While I've have saved my life with melee weapons in desperate situations, there's no way to direct their damage to the core, so most hits appear to do nothing while I'm busy being shot up.
Piercing weapons treat target cores as having 33% higher coverage than usual. Other than that, it's true that you have to get to the target's core for the nice damage to really have an impact, which is why you want as high of an initial hit chance as possible.
As for armor, I'm not the most advanced player, so maybe this is off base, but plating doesn't seem to be as good as just getting extra movement slots. Plating has more coverage generally, but it also generates heat, weighs a ton, and often takes multiple slots. Whereas, like an armored leg or some treads turned off take no energy, produce no heat, have no weight, even if you are flying around, have surprisingly high integrity, are extremely common, and will often save your life if your other means of travel get shot off. I feel like either movement parts need to have a weight value assigned when they are turned off or armour needs more integrity then it has.
Yep, this has changed significantly since the early game, when armor had much more integrity compared to propulsion. The heavier forms of propulsion got a massive integrity boost, but that was without concern for how players might stack them as an alternative form of protection. Part of the reason they are somewhat less effective in that role, at least in terms of protecting parts, is that armor still has higher coverage. Some further tweaking is probably important here to keep this from being abused (yes, I do it a bit, too
), but forcing propulsion mass to kick in when inactive, while perfectly logical, removes a lot of potential strategies and will also end up wasting a lot more slots for part of the game.
And I'll add one item to the list. The remote datajack seems to take a stupendous amount of matter to function. I'm sure this must be from some previous balance change, but every time I seek to use it I run out of matter within a couple fights, having maybe hacked a robot or two.
It's been that way from the beginning, because a really good hacker could (theoretically) practically own a floor via remote robot hacks. That number could still very well be tweaked, though, and likely will be. The reason it hasn't yet is because robot hacking is still only gradually becoming a viable strategy, due to other changes that have been occurring over previous versions.
I'll actually look at changing this one in particular for Alpha 11!
That matter -> energy converter might be sweet toggled on with force fields perhaps...
Nope...still got drained with that fusion compressor turned on against a single sentry. 20 energy/turn isn't enough.
Yep, It won't be enough to run a shield for very long on its own, just a more efficient power source. But I'll definitely be examining those numbers and how they relate to shields. It would be nice if you could willingly use a huge matter stash to produce a ton of power in short order to support a shield very well.
I'll be looking at this one for Alpha 11, too. (As you say, though, having to actively toggle it all the time to avoid matter waste could be fairly annoying. Matter-draining parts are somewhat dangerous to use
)
