Ok, i notice a lot of hate around here on The Order. So i thought i’d take some notes on how the Order could use some improvement:
First off, i don’t bother with fighters. Having a negative speed boost for other things like power generation kinda defeats the point of them. The only fighter worth using looks to be the Acolyte fighter.
The Spirit frigate, when compared with the Saviour frigate, seems absolutely worthless. For 30 more base cost, you get an armor boost instead of a hull drain, not to mention more power and more modules. Same deal with the Priest vs. [other order cruiser].
As an extension of point one, the Order bonuses seem all over the place. To fix this, what if you did something like this:
Priest gets -30% speed, +20% hull/armor for 240 base cost
I dig the asymmetric designs but I can’t find much use for the race. I’ll be blunt about it but I mean no particular malice:
The hull designs are kind of a mess. The brutal speed decrease is not present on one hull of each ship class; ultimately I find my fleets comprised entirely of those three ships. Acolyte. Spirit. Crusader. They’re also the smallest of their respective classes which pushes the bias towards them further. Speed has been found to be an exceedingly important stat for all hull classes, and it hurts bad to have a negative bonus as the main trait of the race - it seems to completely overpower any power benefit.
The nuclear missile is almost always inferior to the fast missile.
Limpet mines have difficulty attaching to the extremely fast spectrum of single-rocket fighters. The fighters are faster. I’m still not sure they properly resume firing after maxing out the mines.
Firefly rockets suffer from the same odd deficiencies of the regular rocket (the spline seems to aim for shields that may not be there; painted rockets constantly go sailing laterally past unshielded craft) and only generally has a range advantage over the regular.
The rad cannon is good (additionally so due to it’s… eccentricities with shield penetration), although a few people don’t realize it’s a volley weapon that doesn’t do 110 dps. The unique graphics on it don’t show up if the attacked ship is an unarmored design.
The limpet mines have a second problem, it’s possible for a single ship to get hit with about 20-30 limpet mines but still limp (pun intended) off to the other side of the map, this essentially makes 2-3 modules completely useless. If the limpet mines would not attach to anything under a speed of 1.00 this would already be a good increase. Andthe nuclear missiles also need a big damage increase.
I’ve actually found that the firefly rockets are pretty good. THey slice through hull and shields at an acceptably good rate, and IIRC they’re cheap so they don’t do crazy things to the cost of your cruisers.
Anyway, i haven’t finished working with them, but my impressions so far is that they could be a good race, but the inconsistency in hull bonuses and weak special weapons make it too hard to use them. The firefly rockets are strong when a bunch of them are mounted on a cruiser and used as back-line fire support. As far as frigates
It’s interesting, because i use the order ships with negative speed bonuses but high power output/hull bonuses; they work quite well for me.
These two traits are kind of linked. The rad cannon is a fairly short-range weapon (bit longer than the CL). Effective as hell in my experience, but kind of useless if you can’t get it into range without being atomized. Long-range missiles can be countered by a scrambler or two; problem is the other long-range weapon you will face is plasma. And the best defense against plasma? Speed.
I kind of like the speed penalty as a race trait in concept … it just doesn’t have an appropriate balancing factor. Power bonuses sound sensible, but you have to throw on a LOT of bonus to make a power bonus really beneficial.
