This is quite comprehensive and give me a nice look into your strategies!
I have some question after reading this.
It seems you have changed a lot more shotguns this patch than the last. What is the reason for this?
I noticed you slotted Therapeutic Grapple. Did you end up using it? What are your thoughts on the ability?
(Phantom Ray is objectively better than Doom Cannon for players, which is a bad balance. I will increase is cost by 1. )
The increased use of Shotgun is due to the nerfing of the Blast Gun. Before I used Blast Gun to deal so much damage with my initial attack that I used the other ships less. Also, abilities that previously went to the other ships were now being used in its place, which meant the ships I'd previously had them on needed replacements. Considering energy costs, the Shotgun abilities were the ones swapped in. With less one shot kills from the initial attack, that also meant the other ships were more often doing attacks, resulting in the use of the Shotguns. In the future I will look at other options as well. When I'm not feeling so tired I will see about trying a Sniper run, which would then let the other abilities go back to where I'd had them.
I did not end up using Therapeutic Grapple. I had a plan for it, but as I started doing things it ended up not making sense. Part of that was I felt like I messed up the order of how to do things, and it no longer made sense, so I adapted the plan. It still finished the fight in the expected 2 turns. At some point I will probably retry, as it sounds like a potentially powerful tool.
On the Phantom Ray, it would be nice if the card mentioned the damage amount so players can do that objective comparison before choosing it, especially if the cost is going up.
For most cards I think the expected damage is obvious. You generally mention the number of projectiles and often how much damage each does. That is such basic math that most people will intrinsically know the total without even thinking about doing math, especially since most are 1 damage each. The ones that don't mention these things could use with having that added. Also, some of them would be hard to give a single value for, since the damage is based on something that is variable. How would you list Fibonacci Strike, for example? There isn't a single value, and giving an average/estimated amount could be confusing to players. That is one where listing out the first set of the sequence would be more helpful. The Sniper line is another, where the range matters for damage, so what range would you use to calculate it? Lasers have a base amount based on if all beams hit a single target, but what if some miss, and others hit multiple? I like the idea in principal, I'm just not sure it will work for the cards that most need it. I think that for it to be viable, it can't be a static number, but needs to have a slider or other controls to allow the player to see the estimated value under different conditions, such as the amount of Energy used or # of ships hit.
Unfortunately this is true for many damage abilities because the expected damage is impossible to calculate. It is just to give an idea of how much the damage would be under laboratory conditions against a single target.
The true value of lasers is that they pass through everything. The true value of Fibonacci strike only comes after a few drive upgrades. Orbit Throw is also in this same boat.
