Tribe OP Thread

You’d use a speed 0.04 cruiser with short ranged weapons in a real challenge? And only 3 weapons modules…? pfffff. That’s not a battle, it’s a joke. :wink:

Anyway… Even sticking with your crazy slow ship and tiny weapons loadout… All I have to do is take off the armour from the Tribe design, and they win. Don’t need to add any extra modules… Just take off the armour… It makes the battle into 27 Alliance cruisers vs 73 Tribe cruiser, on Caspian… Your long-nose Tribe cruisers still get the first shot, and the fleets still crawl together thanks to the tiny speeds you gave them… But it’s 111000 hitpoints versus 20250+armour. Massive victory to Tribe results, of course.

You’ve proved your point that Nuke was stretching to say Tribe hulls were better for any loadout… But so far you’ve only proved it with ship designs that are useless. Tribe are so clearly imbalanced, surely that’s not still up for debate?

Ive already said i agree tribe need to be rebalanced. As for my slow cruisers, ive used 0.08 speed cruisers with 4 weapons each to beat your missile spam challange, dog.
And these ships are necissarily useless, they just arent a ship you make a whole fleet out of.

And obviously you cant keep making the same argument with the tribe, where you use a different setup to win, to prove they are overpowered. Then i can change my set up, and win. And unless you can create a perfect tribe fleet, this argument goes back and forth, proving nothing.

Also, make a similar armour design with Empire. Won one of the higest rated tribe challanges with a fleet of highly armoured, repaing single missile weapons. Id do more, but its a bit slow.

The simple way to test if the tribe is over powered is to edit every hull and halve their bonuses and penalties. Obviously I suggest that you back up their hulls first. Why is this discussion in progress without a test of halving their bonus and penalties? Really guys, I might be new but this is the easiest way to check it out.

In my opinion the Tribe isn’t overpowered. The crew and power requirements of the repair modules can be a rather steep compensation for both frigates and cruisers.

Doing a test with half bonus wouldn’t end this discussion thread, I assure you. People will argue about anything on the internet, no matter how reasoned out and evidenced something might be :smiley: Anyway, it just seems so ridiculously obvious that the Tribe is OP… It seems like the only ship builds that aren’t improved by putting it on a Tribe hull, are massively armoured ones, as Crakker has demonstrated. Nuke showed that even shield heavy builds aren’t actually any better as Imperial (shield bonus) than Tribe (shield penalty,) at least when under cooperative fire.

Whether the Tribe repair modules are overpowered or not is a seperate problem. I think you’re right, they’re not that great (repair module’s best use normally is to maintain heavy armour, but that’s the one thing Tribe can’t do.) However, you’re not obliged to mount repair modules. Start making Tribe fleets without repair modules (just leave the slots empty) and you’ll see…

The deadliest Tribe fleets tend take only the bare minimum of defensive modules, since the hull bonus makes offensive modules strong defensively anyway. One light shield to take the bite out of fighters… And cap off the middle and each end of your line with an armoured cruiser to draw off laser fighters. That’s all the defense you need, the rest of your points can go entirely to weapons and engines - which give you massive HP as well as being the means by which you deal damage… Result is fleets that have double hp, and deal massive dps due to getting their defense (hp) for free.

Shhhh, dogthinker. You are giving all my strategies away…

Id like to point out againt that it isnt quite a clear cut as nuke pointed out. Bigger shields means more time rechargin=more shields then you seem to get.
I like the idea of when a shield goes down, it takes time to come back up. Say you have, just to have a number, 30 seconds. Next time its down, 45… etc. The half strength shields would quickly get left behind, assuming the cruiser behind can survive for a while, which is a design thing.

Also, empire really need a boost. And maybe the feds as well, though i havent really gotten into them yet.

Empire suffers a lot from AI and movement mechanics. As the shield race, they’re at the mercy of recharge rates, and to make use of that they need to be slippery.

What’s frustrating about that, is that many things are already in place for them to do so. The racial bonus provides a greater buffer for them to get away. Two of their four cruiser hulls have speed increases. Shields are a relatively lightweight system compared to armor. The empire racial beam weapon has a staggering 860 range.

With benefits like that, there’s absolutely no sane reason for some of their ships to be regularly blundering within 300 meters of generic .2 speed cruiser laser fleet #3561… ever. That’s just a losing battle for them, especially when you consider that some of their frigates are larger than rebel cruisers - the race just doesn’t do compacted fire very well.

I’ve been hacking at them for a while… I just can’t do anything uniquely workable with them currently besides gigantic shield titans.

The Tribe is actually pretty goofy if you think about it. IMO this is due to having to use the bonuses as the only way to differentiate them (since they can use all “stock” modules.

Think about it, the Tribe can make everything tougher, but get a negative on armor? Huh, armor is the same stuff they use to make the hull (and every thing on it) stronger. Getting a negative armor bonus is mutually exclusive with getting an integrity bonus, IMO, the two go together at some level. That of course would make them even more OP. I can see them not liking shields for some reason, but again, I’m not sure why as they use shields, they are just slightly less effective. That’s an artifact of everyone getting to use the same modules, frankly.

I’m not wed to realism in a game like GSB, but having some consistent benchmark IS important I think. In most SF stuff, the reason you try to break as few laws of physics as possible is that reality gives you a starting point to balance things.

IMO, one major fix would be to customize most all the modules to be restricted to specific races only.

Then, a Tribe ship might take shields, but they’d be TRIBE shields, and would be less effective period, even with the HP bonus. The rationale might be that Tribe hulls are “actively strengthened” by power trickling through the composite (yada, yada, yada). This is similar to “powered armor” used on other ships, but makes shields GROSSLY less effective due to interference, so the Tribe had to make a new shield tech to work at all—and unlike everything else they make, it must sit well outside the hull and is VERY fragile. There you have it, Tribe shields that eliminate the HP bonus because they have like 5 HP. This would only work if the other shields were not available to the Tribe.

We need a “restrict = race1,race2,race3” paradigm added.

Not necessarily. Perhaps a particular composite is perfect for making the basic hull - it’s light, cheap, easy to make airtight, and can withstand micrometeor impacts and block most of the deep-space radiation that would turn its crew’s genetics into tapioca. But it turns out that it warps under the impact of a 30-mph auto accident. And missiles/focused energy beams? No way.

So in addition to our lovely composite hull, we weld on a skin of heavier metal armor - not necessary for the ship to function, mind you. Just necessary for it to survive for a few seconds in the spectacularly violent battles we plan to sen it into (don’t tell the crew until at least 10 minutes after launch).

Now, the Tribe. Their hull composite is denser and easier to repair, making everything extremely tough. Except their armor, because no decent metal sheathing will bond to this tougher composite. Hey, you win some, you lose some. At some point, a Tribe commander might even say “Quit putting that tinfoil crap on my ship. Build me another crew bay instead - at least the walls in there can take a bullet or two.”

So it’s not as inextricably linked as one might think. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.

yurch: yep. It would be awesome if the Empire bonuses applied to recharge rate, and if the AI were improved a bit so you could specify min distance.

Actually… I think the logic with the Tribe, is just that their ships are very bulky. Not well armoured… Just… Big. Floating shanty towns.

So your weapons have no trouble destroying parts of the ship… But there’s a lot of useless bits of ship to shoot at, that you have to work through before you get to the juicy bits.

This is quite unlike armour, which in GSB appears to consist of some sort of super dense or reflective materials - that are literally able to deflect incoming fire. Tribe ships don’t deflect fire… They absorb it… That fractured shell casing will make a nice living room for someone, if the ship survives the battle.

Tough composite IS armor.

In fact it’s superior to metal NOW and used on tanks. Vs energy weapons it’s also superior. By definition in GSB, toughness (hit points) is ability to absorb the damage done by in game weapons. Armor is simply material put on the outside that absorbs damage. The two are identical.

Simple though experiment proof that this is true. Take a Tribe frigate. Put it inside a Tribe Cruiser that is nothing but a shell. The cruiser is armor. However many hitpoints it has will get used up (except for “critical” hits that penetrate an existing hole) before the frigate inside takes any damage. Hitpoints on the outside of the ship = armor.

Armor is a dedicated protection system. The HP just represents how much functionality is left in the ship as well as how much longer the structure of the hull will stay intact to keep the ship from completely disintegrating.

Its like how IRL battleships have armor belts around their waterline to take torpedo hits(ne olde torpedos). If that armor gets penetrated then the ship doesn’t necessarily sink because it has other systems to keep it combat effective, but none of those systems are designed to take direct hits and still keep on working. Otherwise they start degrading at their jobs until the whole thing sinks/explodes/rolls over.

There is only so much redundancy, etc that will protect a target from, say, nuclear missiles detonating on the hull.

A few added hitpoints is an indication of such redundant systems, etc that you suggest—hardening, in modern terms.

DOUBLING the hull integrity is not the above, it’s making it physically more resistant to being torn apart given what the ships are being hit with. It’s a quantitative thing. I think your argument holds for some X% improvement, but not a 100% improvement. Makes no sense, whatsoever.

The Tribe make EVERYTHING tougher… except armor, that they don’t care about making tougher?

IMHO, it’s an artifact of not having an easy way to force a new race to use new modules.

Not exactly. Resisting or reflecting an attack (armor) is not the same as absorbing that same attack (extra hit points). Do we build the car with a tough frame so that it will shrug off the collision, or do we build it with crumple zones so that it will absorb the impact without harming the people inside?

The Tribe’s trick is that while they’re being destroyed it takes longer for them to explode, and their modules work longer. If you think they don’t care about armor, you’re right. So long as their modules keep functioning and their repair crews are alive their ships will stay in the battle. The hidden cost here is efficiency: damaged modules either slow their function or occupy the repair crews. The loss of efficiency isn’t made up for by the double hitpoints because all modules can be damaged faster than the ship can be repaired (unless its attackers are destroyed).

So yes, Tribal ships are tougher. But with the inability to take damage without losing efficiency, and poor shielding, they have to be.

And really, if they’ve got double hitpoints to their modules (and therefore a longer life-span on them) why should they care about preventing the damage? Sure they might lose efficiency, but their repair modules and extra hitpoints help them stay in the game longer than average.

Does the survival of the mediocrity gall you so much? ('Cuz really, the Tribe is a mediocre group that does mediocrity really well. xD )

I have more trouble playing against well designed Rebel fleets than I do Tribal fleets.

then you haven’t played against well designed tribe fleets

Crumple zones vs atomic weapons in effect means spaced armor.

Like I said, I agree with you for small % improvements, but when you DOUBLE hitpoints vs weapons that literally vaporize volumes of ship there is only so much hardening, redundancy, and “crumple zones” can do for you.

Note that the Tribe gets this 100% improvement with ZERO increase in cost or weight. This implies that we’re not talking redundancy (which would cost more in weight/money), but a better materials technology (since it applies to everything they make). So somehow they make a hanger bay for ships that can take twice the damage, but they cannot make a hull of the same material?

Functionally in GSB there is no difference anyway. As I said, put a frigate inside an empty shell that is cruiser sized, and the non-armored cruiser hull is… armor.

It would be easy to balance them a little if they were disallowed the stock modules, and given their own that reflect an increased cost, weight, or both for a given system. The races are simply too homogeneous.

Do damaged weapon modules really fire slower?

Or they mass produce parts better and use the savings in redundancy features.

Note also that armor costs money, weight, and sometimes even power (which costs more money and weight). Tribe HPs are free.

In addition, armor is broken in that it gets ablated away. Armor, IMO, should be expensive and heavy, and should quite simply not go away with damage. Perhaps when armor is “destroyed” it simply increases the chances of a critical, but otherwise nothing that cannot penetrate gets through regardless ('cept criticals).

It’s what myself and others have said in general, sharing nearly all modules is a broad brush to paint with, and results in everything being homogeneous. When one race then gets a massive “hull bonus” as a quick and dirty way to differentiate it from the others it breaks things.

It;s not enough to “restrict =” modules for new races, the OLD races need to be forced to have more limited choices.

Do ALL modules need to be race-specific? No.

Crew, many engines, power, and even some shields and common weapons (missiles, lasers, etc) can be universal. Many other should be restricted to a few races, others to just one race. The tribe IMO needs to have their own shields that are very weak, and the rationale can be that their other technology for integral hull/armor is incompatible with normal shields. Ditto armor. Their weapons could all be heavier since they are twice as strong, etc. Tribe ships should, IMO, be hard to take down, but also VERY expensive.