Crud, the Federation doesn't have anywhere to bring slavage! I think I need to go into the models to fix that too, so it might be a little while. For now, if you put a Homeworld guy on your side, the collectors can bring salvage there.

I also noticed that saved games don't work if you're playing the Federation. I'll have a look to see if I can find a fix becasue I save skirmishes all the time.

Federation ships seem to be a lot stronger in firepower than Homeworld ships. The only thing the HW ships have over them is stronger hulls, but it seems easy for the Federation to just build more ships.

And probably the most "Oof" moment was when the Ambassador [Federation Dreadnought equivalent, I think...] simply spammed some kind of laser that knocks ships back absurdly far. Is that a bug or a feature? Either way, it kind of breaks the balance when my ships can't even engage it while getting torpedo'd and knocked away.

Hi Anomaly,

They’re supposed to be better! Those mincing space-nancies have better technology. But the Star Trek ships are actually more expensive, slower to build, and their unit caps are lower. Were you playing against them on a difficulty other than Fuddy-Duddy? The CPU players are set up like in Goliath, so they’re a lot harder than the standard game.

Those are the Retro-Repulsing Phasers. The Ambassador is a lot weaker than the other dreadnaughts, but therefore it can knock your stuff out of the battle for a while. Neato, huh?

I’m doing some balancing, but it’s more going in the direction of making the Star Trek stuff a little more butch! They are tough to play against though.

I was playing on Fuddy-Duddy but it was frustrating to play as the Kushan against them (I am familiar with the higher difficulty of Goliath). I've had a better game against them as the Hiigarans, and on that note it seemed that the balance of fighter combat was skewed as well. My Interceptor squadrons could hardly stand a chance against their fighters and corvette-equivalents, even just two of those things versus one or two squadrons are tough contenders.

I do recognize at least that I've had the advantage once I've had 2, then 3 destroyers, especially with hull upgrades, with the prior reference to how much more durable Homeworld ships were. Attrition battles were easy for me. The Ambassador however, I think its knockback is quite absurd. Several times a single one fired so many phasers that it sent a dreadnought of mine flying for ~15 kilometers.

If you're going to make knockback its unique ability, could you please put it on a cooldown or nerf the force it produces? Currently, the Ambassador just knocks all capital and supercapital ships away and fires a ton of torpedoes that have enough range in them to blast the victim without the victim being able to do much in retaliation. 1v1s and even 2v1s are hopeless with how things are.

Yeah, that might be an idea, to give the Ambassador a set of normal phasers like the Excelsior and the repulsing phasers with a longer cooldown. That way you could trick it into wasting the repulsing shots on a destroyer before moving the heavy stuff in.

The ST corvettes are already changed a lot in the current build: They fight like HW1 multigun corvettes, so they just hover around lettign you have it, but they're easier to shoot down. I think I'll make them even suckier against corvettes then. Probably the fighters too. Then the fast-trackign torpedoes (the blue ones) will have to take out the corvettes.

Thanks for the input!

Appreciated. Making the knockback phasers on the Ambassador an ability rather than a standard and spammable attack would be a lot better.