Your favourite volunteer lobbyist is back. Before the usual backroom idiots try to discredit this thread: - No, I don't want the Polaris to be a jack of all trades - Nor do I want it to be a one-man OP ship I don't expect the Polaris to be a brawler (even if CIG doesn't really give it the choice any more, making it less and less agile and slower and slower). Nor do I expect a $1000 ship to be able to stand up with ease to a $2000 ship, which requires far more logistics, operational costs and a much larger crew. At the moment, I (and most other Polaris owners on Spectrum) are totally lost as to the future of this ship, which now seems to have no identity, no role. I almost feel like I'm looking at a V2 redeemer, which we don't know what to do with, which is bad at everything and good at nothing. The original Polaris had a well-defined niche: - A small, fast and agile capital ship - A torpedo ship designed for fast, devastating attacks with its torpedoes - Fragile' and not designed for classic, line-of-sight combat. But now, even if some people like to point out that it's an alpha... that things take time, blah blah blah... - He's no longer agile - No longer quick/agile enough to reposition or disengage - His weaponry is weak for a capital, even for a small capital - Its armament does not allow it to assist a torpedo strike - It's still not a brawler, but the recent adjustments to its speed won't allow it to escape the weapon range of an idris or javelin, its natural targets. I get the feeling that the Polaris no longer has a niche. No personality, no particular role. The idris can do everything the Polaris does, only better. - Brawler -Carrier -Finisher -Support - Tank - Devastating weaponry (Laserbeam, railgun) that can be used right from the start of a fight. - The rest of its weaponry remains very powerful Of course, the idris requires more crew, more investment and more logistics. I'm not saying that the Polaris should be able to do 1V1 with an idris, but that it should have a niche, a zone of efficiency. At the moment, ALL the statements from the developers and the capital gameplay vision converge on a single conclusion for the Polaris (and its torpedoes): It won't do any good until the target is already half dead, incapacitated and therefore unable to defend itself against torpedoes. We've gone from a ship that is, in the lore, the new ultra-modern alternative to the idris, from a ship that was sold from the outset as the ‘Tip of the spear’, an efficient, fast and dangerous first responder to ... A spear with a blunt tip, which can do ‘nothing’ until another ship has cut the target to pieces... To Quote @Kydelz : Even if the Idris costs more- so what? The Polaris is still a $750-$1000 ship with a “strike” role that it can’t execute. It’s like designing a sniper rifle that can’t shoot past 50 meters, then claiming it “wasn’t intended to be used from far away.” Today, the idris comes out and all the problems of the Polaris are addressed: - The pilot controls the torpedoes at the moment (whereas with the Polaris, you have to assign a man to a console to press a button... Excellent vision of multicrew gameplay). - The 4 torpedoes come out of the tubes at the same time - The torpedoes have 10x the HP of those in the Polaris, and go at almost the same speed. There are two ways of looking at this: First option: these are deliberate choices that take into account the feedback from the Polaris so as not to repeat the same mistakes on the idris. In this case it's infuriating because why not fix these problems on the Polaris in the same patch (these are just values to be modified)? Second option: it's a deliberate choice to give you a clear advantage over the Polaris (after nerfing its speed as well) and encourage people to buy the Idris. In both cases, I don't think it's clean. I could go on and on about all this. For example, since no turret will be useful (since below S5 there will be no impact on assets), the Polaris only has its size 6 turret to hope to damage components. It only has one, so you can imagine that it will be very quickly focused and destroyed. Even with 2 or 3 Polaris. From me : I've got a feeling I'm going to end up with an armoured Hammerhead From @Marabar : its just a bigger less pratical carrack now it seems. i kinda feel bad for upgrading from the carrack. maybe i will melt it and go back. my friends had a lot of fun with it and the polaris is kinda underwhelming From @Strixine : There is no real point to the Polaris. It's a very fat single fighter transport. Now that the nerfed agility isn't noticeably better than the Idris, it's just inferior in all except a small edge in top speed, which it can't take advantage of because it can't out-turn or out-range anything. The Idris shipping with pilot control of the main weapon really says it all. It was so important for the Polaris not to have this feature that they had to put the torpedo station all the way down in the sewers, just in case the pilot tried get there in a hurry. Suddenly it's not a balance problem when they're desperate to sell the extra expensive ship with the extra expensive weapon kits. From @Voojah : I'm not CIG, but I can tell you what the purpose of Polaris is. Strictly speaking, the ship was good for exactly 2 things. 1) Pay money to CIG, and make it particularly attractive to you with the possibility of upgrading to the Polaris. 2) Now to realize the absurd pointlessness of the ship to spend money again. If this breaks a previously well-planned discount chain, so much the better, because there's not much under $1000 between Polaris and that limit. I just wonder what CIG will do with the Polaris if the Perseus can destroy it completely with ease. Here are a few ideas I have for ‘improving’ the Polaris, giving it back its niche, without making it OP. Making the ship more agile. Without going to extremes and turning it into a heavy fighter, I feel that its agility (albeit ‘fragile’ for a capital ship) should be better felt, allowing it to disengage from an idris, for example, or to overmanoeuvre it if the idris pilot isn't careful. At the moment, there's too little difference between the stats of the Polaris and the idris in terms of manoeuvring. The Chin turret is very good, a size 6 with the characteristics of a quasi S7 is ok in my opinion. I would suggest upgrading the 2 upper turrets, which are 4xS4, to a 2XS5. The side turrets which are 4x s3 (a joke for a capital ship) to 4xS4. We can find the room needed to achieve that. The missile turret at the rear is absolutely insulting. 12 or 16 S2 missiles, when turrets of the same size on other ships or land vehicles have many more missiles, it's absolutely not worth dedicating someone to it. You're better off with another 4xS3 or 4xS4 turret. Torpedoes: If we take the IDris S12s in their current stats as a benchmark : 230, 230, 230, 350, 350, 350, 415 > 2155/7 = +/- 307.86 They go at an average of 307 m/s for 1000 HP and deliver 1m of damage. The average S10 torpedo is 309 M/s. 375, 375, 375, 255, 255, 255, 270 > = 2160/7 = +/- 308.57 Virtually the same speed, except that S12s deliver an average of 1,070,000 damage compared with 713,500 for S10s. Above all, the Idris S12s have many more HPs, making it much easier to ignore PDCs. My suggestion isn't necessarily to nerf the Idris torpedoes, I'm not in favour of levelling down (even though, with 1000 hp per torpedo, in a combat situation it's almost impossible to intercept a salvo of 4 because of the HPs). But rather : - Increase the life points of the Polaris torpedoes a little, for example to 300/400. - Increase their speed (especially as, according to the brochure, the Polaris is supposed to have special technology to speed up its torpedoes...) - More diversity in torpedoes (for example a kind of rattler torpedo that could be fired to try and saturate the pdcs) - Possibility of controlling a torpedo manually - Not necessarily immediate detection of the lock alert. You could imagine firing a torpedo ‘into the wind’, just in the direction of the target without it being locked, and the lock (and therefore the alert to the target) only occurs when it is, for example, 3 or 5 km away. And why not come up with a Kit K that replaces torpedo tubes with laser beams?