collection of over/under powered stuff and proposed solution

these seem to be some popular requests, note that not all of those represent my personal ideas

modules:
weapons:
fighter torpedo: taxes survivability TOO much to be practical------------------------------------------- higher range for them/little less weight
plasma: too inconsistent in damage, eaten ALIVE by tribe with repair/fast recharging shields------ personally i think its ok but… a bit better fire rate but less damage?
disruptor bomb: binary effect makes it hard to use unless solo------------------------------------------ have a chance of shots going through half destabilized shield
PD: just purely incompetent against scrambler beams (including all variants)------------------------- allow placement on regular slots and a bit more accuracy
shields:
turbo shields: only a little better in strength but weaker in too many aspects------------------------- give it more strength and make it the counterpart for multiphasic shield.
others:
EMP shield: doesn’t seem to work --------------------------------------------------------------------------- idk if its a bug or something but it could use some more effectiveness
target booster: negligible effects --------------------------------------------------------------------------- same as above
cloak: negligible effects -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maybe they can make the ship completely invisible for a while
races:
empire:
ships too big, not enough hardpoints to be effective ----------------------------------------------------- more shield bonus to compensate? (they ARE supposed to be shield-tanks)
swarm:
ships too cheap, the negatives hardly even come clost to matching the cost bonus ------------------ they should be a LOT softer to create the true swarm effect

rly hope cliffski can answer some of these

Torpedo is weakened largely by the fact that if they come across a fighter they dump their payload on things they have no chance of hitting.
Plasma is fine
Disruptors aren’t really consistent enough to be worth it.
PD needs to be at least a match for Scramblers somehow; the negative-effectiveness problem has been solved at least.
Turbo Shield is useless because of its resistance as compared to Shield II (which blocks fighter lasers). It would need a substantial strength boost
EMP shield has a percentile functionality. It’s too weak to be really useful though.
Target booster adds a multiplier on tracking; the problem here is the things that benefit most from it don’t need it, and the things that need it get little benefit from it. Rarely will something be right on the borderline of consistent hitting and able to hit something because of a target booster. They’re great for Plasma Spam fleets though.
Cloak is nearly useless because it randomly stops your ships from attacking while they still take damage.
Empire shields are dandy but they’re so big that you can hit them from under it with rockets.
Swarm need bigger downsides, particularly on shields. I think if the Shield Bonuses or Shield Penalties also affected recharge speed and resistance that would be a big step in balancing both swarm and empire.

EMP shield DOES work but as Pandarsenic said, it’s too weak

i have to say that i agree with most the stuff being said here… the game could use a bit of balancing
personally,i dont even use fighter torps,plasmas rarely,cloaks are useless and turbo shields just plain SUCK
as far as PD goes,i didnt realize scramblers were better than PD till i accidentally swapped the modules,then i ended up ramming my head against the monitor for 20 seconds and swearing real loud
as for the empire… dunno,dont fly em anymore,the big shields are a disadvantage but i could always cope with it somehow using repairers,either armor or hull,and using some proper fighter screen

and swarm… yeah,theyre overpowered… but then again tribe reps are overpowered in their own way and order rad gunz are overpowered enough to make me scream like a little girl

so yeah… this game isnt really balanced all that well

edit:
will Tribe “ever” get their own hull bonuses or are they stuck with their “racial” modification and nothing else forever? all the other races have em
just another thing that can be done while filling the gaps

I very much dislike how missiles and PD/Scramblers interact. The more missiles you have, the better they get, because they start to overwhelm the appropriate defense. With any other weapon, the opposite is true (if you have too many beam lasers, shields will make the opposition neigh invulnerable) which makes mixing a better choice than pure spam. Not so for missiles. A fleet with 25 missile launchers and 5 other guns is way superior than a fleet with 15 missile launchers and 15 other guns, because the scramblers will half the firepower of the second one, but can hardly touch the spam of the first one.

A similar phenomenon can be observed with fighters. Twice as many is usually better than twice as good. Which means that most maps with high pilot counts degrade into fighter spam (there’s a topic on this too).

Plasma is bound by the optimum range stat.

This is why the 30 damage plasma cannons do 15 damage at max range, ramp up quickly to their full damage at 800m, and then fall off gradually as the target gets closer. It’s not a hit chance as the tooltip suggests. We can see it now with the in-game damage numbers.

A short range ship rushing a plasma cannon cruiser imparts stacking penalties - faster ships get hit less, and reduce damage the closer they get. While plasma is already a low-DPS weapon - half of a small number is a really small number.

I understand why it’s kept this way, but any effective plasma setup (besides outright critical-mass spam) would be contingent on being able to maintain a tight optimum range band from the target. We don’t have orders that can do that.

I second the comments on Scrambler/missile dynamics. Something that punishes larger amounts of missiles rather than smaller amounts is sorely needed. The swarm smartbomb with it’s “trigger” sort of does this, but I think the concept could be refined somewhat. Scramblers with motion detectors sensitive to speed or volume or something.

The gulf between Scramblers and PD has only seemed to grow wider with the patch changes. PD now degrades with damage, yet Scramblers gleefully fire away even with their modules completely destroyed.

good 2 c ppl agreeing with me

Chain Scramblers? Chain Lightning style through missiles? The more missiles, the better it gets.
The current Swarm item doesn’t change with missile count, it just takes out 60% (or so) of all missiles, I have experimented with it a fair amount and found it very underwhelming. Sure, it does a good job if you add two scramblers to it, but then you have overcommited against anything that is not missile spam.

Or long-range scatter counter missiles. They fly off, and deploy scatter charges, which go off if a missile passes close by, and then both explode in a larger radius, so few missiles means some explosions and some hits, missile spam means every mine goes off and no missile gets through. I like combat wasps from Hamilton’s books

by my experience missiles arent overpowered,atleast not very noticeably from my point of view
they deal a lot of damage,sure,but then again the DPS gets stripped away a lot by scramblers (or even PD if you feel like playing on Elite difficulty :P)
also,missiles take some time to travel,during which time the ol` catapult gets bombed by instant or fast projectile weapons

their greatest advantage is perhaps that they dont take that much power,so personally i use missiles on my ships as auxiliary weapons,to balance out the ship resource usage as best as i can and i dont bother with missile spams anymore as i find them to be ineffective,and lame, compared to a more direct,“in-ya-face-punk” approach…

sure,the missiles are still powerful,but its the way they are designed to be,thats why God invented countermeasures… if you cant deal with it in a way to mitigate the damage enough to get it to a manageable level,like if using projectile and beam weapons,then you got a serious problem and it has nothing to do with GSB

just my 2 cents

edit:
please note,the missiles dont really have that much damage extra especially once you run it through the defence screen,the damage comes from RANGE
more ships can fire at the target at the same time… act on that

Yes, you can deal with missiles through counter-measures. If the opponent only has a few missile launchers, this works out very well for the defender. Out of 5 missiles, 2 get through.
But your need of scramblers goes up linearly with the amount of missiles fired. That means that against 30+ missile launchers, one or two scramblers (per cruiser) will not make any noticeable difference, you might as well have added shields or armor instead. Out of 30 missiles, 27 get through.

But it should be the opposite: Against 5 missiles, one CountermeasureItem should let 2.5 through. Against 30, it should take down a similar percentage (15), or possibly more. That way, it would actually make sense to have some, but not go overboard on them (both missiles and countermeasures). Currently, few launchers are useless, and many launchers open up a Rock/Paper/Scissors-problem where a dedicated Scrambler fleet will destroy the missilespammers, but lose to anything else. And RPS is not strategy, it’s luck. Go and play SAC-42 to see what I mean.

On another note: SAC shows rather well what things are working out weirdly.

SAC-42: Running away but still winning handily, because the other guy cannot disengage due to static orders. I dislike this very much. It would not work either if missile spam were easier to stop.

Cruiser Lasers: A huge number of challenges have tons of those, and Beams/Plasma are rare. Again, there are issues with orders. If you put your CL-cruisers on “engage until melee”, they will easily get there (if they survive), but the opposition fails at increasing distance (except if ordered explicitly, which will then work badly against other deployments, and Keep Moving does not stack with Formation…). They will then continue to crush anything, because CLs are the fusion-powered chainsaws of GSB.
See any of the tribe challenges for exaples, such as SAC-32.

Fighter Spam: More than a few challenges spam a ton of fighters with a cruiser hiding somewhere in a corner. Because fighters are neigh impossible to kill quickly and will whittle down anything except the sturdiest tanks. Hiding a dummy ship in a corner is not very Gratuitous, is it?
Again, SAC-32 does this.

Missiles: Most challenges have one of the following launcher counts: Zero, or more than thirty. As was mentioned.

None of these problems make the game unplayable, but they reduce the strategy and increase the WTF.

still wondering if cliff visits suggestion forums once in a while

Considering he commented on a thread in this very forum just yesterday, I’d say yes.

I’m not sure what can be done about this, or even whether something needs to be done, but as this thread is talking about missiles…

Watching a battle, have you ever seen a cruiser implode under one volley of fire? Sure you have. And I bet most or nearly all of the times you’ve seen that, the volley was made up of missiles. Yep, as mentioned above, one of the key advantages of missiles is their ability to concentrate on a single target, from all over the freakin’ map.

My favorite is when a gazillion missiles converge on a fresh, undamaged cruiser. First the shield resonates and throbs, then it collapses during the first second or so of the incoming missiles–dozens and dozens–then the stream proceeds to the hull, where the smoky hits quickly upgrade to the fiery hits and then kablooie, the thing implodes.

The next most spammable weapon is the fighter. IMHO, fighter spam is easier to counter than missile spam. At least fighters don’t generally hump the same target at the same time. . .

No point, solution, or anything other than the simple observation about missiles, above. And on top of that, missile spam fleets are dead easy to construct. I had reason to run through the missions from scratch. When I hit a tough patch I was in too much of a hurry to be subtle; three minutes in the ship design screen produced a Rabbit Fed cruiser equipped with MW missiles that cleaned house in short order. Nothing like watching those full-size Imperial cruisers go up in less than three seconds apiece. . .

well thats nice

Yes, missiles are brutal. I’ve earned enough honour to unlock everything, and about 10k honour to spare, by playing the first 8-or-so missions in the unexpanded game, with just cruiser fleets armed with megatonne and multi-warhead missiles, and if needed some fighters as interceptors.

That must be because none of these fleets have consistent defences against anything.
So far if you have troubles with missiles, scramblers are your solution.

Also I did some sort of “analysis” some time ago.
There are currently too many useless modules in the game.

i find it interesting that the only frigate i’ve ever gotten to work uses turbo shields (and dosn’t work with any other kind of shield) and my fleets almost only use plasma and work very well, both of which are on this list as being weak…

i do agree that disrupter bombs, point defense, emp shields, cloak and target boosters seem to have almost no effect though.

You’re wasting power, crew, and credits on the Turbo Shield. 7 shield strength gets you at most protection from two very low damage shots or one medium-damage shot.

Plasma works well against slow things once you reach a “critical mass” point where the sheer quantity of it is difficult to deal with.