Feed Back on Current State of the 1.14

So I’ve been playing since the day the beta come out, and great progress has been made. I’m really enjoying the game so far, and has a surprising amount of depth. I’m just going to list some things that I think could use some work still. If it sounds like a rant it is meant to be constructive criticism :).

Critical Strike:

This is 2% right now, and I think it was increased from 1% at one point when stacking armor with infinite repair was possible. I currently don’t like how this works. It mainly benefits fighter with laser canons because a squad of 16 with a fire interval of 0.3 seconds = 53.33 shots per second on a target. using .98^53.33=66.0% chance that there is no critical strike in 1 second. That means ever second these fighters will have a 34% chance to get at least one critical strike on an armored target. Ok, it’s not that simple, lots of these shot could be hitting shields depending on the target size. But still, it’s a ridiculous rate of fire for a fix percent chance to penetrate armor.

This might so fighters can still hurt cruisers, but really sucks for making frigates survive, or armored fighters. If you don’t put shields on a frigate their armor goes down so fast it only buys them seconds. Armored fighters just get nailed by 10-20+ armor penetration weapons now anyways. I think that maybe this crit chance needs to be removed (or greatly reduced) against frigates and fighters. Cruisers are the only ship that can get their armor value over any weapon in the game (although it is much harder than it was with the 98% effectiveness added in). Cruisers are also the only ship that can repair this critical damage. Often a cruisers only need 8.4 armor and a repair module to last a long time against fighters. Frigates can have 16+ armor, and get smoked.

Armor

I know I just went on a bit of a rant about about crit and armor, but this is about armor ignoring how crit works. It seem right a bit weak. I’ll quote something I said in another thread about it:

Fighter laser cannons (Rebel Fighters)

I feel like this, crit chance, and armor are all tied together now. They all seem to be contributing to eachother. I’m not going to go over everything about this weapon, other than it just makes fighters annoying. You either have to build your fleet around surviving them, or risk 4-6 squads of these guys ripping through you. It also doesn’t help that Rebels can build a fighter with a laser cannon and an engine.

Chaos Nebula and -25% speed

Why oh why did you make -25% speed on a large map? It makes me cry. Because everything is so much slower slow, stacking engines is not very effective. The best ships use all their space for weapons and defense. Erlandr made a fleet of very slow cruisers and fighter for our GT tournament. I tried many combinations of fast ships to take them on, none worked. So I just went for equally slow ships and beat him. The problem was it took about 5 mins at x4 speed for cruisers to meet :(.

Conclusion

I feel like these issues need to be resolved in some way. Fix one or two and the others may go away. Lots of other things have improved, so I’m sure these won’t last too much longer. Keep up the good work Cliffski!

The cheap fighter swarms took two severe nerfs between the anti-fighter missile buff and the huge HP nerf on fighter equipment. The rebel fighters are still a little crazy, cuz the rebels have absurdly awesome chassis.

The ability of fighter swarms to quickly kill armored frigates is an artifact of stacking huge numbers of fighters. If you nerf crit chances so frigates can live through uber swarms then more reasonable numbers of fighters kinda suck.

The improvement in frigate armor HP makes it much easier to get both reasonable armor levels and shielding on a frigate, which helps a lot.

Small frigates (like the Loki) are extremely resistant to laser strafing runs, which is helpful.

I agree that armor is very expensive for it’s hitpoints-level. The problem seems to be that armor is balanced around uber-armor tanking, which is already a questionable strategy between beam-lasers and critical hit chances. In fact I’ve posted a mod which makes armor generally cheaper, although not Ultra-heavy armor. TBH though I think the armor formula either needs adjustment (so that armor has more HP but gives less absorb-per-hp) or the whole armor system needs to be reworked. Personally I would favor a system where armor had a lot more hp and resistance was the chance that a shot would hit armor instead of hull. It does actually work sorta like that now but resistance’s damage immunity effect makes it hard to see.

However, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of armor getting hit first… if you use modules to create a damage-soak pool you might save money but your cruiser is very likely to have its weapons knocked out early. God knows it happens enough times with reactor explosions.

I agree that having a 2% critical strike rate is somewhat high.

Here is a suggestion. Tie the chances of getting a critical strike to the speed of the target. Say 0.2% / speed. This will alter the games several ways:

1. Speed is important. Putting a ton or armour on a Cruiser an a single engine will still make it strong against other cruisers with lower rates of fire, but against swarms of fighters or frigates, it will get critically hit a lot.
2. Frigates with moderate speed and armour can now last much better against fighters, and do better against slower targets.
3. There may be more incentive to maintain a more decent speed on the large cruisers.

-edit- Of course, if the speed is below a certain point, it should be capped at say a 4% critical strike chance. Otherwise, stations with no engines would always be critically hit.

-edit- Armoured fighters could take on the ultra-fast fighters since they would be fast enough to avoid being critically hit very often.

I agree with Legedi in wanting to see a bit more HP in the armor. I’m not fond of critical hits, myself, though I see their role in the current system, as I’d be even less happy with invincibility. You might consider removing armor’s damage immunity entirely: I think that ability makes sense for shields, but armor seems like it’s going to take the hit regardless. Average armor strength could instead effectively mitigate a certain proportion of the damage, based on the armor penetrating properties of the attacking weapons. If the damage is reduced so much that it drops below 1, I don’t see a problem there with making the ship immune to that form of attack; a Cruiser may very well be shrugging off a fighter’s strafing guns, but the long range plasma blasts that have pretty huge levels of both armor penetration and damage seem like they shouldn’t be absorbed harmlessly 98% of the time, even on a heavily reinforced ship.

I would add a thought here: Using average armor strength as a statistic means that the marginal utility of each piece of armor increases as you add more armor. The fifth slab of armor is more valuable than the first, even with the efficiency reduction, because it pushes the average armor over the armor piercing threshold of several more weapons. I would look at the option of making the damage deflection/reduction properties of the armor intrinsic to the armor type itself, rather than a value that is added up over the entire ship. This would help to increase the value of adding small amounts of armor to ships that won’t add up to a large average armor strength. Under the current system, this would make armor and shields less unique, but if you change the formula for how armor’s damage resistance works to make it less of a reflection and more of a partial damage resistance mechanic, they’ll become more distinct rather than less.

JamesCooper proposes the first part of this system in more depth in this thread and BlckKnght suggests a logistic function that handles the relationship between armor strength and armor penetration with some grace.

I like your suggestions Jonathan. It does seem like resistance should be some intrinsic characteristic of the armor and not some additive quantity that can be increased by stacking armor. Think of bulletproof glass – there’s some minimum amount of energy needed to break it and many projectiles don’t meet that. But something that does can break through and adding layers doesn’t change that. If you have five layers of glass and a projectile capable of breaking one layer, it doesn’t become invincible, it just requires 5 shots to break through all of the layers.

I think a similar system would balance the armor penetration problems we are having now. Stacking armor would never make a ship invulnerable, it would just take that much more of a beating (basically, adding hitpoints). You could also add minimal armor that would stop light weapons like fighter lasers, without having to slow the whole ship down. You can also play more with the cost and weight of armors with different resistances and hitpoints. As it is now, more expensive armors are usually just more space-efficient, because you can stack two lighter armors and get the same effect, only at the cost of an additional module.

An additional benefit of this is that it wouldn’t require filling nearly all of your module spots to get decent armor coverage. Even with ultraheavy armor, you have to stack it to get any useful level of armor resistance. I don’t mind making the ship heavy, slow, and expensive, but if you’re also taking up all of your module spots too, what’s the point of this tank? It’s not like World of Warcraft where the tank can hold the enemy’s attention: our enemies are smart enough to pass over the tanking cruisers and rip apart the frigates full of missile launchers. Maybe it’s just a balance issue, though; perhaps this could be fixed just by giving more armor per module, so that they don’t have to be stacked 3-4 deep to get any use out of them.