I would say that in general glass cannon builds with little HP or no defensive investment are more difficult to play in Colony Ship than in AoD. In AoD two such builds are the most capable, the max DEX maxxed Crit crossbow and Widowmaker type build. With crossbow you sacrifice CON to max PER and DEX for maximum accuracy and rate of fire, then you compensate for it with investment in dodge (obvious choice because you have low STR for shields and perfect DEX for dodge, you don't want THC penalty from shields and you want your max AP). Then you get bolter and nothing can touch you anymore. Once you get power armor and unlock +3 DEX mode plus get 8 crafting for blue steel ammo (going for 10 to unlock sky metal ammo is not even needed because it is overkill). Shame that at this point there are few battles difficult enough left. The damage output per turn is just that great, and could be made even bigger if you invest in alchemy and make poison and other buffs. With high quality neurostim you have 20 AP and 6 regular shots all with very high THC and crit chance, and you can delete any character from the map very quickly. Usually everyone except Agathoth drops in one turn. Very fun and simple to play
Widowmaker build as in Arena goes for pure max damage per attack which means going for max STR for attack bonus, it scales great on crits and two-handed axes as they have the biggest base damage of any weapon, and better 10 PER for max accuracy. All investment goes into axes, crits, crafting and alchemy, and both defense skills are ignored. Crafting gives better axes with sweet THC and CS bonuses, and alchemy gives high level poison of course. The late game of such build is that it can reliably, with almost no RNG, make two heavy attacks with very high THC and CS to any target in the game. The arena version of the build could deal around 40-60 damage per turn with no RNG to almost any target, no matter the armor or defense skill. In melee battles this build tears everything, but still suffers from ranged enemies. The only way of mitigating the damage directly here is the armor, and no matter how heavy it is, crits and weapon mastery attacks will still deal damage, and CON here is not great too. If you dump INT you wouldn't be able to have max crafting and alchemy. Because of this it's not at strong as crit crossbow, but still very fun to play, you can simply delete any character from the map in two clicks. High alchemy also gives you a lot of tools to remove debuffs. Both of these builds also often inflict bleeding on crits.
For true minmaxxing you also need to collect all crossbow/axe and crit training because it increases your CS and weapon skills above the maximum limit. With weapon skills you can also invest in synergy weapon skills. With crossbow build I managed to hit 220 effective CS but I've seen people reaching 230 and higher. This means that even against Agathoth, despite his overmaxxed vsCS, I still had around 80% crit chance. All of this with very high THC at almost any circumstances
This is because AoD has vsCS rating but Colony Ship does not. In AoD the crit chance is independent from THC, so you are fine with 85%-95% percent shots because you know you will crit. And debuffs don't come on you often or you have so much consumables to mitigate them (I remember finishing with like 30 healing potions on some of my chars). In Colony Ship now the crit chance is limited by the THC and enemies just love to spam debuffs which would lower it, on top of existing penalties. So if you want crit chance over 90% you need to first achieve 100% THC. Basically, now evasion took the role of vsCS directly which is sadly a simplification. My current best for regular shotgun is four enemies in one turn, although they're weak bums (still died later lol, took few attempts).
With laser shotgun you can end this encounter in two turns tops. I did Detroit on the first attempt with laser (although not true solo, brought the girl around too, mostly to distract the attention from me)
This presumes heavy consumable use, and consumable are fairly scarce. Energy weapons tear, laser shotgun doubleshots on my char can deal crazy damage, but cells are equally scarce. If I see enemy throwing some shit at me I of course would reload and kill him before he can throw anything. This means no shit is thrown at me and I have one more grenade to loot.
I understand the design philosophy of such decision, Dungeon Rats was already like that with bombs which you had to ration, but it leaves me wishing for more available energy ammo, it's simply fun. Would be cool to have some Fallout like trait which makes energy ammo dirty abundant, but adds some difficulty modifiers, like now it's solo only and encounters are more difficult
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