Current Balance changes Thread

Modding in a couple of extra / more effective anti-fighter weapons really does help with the fighter defense. Boosted AF missiles and fighter scaled AF missiles both make the issue a lot less of an issue, and making the anti-fighter beam a lot more accurate also helps.

Sadly, there seems to be some sort of upper limit to accuracy - I’ve put tracking speeds in the thousands and they still miss fast-fighters around 50% of the time. Oh, and missiles that have enough turn radius to turn and get a second strike don’t actually seem to reroll their hit chance.

The tractor targeting code wasn’t working right, but I’ve fixed it for the next patch. It’s awesome now. Expect to buy lots more tractor beams :smiley:

Oh, nice. That’ll be fun to play around with.

By the way, I know you’re getting told this in about every other thread, but well done on the super-fast turnaround times on bugfixes, feature tweaks, response to questions/feedback, etc. It’s been remarkable to watch as a developer (albeit of websites, not games), and encouraging as a customer.

Just a reminder for the next round of balancing the Federation Puma Frigate and Federation Fox Frigate are basically identical. The Puma has 1 more power, and that’s all. A little variation so there is a reason to use the Fox would be nice.

Glad to hear about the tractor beams giving target priority to whatever they catch in the next patch (hopefully).

I’ve just been playing GSB and tried two public challenges. Two of them depended heavily on fast fighters that couldn’t be hit, one adding (unnecessarily since the fighters killed even 110-armor ships easily with their lasers / blasters) a bunch of plasma cruisers to finish the job, while the other was a bunch of tightly-packed frigates with ion blasters. There’s just no beating that, so it wasn’t much fun.

Even if 1 frigate with a tractor beam could kill 1 fighter before the swarm killed it, it’d be a great improvement on how it is right now. The other balance issues I ran into aren’t quite as bad, and as we see more variety in modules hopefully we’ll see decent countermeasures (which themselves have countermeasures) so there’s actually a way to beat any challenge. Or at least a way to beat stone-dumb challenges that just rely on one or two gimmicks.

Fighter vs Fighter also needs work though IMO. Two very fast fighter squadrons just fly circles around eachother. That is dogfighting, yes, but eventually in dogfighting somebody gets hit or nobody would do it. :slight_smile: The only time very fast fighters can kill eachother is when tractor beams get involved, but since fighters can’t mount tractor beams that means if neither fleet brings them then fighters can’t kill eachother, and I can’t think of any actiony science fiction setting where that is the case so surely it isn’t intended.

People, don’t forget that a fighter needs to be good for something. I’m not saying it isn’t overpowered (clearly the challenges have shown that it is), but it needs its place. People are suggesting that both Frigate and Cruiser have anti-fighter weapons that basically make fighters lose against both ships – where does that leave the fighters in terms of strategy?

So far, I’ve noticed a rock-paper-scissors pattern happening:
Frigates > Fighters
Cruisers > Frigates
Fighters > Cruisers

A cruiser shouldn’t be able to hit fighters (at least not easily), but fighters shouldn’t be able to take out everybody either (it should take a good, long pounding to take down something as large as a cruiser). Frigates should be able to fill the gap by being able to hit the fighters without taking much damage from them.

Ha I know what missile your talking about. But to be honest I think some kind of “flak” cannon would do better. Something that has no shield penetration and very little armor penetration, but enough to get though the “fast” fighters. Now if the fighter put on a bit of armor they could get though the flak, but that make them slower for regular anti-fighter weapons.

However, I think a better makeshift method would be some kind of automated “slow” gas. A field that would come on sort of like how the cloak would, except it would cause everything in, lets say 300, drop 20% or more in speed for a time. It would solve the fast freighter issue too and it could be balanced easier than any kind of projectile weapon type or missile type.

As a side note, I think this game needs more effect type damages though. But then I like complex games and you don’t want to make something this fun to complex:P

Not so, though you’d think that’d be the case. This is what we’ve got and why:

Fighters > Frigates (Frigates die like popcorn - on smaller challenges where there are only a few max squadrons, frigates can be purpose built to kill fighters, but not so on the huge ones since fighters stack more densely than frigates)
Cruisers > Fighters (Cruisers have heavier shields and auto-repair systems to keep them functioning almost indefinitely while dedicated anti-fighter cruisers whittle down the fighters)
Frigates > Cruisers (Usually - Frigate swarms have some trouble against a phalanx of Cruiser beams, but pretty much any other Cruisers get mangled by a good Frigate swarm)

It’s slightly counter-intuitive… but it’s all about the critical hit code and lack of actual dogfighting effectiveness. Since fighters shoot so rapidly they’ll get enough crits to reasonably speedily overcome any armor that’s not being repaired, and since fighters can basically only be killed by tons of tractors, the above triangle is what we’ve got.

On the one hand, fast fighters are overpowered… I guess due to crits and that should be changed (maybe make fighter lasers not do crits to frigates and caps?)

On the other hand, slower fighters are totally unplayable. They die instantly. Yes… fast interceptors should be killing slower bombers, there’s no question of that. It just happens way too fast right now. And there’s no place for a medium fast heavily armored/armed heavy fighter either. You can’t have everything I guess… but I suppose what I am saying is that fighter speeds vary too much and speed seems to give too much of an advantage. It definitely should give one, just maybe not so much.

EDIT: BTW, another way to handle that might be to make the thrust of all fighter engines a bit higher but the stacking penalty for fighter engines MUCH higher. This would make the fastest fighters a bit slower while the slowest ones would be faster.

IMHO fighters are overpowered and frigates are undertanked. Why use frigates if they instapop. Its just better to build cheap cruiser analog.

This is exactly what I’m experimenting with right now, as it happens

This is the second time this has happened. I need to just shut it and let you do your magic. :smiley:

You’re right, this is basically what I saw last night after trying my damnest to get over 11,000 in Return to Andromeda. I was trying to use fighters against cruisers (worked like a bloody charm), frigates against fighters (frigates were torn to shreds despite heavy armor and fast guns), and other frigates and cruisers against frigates and cruisers (not bad, but even the fast weapons were missing frigates).

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

  • Only one or two fighter configurations are even usable. The rockets and target painters are so heavy that, even with the most powerful engines, I was getting speeds < 1.0, making them dogfood. In the end, only laser weapons were useful and only with an otherwise fast ship.
  • Fighters have far too few options. There are only four weapons and they seem to only be good for close-in laser battles. The rockets are powerful, but their minimum distance means they need to shoot from outside the enemies shield, where they harmless are deflected or absorbed. They also don’t tend to last long, and with no way to dock on a cruiser and refuel, they are quickly relegated to distracting the enemy.
  • Fighters are terribly strapped for power. Strap on a laser cannon and you’ll have to fill the rest of the ship with power generators, leaving you with a speed slow enough to be suicide. Maybe their base power should be higher or their weapons and engines have lower power requirements, at least for the basic ones.
  • Frigates get torn apart by everything. Cruisers take them out handily and fighters rip through them like butter (even with both high armor and shields). It’s also very hard to make a decently-fast frigate, so that it doesn’t get mauled by cruisers. There seems to be a max speed of 2.27 with all the engines you can throw at it, and tack on a single weapon and that quickly drops to low 1s, which is well within tracking speed for many cruiser weapons.
  • Frigates are missing a few basic things that cruisers get, like cloak, weapon tracking systems, and a few other goodies. Being the middle-ground between big and small, it seems like frigates should be good at everything, masters of nothing, but without the options, this doesn’t happen. Instead, they seem to be decent at some things, terrible at everything else.
  • I couldn’t, for the life of me, get a frigate to break through cruiser shields. Even with the highest shield penetration lasers, they just reflected off of the cruiser shields, making the frigates entirely unusable against carriers.
  • Cruisers have little defense against fighters. I found the cruiser defense lasers helped, but not enough to keep a cruiser from quickly being overrun. I was seeing hit percentages of less than 50% with the cruiser defense lasers, which seems terrible for something with such fast tracking. Tractor beams were nearly useless because they didn’t fire often enough and often didn’t slow the fighters down much (unless two or three stacked, but then they were killing fighters much too slowly). The only way to protect against fighters was to have sufficient shields, armor, and repair, which left the cruiser unable to do much else.

Do you mean rockets or torpedoes? The rockets aren’t at all bad. You can put 2 of them on the Rebel Atlantis bomber with 3 level-1 engines and get a speed of 3.30. If anything, they probably should be heavier…

It would be nice to see some more variety in fighter roles. I think making torpedoes a little more viable would be a good step - as it is, torpedo bombers just die too fast to be particularly useful. As part of a huge fighter swarm they can work, but if you’re only deploying a few fighter squads it’s really not worth it.

Also, unless Cliff added an ammo system while I wasn’t watching, your rocket bombers won’t run out of rockets. They don’t fire in a synchronized wave after the first pass, which might make it harder to notice them firing.

A laser weapon will require you to add one generator, but that seems fine to me. On 4-slot fighters you can still get a very high speed with that. Are you trying to fit 2 lasers on one fighter?

Yes. I’m having a hard time finding anything more than a very niche role for frigates. They’re generally terrible against fighters, and only useful against cruisers in very limited roles like second-line plasma or missile fire support. I’ve heard of frigate swarms working well against cruisers, but as part of a balanced fleet I’m not sure how to use them effectively.

Personally, I’d like to see frigates as the premier defensive counter to most fighter types. It would give them a really solid place in most fleets. It’d be nice to see some other options for them, too, speaking of which:

More utility modules for frigates would be fun. A dedicated point-defense frigate with a PD scanner would be cool, for example. And if we can get some more control over how the camo module works, a short-range frigate that activates the cloak for the initial charge into range might work well.

Plasma works well. Torpedoes will do the trick if you can saturate enemy PD sufficiently. The ion cannon has good shield penetration too, but it’s short range which tends to result in a quick death.

I have a generalist cruiser design with one defense laser, one tractor beam, and 2 each of the cruiser laser and cruiser pulse laser. The pulse lasers track quickly enough that they’re actually semi-useful against fast fighters, and the regular lasers will do a good job against them when they’re caught by the tractor. With some armor and a repair system, they can easily defeat a fighter squad (albeit rather slowly, and more than one squad at once can be a problem). They do very well as a front line against frigates and cruisers, too.

I can’t remember right now, as I’m at work and can’t look it up, but I think it was the rockets. In my case, I haven’t unlocked the other races, so I’m stuck with just the Imperial ships. With only 4 slots max, I had difficulty using two weapons and still being fast enough to avoid certain death. Maybe I didn’t find the right combination, but I only found 3 or 4 combos that had a speed over 2.5.

I thought there was ammo, based on the stats for the weapon. I never checked to see if it was actually enforced, since my fighters died too quickly.

Again, I was only using Imperial ships, but a laser cannon required a lot more than a single level 1 generator. I think it required a level 3 and didn’t leave much power for the engines. This could just be a problem with the Imperial ships, because I’ve heard about overpowered fighters, but the only examples were using hulls from other races.

And yes, I was originally planning to use two laser weapons, since the hull I had chosen had 2 hardpoints and 2 standard modules. Unfortunately, due to power and weight, I could never get two weapons in those hardpoints and still have enough power or enough speed.

All this speculation on my part is kind of a mess. When I get a chance (hopefully tonight) I’ll compile a list of designs for the Imperial fighters to demonstrate what I was seeing. I’ll also try unlocking the rest of the races to see if that’s what makes the difference for others.

Yeah, the Rebel fighters are the best. Still, you can build a 2.75-speed Federation standard laser fighter using the Leopard hull, a level 3 generator, and 2 level 2 engines, which is pretty good.

Incidentally, the first race you start with is the Federation. The Empire is the last one you unlock. :-p

I was playing one of the player challenges last night and I was amazed how it took me about 50% more federation fighters built exactly like you said to take on the rebel fighters (that I assume were built with two engines to get max speed). between 2.75 and 3.00 speed… everything changes. At that speed, fighters are very powerful and virtually impossible to hit.

If fighters are slowed down, or tracking speeds of weapons increased, then fighters are going to become nearly useless. To balance this fighters need either stronger weapons, more armor, or more slots. I think this would be a good idea, as it would increase lethality and quicken the pace of the action.

I also like the idea of frigates being a viable counter to fighters. Two things done together could make this happen: up the tracking speed of all frigate weapons and make it harder (or impossible?) to hit frigates inside of their shield range.

When I think of dogfights, I think short, bloody and exciting. Speed and maneuverability should be the first order deciding factors, with firepower close behind. That’s not the case in GSB currently; Fighters do almost nothing to one another if they are both fast enough.Think of a dogfight between a very fast fighter, and one that is very, very fast. The faster one will turn tighter, allowing it to stay inside the turn of the slower fighter and lead it with missiles or guns (let’s avoid the “lasers shouldn’t have travel time” argument, because we all know what a can of worms that can be). The faster fighter isn’t relying on the tracking speed of its weapons to score a hit, it’s maneuvering into an advantageous firing position. My suggestion, then, is to let speed of the weapons platform affect tracking speed, or even replace it when ship speed >> tracking speed. This would make fighters much more dangerous to other fighters, and depending on how the numbers were crunched, might give frigates a chance to hit a fighter or two as well.