[Discussion] Enhanced lower-level items VS higher-level items

General discussion about anything related to Transcendence.
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Militia Lieutenant
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Posts: 124
Joined: Thu May 19, 2016 12:58 am
Location: Was destroyed by a Phobos-class dreadnought in the Eridani system

What if more ships were to equip highly enhanced versions of lower level items instead of higher level items? Very few ships actually have enhanced items at all.
  • Arco Vaughn: Uses super-boosted Reactive Armor
  • Centauri Raider: 10% chance of enhanced Cetauri Recoilless
  • Light IAVs: About 10% chance of enhanced weapon
  • Medium IAVs: 15% chance of enhanced weapon
  • Heavy IAVs: Uses +50% Omni TeV9
  • Dragon Slaver: Uses two +50% Particle Beam Weapons.
In some cases, it would make sense to enhance on a lower-level item rather than use a higher-level item. For instance, consumable damage-type enhancements increase damage output without increasing power consumption and have no level restrictions. Armor coatings such as particle coating, reactive coating, ion resistance coating, and ithalium paste grant notable resistance boosts that could effectively substitute for upgrade purchases. However, there is a point where simply upgrading would be more cost efficient than buying a lot of consumable enhancements, since those items do seem to be somewhat scarce. This could be due to an in-universe throw-away consumerism culture that is influencing people to throw things away and buy new things instead improving what they already have.

Still, enhanced items could play a more important role on enemy ship design.
Derakon
Militia Lieutenant
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Joined: Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:53 am

The difficulty with enhancements is communicating them to the player. Right now you can kind of learn to recognize weapons based on their projectile sprites, but that goes out the window with enhancements. Armor is completely opaque to the player until they destroy the ship, at which point they have a chance to loot the ship's armor. I guess in that case using enhancements isn't out of the question. However, I don't know how reasonable it is to have enemy ships get big resistance to certain damage types (which is what most armor enhancements do). Think of fighting Luminous -- it tends to result in ships turning into massive damage sponges, since the player often can't carry more than one or maybe two damage sources. This is especially problematic in the late game if your primary weapon deals thermo damage, since most late-game launchers also deal thermo damage.

That said, the SM&M mod has a late-game faction that uses massive barrages of laser and blast weapons combined with laser collimators, and it's pretty terrifyingly effective. Early-game weapons can be effective in the late game if you use enough of 'em. :)
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Fleet Admiral
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Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:54 am

The biggest problem with enhancements is loot. Unless it was changed, damaging an enhanced weapon (usually) strips the enhancement only without damaging the weapon, leaving an undamaged weapon (or other item) behind either to use or sell for big cash. Currently, ships using enhanced items are not very common.
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