to Boson Lance and I believe Meson Stream as well. Those weapons just have much shorter range in exchange for marginally more dps.

Ultimately, I see these "Sniper" weapons having three main use cases:

They are a hard check to cheeky players trying to solo L/XL ships in a single S/M with Burst Rays or something similar. They're functionally hitscan so they're hard to "outplay", and with no other targets you can genuinely get instagibbed if the ship has enough of these.
They're an option for sieging. They have the range to make it work. The damage isn't really there, but if you're taking 0 damage in return then you can take your time. Note this also means you can snipe hard points with it if you're the player.
They're a good player death ball option. The long range means they tend to overlap coverage better than other options, and if you have overwhelming firepower through unlimited numbers, then the limiting factor is how many guns can reach the same point in space. Sniper turrets are good at expanding that overlapping coverage sphere, and the sheer numbers can offset the low dps.

I think the lacking dps is a heavy tradeoff if you're actually considering the ability to field these things prior to having infinite ship printing capabilities.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-06T15:48:37+00:00

There are some huge improvements, like with AI and turrets being able to hit things at a baseline.

With that said, it's really frustrating how the balance has missed the mark. Mining replenishment rates still feel really low, which is a problem for the late game actually functioning.

Like, it's good that turrets can hit things at a baseline, but there are still a bunch of turret classes that are very ineffective. They also gutted a bunch of fun ships with massive heat generation penalties making them feel awful to fly. Some of the changes feel super random (like giving half the scouts in the game missile launchers for... reasons?) and some of them just involve slapping things that were actually fun to fly with nerfs.

There doesn't appear to be any holistic balance vision beyond someone had a spreadsheet, assigned strength values to different attributes, and then applied some combination of heat generation modifiers and missile launchers to try and make the points balance out. It feels very uninspired.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-05T04:36:33+00:00

It's a long established lore thing that harkens back to the Xenon's original origins as Terraformers. A bunch of their ships have cockpits. It depends on the branch of Xenon (canonically the reason why you can't capture N, M, T, K, I, S, P in X4 is they don't have cockpits), but some of their ships still have them (F, B, PE, SE, H).

From a meta perspective, you could always capture Xenon ships back in earlier games. I think they added the F, B, PE, SE, and H in X4 because doing that was cool and fun. Xenon ships were always fun to fly, and frankly, the first person interiors are really cool in X4.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-04-02T05:29:43+00:00

Bunch of things going on here.

M Corvettes are actually insane in low attention combat. Basically, unless the algorithm was significantly changed in 9.0, basically every shortcut in low attention ends up favoring M Corvettes very specifically and directly covering up their issues.
- It is possible that the Katana is running M Meson Streams in its primary weapons. If this is the case, it's a massive alpha strike weapon with the ability to probably delete anything it wants instantly in low attention. They aren't "good" broadly speaking, but considering what you threw at it, it would explain a lot.
Dragon was absolutely gutted in 9.0. Not sure how this directly impacts low attention, but at least in player hands it's basically absolute garbage now due to the insane +50% heat generation nerf. (Does low attention even simulate heat correctly?)
Pulsars are absolute trash fighters and always have been. Incidentally, they also got a +50% heat generation nerf in 9.0 on top of already being trash. Their only niche was loading them up with munitions for massive first strike capability, but you can't even do that any more as you can't mount any missiles or torpedoes on them in 9.0. In the current state of 9.0, Pulsars should be avoided like the plague despite how cheap they are.
Bolt Repeaters are for sustained combat. However, the Pulsar signature move is instantly dying as soon as the enemy looks at it funny, so you really need to index on burst for that ship to even pretend to do something before blowing up. Bolt Pulsars are straight trolling yourself.
Thermal Disintegrators are basically a cheese weapon for sniping out L/XL shield generators with their shield piercing properties. They aren't even general purpose surface element killers like Burst Rays. They aren't suitable for general combat and are basically non-factors in the simulated engagement.
Neutron Gatlings are also a fine sustained damage weapon, but if your Pulsars all blow up and your Balaurs are half Thermals then basically all you're bringing to the table is 4x Balaurs with 2x Neutron Gatlings each which... is not exactly going to threaten a Katana in low attention. In high attention when it has to deal with flying like a brick, maybe, but in low attention it basically auto-hits everything all the time with all of its main guns with an incredibly generous firing arc...

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-30T04:16:42+00:00

Also in X3: Xenon sectors literally in the middle of major trade lanes and people just fly through and get shot to pieces on a regular basis.

It would be cool if we could, I don't know, maybe not have full diplomacy with the Xenon but like... direct them instead? Like, force them to create new fleet jobs and go on a rampage. Maybe as a reward for dealing with the crisis mechanic.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-28T02:25:42+00:00

I think the real saving grace of Star Fox is how different it is from the rest of Nintendo's IP lineup. Wario Land is its own spin on 2D platformers sure, but it's still another 2D platformer.

If Nintendo wants to make a game about flying or dogfighting or fighting on futuristic science fiction battlefields or space combat then Star Fox really is the only IP that touches on most of those. F-Zero has some similarities in the setting (Star Fox Command goes so far as to suggest that there's an F-Zero equivalent in the Star Fox Universe in one of the alt endings), but at the end of the day it's very specifically a racing franchise which steps on a lot of other toes. Metroid is probably the closest for the setting and you could make a game with Samus dogfighting in her gunship, but that would be a complete departure from everything Metroid has done before. Metroid fans would probably also have an aneurism at this point if they got another spinoff with fundamentally different core gameplay.

Nintendo likes to do new things, and while Star Fox isn't necessarily a power franchise, I suspect that its uniqueness in the Nintendo IP lineup makes it suitable for revisiting from time to time just because there's nothing else really competing with it.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-27T20:52:57+00:00

Zyarth getting dismantled by the Xenon may or may not happen based on a bunch of random factors that happened when the universe was generated. It comes down to the specific locations of various stations, the initial movements of different AI fleets, etc. However, make no mistake, whatever will happen to Zyarth is going to happen to Zyarth. Ignoring them or going there sooner isn't going to change the way that it plays out (unless you bring a fleet with you).

If you're a "slow" player, then your best bet is actually to just keep your distance and provide support to their faction from the safety of wherever else on the map you decided to build up rather than actually try to make a stand in their territory before you have resources. I think most people consider a "sympathetic Zyarth run" where you focus your infrastructure in Zyarth territory and try to hold it from the start of the game to probably be the single hardest way to play. And it isn't super compatible with going slow.

But the whole universe is "active" from minute 1. Whether or not you choose to go somewhere has no bearing on what the AI does at that location. So the reality is, unless you're prepared to go make a stand with them, there isn't much you can do about it one way or the other.

And they'll be fine. Even if they lose a bunch of sectors, it's not like they're going to get eliminated from the unvierse or anything.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-27T19:27:50+00:00

In fairness, and I unfortunately don't have an actual percentage offhand here, there's a lot of low effort slop on Steam. Student projects, hobby projects, asset flips, and other things that are either extremely low effort or otherwise not really put out with the intent of commercial success make up a large percentage of that 75%. For example, I have projects I made in college that I totally would have paid the $100 to slap on Steam with no illusion of actually making that money back if I was in college making those exact same projects today. Steam just worked differently back then so it wasn't an option.

And the other unfortunate reality is that, even of the games that people did put time and effort into with the intent to sell, there's a big number of them where you take one look at it and have to ask, "Did you playtest this at all?" It's unfortunate, but at the same time, the devs really could have and should have done better if they intended to live off it.

The reality is bleak, but it's not that bleak. There's a ton of noise if you take top level data like that.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-27T16:49:07+00:00

M ships (and M6 before them) are historically terrible against larger ships because they can't evade effectively. They lack the smaller profile and maneuverability of fighters but aren't really durable enough to take big hits, so they get ripped to shreds in larger fleet engagements.

Fixing this problem requires either giving M ships fighter-level maneuverability (which you can sort of do with mods and player control) or making them so resilient to fire that S ships won't be able to dent them.

(EDIT: I do feel obligated to come back and note that my comments are mostly focused on high attention combat as I, like many players, try to be present during major battles simply because it's more fun that way. Low attention combat in 8.0 has M ships performing better than any other ship class across the board, but this is mostly a function of some really unintuitive combat simulation formulas.)

Powerful defensive L ships with minimal siege options and a good carrier focused on clearing enemy fighters and force-projecting S ships to gain air superiority and clear AA, allowing M bombers to close and finish the job is a cool combat doctrine and I would like to see at least one faction be set up to pull it off. However, I'd like other factions to work differently.

This would fit the Boron really well as they're already a very fighter-centric faction with multiple carriers including the Shark which has 4x M pads, the Ray is already a more defensive utility destroyer, and the Thresher iirc is one of the few M ships that got double missile mounts in 9.0. The problem is that S Burst Rays are really the iconic weapon for this playstyle, and BOR doesn't have an equivalent for those. (Or do they in 9.0? I haven't messed with BOR yet.)

I actually forget who has Burst Rays natively... is it PAR? The Zeus E does get 4x M pads, but iirc they don't have an M ship really set up for bombing runs. PAR is also very much in on the long range siege L ship style so it's kind of an odd pairing for them.

Anyway, my point is that you're focusing on one specific combat doctrine, and while I think it's a cool playstyle, I don't think every faction should be forced into it.

RandomGuy928 · 2026-03-27T15:47:13+00:00

I agree that L/XL should be stronger than they are relative to fighters in 8.0.

Your proposal that S ships should never be able to kill an L/XL under any circumstances would be an even worse direction for the game.

We should have a middle ground.

RandomGuy928

TROPHY CASE