I've done some more building on these new settings, and I can only confirm my earlier suspicions.
Oddly enough, I don't seem to be the only one who dislikes something here.
First, the good:
-Removing recoil was the only sensible thing to do. Large cannon turrets were creating game stopping lag before, as they hit and tried to go behind their maximum elevation upon firing. I'd ask how could this have stayed in the game so long, but this is Starmade.
-Removing stabilizer distance mechanic was the only sensible thing to do. It was THE most bothersome detriment to building anything besides the most common stick format ships, right after integrity.
-Beam+Beam weapons are no longer in the "avoid completely, forget they even exist" category.
-Armor stacking mechanic was something I campaigned for in the olden days. I dare say it's my exact proposal came to life.
And now the bad:
In short, pretty much anything that is not a fix to a glaring problem, rather a rebalance is completely wrong. The ones I found to be the worst:
-System block weight too high. Too restrictive.
-Thruster power consumption is EXTREMELY high, extremely restrictive, and scales extremely poorly. Many of my builds would need to be filled with reactors from tail to nose to provide adequate power for adequate manouverability.
According to the balance team, "It was too easy to reach maximum ratio" which is just not true. If one thing was good about power 2.0, it was thrust.
Well built small ships could reach max ratio, but not all of them, especially if they heavily focused in other areas.
Very well built medium ships could still reach max ratio IF they focused on speed
Big ships could still manouver without frustrating the pilot too much, or drift too far while turning.
-Thrust ratio settings are wrong: Nothing practical will reach the maximum.
For example, the interceptor hull I have, which is basically a cockpit on a thruster (can't get more speed oriented than that) can't reach it, and wouldn't be able to power it if it could.
I'm willing to bet if someone replicated WH40K Eldar ships (no shields, no armor, all speed and guns), they wouldn't get anywhere near it either.
-"Chamber" capacity was said to be made more generous; It was in fact made even more restricting, reasoning, by the team's own words: "Some options were more desirable than others" - This shouldn't need explaining, but making the desirable ones cost MORE cap does not make the others any more appealing; less in fact, as rest assured I'll be splitting my capacity between the same ones, except at less power, for an overall worse ship.
If you want people to use a larger variety of "chamber" effects, REDUCE the power cost of the good ones, and drastically lower the cost of the less popular ones. If there's not enough cap. left for a major effect, it'll be filled with something minor that was ignored so far. (Doesn't change the fact some of them are just not useful)
In conclusion, I strongly feel the Quickfire settings were not tested properly, especially on big stuff (See NagyGeri 01's Odissey upload, or my Retribution WIP that might as well be a station now).
Im in my second decade of gaming, seen many balance mods, and without exception while they all made sense to their creators, who no doubt had fun using them, were of lower quality than the original and unfit for global acceptance.
In all honesty, I think the Quickfire team either:
-A, is not very good at game balancing (no modmaker ever was)
-B, wants to make their preferred ships more powerful in comparison to the rest (judging by the settings, small to medium sized space rifle format, as anything wider, more geometrically complex, or larger gets shafted)
-C, is actively malicious (not as far-fetched a thought as I'd like it, considering their responses to anyone who offered critique so far.)
By all means, let them run their settings on their private server, keep it publicly accessible in case anyone wants to follow suit, but revert most of these changes in the base game.
