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 6)

Sideshow_

on Mar 19, 2008

Think innociv's a good judge on this. Am interested to hear what HunterX and Jinx think.

innociv

on Mar 19, 2008

I think HunterX already commented in the other thread when i referred him to the list.

Drexion

on Mar 19, 2008

I did a test here...20 assailant vs 40 disciple...Disciple won with 9.5 of them left over. Thats a supply vs supply battle.

Assuming metal price of 500, crystal of 550 (which innociv said in IRC is close to what his mod black-market change makes it)... two disciple is 500$, 80m so 900$ cost (one metal is $5). Assailant ends up being 827$. So one assailant is 92% of two disciple on a cost-for-cost basis.

40 disciple * .92 = 37 disciples. So cost for cost, the battle should have been 20 assailant vs 37 disciples. Given how 20 vs 40 ended up with 9.5 left, lets call the 20 vs 37 a tie.

So cost for cost, it'll be a tie. Supply for supply (supply is VERY important imo) its a loss for assailants.

All in all, I can say that given these numbers, Vasari using assailant will not have ANY advantage against a advent player making disciples...

Perhaps 7 supply for assailant would be a better number? Or maybe raising the disciple supply from 4 to 5? Or even raising the resource cost of the disciple?

-Drexion

innociv

on Mar 19, 2008

But as I said, supply isn't the only issue.
However, maybe Assailants should just get supply increased to 7. I'm not so sure.
Real world examples show differently than testing supply vs. supply.

Clearly assailants mop the floor with disciples currently(as they should, of course) in REAL WORLD examples so i don't see why just 33% more supply will ruin them. 33% more supply doesn't make the unit 33% worse. To make the unit 33% worse you'd need to give it 33% less shields, less damage, less hull, more supply, and 33% more cost.

But even so, maybe changing assailants to 7 supply would be better but i'm confident that javs should be 6 to be balanced.

Definitely not raise disciple supply, it needs to remain at 4 against cobalts 5.

HuntingX

on Mar 19, 2008

Stop calling me HunterX

Who the hell started that.

Not. HunterX. See my name. HUNTINGX. I don't want to see HunterX anymore. !!!!

I didn't run tests myself, but it appears to me that if Assailants lose supply vs supply, some changes need to made.

It's actually really simple.

Lower their costs so they win cost for cost. Then, even if they lose supply vs supply, it's alright.

However, the key really is that they must beat their counter unit, and by a reasonable amount. I'd say if it's cost for cost, assailants must win with at least 50% remaining, and maybe more.

We want to go for harder counters, not disciple spam.

Drexion

on Mar 19, 2008

One thing worth noting is that since assailants cost more metal/crystal than disciples, raising the black market cost of metal/crystal is in effect making assailants more expensive relative to disciple.

Assuming those 500m, 550c costs the number I got above was that an assailant cost 92% of two disciple. Assuming a 300m, 350c cost that number changes to 87.4%. So it would then be 20 assailant vs 35 disciple assuming old prices.

So there was not only a 33% supply cost increase, there was also a relative cost increase...at least from 1.02 costs.

PurplePaladin

on Mar 19, 2008

I think LRMs don't need any of their DPS, range, HP, Armor, nothing changed, just one thing: Reduce their turn rate greatly, and perhaps even a delay to "lock on" to targets before firing. This makes them more like the artilery I beleive they were suppose to be, and ends their ability to hit, destroy multiple buildings/HC and then run. When you make artilery as mobile as other units, your just asking for nothing but a mass of artilery with hit and run type attacks only.

I also agree with the above poster that being able to tell more about your planets upgrades, AT A GLANCE, is very important. I'm tired of having to constantly go onto and out of 3-4 menus to see what all my planet upgrades are. And even once inside the menu, it's still a pain to stare at the "1" on the icon, and wonder "1 what? 1 of 1, or, 1 of 5?". You should be able to see most planet info with a quick mouse-over. I never play above medium maps because my friend and I go numb with planet micro-management.

Oh, and PLEASE, I'm begging the Devs, can't we have an Empire tree that only Pins what you need. I don't need to see EVERY single extractor or contruction ship in a planet, I just want to see the battle type ships, and maybe just the Factories. As it is now, it's total eyestrain trying to search through the mass of icons.

Sideshow_

on Mar 19, 2008

Stop calling me HunterX.

Sorry, my bad. That's just how you were lodged in my memory. I should know better considering the number of people who think I'm sLideshow.

innociv

on Mar 20, 2008

haha I know it's HuntingX.. I just got confused from sideshow.

I didn't run tests myself, but it appears to me that if Assailants lose supply vs supply, some changes need to made.
It's actually really simple.
Lower their costs so they win cost for cost.
Then, even if they lose supply vs supply, it's alright.
However, the key really is that they must beat their counter unit, and by a reasonable amount.
I'd say if it's cost for cost, assailants must win with at least 50% remaining, and maybe more.We want to go for harder counters, not disciple spam.

Well against LRMs, Assailants got spank both cost per cost and supply vs supply(damn 50% supply more than javs!).

I question the test though, because it's very clear in 1.02 that assailant spam beats advents spamming disciples. Completely hands down, one sided fight. But a 33% increase in supply turns that around? I reallly really think not. Also note this goes along with extractor cost reduction, which will buff vasari's eco the most. All the suggestions where made to go a long with each other as a whole.
Also keep in mind at just civ3 the assailants drop to 333 credits.(after spending 600 creds and a few resources or whatever though, but you make it back)

Not to mention assailants become extremely strong later game. IF you make them too good early on, they're wayyyyyyyyyy too good late game. (Or maybe ships with phase missile damage just need higher DPS but phase missile tech needs to be reduced to 20% at level 6, that'd make them better earlier and worse late than currently)

and the price I gave him to use for comparing cost was from the medium end of the market not low. IT depends how much you're paying for crystal/metal.
But as Vasari, you get more crystal/metal usually than the other races, so you AREN'T buying it, so you might as well assume crystal and metal are 200 each, driving cost down.
This is why the whole spreadsheet thing isn't working in this case. As I said, a 33% increase in supply can't make disciple spam beat assailant spam, I'm quite sure.
BUT if assailants just get increased to 7 supply, that's acceptable.. but might make them too good compared to javs late game.

If the devs where actually going to incorporate these exact changes it'd be worth us testing it. OR them just making us patch testers. *shrugs* Maybe a 33% increase in supply and that's it(well besides the damage reduction to AntiMedium against caps and biuldings, HOWEVER that does NOT effect how they do against light frigs) IS the end of the world and will make disciples pwn assailants, but I doubt it.

MegaVolt

on Mar 20, 2008

Could you try to mod in bomber 150% health and fighter 150% damage? That would also help with LRM counter and might make strike craft interesting. For testing purpose 200% fighter damage and 200% bomber health would also be interesting. It's not the strike craft change you had in mind but I think it might come close and it can be modded.

About bombers being able to overcome flak: I think they never should do that (at least not in a ratio that can be afforded). The problem with bombers is that they can kill a few ships and therefor cost the enemy money while not costing any money themselves for the attacker. As long as hit'n'run attacks can not be stopped it must be somehow easy to kill strike craft because getting to those 30 carriers that constantly jump around in your systems isn't easy. 150% health makes bombers a little stronger but with flak damage as it is I don't think they should be much more durable.

Oh and three other great and short suggestions made in https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/304748:
- shift-click a research object pauses all current research and starts the shift-clicked, resuming the previously queued research afterwards
- Vasari RA should follow the planetary waypoint of the planet the phase gate is built in
- a possibility to lock the empire tree auto-scrolling

innociv

on Mar 20, 2008

50% more damage against lrms is too much. They already do 20dps against them.
Fighters need their own damage type that's the same as AntiLight but with 100% damage to medium and heavy armor.
It's just fighters need a damage buff against light frigs and support frigs.
Bombers will then be better against CAps, Buildings, Heavy Criusers and against flak, and only do slightly less damage against everything Fighters is good against(only thing fighters would have a big advantage against is LRMs). Fighters will kill the other things easier, but they die very fast to flak. This should work MUCH better.

When I said bombers overwhelm flak.. I think i made it clear not 1 bomber kill 1 flak. But currently it takes 7x the number of bombers as flak(generally. Like say you have 70 bombers, 10 flak will stop em.), which is just silly and it's why bombers aren't used.
4:1 would be better.

The 50% hp bonus will probably be fine, but really they might need more. :/ I'm being very conservative here.

Drexion

on Mar 20, 2008

Agreed that your being conservative on the bomber change

. Good thing though.

Regarding the whole assailant vs disciple thing, I can only say those are the results of a ingame test... So your welcome to retest it if you wish, but until then please accept thats what happened, hehe. Given the change from 20 vs 30 to 20 vs 40 in the supply-to-supply contest, that has *definitely* changed from before... I agree that cost for cost, its not nearly as dramatic a change, but as I postulate, that would likely come close to being a tie.

Just how superior to disciples ARE assailants in 1.02 and 1.03? Maybe they don't pwn them THAT badly cost for cost. Early game anyhow. Maybe early game (to ignore all the +dmg techs) they only PWN disciples in supply vs supply, which you just changed

.

Personally I think supply is extremely important for balance... Given how I play anyway, I maximize the supply usage and then hesitate to "upgrade" my fleet due to the economic penalty. So even if assailant "only" had a supply vs supply advantage (and a tiny cost for cost one) in 1.02/1.03, that means after one fleet upgrade (and maxing it with assailants) that vasari still had the upper hand.... If advent upgraded to the NEXT fleet level to fight off the vasari fleet, vasari economy would then have the "upper hand" and this would impact the cost for cost fight scenario to beocome MORE in favor of assailant.

-Drexion

innociv

on Mar 21, 2008

I know it was the result of an ingame test, but if you had two good people playing in 1.02 and one made assailats and one made assailants, I can assure you the one making assailants will win.

They DID win.
And I don't think getting a credit drain early on is going to effect that.
The first fleet cap is only taking like 2credits/second, and the 2nd might be 6, depending how early you do it, though with the higher supply they would be upgrading it early.

But yeah, maybe they should be 7 supply. I just think they might too close to javs supply count then while I know for sure that javs need to be 6 supply.

In 1.03 assailants actually lose cost-for-cost to disciples which is a bigger issue than supply-for-supply.
In 1.02 real world examples would show Assailant hurting advent bad early game usually.

Supply is important, and that's the whole reasoning behind higher supply for them. It doesn't mean they're expensive, it just means SPAMMING them is going to effect how soon you need to upgrade fleet supply. If you use them apart of a mixed fleet, they don't effect how soon you need to upgrade fleet supply.

Maybe if anything they should get AntiMedium damage vs. medium buffed to 175%, but that would widen the gap between how effective LRMS are vs. light frigs compared to illums.
But hey.. Illums need a real damage type anyways. :/ Or cap damage could be raised to 125% vs. Medium.

Gan0ndorf

on Mar 21, 2008

I agree with most changes if they're done as a hotfix, and more balancing will be done later on. The strikecraft problem has been addressed in another thread and helping guardians repel lrms might help. With the current situation guardian's repel ability is useless since lrms can just outrange it.

The market works better now than in 1.03, but price fluctuation need to be alot less random and more (or almost exclusively) based on player actions. About sell prices : you can sell for the full price by using sell orders. Of course you would need a player to buy it before getting credits. I would suggest 1:2 sell/buy prices instead of 2:3. Currently it's 1:3, which nerfs vasari early game too much.

Subvertes are overpowered, they're the counter to every unit. Have enough subverters and some random damage units = win. The other player can't do anything but watch his fleet die. He can't even retreat because his ships are disabled and can't run away. Only counter would be carriers, but they're too easily countered by 20 flaks (20 flaks can counter any reasonable amount of carriers, up to 100+, and add some dps to your fleet also).Instead choosing your units should be based on countering the enemy fleet, not building the same fleet every game. So i agree with a little subverter nerf. I would also suggest a change in flak frigates, since we're talking about new damage types for fighters. We need a new damage type for flaks also, doing less damage to fighters than now, while doing the same to ships. Maybe reduce flak hp a little, they're eally too high for a frigate and for the ship's cost.

Other than this, look into the mp game crashes, and into the migrating code (it always migrates to someone who can't host or it doesn't work at all, well it never works in reality. fix it or switch to p2p networking like every other rts game).

innociv

on Mar 21, 2008

I think gaurdian repel still works against assailants, but not javs now.

I'm not sure what the exact range on repel is, i probably should of checked the entity files.

In the strikecraft thread a lot of people have very very silly suggestions regarding how to balance them imo..

1:2 sell wont' be good enough unless the average buy price is real high.

p2p network is what we have now is the issue.. You mean client-server networking?

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