Well, I was slightly incorrect regarding the use of sniper rifles from jet skis, once 100% stability has been achieved. It's still pants versus sea serpents, since they have an immersion-based special accuracy malus (or perhaps just super-high Evasion when immersed), but a 55% chance to one-shot them when they're lurking below is still quite good. For everything else, there's SniperCard. Abandoned Waterway Facility is pretty much just a mop-up operation where I obliterate everything from outside its range, occasionally boating around a corner, but usually for caution's sake rather than extreme cornerfagging.
"Bigger is better" is a real bummer in the jet ski department. Bigger jets can carry a lot more and don't blow up as easily. Simple, right? Just get a big one. Yawn. I feel a trick was missed here, because you'd think that a fast-moving jet ski would also be harder to hit. Doesn't seem to matter how maneuverable your jet is or how many tiles you move, though—you might as well be standing still as far as the game's calculations are concerned. This is okay for the rest of the game, but stands out as inadequate here. Your own defensive stats, be it resistances, Dodge/Evasion, or what-have-you, only come into play when you're hit instead of the jet. Most of the time, when riding a faster jet, I'd much rather my character take a hit than allow the jet to be hit; and even low-STR/stealth characters can afford to wear heavier armor while aboard a jet, at the very least LemCo Marine and Biohazard Boots. I rode the Phaser into battle recently, and one burst from some random ferry guard shredded it from full HP down to a few bars.
If I have a point here, it's that I can't help but think Maneuverability or perhaps tiles moved should contribute to avoiding damage unless the jet hasn't moved last turn or the driver is incapacitated—and this would affect the player, too. Otherwise, all light jets are basically sitting ducks. The exception is if there is a disembarkation point. You can Turbo right up to an enemy ship and board it in one turn, and indeed, in previous playthroughs, I often did just that. The pity is that there are only a small handful of raid missions, and random encounters that allow boarding are fairly rare.
Don't get me wrong, fast jetting and fast boarding are powerful tools, but there's a lot of combat slog in Expedition, and the Devastator being the overall best regardless of slowness (even in terms of loot haulage capacity) removes potential interest from customizing jets.
To be sure, jet skis in general tend to reward tin can builds the most (less likely to get obliterated when disembarking into a bunch of enemies, can wear a can while on the ski, isn't robbed of important combat tools like Stealth and Sniper, etc.), and I'm all right with that.
One other thing: Jet ski logistics remain annoying. Getting from your house to your jet can be done conveniently only through rifts. The most convenient by far is to Camp Hathor, though Camp Hathor is furthest from any point of interest; the Pirate Bay has the closest rift in Expedition, although getting out to the Black Sea proper is more tedious, followed by the rift in the Aegis encampment, which requires moving a couple screens total to reach, but the docks themselves are in the middle of everything. Your house needs a moon pool down at the docks or something.
"Bigger is better" is a real bummer in the jet ski department. Bigger jets can carry a lot more and don't blow up as easily. Simple, right? Just get a big one. Yawn. I feel a trick was missed here, because you'd think that a fast-moving jet ski would also be harder to hit. Doesn't seem to matter how maneuverable your jet is or how many tiles you move, though—you might as well be standing still as far as the game's calculations are concerned. This is okay for the rest of the game, but stands out as inadequate here. Your own defensive stats, be it resistances, Dodge/Evasion, or what-have-you, only come into play when you're hit instead of the jet. Most of the time, when riding a faster jet, I'd much rather my character take a hit than allow the jet to be hit; and even low-STR/stealth characters can afford to wear heavier armor while aboard a jet, at the very least LemCo Marine and Biohazard Boots. I rode the Phaser into battle recently, and one burst from some random ferry guard shredded it from full HP down to a few bars.
If I have a point here, it's that I can't help but think Maneuverability or perhaps tiles moved should contribute to avoiding damage unless the jet hasn't moved last turn or the driver is incapacitated—and this would affect the player, too. Otherwise, all light jets are basically sitting ducks. The exception is if there is a disembarkation point. You can Turbo right up to an enemy ship and board it in one turn, and indeed, in previous playthroughs, I often did just that. The pity is that there are only a small handful of raid missions, and random encounters that allow boarding are fairly rare.
Don't get me wrong, fast jetting and fast boarding are powerful tools, but there's a lot of combat slog in Expedition, and the Devastator being the overall best regardless of slowness (even in terms of loot haulage capacity) removes potential interest from customizing jets.
To be sure, jet skis in general tend to reward tin can builds the most (less likely to get obliterated when disembarking into a bunch of enemies, can wear a can while on the ski, isn't robbed of important combat tools like Stealth and Sniper, etc.), and I'm all right with that.
One other thing: Jet ski logistics remain annoying. Getting from your house to your jet can be done conveniently only through rifts. The most convenient by far is to Camp Hathor, though Camp Hathor is furthest from any point of interest; the Pirate Bay has the closest rift in Expedition, although getting out to the Black Sea proper is more tedious, followed by the rift in the Aegis encampment, which requires moving a couple screens total to reach, but the docks themselves are in the middle of everything. Your house needs a moon pool down at the docks or something.
