Current Balance changes Thread

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

I’ll sticky this and update it as I go along. I’m working on a big rebalancing to fix the obvious inbalances in the game right now. This will take a while, but I thought I might as well make my changes public so people can scream if they think I am way off the mark :smiley:

[i]pulse lasers for fighters are now yellow.
fighter torpedo damage reduced from 20 to 15
fighter torpedo cost reduced from 50 to 42
fighter torpedo weight reduced from 25 to 15
Increased the damage absorbtion of all fighter armor, and reduced the weight of the cheapest 3 forms of fighter armor
fighter rocket damage increased from 7 to 9
fighter rocket fire interval decreased from 3510 to 2100
fighter engine 1 weight reduced from 2.5 to 2.0
fighter engine 1 thrust reduced from 12 to 10
fighter engine 2 weight reduced from 3.0 to 2.5
fighter engine 2 thrust reduced from 15 to 14
Added a 17% shield boost bonus to the federation fox frigate
Reduced power output of all frigate power modules by 35%
Increased capacity of all frigate crew modules by 35%
Added 12% integrity boost to the rebel Loki frigate
Increased cost of fox frigate to 135 CR
Added 8% power output boost to the federation puma frigate
Reduced Alliance wasp frigates armor boost to 9%
Increased minotaur cruiser hull cost from 99 CR to 120.
Increased alliance alligator crusier hull cost from 110 CR to 120 CR
Increased alliance alligator cruiser power from 8 to 9
Added an 8% integrity boost to the alliance alligator cruiser
Rebel fenrir cruiser no longer has it’s shield boost
Federation Buffalo cruiser gets it’s integrity boost increased by 4%
Cruiser light shield modules resistance lowered to 16
ECM shield effectiveness increased to 44, but it now has stacking effectiveness of 0.7
Cruiser basic shield module resistance reduced to 19
All cruiser and frigate armor modules now have a stacking efficiency of 0.98
Fighter laser tracking speed increased to 2.7
Fighter pulse laser tracking speed increased to 2.9
Frigate Ion cannon tracking speed increased to 2.0
Frigate phaser cannon tracking speed increased to 1.9
ECM shield effectiveness increased
Rebel Atlantis bomber hull cost increased and power output reduced

=== 20th september===
Doubled the bare minimum chance of a weapon making a lucky hit on a super-fast object (basically fighters)
1.12:
fighter engine I thrust increased from 10 to 14
fighter engine II thrust increased from 14 to 17
fighter engine III thrust increased from 17 to 20
all fighter engines stack effectiveness reduced from 100% to 72%
Sped up the rate of fire for cruiser tractor beams
Sped up the travel speed of almost every missile in the game by roughly 33%
1.13:
Cruiser proton beam shield penetration increased from 19 to 24
All frigate armor damage absorbable increased by 25%
Antifighter missiles are now much much more effective in almost every way
Frigate ECM shock missiles are faster
All fighter modules (except armor) have their hitpoints reduced by about 40%
All fighter armor modules have their weight halved

1.18
Cruiser beam laser tracking speeds reduced by approx 15%
Minimum range of heavy plasma increased so it is further (worse) than the default cruiser plasma
Achilles fighter power generation capability has been reduced to 4.8

1.24
Increased stopping power and range of the cruiser supercharged tractor module

1.25
Major reduction in the weight of the fighter target painter module

1.27
Cruiser quantum blaster damage increased from 5 to 8
Cruiser quantum blaster tracking speed increased from 1.1 to 1.5
Cruiser quantum blaster shield penetration increased from 40 to 48
Cruiser rocket crew reduced from 12 to 8
Cruiser rocket damage increased from 14 to 19
Cruiser rocket fire interval reduced from 1170 to 950
Cruiser rocket armor penetration increased from 30 to 36
Cruiser guidance scrambler crew increased from 4 to 8
Cruiser guidance scrambler weight increased from 99 to 130

1.37
Quantum Blasters armor pen raised from 14 to 18, cost reduced
Frigate armor strength increased by 25%, stacking from 0.98 to 0.95
Cruiser armor strength increased by 15% stacking from 0.98 to 0.97
Disruptor bombs speed raised from 0.31 to 0.41. Fire interval dropped from 1950 to 1800
Cruiser defence laser cost dropped to 96 from 114 and damage raised from 7 to 9.
Cruiser Dummy Missile cost dropped from 97 to 66. Crew required dropped from 6 to 4

1.39
Guidance scrambler beams fire interval used to be 220, its now 420. Note this was wrongly reported until now. No wonder it was good!

1.45
Shield Support beam being drastically re-balanced with lower beam rate and capacitor, and only able to have one beam at a time on each shield. Also now auto-selects the lowest friendly shield available
Frigate disruptor bombs damage increased from 60 to 75

New changes being considered for build 1.48

nomads:
Awazem loses its cost boost, gets 8% armour boost
Duwasir loses its armour boost, gets 10% speed boost
Majali reduces speed penalty from 22% to 12%
Abbadi gets an 8% armour boost
Nomadic dogfight laser damage increased to 8
Nomadic beam laser power usage reduced to 13

general:
guidance scrambler beam weight increased to 147
EMP Shield ecm strength increased from 66 to 82
All frigate armour maxdamageabsorbable increased by 20%
EMP Missile launchers, (both types) missile speed 25% faster. fireinterval reduced 10%, ecm strength increased 10%
Decoy missile launcher weight reduced to 70

order:
Limpet launcher limpetweight increased to 8.2, cost reduced to 110

tribe:
Tribal Repair system repair rate reduced from 1.15 to 1.12 Supplies reduced from 1040 to 900

[/i]

2

Lots of interesting changes. Looks good :slight_smile:

Question about ECM shields. “ECM shield effectiveness increased to 44, but it now has stacking effectiveness of 0.7.” Does this mean a shield has a 44% chance to resist being stunned? And two of them would be .442.7=61.6%? How about three? .443.7*.7=43.1% doesn’t seem right, and .443.7=92.4% doesn’t seem right either.

I’d also like to see some frigate or cruiser weapon that is more effective against fighters. Right now none of them can hit a fast fighter without the assistance of a tractor beam. And a tractor beam defense setup takes forever to clear out multiple squads. Maybe someone else has come up with a better system, but basically right now I counter fast fighters with fast fighters, and neither can kill each other. They just end up flying in circles shooting at each other.

3

I suggests air-to-air er… space-to-space… missiles… fighter weapons designed to chase down and kill the fastest of fighters, these would be high speed, fast tracking, high damage, no amour or shield penetration weapons. Make the only defence to anti-fighter missiles is to have armour. That would slow them down enough to make normal fighter lasers a threat.

4

Why did the Rebel Fenrir cruiser get nerfed?

5

Making fighter pulse lasers yellow is so overpowered.

6

In terms of power output and available modules per credit spent, the fenrir was just too good.

7

Indeed :smiley: Just something I noticed when doing all the balancing (both fighter laser colors were the same)

8

The game needs a way to stop current player designs that are nerf’d in the latest changes.
I can still use cruisers that I designed pre-1.06 but which are currently too powerful or need too much crew.

Iain

9

I noticed that when I try to save a design with frigate missiles and they turn into anti-fighter missiles which require more power and crew.
I end up being able to field frigates with 5 anti-fighter missiles and underpowered crew pod and generator.

10

I’m not sure I get the point of a fast missile launcher over a frigate torpedo. Both have a fire interval of 3510, so it doesn’t fire faster. The speed of the missiles for the fast launcher is only 0.19 compared to the torpedo that is 0.17. Not that much faster for only doing half the damage. I guess the tracking speed is 1.90 compared to 1.00, does that really make that much of a different? If that is accurate it seems like it’s fast tracking. Just saying fast made me think it should shot fast, or the missiles would be fast.

11

With a stacking efficiency of 0.98 what is the highest average armor you can get? Right now shields cap at about 1050 HP, but unless a 0.98 stacking efficiency keeps average armor below 70ish then it won’t really change anything. I guess the real question is what does stacking efficiency mean? I’m pretty sure it’s not how Legedi is implying it works and that 44 is hot much ECM energy can be absorbed before the module needs to cool down, just like the ECM beam puts out 32 ECM power and the current module absorbed 32. I just don’t know what the stacking efficiency number means.

12

When you add a second shield each shields efficiency is multiplied by .9. When you add a third, multiply by .9*.9, or .81. With the 4th it’s its .9^3. The total peak for shields is at 9 shields, where each is at .43 efficiency and 9 of them is like having 3.9 shields at 100%.

If you plug the .98 number for armor into the same equation (or spreadsheet for me cause I’m math impaired :P) It looks like this.
Number of armor / efficiency per armor / amor point multiplier.

1 1.00 1.00
2 0.98 1.96
3 0.96 2.88
4 0.94 3.76
5 0.92 4.61
6 0.90 5.42
7 0.89 6.20
8 0.87 6.95
9 0.85 7.66
10 0.83 8.34
11 0.82 8.99
12 0.80 9.61
13 0.78 10.20
14 0.77 10.77
15 0.75 11.30

I don’t think you’ll ever get to a “peak” armor rating, because if I (or bill gates anyways) did my math right you don’t stop increasing armor points until you’ve mounted 50 armor units. :stuck_out_tongue: However, mounting 50 armor units would be like mounting only 18 with 100% efficient armor.

Or to put it another way, the 12 armor monstrosities in the 4 tanks challenge would lose 20% of their armor. Still gonna take forever to bring them down, but when the reppers run out they’ll go down a little faster.

13

I think it needs to be a little steeper, I played around in the ship editor a little bit and was able to come up with a mobile platform that could mount a cruiser plasma launcher and cruiser missile launcher and still have an armor rating high enough it was above the maximum possible armor penetration value with the modifier. It had to mount 2 weapons or 1 weapon and an armor autorepair it’s true, but such a ship would me silly tough, especially if you put it at the front of your formation to draw fire. For that matter you could just build mobile armor balls that had autorepair, an engine and armor. You could wear them down eventually, but it would still be unbalanced compared to the toughness of other ships even if you have to sacrifice your ability to shoot. I mean I guess it solves the problem of essentially invincible ships, but not ships that can be game breaking tough. Though I do have a few ideas…

Would it be possible that those 3% of hits that get through anyway instead of hurting the armor actually reduces it’s armor value so that the overall ships average armor decreases? That neatly solves the problem in that after a certain amount of pounding your armor no isn’t immune to all weapons and it doesn’t punish you for using armor at lower values because your ship is likely destroyed to beam weapons long before it takes the kind of pounding ultrarmor ships do. It would make sense that over time your armor degrades as it absorbs megatons of energy. And while a WWII battleship’s belt armor was immune to 5 in shell essentially if they took enough of them even those massive sheets of steel would break down.

If your ship has an average armor of 73 or more you take 10% minihits instead of 3%, so much of your ship is armor the seams and portholes that let those hits through are more common.

Proton Capacitor Array Module, a module that add 5.00-10.00 armor penetration (dunno how that would balance exactly) to your weapons for each one on your ship so that if the enemy wants ultrarmor ships then you can go laden with Proton Capacitor Arrays, which essentially give any weapon’s shot a sheathe of high energy protons that help it bypass armor. After all even if it only added 5.00 4 of them would let you penetrate any armor they wanted to with the 70 range weapons, and all it does it let you do damage to the armor rather then being absorbed.

14

Tanks are no longer invulnerable!

The armor change was slight, and it only needed to be slight.

What really fixed tanks was the speed of repairing armor. In patch 1.06 repairs to armor were instant, but now it takes a considerable amount of time to repair armor, even with two nano repair modules.

The end result is I can beat the crap out of my tank challenges now, where as before it took a lot of patience :slight_smile:

15

:slight_smile:

First thing I’ve done is trying your tank challenges :slight_smile: As expected they went boom quite quick :slight_smile:

16

Yes, the new balance is excellent against tanks!

Now the repair modules run out, and once they do it’s only a matter of time until the average armour value drops. Once that does, the remaining 80% of the armour goes up in flames nearly instantly.

17

Well, armor repair may have been slowed, or it might now not have infinite resources, but its still the worst thing about the game right now imo. I think repair modules should just be completely removed. As things are right now there is absolutely no reason to not have one on every single one of your ships. And even then you will lose to the person that has 2 on every ship… after about 10 minutes of watching them futilely shoot at each other. That isn’t a gratuitous battle, its just boring, let my ships die please.

18

I dunno, from what I’ve been experiencing you can’t make a super armor ship that also has appreciable weaponry. Which means a command that let you set target priorities could solve the issue. For example you could assign a % to Ships With Shields Down, Ships with Shields Up, Ships With The Most/Least Weapons, Ships With The Most/Least Armor and maybe a few more.

19

Actually, I’d also recommend taking out shield regeneration. This is a single battle not like an rts where you pull back a unit to sit around your base and heal. Ok, so maybe that’s the idea behind the cautious order or cloaking, but really it doesn’t work and also honestly not fun. Whats fun is battles with action and explosions, where ships can kill each other in a timely manner and be done with it, onto the next cool battle.

Having ships self-repair or massive amounts of shield regeneration just draws things out for really no benefit. If you want to make a “tank” ship you can put more armor and shields on it, “but they don’t have to regenerate”. That just makes things worse imo.

While i’m ranting, I mean, giving constructive criticism… I would also take out the empire weapons platforms and disallow ships without engines, and if a ships engines should be destroyed during battle leaving it unable to move, blow it up! There is nothing fun about putting 30 weapons platforms in the corner of the map with 2000 plasma guns and, oh wait, the enemy did that strategy too…

I mean sure, given a game mode more complex than “last man standing” a stationary / turret type of ship could make sense, say, one side is offense one is defense, or its like… get a ship to the right edge of the map and the right side player has to stop them etc etc, but “stationary” ships should be at a minimum disallow-able as an option in some game modes ( like team deathmatch if i might call it that ).

20

Better yet. Say some people think that repair mods and fast shield regen is the bees knees, well, start exposing these things as a challenge ruleset - aka - I can post a challenge with options 1-disallow repair mods 2-no shield regen etc. This would add an entire new level of depth to challenges … 1. cost/pilot limits 2. map size 3. RULES.