Two or three of these things supporting a cruiser may be defeatable (just target the frigates), but a network of mutually-supporting ISSBs seems near-invulnerable.
Oh, sure, you could design a specialist, one-trick pony fleet to deal with it, load up with disruptor bombs, emp cannons and missiles, swarms of fighters… but having an uber-powerful defense which requires specially designed tricks to beat it seems to take optimal fleet design out of the realm of balance and tactics, and into the realm of “gaming the system”. Could I figure out how to take down a network of linked ISSB platforms?
Sure. But I cannot design a balanced fleet that performs anywhere near as well on the pre-programmed scenarios.
Interesting strategic challenges come from tradeoffs, from asking yourself “how much of x do I need, vs. how much of y?”, not from spamming the single most effective system in the game. The breaking point for me is not “Is this unbeatable?” but “Does this reduce the fun factor?”.
ISSB breaks the game by reducing the enjoyment of fleet design. It was an interesting idea. It’s clearly broken. Take it out altogether.
I still maintain that’s it’s just skewed hard by it’s recharge scaling. The recharge rate of one ISSB dwarfs that of a regular shield by several factors, making it an effective shielding replacement instead of support.
4.5 instead of 45 seems to be a more common sense starting value. The ability to redirect dictates that the ISSB could be quite ‘inferior’ to a standard shield and still be useful.
If someone has a sample challenge that illustrates the SSB as being overpowered, I’d love to take a look (if you have the GSBID). I’m quite happy to nerf it if it seems too hard. Maybe I just wasn’t being gung ho enough when I was trying it out in my tests
Ok…
I’ve played a few fights against that. Maybe they are a bit good
I’ll nerf them, maybe half the amount they can actual transmit over each time, possibly more.
FWIW, I foudn the very ebst results against that fleet was to use fighetrs, relatviely slow ones, given orders pruely to wipe out frigates. That almost did the trick, but it’s not ideal. I think I also found another problem, in that my "tons of ECM beams’ strategy didn’t work properly. I think ships need to be cleverer about picking targets with the ECM beam, not aiming them at currently ECM’d targets, for example (must check the code).
Anyway, there will be a nerf in the next patch. Maybe even a micro-patch just to nerf it.
I have not checked it, but there is another issue: If you stack dozens of shields on top of each other, they get diminuishing returns. But stacking ISSBs does not seem to, while at the same time allowing you to concentrate all your power to where you need it. I highly suspect that the module would even be useful if it recharged at less than a normal shield would (between 3 and 7). Make it cheapish to allow some fine-tuning of frigates instead of Do-Or-Die approach. That way, someone who gets the optimal count of the them out of a few remaining resource points and slots has a nontrivial advantage, and spamming is just plain bad. Which is exactly the kind of strategy we want. Fine-tuning fleets is the major thing to do in GSB. Cheap but weak modules allow for more fine-tuning. Expensive game-breakers do not.
The only way I could beat “Nerf …uh, Empire? (Repost)” by Yurch, ID 4590783" was by stacking multiple cruisers armed with MMW’s and one CL. There have been other posts that I have been able to beat with less crazy fleets so perhaps Yurch is just, really really good at making a great fleet. Somewhere up this post - err the last post Kdansky was talking about shields and diminishing returns…
Perhaps ISSB could recharge at the speed of a normal shield? The idea is great…
Think of it this way - imagine you could reverse the polarity of the ISSB and use it as a pure weapon - a frigate that could leach 70 shield points in a single hit… Not to mention it can fire fairly often.
Actually that would be a pretty sweet weapon…
I’m carrying out various balance experiments here, and seriously nerfing it has little effect. I wonder if the real re-balance here is to just code it so that ships can only ‘receive’ shield support from a fixed number of beams at once. I can imagine allsorts of technobabble reasons why a ships shields can only be reinforced from one power source at a time…
Plus, I think the system should not operate on target ships currently ECM jammed…
Thoughts?
Limiting the number of beams that a ship can have supporting it at any one moment seems like a good idea and I think would probably be the easiest way to balance it.
I just posted another better ISSB fleet. Challenge # 4591168 “You must FEAR the dreaded Imperial Shield Support Beam - until it gets nerfed that is”
It has defeated all of the SAC-1 ISSB fleets posted, all of the retaliations I got for my previous posted ISSB fleet and all of the numbered SAC challenges back to 32 so far. I’m reasonably confident it would sweep the SAC if I have time to finish before it gets nerfed. Most of them it just laughs at and kicks sand in their faces. It was kind of funny watching it slowly chasing down SAC-42 and finally trapping it in a corner. Who knew there were corners in space?
Look, I get it. I’m a software engineer myself, so I’ve been there.
You have an idea. It seems really cool. It will be fun to implement. Users will love it. The data structure is elegant and computer science-y. It will speed everything up. It’s awesome. It provides magic ponies.
But then you implement it, and it sucks. Maybe it won’t play nice with pthreads. Maybe it hogs memory bandwidth. Maybe the users have to choose between optimizing the search trie for space, or for speed. Whatever.
But it sucks.
At this point, there’s an almost irresistible temptation to hack on it. To pile on kludge after kluge, restriction after restriction, hard-code corner case after corner case, to somehow save your baby.
The kindest thing another software engineer can do for you, at this point, is fetch the cluebat, and beat some perspective into you.
To tell you your child is a monster, and it’s time to let it die.
To "cleartool merge . -delete -fver …/Project_10.3_my_lame_idea/LATEST -merge -abort "
To take it out and see if a single user misses it.
Well, there was widespread agreement that the empire was the weakest race in the game. It needs something to bring it up par with the other races. Personally I would have gone with something to address it’s biggest weakness, its vulnerability to laser fighters. The Imperial fighter hulls are not very good and it has very large shield bubbles. A good fighter hull would do wonders for the empire, or perhaps some special anti-fighter weapon.
This will likely invalidate a bunch of recent challenges (and by “invalidate”, I basically mean “make the challenge cause a crash when you open it”). Not so bueno.
You could always switch the beam to be more of a “shield repair beam”, so it can only target a ship that is not currently taking fire. It would still have great use for ships to pull back to get their shields repaired before going into combat again.
You could impose other limitations to the beam, so that a ship targeted by said beam has it’s targeting effected in a negative sense (that’s a lot of energy being added to the vessel), something like a -5% chance to hit per beam with a 1000 interval or something (obviously numbers would need to be tested…)
Just a couple of ideas so that the beam itself is still useful, but not godly.
Ehh, I love the idea of the SSB, but too much of it can be just too powerful. Its a great idea, perhaps just a little OP.
Nerfing it by either making it more expensive or limiting it to 1 per ship is probably all that is needed.
It has another great side effect, and that is making frigate fleets useful. If frigates can support each other with SSB’s then frigates are no longer glass cannons and capable of standing up to cruisers, at least for a time. Frigate defenses are actually important now!
Without an SSD supporting frigate shields, why bother? Why bother with shields or armor at all? Just give them lots of engines, lots of weapons, and hope they do enough damage before they die.
Incidentally, frigates have pretty damn good AA weapons. Frigate survivability is an interesting path. The airforce is still trash though.
Yeah, empire cruisers are big (although swarm cruisers as a whole are bigger) but it’s the cruiser-sized frigates that are really unique to empire and a significant drawback. The Hasta is a 180m monster; it’d be nice to have a use for a frigate that big without it being a total liability.
The new patch hits it pretty hard with a single-target restriction. It’s probably not going to be useful to have many SSB’s in a fleet anymore, very few beams are active unless the opposition is disorganized.
