Mask of Arcadius: The Sunrider
Sunrider
The first unit of the game. As it happens, the Sunrider is probably your most powerful unit, too, and it's able to perform comfortably in most any situation, at least if you've upgraded it appropriately.
30 Energy per tile of movement.The Sunrider is slooooow. You should generally not be moving more than 1 tile a turn, if any, and ideally you should tune your Energy Cost and Energy total upgrades to account for that.
Overall, 120 Energy is a bit of a 'magic number' for the Sunrider to eventually achieve. It gives you one more potential tile of movement if you need the Sunrider to rush somewhere, and it makes it easier to cram in double-shots with your Kinetic and Laser weapons without dumping obscene amounts of cash into upgrading them per se. That said, it should tend to be a priority more in the mid-game than the early game: early on you're better off reducing Energy costs on weapons.
1500HP is straightforward enough. You run out, you die.
In the Sunrider's case, it's your toughest unit by a fair margin, especially early in the game before you get the Paladin and can purchase Solar Alliance Cruisers, but this is small comfort as the Sunrider is usually your only mission-critical unit: if the Sunrider dies, you game over then and there. Your other units can all die and it doesn't really matter if you manage to get to the end of the mission successfully anyway.
One wrinkle worth noting is that the game has a 'repair cost' notion, where the amount of HP your units are missing at the end of a mission subtracts some cash from what you just earned. The actual ratio is extremely generous, with every 10 HP your forces are missing costing you 1$, so it's largely an ignorable mechanic (You make hundreds of credits in early missions, thousands in the mid-game, and can easily break 10,000 on some late-game missions, while your repair costs even with catastrophic losses are generally double-digit or triple-digit), but it does mean that raising HP as a means of improving a unit's survivability is slightly counterproductive relative to other options. More importantly, it means that repairing your units mid-mission is a way to slightly increase your intake from a mission, which is particularly significant in the early missions when you don't have much money to go around and saving 30$ can be the difference between affording one additional, vital upgrade vs not hitting that threshold.
Note that this isn't an endorsement of the Repair Drones Order once you're into the part of the campaign where they cost 400$ a pop. To save as much as they cost, the Sunrider would need to have 8000 max HP, which is simply not happening.
No shielding by default. A shield can be purchased for 1500$, which has a base Shield value of 15 and a base range of 0. (ie it only affects the Sunrider)The Sunrider can get a shield generator, as noted, but it's basically a trap choice, which requires a bit of a mechanics explanation first.
A unit that generates shields projects them in a radius. All units in that radius gain the Shield value of all units they're in the radius to benefit from, so that eg two sources of 35 Shield will stack to 70 Shield on any unit that's in range of both. Shield value itself acts specifically as a percentage damage reduction on all Laser-class weaponry: at 70 Shield, a unit erases 70% of the incoming Laser attack and then applies their Armor to it.
The thing is, the Liberty and Bianca both have a native Shield rating of 35 and a range of 1, and ideally you're going to extend their range by 1 tile apiece (For 2000$ total) no matter what you do otherwise just to ensure your entire fleet can be under a shield bubble at all time. It's also dirt-cheap to then increase their Shield ratings twice apiece to reach 90 Shield across your entire fleet, rendering your forces borderline-immune to Laser weaponry.
Getting the Sunrider's shield going costs not only 1500$ to start, but if you want to expand its radius to a respectable 2 tiles you'll need to spend a further 6000$. If you instead stop at 1 tile -shaving off 5000$ of the cost- the Sunrider isn't going to be consistently helping your entire fleet, and furthermore you've just spent 2500$ to increase a portion of your fleet's Shield rating by 15 points.
Since Shield is percentile, buying the Sunrider a meager 15 Shielding doesn't even really improve its ability to survive when off by itself by a meaningful margin. (ie it's not going to open up the option of warping the Sunrider out and firing the Vanguard Cannon and letting it ride out a turn of fire)
So overall buying the Sunrider's Shield generator is just a waste of money, with the only substantial argument in its favor being that eventually enemy hacker units show up and having more Shield generating units makes it harder for the enemy to completely disable all your shields. This isn't much of an argument, though, especially since it's completely possible to arrange for your army to be able to kill enemy hackers before they ever get a chance to do their thing in literally every mission they show up in. Maybe not on the higher difficulties, but frankly Sunrider is tuned to be shockingly difficult on the default difficulty level and I suspect getting through higher ones relies more on stuff like AI exploits than anything like conventional skill.
15Armor is straightforward enough at first glance: 15 points of Armor subtracts 15 damage from incoming attacks.
There's three major wrinkles to that, though.
First of all, Armor rots. As a unit loses HP its Armor scales down by an equivalent percentage: a half-dead Sunrider only has 7-8 Armor. (Note that repairing damage does, in fact, restore Armor, but the UI will not immediately update to reflect this)
Second of all, in Sunrider some attacks are volleys of shots, and these attacks do in fact have Armor reduce their damage on each separate hit. As such, 15 Armor is basically nothing against some of the big cannons doing 400 points of damage with a single hit, but is near-immunity to light weaponry that only does 12 damage per hit but hits 20 times. (Though the game enforces a minimum damage value of 1 in all situations on any attack that actually hits)
Thirdly, some weapons are classed as 'kinetics', and they treat a unit as having twice as much Armor as it actually does.
As far as the Sunrider itself goes, its Armor is a bit difficult to talk about. It's not nearly as heavy as you might intuitively expect it to be by looking at the Armor on your Ryders, but the mechanics of the game and the weapon selection of enemies mean having it be eg 20 points higher at base wouldn't have as much of an effect as you might assume. While the player has Assault, Pulse Laser, and Missile weaponry for multi-shot attacks that can be disproportionately affected by Armor, the AI has no Pulse Laser-equipped units at all, leaving it at just Assault and Missiles. Since Assault weaponry is classed as Kinetics and so doubles the effective Armor and tends to hover down near 12 damage per shot, the Sunrider's Armor has to degrade to below 6 points (ie the Sunrider needs to end up around 1/3rd of its max HP) for enemy Assault weaponry to be doing any more damage at all, while Missiles are impacted more by Flak than by Armor, generally speaking.
It would be nice for the Sunrider to have more Armor, and in playing the game it's certainly worth buying an upgrade (+5 Armor per upgrade) or maybe even two of them later in the game when you've got cash to spare and have probably already gotten a whole bunch of important upgrades to the point that they're burning 1000+$ per further step. But the Sunrider's Armor actually serves its primary purpose just fine: so long as you don't let it ever reach dangerously low HP values, Assault weapons are useless against it.
Single-target attacks, meanwhile, are either hitting so hard that the difference between eg 15 and 25 Armor essentially doesn't matter or are Laser attacks that you've arranged to be knocking off 90% of the attack and so a 200 Damage Laser attack becomes a 20 Damage Laser attack becomes 5 points due to your Armor.
Again, an upgrade or two can be worth grabbing, both because it gives you a little more wiggle room regarding the Sunrider taking a lot of damage all at once and potentially pulling through anyway and because it can have a relatively pronounced impact on Missiles lobbed by some of the relatively basic Pact units who are hitting with eg 10 Missiles at 40 Damage apiece, but overall the Sunrider's base Armor value does its job and other stats should usually be a priority. Especially since enemy Missile quality climbs fairly quickly and the game quite clearly intends for you to rely on Flak stacking and striking Missile-using enemies down before they get a chance to fire as your real defenses against Missiles.
Speaking of Flak...
40%, Range: 2Flak is a somewhat complicated mechanic, but essentially every Missile or Rocket that passes through a unit's Flak radius has a die roll made for whether it gets shot down or not. In the Sunrider's case, its Flak rating is 40, so it has a 40% chance of shooting down any given Missile, and it has a 30% chance of shooting down any given Rocket. (All enemy Rockets have a Flak Resistance rating of 10, which simply subtracts that number from the Flak rating before rolling dice happens)
You might think from the way the in-game UI feeds information back to you when targeting your own Missiles that Flak stacks like Shields do (The game will actually wig out and try to claim a more than 100% chance of being shot down when aiming through really dense Flak), but it doesn't. It just means you've got more things trying to roll numbers at incoming Missiles, which does help but critically you're never going to reach 100% shoot-down rate unless you pour insane amounts of money into upgrading a specific unit's Flak rating. (Upgrading the Sunrider's Flak rating by 5 points starts from 500$ and doubles for each further upgrade: getting up to a mere 65 Flak rating costs over 20,000$ in total)
I list a range here, which is an element of Flak the game never bothers to explicitly spell out. Basically, all units either have a Flak radius of 1 -which is to say they can shoot down Missiles that pass adjacent to them- or a Flak rating of 2. (ie they fire one tile further out than that) You can see this radius in-game by hovering your cursor over a unit and looking for the red grid that appears around them, but with one cheat-y exception the game kind of doesn't intend for you to fight it's always the case that Ryders have a radius of 1 and capital ships have a radius of 2 if they have a Flak rating at all.
The part about Flak that leads to me saying it's 'slightly complicated' is that Flak also has a rot mechanic: for each Missile a unit attempts to shoot down, it loses 2% of its Flak rating until the start of its next turn. When I say 'for each Missile' that's taking into account that non-Rocket Missile volleys always fire multiple shots: a unit that fired a single volley of 10 Missiles at the Sunrider would shave off 20% of its Flak rating. (20% in the sense that 40 becomes 32, not in the sense that 40% becomes 20%) This accounts for how many Missiles actually survived to reach a unit: if a 10-pack of Missiles was fired past the Sunrider at the Blackjack, and the Sunrider shot down the 4 it 'expects' to shoot down, the Blackjack would only suffer 12% Flak rot from the remaining 6 Missiles.
Flak rot means Missile effectiveness at breaking through Flak is scaled to the quantity of Missiles being fired. As a general rule of thumb you should be prioritizing clearing out enemy Missile-launching units before anything else in situations where there's a good number of Missile-launching enemies, because the effect on your safety is far greater than the effect of wiping out Laser-using enemies of equivalent danger.
As far as the Sunrider itself goes, it's by far your best source of Flak, with a high Flak rating and the radius of 2. You might intuitively think it makes sense to thus stack Flak upgrades on the Sunrider, but since upgrade costs scale so rapidly this is only true inasmuch as it helps more against Rockets. Mostly you should try to spread around Flak upgrades if you buy them at all.
-25Bizarrely, the game doesn't have an icon for Evasion. I've made do with an entirely different piece of the UI.
And yes, the Sunrider has negative Evasion. Mask of Arcadius does this with heavier ships in general, allowing you to target them with inaccurate weapons much further out than Ryders that actually have positive Evasion. By the same token enemies can very reliably land hits on the Sunrider, and indeed it tends to be their favorite target all else being equal. (The AI is surprisingly smart about eg targeting Lasers on unshielded targets, moving in to Assault range if everything is heavily Shielded, etc)
Evasion is straightforward: you subtract (Or add, in the case of a negative number) your Evasion from the enemy's Aim, in addition to whatever they've lost to Aim from distance penalties, and the final result is their chance to hit you with that attack. This is rolled per-hit in the case of attacks that strike multple times.
Energy: 70, Damage: 200x1, Aim: 120As a class, Lasers lose 10 Aim per tile out to the target. In the case of the Sunrider's Laser, this means against a neutral-Evasion target it can hit 100% reliably out to 2 tiles, as Sunrider applies its Aim penalties even to adjacent targets...
... except actually a semi-hidden component to Sunrider-the-series' accuracy formula is that all attacks get +50 to Aim in actual combat. As such, the Sunrider's Lasers actually hit against 0-Evasion targets out to 7 tiles. (Though in Sunrider, 0 Evasion more or less doesn't happen: Ryders and small ships always get 10-30 Evasion, while large cap ships get negative Evasion, allowing you to hit them from farther out) As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of this +50 boost is to fiddle with the tuning on Aim upgrades: the game always has upgrades provide a percentage of the base Aim per Aim upgrade, where if the 50 extra Aim was integrated into weapon base stats the difference in how effective Aim upgrades are for low-Aim weapons vs high-Aim weapons wouldn't be as significant.
The Sunrider's Laser is expensive to fire but can reliably hit cap ships fairly far out and can even semi-reliably hit Ryders closer in. Its damage is strictly inferior to your Kinetic cannon while burning the same Energy and suffering when Shields are involved, but the superior Aim/effective range means it's often the smart weapon to use anyway. Furthermore, it shares upgrade benefits with the Pulse Laser, and the Pulse Laser is really good against basically anything that isn't currently shielded or is only lightly shielded. Aim upgrades are percentile, as well, so upgrades to the Laser's Aim will go farther than upgrades to your Kinetic Aim. In the early game in particular it's pretty routine for you to be dealing with PACT Cruisers trying to Laser you from extreme ranges, and being able to competently Laser them back can go a long way to making those fights tolerable instead of them wearing you down while you're trying to close and then taking you apart with their own cannons once you're in range for your cannons to hit.
Energy: 40, Damage: 25x10, Aim: 90
Note that Pulse Lasers are synched with Lasers in terms of R&D upgrades: every time you upgrade the damage or aim or reduce the Energy cost of Lasers you're also benefiting Pulse Lasers in the process. This is particularly nice given Lasers and Pulse Lasers are both extremely useful weapons against basically anything out to a very long range
As I noted earlier, Pulse Lasers are never seen on enemy forces, which is probably for the best since it simplifies the AI's needs a bit. Pulse Lasers themselves are generally superior to your Lasers for taking out unarmored or lightly-armored targets (ie Ryders or mortally wounded cap ships) at a base of 250 potential damage as opposed to 200, and since Shields are percentile this relationship only changes when Armor is involved. Pulse Lasers still can be used against targets with moderate Armor, such as if you've got a middling final accuracy value and would rather be reasonably certain at least some damage will get through, and in fact it's fairly difficult to justify using Assault weaponry on the Sunrider when Pulse Lasers will pretty much always do more damage. (They have higher total damage, higher base Aim, and suffer less Aim rot per step than the Sunrider's Assault weapons)
Even when Shields get involved, the fact that Pulse Lasers don't deal with doubled Armor means they often perform better against eg Pact Elites benefiting from 25 points of Shields. Pulse Lasers do demand more Energy to fire than Assault weapons, but the whole issue is compounded by how upgrading Lasers and Pulse Lasers is making two good weapons better, whereas Assault only starts getting competitive if you were focusing heavily on your Kinetic cannons over your Laser batteries and Assault is thus incidentally being made better-ish.
As the game progresses enemy Shields become more common and achieve higher values, but your ability to work around enemy Shielding also improves in several ways, so while Lasers are particularly impressive in the early game they never stop being useful.
Energy: 70, Damage: 400x1, Aim: 70
Kinetic weaponry as a class loses 15 points of Aim per tile of distance and treats the enemy as having twice as much Armor as they actually have.
The rapid Aim rot, in conjunction with your Kinetic cannon having iffy base Aim, largely restricts the Kinetic cannon to killing cap ships at middling ranges. Since, again, Aim upgrades are percentile and upgrades in general rapidly increase their costs, there's only so much you can realistically do to offset this. It's certainly worth getting the first three or so Aim upgrades reasonably quickly just to give you a turn or so advantage when it comes to cannon-on-cannon combat, but it becomes very difficult to justify pushing much beyond that.
This is important on a design level, as Kinetic cannons are mechanically the best weapon class in the game. They hit extremely hard, so much so that Armor doubling doesn't really matter (Really tough enemies generally have no more than about 40 Armor; your Laser will do 200-40=160, while your Kinetic cannon will do 400-80=320, still double the Laser's damage), and them and Melee are the only weapon categories that no special defenses exist for. Literally the only balancing factor to them is their problems with Aim restricting them to close-quarters combat.
In the Sunrider's case, in the mid-to-late game you unlock Warp, and Warp can be abused to render the Kinetic Aim weakness completely irrelevant. Simply Warp right next to your target, fire until your Energy is out, and then Warp to the safety of your fleet. This makes the Aim upgrades even less worth bothering with, and your focus should probably be on getting damage up and getting the Energy cost down to 40 so you can triple-fire with the 120 Energy you're also upgrading to. Sure, using Warp in this way burns Command Points, but once you get far enough into the game (In fact, not long after you unlock Warp) Command Points are ridiculously abundant. Furthermore, completing a mission faster increases how many Command Points you get, so abusing Warp in this way is partially -potentially completely- paying for itself!
Note that in my own run I was able to beat the game without abusing Warp in this way... and I ended up persistently focusing more on upgrading my Lasers than my Kinetics. Lasers are good for more stand-off fighting, even as shielding proliferates.
Energy: 30, Damage: 12x20, Aim: 70
Note that Assault is synched with Kinetics in terms of R&D upgrades. This isn't nearly as helpful as with the laser over-category -at least, not for the Sunrider- as Assault weaponry is fairly difficult to justify using over Pulse Lasers and Assault weaponry isn't very good. In real terms if you're upgrading Kinetics it's for your Kinetic cannons and not for the spillover to Assault.
Assault itself being classified as a Kinetic weapon is much harsher on it than for the Kinetic cannon. Doubling enemy Armor hurts when your base damage is 12, ensuring that you can't touch moderately armored targets, have to wait for heavily armored targets to be nearly dead to be able to do anything of substance, and also meaning that minor Armor such as PACT Elites have is still potentially slashing away half your damage output. In the Sunrider's case Assault weaponry is generally difficult to justify using; early in the game you might use it because your Energy ratios work out so that it's the only thing you can do after firing a Laser or Kinetic cannon shot, and if you don't end up focused enough on Lasers that Pulse Lasers end up cheaper anyway you might occasionally use Assault for the same basic reason later in the game, but in most circumstances Assault is fairly directly shunted aside by Pulse Lasers. The only exception -and this really shouldn't be happening in real play, outside maybe abusing the Warp trick- is that if you've got Ryders in your face and under shielding then yes okay Assault is probably your best bet.
I personally basically never used Assault at all.
One point worth mentioning is that if an enemy moves next to the Sunrider, the Sunrider will automatically make a free attack with its Assault weaponry. (This is actually a standard mechanic, but I'll cover it a bit more later) This only very slightly helps the Sunrider's Assault weaponry's case, as enemies will almost never do this of their own volition; they far prefer to stop one tile away and open fire if they're going to try to get close. The main way it's likely to crop up is abusing a mechanic on a later unit, and usually upgrading your Kinetics to improve your Assault weaponry for this situation is unnecessary anyway.
Energy: 30, Damage: 50x10, Ammunition: 1, Aim: 130
Missiles are nearly unique in that they have a limited supply of shots per battle. You can upgrade that amount in R&D, but it's pricey to do so (500$ for the first added Missile, doubling with each further one), so it's never going to be realistic to get a mission's supply of Missiles sitting in the Sunrider.
As a class, Missiles lose 5 points of Aim per tile traveled, allowing them to strike capital ships at extreme ranges and fairly reliably strike even relatively dodgy Ryders at more moderate ranges. Unlike other weapons, you can't upgrade their Aim, which admittedly only matters in that it means you can't really extend their effective range. Instead you can upgrade their ammunition supply and Flak Resistance.
Note that enemy units also run out of Missiles, but where player units all have a base ammunition of 1-2 enemy Missile units generally have 3+ units of ammunition. As such, my prior advice of focusing on enemy Missile units first when they're massed still applies, the only real change is that it's also a good idea to focus on killing new Missile units first since the old ones might run out of ammunition before you get around to them and not the reverse.
The Sunrider's Missiles are really difficult to justify putting money into. A damage upgrade or two might be worth grabbing simply because there's some enemies it takes from 'cannot ever one-shot' to 'can potentially one-shot, assuming no Flak'. Beyond that though, unless you've got specific plans with Rockets there's really no reason to put money into Missiles. Improving their Flak Resistance has a statistically insignificant impact and improving their capacity is too pricey in the early game for too little benefit while in the late game enemy Flak gets so consistently dense that while 500$ is small potatoes it's dubious whether it's worth bothering anyway. Indeed, in general one flaw with Missiles in player hands is that enemy Flak is pretty consistently exceptionally dense, with the point at which you can actually pull off getting a decent number of Missiles through generally being the point at which the enemy force is no longer a threat and so it's not necessary to burn a limited resource on them. There's only a handful of cases where the game places enemies that lack innate Flak rating in positions where they're not covered by others units' Flak, severely limiting the utility of Missiles. The Sunrider's Missiles are also unusually Energy-intensive to fire, making them even more dubious; your other units with Missiles are much more justifiable to put a little money into because they'll fairly routinely find themselves in a position where they can't do anything but fire Missiles and maybe move.
It's unfortunate, and I really wish base Missile capacity on player units had been higher. 4-6 Missiles as a base would do a lot to make them more relevant and I don't see how it could possibly break the game.
Energy: 30, Damage: 800x1, Ammunition: 0/2, Aim: 150, Flak Resistance: 10. In addition to standard damage upgrades, a 'Quantum Torpedo License' can be purchased one time to increase the base damage to 1200x1.
I hate Rockets.
On the player's end, Rockets are a special weapon that requires you actually fork over 300$ per Rocket you intend to expend, making them expensive to actually use. Their Flak Resistance rating makes them unlikely to be shot down -they simply shave off 10 points of Flak for purposes of calculations, and this happens after Flak rot has occurred, when most enemies have maybe 33 Flak and often more like 25 or 15- but it's still going to happen periodically, which will be 300 bucks down the drain, and while they're impressively damaging at twice the base damage of Kinetics -three times if you purchase the Quantum Torpedo License- that money could just as easily have gone to improving your other weapons for stable improvements in your performance that last throughout the entire game.
That's sort of irritating in and of itself, but the real problem comes from the fact that the AI gets Rockets too, and of course the AI isn't dealing with an economy so the entire balancing aspect of 'Rockets cost real money to fire' doesn't apply to the AI at all. Sunrider is mostly pretty good about avoiding RNG being overly-much a factor in your play, but Rockets toss that out entirely, as Flak mechanics make it impossible to actually ensure a Rocket fails to go through, and due to their nature as single big hits the result is extremely swingy. When enemies lob hordes of Missiles at you, the result is technically random, but the sheer number of attacks being lobbed means it's generally fairly predictable within a range; if you lose the Sunrider to a Missile storm on the second turn, you probably need to do something different instead of trying to savescum. If you lose the Sunrider to 3 Rockets, even if that's the 'expected' result it's just as easily possible that reloading will lead to all 3 Rockets being shot down -and since no AI unit gets more than 1 Rocket (Bar maybe Pirate Iron Hogs; I've never given them the chance to fire more than once) if you RNG right through such a Rocket storm you don't have to worry about them lobbing more Rockets; contrast this with getting lucky and surviving a volley of Kinetics that ought to have killed you, where the AI is just going to keep firing them until they're dead, constricting the RNG's ability to save you from bad play.
Rockets are the one piece of Mask of Arcadius' game design that are just plain awful and they shouldn't be a part of the game. The fact that they're not even very good in the player's hands -and the Quantum Torpedo License is irritatingly expensive- is just the icing on the cake.
... oh, Rockets are synched up with Missiles in terms of R&D upgrades, by the way, being part of the Missile class. By the same token they only lose 5 Aim per tile traveled. The one exception is that upgrades to Missile capacity don't increase your Rocket capacity; you're always capped at 2 Rockets in storage.
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The Sunrider is one of your slowest pieces, but while it starts out the game somewhat unwieldy it doesn't take much investment to turn it into one of your most versatile units. Its kinetic and laser weaponry, once Pulse Lasers are unlocked by the plot, are plenty to handle a variety of situations on their own, it's your best source of Flak, period, and eventually you gain access to personal teleportation for it that can be used to trivialize its mobility weakness.
Yet, it never feels overpowered. Versatile, yes. One of your best pieces, yes. Overpowered? Not really. That's a hard balance to strike, and I'm legitimately impressed Mask of Arcadius manages it.
I do wish Rockets weren't so badly-handled.
Next time, we cover the Blackjack.
The Sunrider's Laser is expensive to fire but can reliably hit cap ships fairly far out and can even semi-reliably hit Ryders closer in. Its damage is strictly inferior to your Kinetic cannon while burning the same Energy and suffering when Shields are involved, but the superior Aim/effective range means it's often the smart weapon to use anyway. Furthermore, it shares upgrade benefits with the Pulse Laser, and the Pulse Laser is really good against basically anything that isn't currently shielded or is only lightly shielded. Aim upgrades are percentile, as well, so upgrades to the Laser's Aim will go farther than upgrades to your Kinetic Aim. In the early game in particular it's pretty routine for you to be dealing with PACT Cruisers trying to Laser you from extreme ranges, and being able to competently Laser them back can go a long way to making those fights tolerable instead of them wearing you down while you're trying to close and then taking you apart with their own cannons once you're in range for your cannons to hit.
Energy: 40, Damage: 25x10, Aim: 90Note that Pulse Lasers are synched with Lasers in terms of R&D upgrades: every time you upgrade the damage or aim or reduce the Energy cost of Lasers you're also benefiting Pulse Lasers in the process. This is particularly nice given Lasers and Pulse Lasers are both extremely useful weapons against basically anything out to a very long range
As I noted earlier, Pulse Lasers are never seen on enemy forces, which is probably for the best since it simplifies the AI's needs a bit. Pulse Lasers themselves are generally superior to your Lasers for taking out unarmored or lightly-armored targets (ie Ryders or mortally wounded cap ships) at a base of 250 potential damage as opposed to 200, and since Shields are percentile this relationship only changes when Armor is involved. Pulse Lasers still can be used against targets with moderate Armor, such as if you've got a middling final accuracy value and would rather be reasonably certain at least some damage will get through, and in fact it's fairly difficult to justify using Assault weaponry on the Sunrider when Pulse Lasers will pretty much always do more damage. (They have higher total damage, higher base Aim, and suffer less Aim rot per step than the Sunrider's Assault weapons)
Even when Shields get involved, the fact that Pulse Lasers don't deal with doubled Armor means they often perform better against eg Pact Elites benefiting from 25 points of Shields. Pulse Lasers do demand more Energy to fire than Assault weapons, but the whole issue is compounded by how upgrading Lasers and Pulse Lasers is making two good weapons better, whereas Assault only starts getting competitive if you were focusing heavily on your Kinetic cannons over your Laser batteries and Assault is thus incidentally being made better-ish.
As the game progresses enemy Shields become more common and achieve higher values, but your ability to work around enemy Shielding also improves in several ways, so while Lasers are particularly impressive in the early game they never stop being useful.
Energy: 70, Damage: 400x1, Aim: 70Kinetic weaponry as a class loses 15 points of Aim per tile of distance and treats the enemy as having twice as much Armor as they actually have.
The rapid Aim rot, in conjunction with your Kinetic cannon having iffy base Aim, largely restricts the Kinetic cannon to killing cap ships at middling ranges. Since, again, Aim upgrades are percentile and upgrades in general rapidly increase their costs, there's only so much you can realistically do to offset this. It's certainly worth getting the first three or so Aim upgrades reasonably quickly just to give you a turn or so advantage when it comes to cannon-on-cannon combat, but it becomes very difficult to justify pushing much beyond that.
This is important on a design level, as Kinetic cannons are mechanically the best weapon class in the game. They hit extremely hard, so much so that Armor doubling doesn't really matter (Really tough enemies generally have no more than about 40 Armor; your Laser will do 200-40=160, while your Kinetic cannon will do 400-80=320, still double the Laser's damage), and them and Melee are the only weapon categories that no special defenses exist for. Literally the only balancing factor to them is their problems with Aim restricting them to close-quarters combat.
In the Sunrider's case, in the mid-to-late game you unlock Warp, and Warp can be abused to render the Kinetic Aim weakness completely irrelevant. Simply Warp right next to your target, fire until your Energy is out, and then Warp to the safety of your fleet. This makes the Aim upgrades even less worth bothering with, and your focus should probably be on getting damage up and getting the Energy cost down to 40 so you can triple-fire with the 120 Energy you're also upgrading to. Sure, using Warp in this way burns Command Points, but once you get far enough into the game (In fact, not long after you unlock Warp) Command Points are ridiculously abundant. Furthermore, completing a mission faster increases how many Command Points you get, so abusing Warp in this way is partially -potentially completely- paying for itself!
Note that in my own run I was able to beat the game without abusing Warp in this way... and I ended up persistently focusing more on upgrading my Lasers than my Kinetics. Lasers are good for more stand-off fighting, even as shielding proliferates.
Energy: 30, Damage: 12x20, Aim: 70Note that Assault is synched with Kinetics in terms of R&D upgrades. This isn't nearly as helpful as with the laser over-category -at least, not for the Sunrider- as Assault weaponry is fairly difficult to justify using over Pulse Lasers and Assault weaponry isn't very good. In real terms if you're upgrading Kinetics it's for your Kinetic cannons and not for the spillover to Assault.
Assault itself being classified as a Kinetic weapon is much harsher on it than for the Kinetic cannon. Doubling enemy Armor hurts when your base damage is 12, ensuring that you can't touch moderately armored targets, have to wait for heavily armored targets to be nearly dead to be able to do anything of substance, and also meaning that minor Armor such as PACT Elites have is still potentially slashing away half your damage output. In the Sunrider's case Assault weaponry is generally difficult to justify using; early in the game you might use it because your Energy ratios work out so that it's the only thing you can do after firing a Laser or Kinetic cannon shot, and if you don't end up focused enough on Lasers that Pulse Lasers end up cheaper anyway you might occasionally use Assault for the same basic reason later in the game, but in most circumstances Assault is fairly directly shunted aside by Pulse Lasers. The only exception -and this really shouldn't be happening in real play, outside maybe abusing the Warp trick- is that if you've got Ryders in your face and under shielding then yes okay Assault is probably your best bet.
I personally basically never used Assault at all.
One point worth mentioning is that if an enemy moves next to the Sunrider, the Sunrider will automatically make a free attack with its Assault weaponry. (This is actually a standard mechanic, but I'll cover it a bit more later) This only very slightly helps the Sunrider's Assault weaponry's case, as enemies will almost never do this of their own volition; they far prefer to stop one tile away and open fire if they're going to try to get close. The main way it's likely to crop up is abusing a mechanic on a later unit, and usually upgrading your Kinetics to improve your Assault weaponry for this situation is unnecessary anyway.
Energy: 30, Damage: 50x10, Ammunition: 1, Aim: 130Missiles are nearly unique in that they have a limited supply of shots per battle. You can upgrade that amount in R&D, but it's pricey to do so (500$ for the first added Missile, doubling with each further one), so it's never going to be realistic to get a mission's supply of Missiles sitting in the Sunrider.
As a class, Missiles lose 5 points of Aim per tile traveled, allowing them to strike capital ships at extreme ranges and fairly reliably strike even relatively dodgy Ryders at more moderate ranges. Unlike other weapons, you can't upgrade their Aim, which admittedly only matters in that it means you can't really extend their effective range. Instead you can upgrade their ammunition supply and Flak Resistance.
Note that enemy units also run out of Missiles, but where player units all have a base ammunition of 1-2 enemy Missile units generally have 3+ units of ammunition. As such, my prior advice of focusing on enemy Missile units first when they're massed still applies, the only real change is that it's also a good idea to focus on killing new Missile units first since the old ones might run out of ammunition before you get around to them and not the reverse.
The Sunrider's Missiles are really difficult to justify putting money into. A damage upgrade or two might be worth grabbing simply because there's some enemies it takes from 'cannot ever one-shot' to 'can potentially one-shot, assuming no Flak'. Beyond that though, unless you've got specific plans with Rockets there's really no reason to put money into Missiles. Improving their Flak Resistance has a statistically insignificant impact and improving their capacity is too pricey in the early game for too little benefit while in the late game enemy Flak gets so consistently dense that while 500$ is small potatoes it's dubious whether it's worth bothering anyway. Indeed, in general one flaw with Missiles in player hands is that enemy Flak is pretty consistently exceptionally dense, with the point at which you can actually pull off getting a decent number of Missiles through generally being the point at which the enemy force is no longer a threat and so it's not necessary to burn a limited resource on them. There's only a handful of cases where the game places enemies that lack innate Flak rating in positions where they're not covered by others units' Flak, severely limiting the utility of Missiles. The Sunrider's Missiles are also unusually Energy-intensive to fire, making them even more dubious; your other units with Missiles are much more justifiable to put a little money into because they'll fairly routinely find themselves in a position where they can't do anything but fire Missiles and maybe move.
It's unfortunate, and I really wish base Missile capacity on player units had been higher. 4-6 Missiles as a base would do a lot to make them more relevant and I don't see how it could possibly break the game.
Energy: 30, Damage: 800x1, Ammunition: 0/2, Aim: 150, Flak Resistance: 10. In addition to standard damage upgrades, a 'Quantum Torpedo License' can be purchased one time to increase the base damage to 1200x1.I hate Rockets.
On the player's end, Rockets are a special weapon that requires you actually fork over 300$ per Rocket you intend to expend, making them expensive to actually use. Their Flak Resistance rating makes them unlikely to be shot down -they simply shave off 10 points of Flak for purposes of calculations, and this happens after Flak rot has occurred, when most enemies have maybe 33 Flak and often more like 25 or 15- but it's still going to happen periodically, which will be 300 bucks down the drain, and while they're impressively damaging at twice the base damage of Kinetics -three times if you purchase the Quantum Torpedo License- that money could just as easily have gone to improving your other weapons for stable improvements in your performance that last throughout the entire game.
That's sort of irritating in and of itself, but the real problem comes from the fact that the AI gets Rockets too, and of course the AI isn't dealing with an economy so the entire balancing aspect of 'Rockets cost real money to fire' doesn't apply to the AI at all. Sunrider is mostly pretty good about avoiding RNG being overly-much a factor in your play, but Rockets toss that out entirely, as Flak mechanics make it impossible to actually ensure a Rocket fails to go through, and due to their nature as single big hits the result is extremely swingy. When enemies lob hordes of Missiles at you, the result is technically random, but the sheer number of attacks being lobbed means it's generally fairly predictable within a range; if you lose the Sunrider to a Missile storm on the second turn, you probably need to do something different instead of trying to savescum. If you lose the Sunrider to 3 Rockets, even if that's the 'expected' result it's just as easily possible that reloading will lead to all 3 Rockets being shot down -and since no AI unit gets more than 1 Rocket (Bar maybe Pirate Iron Hogs; I've never given them the chance to fire more than once) if you RNG right through such a Rocket storm you don't have to worry about them lobbing more Rockets; contrast this with getting lucky and surviving a volley of Kinetics that ought to have killed you, where the AI is just going to keep firing them until they're dead, constricting the RNG's ability to save you from bad play.
Rockets are the one piece of Mask of Arcadius' game design that are just plain awful and they shouldn't be a part of the game. The fact that they're not even very good in the player's hands -and the Quantum Torpedo License is irritatingly expensive- is just the icing on the cake.
... oh, Rockets are synched up with Missiles in terms of R&D upgrades, by the way, being part of the Missile class. By the same token they only lose 5 Aim per tile traveled. The one exception is that upgrades to Missile capacity don't increase your Rocket capacity; you're always capped at 2 Rockets in storage.
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The Sunrider is one of your slowest pieces, but while it starts out the game somewhat unwieldy it doesn't take much investment to turn it into one of your most versatile units. Its kinetic and laser weaponry, once Pulse Lasers are unlocked by the plot, are plenty to handle a variety of situations on their own, it's your best source of Flak, period, and eventually you gain access to personal teleportation for it that can be used to trivialize its mobility weakness.
Yet, it never feels overpowered. Versatile, yes. One of your best pieces, yes. Overpowered? Not really. That's a hard balance to strike, and I'm legitimately impressed Mask of Arcadius manages it.
I do wish Rockets weren't so badly-handled.
Next time, we cover the Blackjack.
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