Basically, as soon as you find a Bushido dealer and upgrade armor to carbide carapace, Marauders become completely inconsequential. The only way they can really hurt you is if you blow up a stronghold while sitting directly over top of it. You’re immune to turbolaser fire, and even on those occasions that you run into a Tripoli packing Stilettos, you won’t take enough damage to really warrant concern. Even Barbaries, with their EMP weapons, are more of a nuisance than a threat.
This was plainly demonstrated in George’s 12/03/15 stream of playing through to the Core, where he came away from a Marauder Stronghold without having taken a scratch despite his shields spending most of the time being down.
Possible solutions:
» Don’t let Bushido dealers show up as early as they do.
» Don’t let Bushido dealers sell carbide carapace.
» Replace Marauder weaponry with something with higher damage tiers.
Keep in mind though, that was a marauder stronghold in Jiangs Star....which is right on the edge of where they can spawn (probably a bit far to be honest). Being immune to turbolasers at that point isn't too far fetched. The issue really is that dealers ignore system levelling when generating their inventories....this is why you can theoretically get red strelkas and military-grade weaponry as early as Rigel.
It's quite possible to get Black Strelka missiles in Rigel, even, which makes a lot of the fights pretty much trivial.
If you can handle a Marauder Stronghold without a scratch in carbide carapace, you could drop your shields and attack their lesser stations with impunity. You don’t really start running into Marauders until St. Kat’s (which, incidentally, is also where you can start finding Bushido dealers). If you find carbide carapace that early, that’s an entire midgame faction that’s effectively been rendered irrelevant.
I think we need two changes here:
- Shops need to be level-sensitive. Newer stations, I believe, are better at this, but Bushido hasn't been updated. It should determine its inventory based on the system level.
- Marauders are a little underpowered. Except for their EMP cannons, they are using obsolete weapons.
The turbolaser's actually surprisingly competitive up to about Sanctuary. Past that point yes, definitely.
The turbolaser is a wonderful flyswatter for the player, as it can kill all of the light enemies in the region very quickly(especially the Wind Slaver, which fields a nearly 10,000 credit weapon and virtually no armor), and can be used to eat through the Internal HP of capital ships. For the enemy, however, it's useless against any player that's gotten a reasonable level of armor upgrades.
This reminded me to open this issue: Enemies with strong defenses and weak weapons are boring to fight
I’m resolving this one. With level-sensitive shop inventories, it’s not really an issue anymore.