alt3rn1ty wrote: ↑Thu, 14. Aug 25, 12:55
You can still use ships like the Yasur or Xperimental Shuttle to reduce Agents time on mission (in the case of Yasur, once one is being used by an Agent, you can download another in the Ventures inventory .. although weirdly I have had a couple of Agents would not accept the Yasur as a ship, the other 6 did accept it). If you never played Ventures, or dont have Timelines, other ships like the Boron Irukandji, or Paranid Pegasus Vanguard, or the Yaki Moreya are good. I guess there are more I haven't tried on Agents.
And the cloaking ability we already have if you are flying the Litigious Rodent ..
https://i.imgur.com/Dps1tCm.png
.. On that ship you dont need to deactivate weapons to go into its cloaked mode, its probably not as sturdy as these new ships are going to be though.
.. So I don't see what is being "locked" behind a paywall?
Your choice of course, but I am pretty sure Egosoft never want to fall foul of other games companies mistakes. And this approach does give them even more time in development to polish the game. Much longer than we have ever seen them put into any of the X series of games. Without it we may never have seen Frame Generation in the 8.0 betas, which is a game changer especially for those of us on laptops.
Yasur is locked behind either community of planets bonus (not available to players who bought the game before then) or those who got to play in the ventures beta. Xperimental Shuttle is bundled with Timelines, so again locked behind a paywall for those who bought the game before it became standard. And by the sounds of it, either of those ships is worse than what is being advertised for the Envoy here.
I'd rather the Envoy was more in line with existing ships when it comes to agent missions - you don't want the game balanced such that there is an incentive to make things more annoying for people who didn't buy a DLC addon, essentially paying to skip the (artificial) wait. A worse version of this would be something like introducing a pack with better build ships that allow you to construct station modules in parallel (oft-requested, and would be an indispensable addition for building large complexes).
Nothing wrong with DLC packs being unique and fun, even powerful, but they should not be a shortcut or straight upgrade to what is in the base game.
The same is true for the cloak feature - I would not count the Litigious Rodent, disguising as YAK is not that useful since pretty much every faction hates them, and the ship itself is a small little fighter. Now I could be wrong about this, but from the OP it certainly sounds like the Envoy gives you access to an actual piracy cover mechanic, something that has been missing from the game since inception
with NPCs being able to do it, and something people have been asking for for the same amount of time. If you're already implementing this feature for the Envoy there is no reason, other than trying to sell this DLC pack, not to extend this to pirate ships in the base game, since they are clearly also supposed to be capable of it.
It is not a great direction to take, and as has been pointed out, limiting these things to specific ships that are gated behind DLC packs actively makes the game worse by eliminating choice.