and everyone will quit

People will quit because of how the game is run, because if you try this stunt in any other game, people don't quit. It's simple; if you have more than one option to use, nerfing one item to hell means very few people quit.

The problem is that there are no alternatives period to use instead of a HM or Prawn, not that I really agree with the Prawn having 40% resist...

Your closest freighters to the HM are the Flamberge and the Levitas. The Flamberge is a really slow Rhino with a fuckton of hull. The Levitas is a rare T21 Pax Astro with some questionable items ratio to the rarity. Even if the other two were made stronger/more common, the reason why so many people prefer the HM over the other two is the raw power and versatility of the 4th aug.

tldr
There are no freighters that has the raw power or the versatility of the HM.
Prawn is OP and lack of variation.

Prawn is squishy but the damage is nice. (Dont own one yet)

I'd like to add that with the new fighter update, this ship looses one of its primary features.

It's still under consideration

I'm going to lock this post since it's clearly not in active consideration any longer. Going off of the original post, we are definitely not adding a 3rd aug slot to the Zeus Throne.

We are aware that the forthcoming fighter rebalance will make special fighter generators less advantageous. If you would like to propose reasonable improvements to the Zeus Throne fighters to set them apart from ordinary ones, we can consider that.

A third augmenter would definitely be overpowered. I do however think that buffing resistance and regen could set it apart from other capital ships and make up for the lack of shield and energy bank.

For a fleet commander who wants to upgrade from a Pax coronae I can say this:
My only option is the Vazi and that is extremely boring. Currently the ZT is inferior in hull space, 200% less bonus shield bank, 100% less bonus energy, does not give additional energy nor shield regeneration nor healing bonuses (being able to heal your slaves helps a lot) and has a lower critical hit resistance and even less inbuilt elec.. ontop of that, the inbuilt drones of the Vazi are arguably a better inbuilt too, especially with the upcoming fighter rebalance.

As a matter of fact, when you compare the ZT(100b+) to a Pax Coronae(15b), it looses in speed, shields, energy, critical hit resists and only has 10% more base resistances, an advantage which can be almost nullified by the Pax Coronae's awesome inbuilt tweak.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would suggest

Hull Space (+25 sets it apart from Pax Coronae but 100 less than Vazi)
775

Resistances
L E H P R S M T
65% 70% 60% 80% 60% 60% 40% 0%

Inbuilt Elec (+100 because Zeus)
200
Mods:
Shield+500%, Energy +500%, Critical Hit
Resist +20%, Thrust +40%, Turning +40%
Energy Recharge +30%

And perhaps to make up in the rest, adjust the fighters DPS, maybe it should have the most damaging fighters? Or a tweak for survivability, like the one Pax Coronae has.

The way Jeff made it out was that the Zeus Throne was supposed to have high resists (a theme carried by the other Olympus ships), small size, and be very versatile while retaining some power.

1. At the time, all other ships had a resistance profile similar to a UZ ship. There were ups and downs and the whole thing wasn't particularly high.
2. The Zeus Throne is actually very small, compared to something modeled on a Dreadnought. It's even smaller than a PBF.
3. The inbuilts were kinda useful. They didn't have jaw dropping amounts of power, but the utility was pretty high for the time being.

The problems highlighted over the years since its inception boiled down to this:

1. It's expensive. Those Zeus Modules are still no joke, especially when many Subspace and PPS items compete with higher tier Oly stuff for lower raw resource costs relative to where new players can access them.

2. That small size and "false negative inertia dampening" (increased ship weight offset by bonus thrust and turning) isn't a huge deal to laser beam weapons. Capital Ships can still be kicked around by sufficiently large explosions and or knockback.

3. The actual utility brought by the inbuilts were completely overshadowed by the raw power that its competitors brought. Sometimes its competitors had both utility AND more raw power.

Please focus any suggestions on the fighters. We aren't going to rebalance the ship. In general, we don't like to buff old content.

Not liking to balance "old content" has nothing to do with this. The the ship is simply under-powered for its cost and purpose and you cannot deny that! If you want to fix this game then start by fixing its problems and not things you like or don't like. You have an amazing community which really wants to help. Also you have to realize that the community always knows best so listen to it!

Plus this is not old content by any stretch of the imagination. It is tech 21 for high end players who invested a lot in your game. It is for players to use and if it is in the game then it should have a purpose.

If you want to balance the ship without altering its stats and just change its fighters then better make sure those are the best goddamn fighters in the entire game by a long shot. Because investing 100b+ for specific type of fighter better make that fighter worth it.

Sorry for the rant but seriously guys, wtf.

Olympus ships cost about 30b to make. 100b is a wild exaggeration of the cost.

This content is over 6 years old. It is working fine as is. If the Zeus Throne is not a desirable ship in the current meta, that is not a big problem for the dev team. It had its time in the sun, even concurrent with the Red Photon Warship. We are happy to leave it as a niche ship with nice fighters (still waiting for a proposal).

I'd like to see the Zeus Throne+ ship buffed to be competitive with Wrathful/Armored Commanders and Antu/Vazi, but that's because you're basically building the ZT again.

The Fighters, I'd like to see Zeus Thrones able to use (not at the same time) two sets of fighters. One is fast and designed to nail fast targets. The other is slower and designed to contend with slower enemies.

I don't know what to do with the missiles.

The cost: Enkelin, I'm going to use your argument. Whatever amount of money I can gain by liquidating the resources needed to build a Zeus Throne at a low conservative price, that is the price of the ship.

Selling all the raw resources (augs, extracted commods, basic commods), I can net 45.5b credits, at conservative prices.

This is what I can get from instantly liquidating the build material. I can get more if I convert to IC myself and optimize AI base consumption so I maximize profit. This is totally disregarding any additional effort cost to get any items (such as that Zeus Energy), any additional side builds (Zeus Modules), and any effort requirements to get blueprints and build stupid Laconia/Demented/Adamantium modules.

I'm looking at a ship that in total effort, is at least 100b to *build*. I expect it to be superior to other T21 choices to the average player. So far, the only place it is superior is resists...which, surprise surprise, if I get P22, I can use the Sutaatiguruayu, a ship that is pretty much on par with a Zeus Throne despite costing a tenth of the latter.

For the Zeus Throne+, I can liquidate the build material into 120b. I also need a *third* Zeus Module. The blueprint/ship is a rare as fuck drop, too.

What do I get? A ship that is better than a Sutaatiguruayu, but worse than a Vazi or Antu.

I'm expecting a Zeus Throne+, despite being T21, to roughly match the power budget of a W/A Commander, to roughly match the power budget of an Antu/Vazi, and to exceed the budget of the Red Photon Carrier/match the budget of the Red Photon Warship.

For a Gunner ship, I can argue that the RP Warship is superior in nearly every way, the Antu is superior in most ways, and the WComm is superior.

For a FC ship, the RP Carrier, Vazi, and AComm are superior.

Why would I ever get a Zeus Throne+? Oh, wait...I know. Because it looks sick as a travel ship.

This requires a separate post.

The opportunity cost of building 3 Zeus Modules is 120b. That's about 10b for 10 Dips, 10b raw credits, and about 100b worth of Platinum liquidated.

Assuming a team actually needed to build three of them, there are not even 6000 Platinum on the market to buy up (for much higher prices). That means, you need to extract.

If we had a massive excess of credits, at this point I'd just buy the ship/plus ship/blueprint.

Presuming we don't actually have a trillion credits lying around collecting dust, that means we need to extract Platinum and do Olympus until a blueprint drops/the ship drops. The old chance (no dev posts about it changing, ever) is 1/1000 chance of the Plus blueprint dropping, same as a Pax Levitas blueprint dropping. So let's be conservative...you need at least 30 runs to get this blueprint, so about 7 months.

Extracting Platinum, assuming EXE30 and 10 Extractors, that's about 85 days. Okay, we can prospect for Platinum and you can get Platinum Pieces, netting about 15 Plat per break. How often do you get Plat Pieces? I get 1 about every 2 days from casually camping some Peri Space dgs. 10 people on the team? Bout 75 Plat a day.

Takes about 40 days at this rate for both extraction and prospecting/dging to account for enough Platinum to actually build the dumb modules.

In this time, I can be rolling an Armored Commander.

If it is not balanced it does not work fine as is! This thread is started back in 2011!! What do you mean it had its time in the sun?? This whole time the community is telling you that the ship is under powered so of course it is a problem for the dev team! Yes, 6 year old content and for these 6 years people are complaining! For such a simple fix!

If your plan is to balance this ship not by its stats but by its inbuilt fighters then those fighters should make up for where the ship falls behind but fighters cannot do that, their purpose is DPS! Then give them so much DPS that a tech 21 fleet commander might actually justify spending extra 85b more for the same ship ( ZT vs Pax Coronae).

Also the cost of the ZT is nowhere near 30b...you cannot simply assume everyone has the necessary commodities and blueprints just laying around!!

Sorry for the rant again but this is really absurd!