A fresh and different way to "balance" siege frigates

from Sins Forums
Being mostly a single player fan, I've been annoyed as hell about the AIs siege frigate blobs, but just the same, I found them expensive to build and preferred capships for bombing myself. As pointed out in several threads, right now it's cheaper to build a capship than 4 siege frigates, making them all but obsolete.

Here are some other approaches I haven't seen yet, that might help get past the "unstoppable in a blob" vs "obsolete" dilemma.

1) Planet bombing as an anti-matter ability.

As anti-matter is drained by phase jumps, this would nerf the jump-bomb-jump-bomb raids. Siege frigates could still do some serious damage, but they'd need time to get started, and would be less able to fly deep into enemy territory and destroy a planet before the defender could react.
In addition, anti-matter stealing/skill disabling can now be used to delay sieges.

2) A "set-up" time before firing/bombing

Not unlike the Assailants "disable your drive to fire more" ability, this would disable the siege frigate's drive once it is in position, diverting all power to the main weapon. At the moment the skill is activated, the drive is disabled for say 10 seconds and at 10th second the weapon fires. Obviously, one shot would do more damage to maintain the current dps, but it would make the frigates much more vulnerable to counter-attacks.

3) Flying bombs

Sins' siege ships are loaded to the brim with huge guns, volatile explosives and/or oversized nuclear reactors. What would happen if the hull got penetrated by a glowing ball of plasma or phase missile? I'd say AoE on death >:-)

4) Slllllooooooowwwww

You need huge weapons to damage a planet, but you don't want to spend the credits to build a capital ship? Just stick on a basic frigate drive and you have a flying gun. But wait, you also need ammo stores, armor, controls, fuel...
You get the picture, this thing will always be last to the party, just in time to mop up. And that's exactly what they're for.
Make siege ships powerful, but slow enough to be a hassle. Can't keep them with the main fleet, can't easily escape. You could combine this with #1 and give them a "faster, but drains antimatter" skill to at least get them near the frontlines before the game is over.

11,617 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
siege frigs are already pretty slow.

The AM idea isn't a bad one as long as the am regen is fast(like cap ship rate, not colony frig rate). Then you'd probly want to sit your ships out one jump away from their target for a few minutes instead of rally point the target from factory.


But siege frigs where fine in 1.02..
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I prefer that people just learned the appropriate counters (this could be better documented in the game somehow) but yeah. My vote would go to the antimatter idea as well, assuming we can't just have the old ones back (with less health, if need be).
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I like the concept of Siege frigates and think they need to be in the game, but now their cost is pretty restrictive to the point I can't see making them anymore.

The problem with Siege spam that the computer would often do is that they would often suicide against a planet or simply turn tail. The siege frigates did not go down fast enough .. even with planetary defenses .. if they come in with enough siege frigates they can take a planet (especially a non-reinforced one) down in short order .. EVEN if you had ships trying to take them out.

There needs to be a way to disrupt their shots or something to prevent a dozen or so of them from just streaking in and bombing. Have them move slower .. give them longer range, but make it take longer for them to shoot each shot?

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
I'm sure it would also help if people were able to more easily quantify the value of a planet's surface. In many cases, the cost of a siege fleet far outweighs the cost of losing a planet (and nobody should be losing more than one at a time to a relatively defenseless siege fleet), especially a lightly developed non-terran planet.