Hello. This is a thread intended to provide feedback about the recent patch. Everything posted herein are my personal opinions and does not reflect what the developers should do - merely what I think they should do, and I shall argue for what I think they should do.
Post-patch, Pyramidion now has less armor than the Squid. A huge vessel made for close combat and ramming, as I understand it. How then, does it make sense to nerf it to the point where it may well go down before getting close enough to pull it's weight? And why does a small ship made for hit and run have more armor? It makes no sense.
As for the minotaur, the problems, as I see them, are the following.
It forces enemies to focus a specific ship, just to be able to reliably land shots, ignoring allies in the proccess - that alone is a terrible advantage. It also gives an almost sadistic potential for "bouncing" an enemy ship between two ships, thereby sealing it's fate completly.
Now, I have been discussing this a lot with my GoI pals, and several suggestions were made about the Pyramidon. One idea was to reduce it's turning rate instead of it's armor, or it's lifting power, basically a slower ship. However, the real problem, as I see it, was always the two guns at the front of the ship, which resulted in a gatling-mortar/flak combo that was really hard to defend oneself against. Basically, the gatling gun ate up the armor too fast and the mortars/flaks blew the hull up faster than it could be repaired. But since switching the gunports might require a redesign of the ship at large, an easier solution would probably have been to make the Pyramidion slower, or to keep the armor a hundred or two above Squid.
As for the minotaur cannon, I think that it should have been made into a stopping weapon, not a moving weapon. Making a ship stop for a few seconds on hit would have made it effective against close combat weapons and ships, yet demanding positioning. It could also have worked as a balancing pin vs the Pyramidion. Possibly that could result in a meta game where the minotaur cannon is a must, but that seems to be the case as things currently are anyways.
Those are my thoughts about the patch. Feel free to post your own ideas.
Thanks a lot - Dr Brobotnik.