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 4)

Ishmanian

on Mar 16, 2008

I agree with everything except the suggested assailant and subverter nerfs.

As they are, those nerfs are extreme.

The skirmisher is just a sucky unit and needs a buff similar in magnitude to your suggested nerfs to equal the assailant, and the subverter is quite strong, but is pretty much the only counter that doesn't involve RA, which some people don't actually like using, you know?

On a tangent though, it would be greatly appreciated if you could scrap more than one thing at a time.

You also NEED the ability to turn off and on charged missles for all of your selections, as it is, there are some serious problems with it.

It also seems to do a rather negligible amount of damage, and is really only worth it being available for the sentinel for its huge trade offs. A little micro and your assailants will be decimated.

innociv

on Mar 16, 2008

I agree with the majority of the ideas but think fighters shouldn't be buffed that greatly, you also have to take into account that fighter squadrons tend to be larger than bomber squadrons, even though I see your point that against flak bombers would still be better I think bombers should always be a better choice against heavier armour types.

I took into account that fighters have larger squadrans.
Both their total HP is still higher, and flaks do more damage against fighters than bombers. It'd be even more higher if bombers get that +50% hp
The special new damage type could give 75% vs. heavy instead of 100% so it'd do less than bombers, but i don't see why with how flaks decimate fighters.

Oh also carbon, I already made a mod with all these changes except extractors and armor type changes.

Regarding this whole subverters thing.
Okay so Vasari is so dependant on that unit. They need it to be at least 3-4x better than any other support cruiser to play late game? In 1.03 yeah, but with 1.02 eco I don't really think so, especially not so if they buff ore refineries (since vasari get tech3 ore refineries which'll stack on their cheaper extraction upgrades)

If Vasari has a problem after the fixed black market, buffed ore refineries, and nerfed subverters, then SOMETHING ELSE needs to be buffed, not have one severely overpowered super unit to fix the race!

Astatine

on Mar 16, 2008

That's a good post with some logic to it. I'm not sure I actually agree with all innociv's proposed changes, or even with all of the problems they're solving, but I'm game to try them out and see how the game feels afterwards. My hunch is that despite the careful unit analysis these changes won't give us perfect balance either but if they can get any kind of consensus we might as well try them and see if they're fun.

I am a bit concerned about the idea of pushing the buy price much higher, but I suppose that with higher sell prices the effective spread between buy and sell would be much lower (currently I see sell prices around 1/3 or 1/4 of the buy price). I can already beat TEC with Advent a decent proportion of the time so I also wonder if some people are exaggerating the situation a bit. As I say though, I'm prepared to play it and see. The market improved from 1.02 to 1.03 and if innociv's suggestion improves it further that'll be grand.

The other thing I'd like to say without intending any disrespect to the way innociv has presented the changes which is good for the purpose of a discussion thread is that if all those changes are adopted as a package, I think someone should spend extra time on writing them up into something a bit more than the usual changelog format. It would be useful to announce the changes with a writeup that explains the rationale and how they relate to each other.

Skipping the explanations here does reduce the scope for people to disagree with the changes, but further down the line we'll probably be wanting to compare how effective these unit values are at solving particular balance challenges with some other proposal and that'll be easier if we have something to refer back to explaining how each change was supposed to contribute. The later part of the proposal already has good explanations, it's mainly the early bullet-point part I think needs fleshing out.

(Yeah, I can be a bit wishy-washy, I know... but hey, there's enough absolute confidence around already

)

innociv

on Mar 16, 2008

IF I explained every little detail people wouldn't read it.

I think most peopel that have played a lot of games understand the reasoning.

And no this won't perfectly balance things, it is just a short list to address the biggest problems. The small imbalances aren't much to worry about.

Drexion

on Mar 16, 2008

.

This would be a grand way to balance the TEC cash-income with the vasari resource-income strengths. Let real-market dynamics solve it for you!

.

Of course, to be a true market, one player would have to sell and another buy...None of this "buying from nobody" business. But given how we would then have "I need cash, but if I sell this resource my opponent will benefit! Do I need cash as much as he needs metal???" arising... And thus there would be hoarding, price gouging, etc...So I can understand not implementing that. I think the above suggestion would be a great "compromise"... Neat idea anyhow, heh.

Fumikaa

on Mar 16, 2008

THis isn't a balance change so I'm not sure if it goes here, but please please please overhaul the chat options?

Something like a chat menu where you can click who you want to send messages to instead of the stupid tab system.

Make enter = team chat by default and shift + enter = all chat by default as is the norm for 99% of the RPGs out there.

Make ally chat and all chat different colors again. I can't tell between the two anymore.

Color code the names when whispering.

If you don't want to change the chat system again, just revert it back to the way it was in 1.02!

Astatine

on Mar 16, 2008

IF I explained every little detail people wouldn't read it. I think most peopel that have played a lot of games understand the reasoning.

I bent over backwards to be tactful, but perhaps I still offended you since your reply seems to be saying that you ought not to need to explain any of the bullet point changes.

Perhaps also I didn't make it clear that I think you should say why, for example you think the Skirmisher should get a 50% boost to regen base. You must have some problem in mind for each change to solve. I'm interested to hear what they are.

At the end of the day I don't mind giving anyone's balance plan a try out if they've actually thought it through and come up with a rationale for it and my first impression of your own plan was that you probably did have one and just left it out for brevity. Your reply gives a different impression and I'm now less sure your plan can be a model for the changes in the next patch. Not that this is a democracy or anything, you've only got to convince the developers to give it a try... but the rest of the fans are still interested and it makes you look arrogant if you present a package and expect everyone will immediately see and agree why you choose to buff Skirmisher regen a full 50%.

You gave decent explanations for the later parts of the package, give us your thoughts on the bullet points at the start while they're still fresh in your mind.

Astatine

on Mar 16, 2008

Regarding the market prices, I think innociv's suggestion is a fine "quick-fix". It would also be the easiest to balance.Ideally, i'd rather a black market whose buy/sell price was more reflective on the *player* buy/sell patterns. Not sure how this would impact the game, but here goes:Start off a preset "good" buy/sell price. Then every time someone buys that resource, the price increases (for both buy and sell prices, maybe keeping a ratio between them?) ...If someone sells a resource, the buy/sell price will then decrease. If most people are buying the resource, its price will keep increasing throughout the entire game until it gets so high, people will buy less and others will sell more. Goooo real market simulations .This would be a grand way to balance the TEC cash-income with the vasari resource-income strengths. Let real-market dynamics solve it for you! . Of course, to be a true market, one player would have to sell and another buy...None of this "buying from nobody" business. But given how we would then have "I need cash, but if I sell this resource my opponent will benefit! Do I need cash as much as he needs metal???" arising... And thus there would be hoarding, price gouging, etc...So I can understand not implementing that. I think the above suggestion would be a great "compromise"... Neat idea anyhow, heh.

I think one of the biggest problems with the market interface is how unobtrusive the interface for player-to-player selling is. Selling crystal to "market" for 100-200 credits is easy and quick, but the real money comes from waiting for your enemies to buy from you. That also adds an interesting strategic element because it couples your economy to the other players so with careful management of the resources on offer you can ensure that when your enemy tries to build up their fleet for a surge by buying on the market they boost your own economy enough to allow you to match them.

That trick is how I beat TEC players at their own game (not every time, but I out-trade them on the market often enough to get my share of wins Advent vs TEC). What I'm trying to say is that we've got more of those "real market" features in the game already than meet the eye. The market price does try to follow how much raw material players are offering to the market and how much they are buying. The "buying from nobody" situation is possible and even common since many players don't bother to put their goods up for sale but just sell them to the pool. It does have a purpose though, which is to absorb surplus credits just like "selling to nobody" absorbs surplus materials. Both reduce the amount of dead-time waiting to earn enough resource to build things.

The 1.03 patch brought us more dynamic market prices which tick up and down constantly instead of just when a buy or sell button is clicked. I'm game to try different base prices such as innociv's suggestion of raising both buy and sell bases, but I also think that some of the TEC vs Advent advantage is coming from Advent players needing to know and use more obscure parts of the trade interface to make their economies competitive.

innociv

on Mar 16, 2008

Nope you didn't offend me.

I was just saying, people don't like reading long posts usually so I tried to kep it brief.

At the bottom of the post I noted that Skirmishers are an extremely underpowered unit and highly regarded as too expensive or not good enough.

They should get 50% health regen because skirmishers cost 75% more supply and resources than disciples.
At 700, or my proposed 800 change, that's a lot of health to regen at only 1. Most units with high hp have 1.5 or 2 health regen so it doesn't take attrociously long.

Also i think it'd be better to add things like more range and health regen over the other light frigs to make it more of a different unit instead of spread-sheet-stat-balance it based on comparison of supply and credit/resource cost.

P5yy

on Mar 16, 2008

I agree with most things like the LRM and assailant

Some of it im indifferent to some of the stuff as im no expert on them

The Siege however I think needs this..
1.03 survivability
inc. +3 to bombard damage

Also , Id like to see the Hp of buildings (exc def platforms) reduced by 50% . just my opinion on it.

And constructing buildings should be more vulnerable.

Joe Bagodoe

on Mar 16, 2008

First, sorry for the long post, but these elements should have been covered a bit more in the beta.

In regard to research, it would seem to me that a unit that has no upgrades vs. a unit that has all or just key upgrades would be at a more severe disadvantage. I submit for example the US fighter jet, the f/a-18 hornet. The f-18, when it was first released was a very capable attack aircraft, but during its later development stages, it gained many abilities such as greatly enhanced radar jamming, new weapon abilities, target tracking, speed, and durability. I would argue that the first f-18, if pitted against one of the later f-18, would be taken down with fair ease.

The upgrades I mainly speak of are not simple structural upgrades. Most are comprised of newly researched composites and cutting edge computer technology. Researching new technology should gain global "break-throughs". Instead of a 5% increase in durability, we should see a 25% gain in armor while also receiving a 35% decrease in weight.

In this game, there are many different types of ships. Do we really need such variation? As an example, a US carrier is very multi-role. It carries strike craft for offense and defense, but it has many of its own defenses to counter incoming missiles, aircraft, and torpedoes. In 2008, our carriers are not so vulnerable that they can, even if vacant of all aircraft, be taken out by two or three enemy aircraft. A carrier is a key component and is protected by many on-board systems such as long and short-range missiles, medium and short range cannons and the CIWS. Many of these components have been in use for nearly 30 years or longer! What year is this game based in?!

Sorry for the long post, but these things should have been addressed in the first release.
Perhaps many of the balancing issues can also be addressed in research. Research and development is what drives us forward. Breakthroughs often decide the outcome of the battle and should be more of a key component of the tactical needs of the game.

Astatine

on Mar 16, 2008

At the bottom of the post I noted that Skirmishers are an extremely underpowered unit and highly regarded as too expensive or not good enough.They should get 50% health regen because skirmishers cost 75% more supply and resources than disciples.At 700, or my proposed 800 change, that's a lot of health to regen at only 1. Most units with high hp have 1.5 or 2 health regen so it doesn't take attrociously long.Also i think it'd be better to add things like more range and health regen over the other light frigs to make it more of a different unit instead of spread-sheet-stat-balance it based on comparison of supply and credit/resource cost.

OK. I follow what you're saying there. It does make sense, but I think the Skirmisher's special "shutdown and regen" special ability should be its centrepiece if possible and such a big boost to basic regen might marginalise the special ability. That's in support of the goal of keeping it (and the Vasari) different from the other frigates (and races).

So rather than a simple regen buff, what change would you make to the special ability to boost the effectiveness of the skirmisher? I wondered about what would happen if the ability cut in automatically when the ship is about to die and included a brief period, maybe only five or six seconds during which the ship is actually invulnerable or untargetable. Skirmishers would be much more powerful, maybe even overpowered if they could move out of their place at the top of the target list when they're about to pop.

innociv

on Mar 16, 2008

added in to the original post that we need random extractors option back.

Also AntiLight damage type(which fighters use) has 75% chance to hit bombers. For the new FIGHTER damage type i've suggested this be 100% chance. This will boost fighter damage by 33% vs. bombers so that they (bombers) aren't too much harder for fighters to kill compared to flak after the bomber 50% HP increase.

Astatine, the ability comes in automatically with autocast after the skirmisher has taken some damage.

This is why i've suggested, like i've said already, to boost skirmishers HP by 100 and reduce shields by 100. This way it'll start using it's hull regen sooner, effectively boosting the ability.
Also I believe the passive hull regen will stack with it's abilities repair.
It's ability is 18 hull repaired per second IIRC.

Skirmishers are "somewhat decent" once they have the ability, current, and completely worthless without it. But that ability is very expensive atop the expensive Skirmishers and military 3.

I really think what i've suggested is not even enough to buff it, maybe it needs more armor too. But don't want to be TOO drastic. Often in games things get overbuffed or overnerfed, sometimes just 5-10% adjustments in overall effectiveness is all that's needed.

Astatine

on Mar 16, 2008

Yes, I know it has autocast. I just don't think it is currently as effective as it needs to be. The autocast has the problem of disabling the ship (zero damage output) while it is still in good fighting condition and may be needed for the fight. That's why I was thinking that brief invulnerablity or "invisibility" (targeting immunity) might be a way to improve the self-regen special ability. The autocast could then trigger later, when the ship is in some real danger and that would make more efficient use of antimatter.

It's a fair point that the ability is expensive. I don't think I would call it very expensive, but it is at least somewhat expensive to get and I would like to see it improved in some way as part of improving the Skirmisher's overall effectiveness.

innociv

on Mar 16, 2008

http://rapidshare.com/files/100119774/balance.rar.html

I made a mod with all these changes EXCEPT:
* I just made subverters be 7 supply, 70 cooldown on aoe disable, 25 duration on aoe disable.
* No changes to fighters damage type. (not possible to mod this.)
* No new damage type for buildings. (Again, not possible. So LRMS will be doing 50% damage to both Buildings and HeavyCruisers, instead of 50% to Buildings and 100% to HeavyCruisers.
* Chat isn't fixed. (also not possible)

So all IC has to do is take this, add in the FIGHTER damage type, BUILDING damage type, add back random # of extractors, fix the chat, then release it as 1.035. ;3

Then we'd all be tided over until 1.04 with all its fun new stuff

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