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 5)

innociv

on Mar 17, 2008

Bump.

We've been playing some games online and it's playing wayyy better. Especially the new black market.

Pnakotus

on Mar 17, 2008

I'll try it in a 4-way tonight and let you know how it goes. I'm very interested in the market changes - good work.

Anubis208-RG

on Mar 17, 2008

I agree with what innociv said. Plus, the ingame chat system should be restored to the 1.02 version, and DEVs, please take a look into this:

If you choose the large or small fleet sizes, the fleet point numbers change (like from 125 to "something" instead of 100 to 250, but when you are researching them, it still lables the advances as going from 100 to 250 (the normal numbers), not 125 to "something."

And, I have a question: Why do carriers only carry one squadron of strikecraft?

Tsed

on Mar 17, 2008

http://rapidshare.com/files/100119774/balance.rar.htmlI made a mod with all these changes EXCEPT

Heh, and here I was going to suggest you do exactly that. Kudos, innociv.

hydrocarbn

on Mar 17, 2008

Working on a mod that encompasses most of these changes.

http://rapidshare.com/files/100119774/balance.rar.htmlI made a mod with all these changes

;_;

innociv

on Mar 17, 2008

Lol sorry. :3

It was only like an hour of actual work to finish it. Some time beyond that spent figuring out i can't add new damage types.

Thrax1

on Mar 17, 2008

^bump

Agree with OP.

Ragarth

on Mar 18, 2008

yes, thank you for the mod innociv.

shameless-bump.

innociv

on Mar 18, 2008

yeah no problem.

Just a shame everyone doesn't have it on ICO.

Vanechka

on Mar 18, 2008

I thought I had already written this, but having had some problems with my browser and not seeing it listed in my "replies" section, here I (maybe) go again. I'm with you on everything, except the fact that there's nothing done about RA. As I've said in several other threads, RA is only tolerable now due to the combined unbalance of TEC Trade and the Black Market, nerf those two, and you're left with RA being dominantly overpowered again.

An easy and effective way to balance RA, would be to make the quantity/quality of ships provided by RA inversably correlate with the size of the Vasari player's existing fleet, i.e. the quantity/quality of ships provided by RA decreases as the player's fleet size increases. This would ensure that RA exists only as a powerful supplement to a functioning economy, and not a complete replacement. Furthermore, it wouldn't hamper the usefulness of RA on the smaller maps on which the fleets by nature are smaller than on the larger maps.

I do appreciate however, that this is probably not something you can just mod into the game. Great thread!

innociv

on Mar 18, 2008

I've suggested nothing about RA because these suggestions are for an intermediate patch between 1.03 and 1.04 to tide us over and fix the game until 1.04 comes.

The intention was stuff that's less than a days work that they could do to easily greatly improve the game..
"Fixing" RA would take a lot of testing and such.

I agree that something needs to be doen with RA. Not that RA is necessarily too good or too bad, it's just too.. easy. You get labs, research, make phase gates.
To make an actual fleet and build your economy the normal way there are 10x more steps. It's much more in depths and takes a lot more decision making.
One player doesn't really RA better than another..(not at the level of normal play)
RA is like just completely indepedant of other gameplay mechanics which i see as a problem.

Vanechka

on Mar 19, 2008

I completely agree with you, as I've said many other times, but not as detailed as you, RA dumbs down the game experience, it's too easy to use once you have it, and it's too frustrating to play against.

innociv

on Mar 19, 2008

Aye. Just if it did something like the number of units or AM recharge rate of the phase gates dependent on your income rate(so more income, more unit) would be nice. Or it only makes units that you have researched (IE no enforcers unless you could actually build them at your factories) would be nice. Something that'd make them worse when you get it 20 minutes into the game, but better 2 hours in. But that'd take too much testing and stuff to get right. It's not something for right now.

Right now we need a nice balance patch with changes to the black market like described in my original post.

Subverters don't need to be nerfed SO much.

But the people that think 8 supply is too much for assailants i have to strongly disagree.
Look at it this way:
Compared to 1.02
* Javs get 20% cost in resources, 50% increase in supply(from 4 to 6)
* Illums get 17% increase in supply(from 6 to 7) but retain 1.03's health buff and shield reduction.
*Assailants get 33% increase in supply(from 6 to 8). Shields back down to 340.

A supply cap of 250 could now have:
*41 Javs, down from 62
*35 Illums, down from 41.
*31 Assailants, down from 41
Now there is a difference of TEN ships in an assailant vs. lrm 250 supply fleet, when before there was TWEENTY ONE. That's 50% more ships when javs only do 16% less DPS.
So really did Assailants get nerfed? No, they get buffed compared to LRMS. It's just that LRMS are being put more to the role they SHOULD be which is anti-light frig, with just minorly anti-cap and anti-building. They aren't the wonder-fleet until you run into someone who counter-masses flaks or heavy cruisers.

If assailants only got their supply increased to 7 then they'd be TOO good compared to javs then, and illums needed to be the one getting nerfed the lease.

Not to mention, it also makes it so now all LRMS are 1 supply more than light frigs(3 supply more in advents case), so you can't make more lrms than light frigs for the same supply cost which was silllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

It ALSO buffs the advent early game (but doesn't effect their mid or late game hardly).

People SHOULD be using more light frigs, not rushing to lrms and massing them and simply making more lrms than your enemy does. But as of current lrms take too low supply and have an overpowered damage type combined with very high DPS so light frigs are an option.

NOW yes in vasari's case before there was really no option but to make assailants. Vasari had a strong early game with them, but weak mid game as they had nothing else and the assailants could then be countered. Sentinels take too much supply and cost too much to be good early on (but later on with charged missiles they rock. Skirmishers are just crap for what they cost and how they take 7 supply even with their heal ability.(you can have double the disciples for every skirmishers, almost). So early game they're left with just Assailants. Buffing of skirmishers should give them more options.

Drexion

on Mar 19, 2008

My biggest worry here becomes the Vasari vs Advent balance. Will assailants really do well against the 4 supply disciple at a 2:1 ratio? Looking at the stats and costs, I think the disciples might win... Given advent's great synergies later on, IMO vasari should have the advantage in the early game...

Testing here will be needed I think...

innociv

on Mar 19, 2008

Yes. Assailants kill disciples 4:1 or 4.5:1 or so. So it's still 2:1 supply wise. A 33% supply increase isn't going to make it 33% worse with costs increased. It just makes people who spam LRM's have to upgrade fleet sooner which drains their credits fast, and it also makes people need to consider other lower supply units more if they want to keep under a certain fleet level(so they don't go over and have economy drained, thus more credits to do more research and expand more, as veteran players consider this a lot).

The bigger impact is the 33% less damage to buildings and cap ships(from 75% down to 50%)

assailants and javs both counter light frigs well. They are still even with the 33% damage decrease kill caps and buildings fastest, it's just not OBSCENELY fast killing them now.

We already tested it and stuff, it works well.. The changes are quite conservative.

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