Shortlist simple easy 1.035 suggestions (or 1.04 ;/)

Published on March 15, 2008 By innociv In Sins of a Solar Empire

Well the game is rather.. messed up now.
This whole people accidently telling the enemy your plans because /a doesn't stick.
The lack of colors, you can't tell if someone said something to everyone or just you. While what you say will go "To allies: yada yada" everyone else just gets your name and text, so you have no idea if they accidently told that to the enemy or not, you have to ask if they ally chatted that.
Then there is the bad imbalance between races now from the new black market. The only time people play Vasari now is because they purposefully want to gimp themselves and know they'll win anyways, or because they haven't seen how much worse they are(which then the game starts and 20-30 minutes into it they say "my god vasari is horrible now..")

Are we going to have to wait until 1.04 to get these things fixed?.. 1.04 is supposed to have lots of new features and extras as I understand it, and thus it's not coming out next week or anything. Probly late next month, right? But can we wait and undure the game being so messed up until then in online play?..

I'm going to keep this simple without to many explainations so that it's not tl;dr:

Firstly.. Please bring back random amounts of extractors per planet like in the "Random Resources" setting in 1.02!

Black Market

How the Black Market works now is much better, but the prices are not. This whole tec and vasari imbalance is coming from cheap buy prices and even worse sell prices. The solution to this is simple.. adjust the Black Maret so buy pries tend to go higher and stay high, and sell prices be much higher too.
The 3:2 ratio was better than the one now
sellPrice 1.6(up from 0.8) buyPrice 2.4 would be good, IMO, and have booms happen twice as easy and the price go down slower after booms.

LRMS
TEC Jav LRM

1.03 cost. 275/45/25
Supply increased to 6.(up from 4)
Reduce range (it's at.. 11000.. now.. With Akkan it's 13000 or so. It should be getting 11000 WITH akkan, so start at 9250 or so)so that it doesn't outrange Gaurdian's Repel skill and so many other abilities without having Akkan(that'd be buffing akkan if using it made javs outrange some abilities. Tactics, and such).

Advent Illum

1.02 cost. 360/50/40 I believe it was
Supply increased to 7.(up from 6)

Vasari Assailant.

1.02 cost. 360/55/35
Supply increased to 8.(up from 6)

All LRMS

Medium Damage Vs. Very Heavy increased to 100%(up from 75%, this is what heavy cruisers and buildings have now.
Building armor changed to a new "Building" armor type. Medium damage vs. buildings 50%(down from 75% it had on Very Heavy) All other damage types vs. this building would be the same as Very Heavy's.
Medium Damage Vs. Cap armor to 50%.(down from 75%) At starting at 11/13 DPS, half that is still good dps against a cap ship. Illums have anti-cap damage, so they'd do the same, but each beam of theirs is only 5.2DPS against caps versus the current 9.75 of assailants. 50% would bring assailants down to 6.5 for caps, much better.
In short, LRMS damage increased vs HC's, lowered against buildings and caps.

Light Frigates
Vasari Skirmisher

Hull Regen increased to 1.5(up from 1.0)
Damage increased to 13 DPS(up from 10.5)
Range increased to 4250(up from 3500)
Increase hull to 800(up from 700). Reduce shields to 340(Down from 440). [More effect from hull upgrades, more effect from healing abilities when hull is gotten to sooner. It's self repair would happen sooner with hull getting attacked sooner.)
OR reduce its supply to 6, increase DPS to 11, reduce cost to 360/60/0(down from 400/70/0).

Siege Frigates

1.02 Cost or 30% increased DPS. (currently a siege cap costs LESS than 4 siege frigs, and the siege cap is as good as 6-8 siege frigs at bombarding planets, while obviously the siege cap is obviously much better at fighting too.)
1.03 Survivability

Carriers.

Currently well.. http://dstuff.l2wh.com/images/soase.png This shows well what I mean. Fighters are ONLY better against LRM's and bombers. Besides killing LRM's, you use bombers. This is rather.. or very odd to me. It would also make sense to me that if you had enough bombers you could overwhelm flaks (heavy armor) but this isn't the case. You need something like 7 carriers with bombers for every flak to overwhelm them. So as long as someone has just one flak which costs 1/2 as much for every 5 carriers, your heavy cruisers are safe.
This wouldn't be too much of an issue, but HC+Flak is a very strong combination. Bombers are their only really counter, but you only need 1 flak per 5 bomber squads to stop them. You can't use light frigs to kill their flaks because their HC's eat them.

Increase bomber HP 50% higher.

Fighters do 1/4th the damage as bombers against everything but LRM's and scouts, basically. But with how low hp/shields/armor scouts are you might as well use bombers for those too as 8.22 vs 19.50 is good enough against them. This shows rather well how you should only use fighters vs. bombers and lrms. On the other dozen of the units, in any situation, use bombers.
NAME........DPS.....vs v-light...vs light...vs med...vs heavy...vs v-heavy...vs cap...vs bomber
FIGHTER.....9.75..........9.75......19.50.....2.44.......2.44.........2.44.....2.44........14.63
BOMBER......16.44.........8.22.......8.22.....8.22.......8.22........16.44....12.33.........1.64

I'd give fighters a new damage type to make them just as good against medium armor and heavy without buffing scouts.(even if fighters did 9dps vs. heavy armor, flaks kill them twice as fast, so it's effectively half. This new damage type should do 100% to medium, 100% heavy, over the 25% it does now, but the rest the same as AntiLight)
100% chance (up from 75%) to hit Bombers with this new damage type, this balances out the HP increase for Bombers with fighters attacking them. (effectively 33% increased damage against them vs. their 50% hp increase should work fine)

Numbers if Fighters got a new damage type that was same as AntiLight but 100% vs medium and heavy.
NAME........DPS.....vs v-light...vs light...vs med...vs heavy...vs v-heavy...vs cap...vs bomber
FIGHTER.....9.75..........9.75......19.50.....9.75.......9.75.........2.44.....2.44........14.63
BOMBER......16.44.........8.22.......8.22.....8.22.......8.22........16.44....12.33.........1.64
HOWEVER you must take into acount while they'd do SLIGHTLY more than the 8.22dps bombers do vs these, that the flaks will kill fighters about twice as fast as bombers especially with bombers getting a bigger HP increase to better survive flak, so bombers are better in situations against flak always, vs heavy and medium it depends on whether there is flak or not.
Also since abilities do damage vs. fighter typically(cap abilities) fighters are more suceptable to these, more to take into account with their balance.

Support Cruisers
Vasari Subverter

Increase supply cost to 9-11(up from 5)
Increase cost to 450/130/110(up from 400/80/80)
Increase cooldown on it's aoe disable to 70(up from 60)
Decrease duration on it's aoe disable to 25(down from 30)
If that isn't enough maybe it needs AOE range reduced aswell..

Vasari Overseer

Have it's health buff no longer require facing the target or greatly increase turn rate.

Buildings
Refineries

Increase their effectiveness, I'm not exactly sure how much.
Reduce cost to 1500/75/100(down from 1500/125/175) for vasari/tec's of course.. advent shares it with trade port.

Capital Ships

Remove the XP sharing so that two caps doesn't make you get half xp. Both caps should get the maximum xp. There is nothing overpowerd at ALL about rushing a 2nd cap, or using more than 2 caps, so why penalize they're xp rate? 2 caps might become viable with this change and the lrm nerf.

Mostly just simple entity editing except the black market and text thing. :3

Edited to include something about AntiMedium damage type, and Vasari skirmisher as no one uses them, they are highly regarded as far to expensive/not good enough.

Edited in suggestion to buff Refineries

Comments (Page 1)

Frogboy

on Mar 15, 2008

I agree with most of these suggestions. What do the rest of you think?

innociv

on Mar 15, 2008

oops typo.

Supply increased to 8.(up from 8) should say up from 6, of course.

Too late for edit.

I also forgot to mention:

Siege Frigate
*1.02 Cost and supply.
*1.03 Survivability.

ehtom

on Mar 15, 2008

I think these are all good suggestions. Pretty sure about the first bit on Black Market and LRM. I'd have to think about the carriers and support cruiser stuff before I agree with it or not (Subverter definately needs a nerf, but what you're suggesting could be too much).

LinkesAuge

on Mar 15, 2008

agree on everything innociv wrote.

I also might add that there are several researches which need to become more usefull, especially in the civic tech tree.
Though even a lot of the military upgrades need a buff.
If i currently play or watch a 1v1 then players do just trade port tech, the various colonise techs and ship prototpye techs, thats pretty much all.
Nearly all ship upgrades get skipped and instead u will see tech rushes to HC's and support cruisers.
Seriously, something needs to be done about this. Ship upgrades must play a bigger role and this is easily accomplished with increasing the effects of ship upgrades (double em) and lower the costs of the later ship upgrades.
It makes no sense that its a lot mere expensive to get 5% additional shield compared to getting heavy cruisers which will pretty much own everything for you.
Ship prototype techs must become a lot more expensive so that researching them is actualy a strategic decission and not a must have.
Also a player with a lots of ship upgrades should own someone without any but currently it hardly matters, its more about unit quantity than quality.
Thats not a good thing, especially not for a game which is supposed to be more 4X than any other RTS before (even in Starcraft upgrades have a much bigger role).

Btw the tech that needs an improvement the most are refineries. Compared to trade ports they are redicilously underpowered and this despite being a higher tech research.

Windexglow

on Mar 15, 2008

I disagree with increasing supply costs; other whys a scout will soon cost 20 supply points.

LRM should keep it range; but have lower life (it should be more in the back of your fleet anyway).

Astax

on Mar 15, 2008

hmmm LR frigates more supply than light frigates, that does seem to tickle me in a strange way, it might work. However! 8 supply for Vasari would be a disaster probably. You would have to go into next supply much sooner as Vasari, and combine that with their poor economics, well that wouldn't play our right.

As far as illuminator goes, only one thing makes illuminator good, Malice. Without Malice it's a joke unit in a serious fight :/

I have a problem with increasing bomber HP, it would take away unique Vasari advantage. Going bombers as Vasari is already almost unheard off (Unless you get some carriers from RA). I don't think this would help.

Do not touch the subverter. It's low supply is already countered by really high cost/supply! 50 subverters cost about as much as 40 enforcers! Even thou 50 subverters take 200 supply, you can't afford to build more units! Also they have survivability lower than a light frigate! Their effective-ness is only highlighted by people who don't use antimatter counters (A lot of people don't).

Siege frigates need a changin

innociv

on Mar 15, 2008

I agree that many researches need to look at either with cost or buffs, but this is something quite detailed to go into and figure out.

I would like those changes, but in 1.04 or 1.05. 1.02 had the same number of useless/not-worth-the-cost techs as 1.03, but 1.02 as whole was balanced between races and had working chat. I'd like a hotfix with these small changes. =]

The new changes to ico, the commands, and all that are great. That stuff is much better than 1.02's, and i'm glad they changed that. But we need the colors and sticking back.

You're right about refineries.. except Vasari's. I've gotten 4.8 metal income from one volcano planet as vasari.

Vasari get the cheaper ones with reduced credit cost, 1388 is a nicer price for them. (I had like 4 ore refineries there, +30% metal income, and exploration uncovered increased metal extraction)
I'd also like to not see geting +% metal extraction rate exploration things to NOT EVER appear on ice planets, and other things like that. It's so annoying to have exploring find something that won't effect that planet.

But, again, this is "shortlist simple easy 1.035 suggestions". I wanted to keep it to needed changes, not 'It would be nice iff...' sort of changes. I could make a 20x longer list of things i'd like to have.

Frogboy

on Mar 15, 2008

I don't think siege frigates should be changed except that they should be more lethal.

Mettra

on Mar 15, 2008

Excellent post. Good catch on the Guardian vs. Javs.

As for the black market prices, I agree they should be higher. Also, it seems like the price should overall rise as time goes on (with mid-late game prices being very high - approaching 1000). I like the boom/crash mechanic but the prices are far too low.

I think messing around with the siege frigate is not proving very useful. It seems they are never used in multiplayer except for mid-late game kamikaze attempts. Perhaps make the siege frigate do good damage against a particular armor type? It'd be a bit more interesting that way instead of having it be the always-almost-nearly-overpowered planet-killer extroardinaire suicide bomber.

By the way, innociv's points on fighters I thought was pretty spot on.

For 1.04, I think an issue with research needs to be addressed, specifically early game research. Mid-late game, everyone will have very thorough research. But shorter 1v1 or even 2v2 games, it seems to make more sense to forego research in favor of superior numbers of ships. In other words, the risk-vs.-rewards of research early game is too high a ratio. Perhaps raising the effectiveness of early-game research (even just one particular thing per race) could really spice up the 1v1 play and provide more options for shorter games.

One good example in mind is the Vasari's first or second hull research which gives quite a large percent of hull gain, but it smoothes out more linearly later on in the tree. Something along the lines of that (though perhaps a bit more pronounced) for every race would make the shorter games more diverse.

Another thing for 1.04 to look at is the flak frigate. Their effectiveness against fighters causes problems (see innociv's points above). Perhaps tone down their effectiveness slightly against strikecraft and boost their %dmg against another armor type to make them a bit more useful without entirely foregoing the possibility of anyone building carriers. You CAN dock your strikecraft until they're dead, but they are very effective tanks, and it's better most of the time to just suicide your strikecraft in order to gain immediate kills.

Once again, excellent post. Hopefully more will contribute to this thread and 1.04 will be well on its way.

innociv

on Mar 15, 2008

Well the flaks effectiveness against fighters is fine, or pretty much fine. It's just their effectiveness against bombers that needs nerfed, which simply means more bomber HP like I said.

But like i said.. I'm hoping for a 1.035 for this stuff.

I don't think siege frigates should be changed except that they should be more lethal.

If they keep their current cost they should be doing 35 DPS or so.
Currently 1 siege cap costs less than 4 siege frigs and siege caps are equal to 6-8 siege frigs.(at JUST planet bombarding. Not to mention how much better cap is at tanking, dps vs units, etc)

Sakhari

on Mar 15, 2008

I'll leave the unit-specific number crunching to more interested parties but I do want to throw my support behind the proposed market and Siege Frigate changes. I like quite a few of the changes made by this patch but the problems with these two categories look to be blatantly obvious right now.

Cykur

on Mar 15, 2008

Have to be careful about changing too much too fast.

I will say:

Siege frigates either need to be lowered back to 12 cap with low survivability, or remain at 15 cap with increased effectiveness. Yes, no one likes siege gank squads, but to be honest I rarely used siege in 1.02, and I haven't made one in 1.03. My main gripe with siege frigs was the difficulty in shooting them down.

Market: I like the way it behaves, but price tweaking is needed. It seems like everyone waits for the price to crash and then buys 2K of whatever they need. This benefits races with stronger economies (TEC). Refineries are ignored, and Vasari are in trouble -- takes em too long to get trade up. Vasari either rush if they are close to you or hope to get RA if they are far and have a secure start location.

Flak vs Bombers: I know Flak has the advantage, but then again, the bombers just keep getting rebuilt. Hit and run bombers seem to work pretty well at taking things out even when I'm trying to defend with flak. I would be careful about making bombers relatively stronger in some way.

I would stop messing with LRM / Assailant / Illuminator for a bit. They have counters and uses. If everything gets gimped too much, no one is gonna want to fight until they have HC.

Subverters: Vasari's one defense against superior numbers. Yes, it is powerful, but HC's don't die that fast even when they are subverted/immobilized. Vasari usually either tech up to Subverters or tech up to RA. If a Vasari can get both RA and Subverters at the same time, the game is so big that the TEC can not build faster than he makes money and the Advent fleets are damn near unkillable balls o' death.

Finally:

As stated a lot of us would like the 1.02 functionality of chat client added back to the 1.03 irc style chat. Also, we can't chat in multiplayer when game is paused -- message doesn't appear until game is unpaused.

In short, with some market price tweaking to balance value of resources vs credits / refineries vs tradeposts, I am pretty happy with 1.03 in general. We are getting there.

Thanks Ironclad & Stardock!

Pnakotus

on Mar 15, 2008

The black market fix is 100% necessary. I'd rather something more complex (like starting at x value, allowing it to rise, but only allowing it to drop very slowly, and to tiered values to simulate the market 'testing' various other prices, in some way linked to overall volumes), but it should NEVER drop back to the ridiculous 300 price, EVER, because the black market guys can name their price and it makes no sense that they'd offer such ridiculous prices (or that 1 crystal would sell for less than 1 credit, ever).

Haldur

on Mar 15, 2008

I have a couple of quality of life requests:

1. One thing that I'd like to see is an in-game reference chart listing all my colonies/planets, and a list of whats there, including logistics (current/max), population upgrades, etc. There's no problem now when playing on smaller maps, but in very long games on very large maps, it's far too easy to lose track of what you've upgraded, etc. It may be realistic (hey, the bigger your empire, the bigger the bureaucracy, the harder to manage things). But who here likes bureaucracies? It would also be nice to be able to click on the name of the planet in the chart to zoom to that planet.

2. I'd like to have a similar chart for my Capital ships.

3. Also, I'd like to see the tech tree appearance changed so that it's easier to distinguish between techs you actually have and techs that you don't have, but can afford to improve. I don't know if it's my bad eyesight, or what, but they both look exactly the same to me. Maybe have a blue border on those techs that you have, green border on those you can learn?

3. I'd like to have a similar chart for my Capital ships.

innociv

on Mar 15, 2008

Well I suggested just a few small tweaks, not changing a ton real fast.

With flak vs. bombers, yes Bombers rebuild, but your carriers get killed quickly. The ships rebuildne at a time(unless you dock) and fly to their death. If you dock, it takes aobut 30 seconds. Best to jump out.

LRMS are counterable but that doesn't mean they don't have issues.. Sure flaks are good against them, but they kill your cap and all your tradeports, labs, etc before you take them all out. Then after that, you can't get revenge and do the same to their cap and buildings with your light frigs. This is why people like LRMS so much. Higher supply will reduce their numbers, force more credit bleeding.
The more LRMs you'd make, the less credit income you'd have, so the less you could make.

Subverters.. oh come on. You're defencive because you like your super imba unit

The changes i've suggested aren't THAT drastic. Just minor tweaks except i think it should take a lot of supply. Would you rather it be changed to just single target?
Compared them to gaurdians. Gaurdians cost like 140 metal and 125 crystal, along with 525 credits, 5 supply. 2 Subverters can chain shutdown tons of these.
I'm suggesting to keep it as the best support frigate still, just not be super-overpowered.

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