Redundancy means 1,2, or however many backups.
That costs at the very least WEIGHT. They have 2 of everything aboard? So you’ll say they make things that weight half as much but are just as strong, AND they carry a spare. Greatm, then they can make twice the armor for the same cost/weight.
Sorry, but again, I can handwave some % increase for them, but doubling is so high it is a problem, AND it begs the obvious questions like why they can’t then make twice the armor.
Well, not 2 of everything. Things can be reinforced, you can lay extra wires everywhere. You can distribute one system into several so one hit can’t take 100% of that particular system.
It fits in the same space because they don’t use as much armor. So they aren’t as good at making armor.
Also, space hippie magic.
The same space is the same space, armor is a choice. If the Feds chose no armor, they don’t get a redundant everything.
Reinforcement takes weight and cost. As does doubling wiring, etc. Besides, all warships would be hardened this way regardless.
Even hippie magic begs the question why they don’t do it for armor. Maybe they could get a -bonus on tracking value to reflect the fact they are all stoned?
Maybe they just never had the concept of armor. Armor to them was making really strong hulls. The two are mutually inclusive to them. They don’t strap armor on to their hull as an afterthought. They just build them strong to begin with. Sure, they COULD strap on several tons of hardened alloy(sp?) to their hull, but that’s silly to them. If you want lemonade, don’t use water with a lemon substitute. Use real lemons to begin with. If you’re going to en energy slinging party in space, don’t strap hard stuff to the softer stuff that makes up your ship. Make the whole ship with harder stuff, and if our harder stuff isn’t as good at making crap bounce off it like those pesky Imperial shields, maybe our scientists should get to work making reflective hulls, or improving our hull repairing modules to the point that it’s almost like fast recharge shields!
Anyway, that’s one way of looking at The Tribe… =D
Nuke…
^^^ I agree, actually. Except that the Tribe CAN add armor to the hull, and instead of being magically twice as strong like everything else they build (even coffee makers) it is HALF as strong!
I call game logic. I therefore negate your speculation.
I call prehaps the most stupid argument i have yet to see on the internet.
Noone cares about back story here. Its even how it was advertised.
Its about mechanics. I prefer the funny explanations than the “serious” ones here anyway.
Tribe hulls are twice as strong cause the hippies make so much crap, it acts as a buffer. But they cant really be bothered making armour, takes too much organasiation.
And keep shields up? Bah. Theyd rather make more hippy crap.
Anyone want a dream catcher?
hi,
because i couldn’t find it in the thread, and because i find the attempt to explain somthing with logics from reality stupid, i state my argument:
they have stronger hulls and weaker armor because cliffski designed them that way. haha, who would have thought of that…
what if i would go to the \tribe\hulls folder, open a txt. file and randomly smash the numbers on my keyboard?
i guess people would still try to explain things with logic…+
greetings
driver
Clearly the underlying point I was making was completely lost on you.
The point was that the very crude technique of using:
[bonuses]
0 = ARMOURBOOST,-0.5
1 = SHIELDBOOST,-0.5
2 = INTEGRITYBOOST,1.0
to try and differentiate a “race” in GSB while not forbidding them ANY modules available to any other race is ineffective, and results in a “broken” race. The point about the absurdity of them not making armor as magically strong as anything else was just an observation of the lack of consistency. Reality doesn’t matter much in a game like this, but consistency DOES since balance comes from consistency—or perhaps I should say that balance is easier to create when the designer keeps some consistent ideas in his head. Failure to do so(it’'s EASY to mess this up) results in unintended consequences like absurdly strong races.
[bonuses] is a very crude tool indeed, which is why several different people have suggested and agree that populating the races with “personalized” modules makes more sense. It’s a helluva lot more work for cliffski, however.
If he was interested in doing this—note that to the end-user they’d not really see any complexity increase since the number of choices per race would not really change—I bet a few of us could do some footwork and rough out the files to a consistent guideline. That’s really the tough part, making 5X every module that needs to be race-specific and then making sure the stock ships then have the new name convention. A few guys could bang it out in a couple nights for him, then he’d just need to tweak the numbers as he sees fit.
I’m not finding the tribe to be all that overpowered.
Generally, I find two types of tribe scenarios in the challenges:
The opposing fleet basically charges you and tries to get into point-blank range as quickly as possible and hammer you down up close.
The solution I use here is depth of deployment with a really heavy front rank.
Line 1: Tank cruisers. Tons of heavy armor and shields, one beam weapon, one MLRS and an EMP.
Line 2: What I call a “Line Cruiser” - mostly beam lasers, some MLRS, good armor and sheilding. A slow, well protected, high firepower unit.
Line 3: “Plasma Wreckers”. Cruisers packed to the gills with MLRS and decent speed (all my other cruisers are slow as molasses).
Line 4: Missile spam frigates. Since many Tribe players forego sheilds, these little honeys do a fantastic job.
The same tactic as above, but with fighters in escort so that when the Tribe fleet loses the escorted cruiser, the fighters get released.
To beat that, I use the above deployment and I add specialized fighter defense cruisers and frigates.
I think the keys are:
A really heavily protected front line to absorb punishment until the rest of the ranks can overwhelm the onrushing Tribe front rank.
Back lines packing a lot of firepower like frigate missiles and multi-warhead missiles. Since the Tribe fleets neglect shields mostly, these weapons (which against a different race would be less valuable) can overwhelm the onrushing Tribe.
Depth of deployment to ensure that the Tribe fleet can’t get inside the minimum range of your entire fleet.
I never use fighters if I can avoid it at all. I hate fighters.
Would love it if you guys could post up the names of the toughest Tribe challenges around so I can keep refining my tactics.
Go to beginning of thread and re-read the in game tribe vs * tests. Pretty obvious something is wrong.
That’s just one type of fleet, now fight the tribe counter to it and compare it to the other faction’s counters to it.
Is there an actual fleet size challenge you have in mind? I’d love to play against it.
Are you saying you want me to post the fleets I used as a challenge? I’ve already deleted the challenges, but I could recreate them…
Challenges are static. They do not change based on your fleet. If you see a rocket fighter-heavy challenge and beat it by not using any frigates, that is not an accurate commentary on the relative power of rocket fighters vs frigates, or of the race that burned it’s entire pilot count on rockets. The situation is the same for using a fleet without aircraft vs one that spent 30% of it’s credits on air defense, or armor vs an all-ion fleet, ect.
The mere ability to defeat an archetype of challenge actually has very little to do with balance.
Start with missile fleet, it beats a tribe assault fleet. Next tribe assault fleet has scramblers and fighters, then it beats missile fleet. It just goes around and around like that all day - you get nowhere.
Wins are binary. They don’t tell you the story of how that tribe scrambler fleet would probably crush similar fleets of other races, or of how much more or less performance margin a tribe fleet has against it’s intended target archetype.
Without that type of evaluation, the debate goes nowhere.
The true measure is the % chance that the Nash equilibrium mixed strategy would have for picking a tribe deployment.
From a defensive standpoint, it seems like Tribe cruisers need a single, cheapo shield generator (to mitigate opposing rocket fighters). Beyond that, while other races are balancing out their shield generators and armor, Tribe designers can load up on damage repair, and engine modules. Other races tend to have slower cruisers, because they’re loaded out with armor and shield modules.
It might be interesting to give the tribe something like a 70% hull integrity boost, no armor penalty, and a 25% shield penalty.
As it is, are the Tribe overpowered? A better word might be ‘different.’
There seem to be no shortage of Tribal challenges which can be defeated with a mid-to-long range array of weapons. At close range though, I’d have to say that the tribe are the best.
Overall, the key is to destroy Tribe ships, and to do it so quickly that they are never allowed to focus their return firepower.
I went from beating every challange easily with one of 2 predesign tribe fleets to a much more difficult time with Empire and Alliance. Rebels are easy enough, and i dont use feds.
Though it is of course not conclusive, i do think Tribe are a fair bit easier to play with. They are alot more simple to make a solid build with. This in turn influences how versatile they are.
QFT 
Econ major?
This is one of the things I love about communities like this… Somebody says something that I know nothing about, so I go off and learn about it. I now know what “Nash equilibrium” refers to, and the whole prisoner’s dilemma thing… Interesting reading… Thanks… =D