This thread is a split from the “New Balance Thread”, in an attempt to prevent us from hijacking the original thread, and is a response to this message:
Only total shield power is halved for tribe. They still get the full resistance of the shield in question. Further, the tribe don’t have to buy a dedicated item to take advantage of their primary hull bonus. It just happens automagically every time they buy something. This lets them mount more weapons or defensive structures that they didn’t need, or field MORE ships. This means they have higher DPS, or more ships(which means higher overall DPS), which means other races shields and armor drop that much quicker(assuming both sides are properly equipped to deal with each other). To illustrate this, I made a Phalanx of 20 Imperial cruisers stacked 10x2. The cruisers had:
Cruiser Beamx3
Cruiser Laserx3
Fast Missilex1
Reflective Shieldx1
Multiphasic Shieldx3
Lightweight Enginex2
Crew Module 2x1
Power Generator 3x2
TOTAL COST: 51620
I then made the exact same cruiser on a tribe hull. The cost came out EXACTLY the same. (I can post the two fleets if anybody is interested.)
I lined up the tribe cruisers in the same 10x2 phalanx. Both sides were set to cooporative, vulture, and had engagement ranges set to allow all weapons to fire. (Orders were identical on both sides.) Although the tribe were the first to lose shields, they won with 55% of the fleet remaining, and most of them still sporting full shields. 55% win using a loadout that played to the strengths of the Empire.
Or, lets just have the tribe plunk down as many fast missile turrets as the hull can hold, a single engine, and the same types and number of armor and shields as the enemy ship. The tribe ships are similar speed, their shields reflect the same weapons as the enemy. What they don’t reflect takes them down faster, but when the shield drops the hull is still there. And the tribe will field MORE weapons, because they didn’t have to buy other crap to get their bonus. Any shields or armor they actually DO buy help them defensively TWICE.
I don’t thing anybody is arguing that the tribe are OP, but I think they’re way more OP than people realize.
You could introduce that mechanic so that ROF degrades exponentially with damage so that the Tribe’s return fire diminishes much faster than other factions. Though that makes laser fighters a little OP. :-\
Um, if letting a fed ship with with 1 extra amour is a pointless argument, then so is the one above.
You can write the exact same thing, add the extra armour, switch fed and tribe, and then make a case for fed being op, or tribe being underpowered.
If armour is only a hp buffer, thats kind of useless, considering the hp of armour is 0…
My example was better. I purposely used 3 weapons that were shield droppers, 3 weapons that were armor droppers, and a 7th weapon that was good all around and added some DPS. You can swap in and out shields and armor to your hearts content and the tribe will still win.
Grand, they might do. Its against empire. Mount up some armour and a weapon on a ship. Build as many as you can. Alliance vs Tribe. Alliance wins! OP. OP. OP. 1 time doesnt make it so. 1 setup doesnt make it so.
I do know that the tribe are easier to use, just to set up a decent fleet. But like in something like street fighter, a character might kick ass against noob vs noob, but at the higher/higest levels, it mightnt.
Also remember that a lot of these comparison arguments rely on reflective shields, as well as the fact that tribe dont need to buy shields… The two dont mix.
If you dont buy shields (exclude armour for the moment) all damage starts onto modules, possibly disabling them and redcuing abilites. If they do but shields, they have to spend the same crap as other races, without neccesairly getting their moneys worth.
With shields, i think tribe do better. But ive always found armour to be more useful. I few repair mods and lots of armour, and 0.06 speed ships can last against 80 ships with 8 cruiser missiles each, to a point where its in close weapons range. A few of those, a fleet behind… Tribe can never do that.
Then you don’t know how armour works. Armour has Damage Absorbable that is the same than armour hitpoints, and used to calculate the average dividing by all used modules.
And we can throw at a imperial ship (or any for the matter) ships only armed with beams and say its op, and this is not related with this in any way.
You know the problem? If you get your cruisers with enough armour to stop cruiser laser, Tribe ships will not be using armour and will be 25% cheaper and still have 33% or more extra hitpoints than you (and that supposing that you are using fed ships) not to say faster and still have the same firepower ship per ship.
Now consider this: more ships, more weapons, double overhall hitpoints than non tribe fleet => win
oh and by the way,
the total hitpoints that the tribe gets with shields is barely lower than other races. Why?
"Reflective Shield"
hitpoints = 110
shieldpoints = 200
total = 110+200=310
tribe total= 110*2 + 200/2=320
Oh wait, this one actually gives more hitpoints… xD
"Multiphasic Shields"
hitpoints = 115
shieldpoints = 275
total = 115+275=390
tribe total= 115*2 + 275/2=367
and this is the worse ratio the tribe will get with a shield
Yes they only going to use reflective and yes are not shield hitpoints (that have a good chance to be burned first before hull) but they still don’t give any real disadvantage when they are supposed to.
The reason why the Empire is bad and the Tribe is good can be boiled down very simply: with the numbers the way that they are in GSB, shields are all about resistance. At least once you get past the smallest skirmishes.
Unless the weapons armour penetration is higher than the average damage absorbable, which in this case it is. So it does nothing. So its useless.
As for the other part, yes i agree about the shield offering close to the same amount of protection. A simple fix is to lower the hitpoints of shield modules, as i have just now suggested in the suggestion forums.
Fine… I’ll bite… I created 3 more fleets… One Fed, one Reb, and one alliance. I made each tailor to their own strengths then built the same cruiser for Tribe. Here’s the builds:
Federation Buffalo Hull
Beam Laserx3
Cruiser Laserx3
Fast Missilex1
Power Gen 3x2
Super Charged Enginex3
Multiphasic Shieldx1
Shield Gen 2x1
Powered Armorx3
Crew Modulex1 (Forgot to write down which I used… The one that satisfied the crew requirements cheapest.)
Reb Valhalla Cruiser
Beam Laserx2
Cruiser Laserx2
Cruiser Plasmax3
Power Gen 3x2
Crew Modulex2
Multiphasic Shieldx1
Shield Gen 2x2
Supercharged Enginex3
Alliance Python Cruiser
Cruiser Laserx3
Beam Laserx3
Fast Missilex3
Powered Armorx4
Power Gen 2x1
Basic Power Genx1
Crew Module 2x1
Lightweight Enginex2
Results:
Tribe vs Fed: Tribe 80% win
Tribe vs Reb: Tribe 25% win
Tribe vs Alliance: Tribe 50% win (Note: Tribe has no hull that can field nine weapons, so I used a hull that had 7. Tribe STILL won, even with lower DPS, and not just by a little!)
Any more arguments? =D Seriously, post a build for any race that you believe will beat the same build on Tribe. It can’t be done. If it can, prove it. Post the challenge with 20 of your frigates, and limit cost to whatever it cost you to make them. Max out pilots, make the fields size about 3000. I guaren-dang-tee the Tribe will whoop whatever you put up.
ROF is already linked to the weapon’s remaining HP (notice how infrequently a heavily damaged ship fires.) I don’t think making it exponential would balance Tribe.
To be frank, the means to balance Tribe seems quite trivial to me. Take a bite out of their bonus. Instead of:
+100% HP, -50% shield, -50% armour
Which has been demonstrated admirably to be too strong
that’s exactly what i am thinking. cliffski overdid it a bit with the tribe’s boni/penalties. maybe 50% bonus and 25% penalty would also work.
or instead of the same modifications on every tribe ship, more diversity, like the other races have. a little power/speed bonus and so on…
btw, if my observation is correct, one great disadvantage of the tribe is that, if you only use repair modules and no shields/little armor, chances are your repair modules get knocked out early, beeing of no use at all. the difference i see here is, shields can guarentee a certain amount of absorbed shots, the repair systems cannot.
Well, the repair modules have a bit more HP than most modules, so as long as you have a few of them they shouldn’t get disabled too long before the ship dies.
But the real issue, is that the repair modules are pretty unnecessary, with so much HP coming from the +100% bonus. You don’t really need to consider defense for Tribe cruisers, besides a minimal shield to slow down fighter swarms, since you get so much hp from the essentials like weapons and engines.
Easiest challange ive ever had. Took me roughly 20 seconds to make this ship:
Alliance hull, i used the long one. 1 cruiser rocket at front. 1 micro crew module, 1 cheapest engine, 2 ultraheavy armours.
Tribe, used the smallest ship, utopia i believe. Exact same.
Alliance won 95%, with the statistics showing only 1 alliance ship took damage.
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Your other ships didnt actually play to the strengths of each race. Like using too many modules can destroy the usefullness of armour. Taking a weapon away can mean 1 level 3 powerplant, allowing more armour per modules again. And so on. Its armour that i consider to be the tribes biggest weakness.
Id like to try, make a tribe fleet with whatever weapons you want, put the weapon restrictions on me. See if i can beat it with the race of my choice.
You gotta admit, your counter example wasn’t much like anything you’d see in a real game. Try that again with a cruiser beam laser… Any sane fleet will contain at least some of those, unless they want to get thrashed by armour tanks.
Try to disprove his point again, but this time using something like the load out you’d use in a real challenge.
His first example was stacked towards Empire’s strength. Those ships had four shields each - Empire is the shield race. But as demonstrated by someone above, the shield penalty barely effects Tribe, since it’s already offset by the hp boost on the shield module itself.
The armour penalty certainly hits Tribe a lot harder. But I think it’s been quite reasonably demonstrated over the last few months that there’s very little point in armour beyond having enough to stop fighters, since armour comes down very fast if there’s even a sprinkling of armour piercing weapons in the opponent’s fleet.
Well Cracker has a point with close range pop shields/pop armor ships. Those close range resist busting ships really shred everything so no amount of armor or shield will prove superior to uber HP. Those types of loadouts just nerf Alliance and Empire fleets who really don’t seem to be that great at close range tons of DPS situations. Try some longer range fleets.
Also, I think it would be better if it was about 75% as the difference in HP between my tribe/not tribe ships are about 33%-25% and give them a light bonus for not having armor resists.
Done alliance long ships vs tribe utopia.
2CL, 1 CBL, 1 shield II, 1 engine I, 1 Crewbay, 1 generator II, 7 ultra heavy armours. Weapons were placed as close to ships as possible. Both fleet were set up in a straight line, facing each other. Set to coperate, range as close to 350 as i could make it.
ALliance wins! worst outcome ive had is 65% to 5%, best is 75% to 5%. Big problem seems to be alliance line splits out, not all the ships get into range at the same time. It would help them more if this did happen. A well. A wins a win.
my brain is starting to hurt, and I’m a old wargamer.
Any chance we could create a seperate forum for Game mechanic topics as this is starting to spoil my Gratuitous Explosive gameplay enjoyment.
I think that we’re spoilt here, think of how many games out there that were obviously broken and that took months, if not years to fix. Most of the inbalances in this game (at all the patch levels) have been relitively minor and have no way stopped our enjoyment of the game as a whole.
In fact, so much work is going on that it almost feels like a full release but polishing beta.
I see Cliffski as the games master, constantly creating imperfect balances to keep the game players interested in the game they play, cos lets face it, if this game were perfectly balanced, whould you play it as much ? :o)
