I ran through 1.8 and liked a lot of the changes. A couple of things bummed me out though, mainly the discovery that my favorite shield (Ares Kaidun) now requires two slots. You guys also seem to have nerfed the Kaidun a bit, so I'm not sure why you both nerfed it and made it use two-slots. Since my favorite base-buster, the Ares plasma archcannon, is also a 2-slot item, it really puts the squeeze on me as far as what else I can equip. In the ship models that are limited to four non-weapon devices, I can equip either a cargo bay expansion or propulsion upgrade, leaving me no device slots left for actual devices, like the howitzer accelerator. This is not a great situation!
Can I suggest a cargo upgrade that doesn't increase the cargo capacity and doesn't use a device slot that simply converts the existing cargo space into a smuggler cargo hold?
I played around a bit with the ship brokers and tried out both the Centurion and the Corvette. I much preferred the agility of the Centurion, but ultimately finished the game in the sluggish corvette, since its eight slots can be anywhere. It was so slow that I ultimately dumped my smuggler hold to equip a thruster upgrade, but at least I was able to equip the howitzer accelerator by dumping my third weapon -- an ion blaster.
I was a little bummed that none of the ships at the brokers were "bare bones", allowing you to transfer over your existing equipment. The thing is, by the time you are able to afford these, you're likely to already have a lot of hard to find weapons and armor and such that you don't want to part with. I used the Point Juno broker, and basically I replaced my weapons, shield, engine, armor, etc., with crap versions and stashed my good stuff in the weapon vault of the wrecked fleet ship there, then traded in my ship and retrieved all my stuff from the weapon vault to reequip it. It's doable, but kind of a pain.
I was amused that I could give my two wingmen new ships and I did that. It also occurred to me that I could deck out a cool ship in top grade armor and weapons, trade it in, and then buy it for one of my wingmen. I'll have to try that next time, although I usually park the wingmen in a corner somewhere where they can't be hurt, so they aren't going to get many opportunities to use their weapons. Still, it would be amusing to have a wingman with a plasma launcher and a lamplighter.
I encountered the old bug where you blow up the invading ships in the Gunzen attack. I couldn't get Kate and Whats-his-face to land, and Gunzen just told me to get back out there and finish the job. Eventually, I just left the system until it "failed" and then came back, but I do seem to have gotten credit for defending the complex and was able to complete the final mission in that quest line. I haven't seen this bug in a very long time and thought it was fixed, but maybe it's just very rare?
Those are just my thoughts from one play-through. Please consider returning the Kaidun to a single-slot shield and/or adding another device slot or two to all the ships and/or adding a 0-slot device that converts a cargo hold into a smuggler's cargo hold. Even when the Kaidun was a 1-slot shield, it was always a bummer that I could never equip more than one device, meaning the transpace jumpdrive is just something I dream about but never get to use.
