Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

The underused capital ships

possible suggustions for ideas on various ways of slightly buffing them

In responce to another post, i started writing this, and it got really long, and started to become offtopic, so i will post it here. (2 gigantic threads in less than 12 hours, man, i am on a role!)

We have to be careful when buffing the unused capital ships. i find use for the other capital ships occasionally, and it doesn’t take much from "occasionally" to "always".

nerving scramble bombers to 1.18 level is a great start, but we must also remember that the skrims, and the enforcers were rather nicely buffed as well, but for some reason, still rather unseen. this is due to phase missiles, and their amazing damage bonuses. I made a separate thread for my thoughts on phase missiles.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/383347

now, about the other caps.

colony and carriers like you said, are good. Vasari colony cap’s colonize could be a little bittybit better… maybe a pop growth bonus, or 20/40/60 on the building build speed… but the Vasari don’t need buffing.

Kol. I like the kol. Its kinda hard to kill… but it also does little more than sit there. It is only used for flack burst. GRG sucks. How much does GRG suck? Death egg does 1125 hull damage while also reducing armor value so other ships do more damage. GRG… gets reduced by shield mitigation to patheticness. Ima suggest this: reduce GRG back to its previous damage (it got a little boost, remember?), get rid of the silly speed penalty, and simply allow it to ignore shield mitigation and armor. This will about double its current effectiveness. A kol that is able to do 350/550/850 damage instantly, and that I know will do exactly that much damage, might actually be useful, mind you it will never get more than 2 shots off before it is out of antimatter for the rest of the battle, but at least now *almost* brings up the kol up to deathegg level of dreadedness on the battlefield… and for some odd reason, a battleship might get close to beating a carrier cap in a 1v1.

Marza is fine.

Donov. I like my donovs. If they were not in space, I would go pet one like a kittycat. (that reminds me, did ironclad ever get anywhere with its capitalship plushy line? I really want a donov for a pillow, a marza to prop up my arm when ima reading a book, and a kol I can hang in the center of my ceiling.) ok, seriously, donovs are not that bad… except magnetize… and magnetize wouldn’t be so horrible if it could kill a single advent fighter squad at lv 1. (it cant… at lv 1, 8 targets, 9 fighters per squad, pathetic) it is rather ok vs Vasari, killing 2 fighter squads at lv 1, and almost 3 bomber squads. (4 vas fighter squads at lv 3, 5.33 bomber squads) I am not sure how much damage this ablitiy does, it kinda depends on the strike craft… but it doesn’t seem like its a lot (not nearly as good as, oh, idk… 150/300/450 AOE uncapped damage +50/100/150 antimatter removal) All I ask for the donov, is change “strikecraft” to “squads” and divide by 2. So, 4/6/8 squads are (possibly) removed from battle, and as the battle goes on, the ablitiy will return from meh level to sucky level as each squad is reduced to 1 or 2 strikecraft per squad…. So make sure it targets full strength squads if it can. Hey! If it didn’t cost so much antimatter, it would almost counter scramble bombers! If you felt like it, you could buff restore shields a tinny bit, by say, giving a nonstacking 2%/4%/6% max mitigation bonus… which would almost give the same damage reduction as an overseer with its +2 armor. I mean… lv 3 donov… 50 slots, 1 capital slot, and 500 shield restored… vs 2 overseers, 14 ship slots, MUCH cheaper, oh, and 500 hitpoints restored… ya… currently, its overseers all the way.

Advent…

progen, fine, halycyon, godly,

Revelation: reverie is great, clairvoyance is really nice for instantly knowing about somewhere for free… guidance… sucks. There are many ways to change it… it could be made into a passive aoe, but that’s radical, what if instead of 40%/40%/40%... we change it to 50%/75%100%.that doesn’t seem too horrible (remember, the way things stack in sins, 100% is 2x as fast).. infact it still seems rather sucky…. The issue is, if your spaming an ability faster, your draining your antimatter faster… and what good is ability speed up if you have no antimatter? What if we tried 50/75/100%... and lets throw in a 50/75/100% antimatter reduction usage. This means, that at lv 3, if cast on your progen, you could use shield restore twice as often, at ½ the am usage per cast. (note, since your spamming it twice as fast, the antimatter/second usage is the same) (or telepush twice as fast). While provoke hysteria is kinda meh, we cant really mess with it, so lets not, for now at least.

Rapture: This capital ship is GREAT, I don’t know why it is so underused, its vertigo is amazing (weapon cooldown increase and weapon chance to hit decrease… at max level, that means flack frigs are down from 75% chance to hit to 45% chance to hit… 25% in certain neutrals…. But all other ships are down to 49% effectiveness. Concentration auara is amazing… 10/20/30% damage bonus on strike craft… (and can hang out on the edge of the grav well with the carriers) that’s better than the haylcon, and vengeance is, if used properly, the best anti-strike craft ability in the entire game. (I kid you not, cast this on a starbase that Vasari bomber spammer is hold positioning on… and just laugh your head off… assuming he doesn’t have a skirantra in range using repair cloud… ) and domination… well, at a minimum you should be picking up a heavy cruiser every 60 seconds, but the support cruisers are fun too. It’s a good thing the advent players are so set in their ways that they don’t ever change, and that no one reads these forums, else some people might be calling for a nerf on this thing.

Radiance: This ship is decent, animosity is its weak point, but can you really do anything about that? Perhaps animosity could reduce the damage of the force attacking ships by 20% or something. Perhaps someone else could come up with a better solution for that. Antimatter burn is awesome. 200/400/600 damage done to the hull, (no armor/shield mitigation to get in the way), drains antimatter, interrupts, and disables. I mean, GRG currently does less damage, and doesn’t do any of that cool stuff, (my proposed buff to GRG does ~50% more damage, and does non of that cool stuff, which is why I think we can get away with it.) cleansing brilliance does less damage than missile barrage, and is harder to set up, but its also harder to interrupt, and it is easier for advent to set up combos with it. ( malice)

Vasari:

Eggy: fine. Skirantra: please, please nerf Scramble bombers!) Scramble bombers does… 9227 damage over the life of the bombers from a single cast! Ridiculous! For 50 antimatter! And has phase missiles! Kol does less than 1000 for more antimatter! Wtf? I mean, its over 9000! (First person with adobe to take that 17 second video and stick a skirantra onto of it gets a karma kookie.)

Kortul: this is a mighty fine capital ship, however, I have one quarrel with jam weapons… ships (or, strike craft in this case) can fire their weapons the second the very edge of the target gets in range, so while say, lv 1 jam weapons has a range of 3500 units, in order to be protected, a ship has to be within 3500-2400(range of strike craft before research) – radi of hit sphere. So, ill be honest, I don’t have numbers here, but basically the protective range of jam weapons is much much smaller than advertised. Lv 3 jam weapons hardly covers a starbase if the kortul is hugging it as close as can be (and try that when they are both moving) to make it worse, the higher the level, the faster the ability drains antimatter (if I did my math right, a lv 10 kortul with max antimatter research cannot constantly keep jam weapons up… and even then its only a partial protection ½ time at lv 1 to 2/3 time at lv 3.) I am going to ask for, either 500 increase in range for all levels, OR, 70/65/60 antimatter cost per level, OR, 20/25/30 duration per level. (the 500 range is the least of all, and would put the lv 3 range to 7000, a number it was previously at.) Vnanites is amazing, and does not need changing, and power surge is great as well.

Marauder: I like this capital ship, its fun. Its one of those cap ships I want to hang from my ceiling, but its rare, it doesn’t need much though. Subversion is much improved… but it sucks. The worst part about it is that you have to get close to the planet to use it (think about it… if your that close.. why aren’t you bombing it… and then you don’t want that buff still there when you capture it… but the buff will stay, making building repairbays a PAIN…) You know, the sova doesn’t reduce extractor income from the planet… maybe subversion could reduce extractor income by 33/66/100%, (doesn’t stack, obviously)… OR make the range unlimited… so you could skirt around the planet like a sova does with embargo. Phaseout hull is an amazing ability… but it has one issue: shield mitigation. If your trying to use phaseout hull to save your own ship, it is actually almost counter productive, because during phaseout, the ship loses shield mitigation, and hence, when it comes out of phasespace, it has a lower shield mitigation than when it started, and so, while it did get healed 200 damage, that 200 damage goes straight toward rasing that mitigation back up, and this effect gets worse the higher the level (more seconds for shield mitigation to go down, but the 200 damage doesn’t change.) I don’t want to change this so much that it becomes op (cause its really nice right now)… but I would ask for… either 10%/15%/20% increase (towards the normal maximum, not above) in shield mitigation for friendly ships on return from phase space, OR, 200/250/300 damage healed/dealt on return, OR, (and, heh, this might be interesting… think about it, you just sent them into phase space) give the ability a .05 second warm up before the phase out, during which time phase jump charge up time is reduced by 100000% on the target ship… aka, cast this on a ship trying to jump into phase space, and guess what? It jumped into phase space! Whoda thunk it?? I think that might make this ability a bit on the really cool side. (now, if you felt like it, make this insta-jump effect only work on friendly ships, so that phase out hull can still be used like ion bolt/reverie on enemy ships)

Desolator:

This is a weird ship, and I haven’t messed with it much, mostly because its just so meh. Its great at siegeing, but that’s about it, course, I guess there is nothing wrong with that, but lets take a look at phase missile swarm. 600/2000/4200 damage. Now that’s just weird. (well, if it didn’t autocast the second a single target got into range, making it actually do 200/400/600 on its first cast) You would also think that the phase missiles on a phase missile based capital ship with an ability that costs 90 antimatter would be slightly better than the phase missiles on the second rate rejects they put on bombers and assailants… but nope, these phase missiles on this capitalship, don’t phase one bit. So while the lv 1 of this ablity still does more damage than lv 1 or 2 of current gauss rail gun (rofls), the damage is still reduced by shield mitigation. How about 5/6/7 targets dealt 200/300/400 damage direct to hull (like a proper phase missile)? This means 1000/1800/2800 damage done (before armor, unlike proposed GRG, and eggydeath), which is a significant buff above what it is currently, but it puts it approximately in line with the 1/3 2/3 3/3 usual progression of abilities. (mind you, that is a lot of damage, but it is spread out to different targets, 5/6/7 hoshikos would heal all/almost all/more than half that damage before a second volley was fired.

I think that’s everything. Now, while I did do some serious thinking into this, I didn’t use the dev’s uber balancing spreadsheet thingy they have hidden away somewhere, but the goal here was to not change things too much, and hopefully make the other capital ships slightly closer to being chosen over the current choices. At the very least, I hope I gave a few new and interesting ideas on how to mess with the various abilities. (except animosity, ima stuck on that one)

So, thoughts, questions, comments? i tried to be logical, but i am sure there is a flaw somewhere. feel free to point it out, but dont throw out the idea because it is 10% to powerfull or something.

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Here's the thread that sparked a lot of the 1.18 capital ship changes for reference:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/361228/

Perhaps unfortunately for the archive, the main post was edited after the 1.18 release so we can't actually see just how close the community consensus was to the actual change list.

Anyways, my personal opinion is that if we're going to balance against any capital ship, it's the Halcyon. Four very powerful and useful abilities, generally well balanced stats, strong from the early game to the late game, it's what all capital ships should aspire to be.

Anyways, some generic changes I think would be good:

Increase the damage of all battleships; a level 1 battleship's total DPS output should be just less than a level 1 carrier capital ship with 3 squads of bombers (no special abilities on either side). This comes out to ~50% damage buff. Give the Vulkoras and Marza the same treatment.
Increase antimatter and antimatter regeneration speeds on support capital ships, to better allow them to spam their abilities. Slightly increase their move/turn speed to give them better mobility than other capital ships. Give the Revelation the same treatment.

Now on to specific capital ships:

Kol: Rework this hog to have antimatter requirements more similar to the Kortul. The Kortul has abilities with long durations that are antimatter economical, allowing it to keep using its abilities for minutes on end. The Kol has abilities with large antimatter requirements that need to be spammed to be effective.

My suggestion is to really bring down the antimatter costs of these abilities; reduce their effectiveness if need be but bring those antimatter costs down to the point at which the Kol can spam them. Someone who specs a Kol with maxed out GRG should get something that scares other capital ships. Right now, it doesn't.

Dunov: Make shield restore self-targetable, and add a short-term buff to the target that raises mitigation to 90% (does not stack with anything). Magnetize needs help, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

Marza: Incendiary shells needs a buff. Missile barrage could always stand to be more noticable. Otherwise fine as is.

Sova: Rapid manufacturing needs a secondary effect. Right now the Sova has very little role in the late game, making it largely a legacy capital ship if it survives long enough (whereas Skirantra and Halcyon only continue to grow in their roles). Give rapid manufacturing some more application and power to make it part of the TEC's fleet. Maybe passive repairs to all units in the gravity well for the duration? Just throwing out ideas...

Akkan: If everything else is getting buffed, the Akkan should too. Maybe add some damage to ion bolt? I've always thought of the ability as Sin's version of storm bolt, anyways...

Progenitor: Fine as is.

Halcyon: Fine as is.

Radiance: Animosity needs a rework. There's been some discussion about this before, but I'm really not sure what should be done. Its current function really isn't working very well.

Rapture: Not sure what should be done... it's abilitis are already pretty solid and it's one of my favourite late-game capital ships with vertigo. Probably fine if it gets the generic buffs I suggested above.

Revelation: reverie is a can of worms here; that ability is only held in check by the general suck of the revelation, and will probably need to be changed around to become viable. My suggestion is this: the target of reverie is still able to move, it just cannot use abilities or attack for the duration. This prevents it from being used to stop retreat, but allows it to keep the enemy shut down and effectively out of the fight. Reduce the antimatter cost and cooldown of clairvoyance, and then give guidance the effect of increasing the antimatter regeneration speed of the target for its duration.

Provoke Hysteria also needs help (since it's basically an inferior version of drain planet a good 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time it is useful you still need other bombard units in backup to finish the job anyways).

Jarrasul: Give its colonize ability a secondary function to make it comparable with the Akkan and Progenitor. I recommended negating planetary upkeep for its duration. This would mean that the advantage of the Jarrasul isn't saving money, but allowing you to delay the expenditure until later (which is very useful in the first few minutes of the game)

Kortul: Fine as is.

Vulkoras: Buff phase missile swarm; a lot. Otherwise fine.

Skirantra: Not sure how to change scramble bombers... really a tough call because I do believe the 1.18 version still needed work, and 1.19 got the spirit of it right even if the implementation was brutally overpowered. Other than scramble, the Skirantra is fine, however.

Antorak: I have no clue how to fix this guy. POH is probably fine as is, but I'm always worried about it becoming a death sentence to retreating capital ships. His other two abilities are pretty sucky right now and definitely need help. Distort Gravity can probably be fixed by adding a secondary effect that's useful in combat... maybe nearby friendly units have a small chance to be missed when they are attacked (which would also be a welcome stealth buff to targeting uplink, giving it a stronger role in the vs Vasari matchup). As for subversion, I just don't know what to do about it without making it infringe on the domain of Embargo.

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Now that I've made my own comments, I'm going to compare with what you said (I purposefully wrote my stuff without reading your's so it wouldn't bias me. We're mostly on the same page, it seems)

(that reminds me, did ironclad ever get anywhere with its capitalship plushy line? I really want a donov for a pillow, a marza to prop up my arm when ima reading a book, and a kol I can hang in the center of my ceiling.)

Now I want my very own Kortul and Halcyon...

Rapture: This capital ship is GREAT

The Rapture is indeed awesome and probably the game's most underrated capital ship. Still needs something small to bring it up slightly, but it certainly could be left as is.

animosity is its weak point, but can you really do anything about that?

Animosity, IMO, needs a complete reworking.

I have one quarrel with jam weapons…

Good points, I agree with you.

If your trying to use phaseout hull to save your own ship, it is actually almost counter productive, because during phaseout, the ship loses shield mitigation, and hence, when it comes out of phasespace, it has a lower shield mitigation than when it started

Very good point there; do you think that shield mitigation should be frozen while phased out? That might weaken its offensive application a little, but Vasari have phase missiles, what's a bit of mitigation to them?

but lets take a look at phase missile swarm. 600/2000/4200 damage.

That's before mitigation, so it actually comes out to 360/1200/2520. For a 90 antimatter ability with a relatively small target count and minimal damage to individual targets, that's not nearly good enough.

This ability needs to scale better in larger battles, and I don't think its tiny target count does this appropriately.

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The Kol needs a DPS boost, GRG to negate shields (But lower damage output and remove the debuff), Adaptive Forcefield as a passive (With lower damage reduction, but keep phase missile negation), and it'll be fine.

For the Sova, I'd think having Rapid Manufacturing instantly replace SC for all carriers in a short distance of the Sova would help enormously. Especially considering that TEC currently has no SC support abilities, and this would give the Sova late-game use and actual fleet support.

Akkan and Marza are largely fine.

The Dunov just needs small boosts everywhere. Lower AM requirements for all abilities would help a lot.

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

Quoting Darvin3,

reply 1

Here's the thread that sparked a lot of the 1.18 capital ship changes for reference:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/361228/

Perhaps unfortunately for the archive, the main post was edited after the 1.18 release so we can't actually see just how close the community consensus was to the actual change list.

Anyways, my personal opinion is that if we're going to balance against any capital ship, it's the Halcyon. Four very powerful and useful abilities, generally well balanced stats, strong from the early game to the late game, it's what all capital ships should aspire to be.

Anyways, some generic changes I think would be good:

Increase the damage of all battleships; a level 1 battleship's total DPS output should be just less than a level 1 carrier capital ship with 3 squads of bombers (no special abilities on either side). This comes out to ~50% damage buff. Give the Vulkoras and Marza the same treatment.
Increase antimatter and antimatter regeneration speeds on support capital ships, to better allow them to spam their abilities. Slightly increase their move/turn speed to give them better mobility than other capital ships. Give the Revelation the same treatment.

[/quote]

Now, i wholhartendly believe that a battleship should beat a carrier in a 1v1, but i am not sure that a damage buff is quite the way to do this. see, a kortul should be able to jam those bombers into uselessness so he can fight that 1v1 free of the annoyance of the strike craft for most of the time, and regenerate his shields when jamweapons is down, and use disuruptive strikes to destroy the antimatter of the opposing carrier so that it cant use scramblebombers or missleturrets. A radiance should be able to do a similar thing with detonate antimatter. (course it has issues of not dieing to the bombers) and a kol should jsut be a fking bad ass and pound that carrier into dust with GRG. (i mean come on! right now its the biggest gun in the game and it has the smallest punch... its like the captain is compensating, and yet his... ok, nvm. course, if the carriers kite, in this case they should win.

I feel that a 50% damage buff... (it doesnt bring the dps of a kol up to the same dps of 10 cobalts... at lv 1... at lv 10, hoboy...) would definatly help the kol (and other battleships) out, but i think that if this was done, with a buff to GRG, we might start seeing kol spam. (or worse, marza spam since it already has the highest dps of any cap ship in the game)

You see, I notice that alot of people pick capital ships, not on thier ablities, but instead on thier ability to clear militia so they can expand faster. Egg: nanos cream militia, carriers: strike craft cream militia, the progen and akkan get to be picked because they can colonize as soon as all but one seige frig are killed...

I tried to do my best to only look at one ablitiy of each capital ship, because i feel that, i mean, have you ever done a science project? you always change one variable first, then you measure the results, and then you change a second variable and measure the results. if you change 2 variables at the same time, you dont know which caused the change in the results... In the same way, i feel that we should only buff each of the capital ships one way, and then measure the results in playtesting, see where we end up, and if needed, apply a second buff. does this make sence?

Basicly, there is 2 routes here, buff the cap ships, or buff the abilities. Let us please do one or the other, and if nessary do the second at a later patch. I feel no problems with splitting it up, say, buff the donov's antimatter, but change the mauraders abilities.

(now: wowoh wow.... the maurader starts with less antimatter regen and less antimatter regen per level than the other support ships... .85/sec vs 1/sec, and .09/level vs .15... now thats just not nice. is the pathtic antimatter regen on the maurader on purpose or someone forgot to change it when copying and pasting?)

Now on to specific capital ships:

Kol: Rework this hog to have antimatter requirements more similar to the Kortul. The Kortul has abilities with long durations that are antimatter economical, allowing it to keep using its abilities for minutes on end. The Kol has abilities with large antimatter requirements that need to be spammed to be effective.

My suggestion is to really bring down the antimatter costs of these abilities; reduce their effectiveness if need be but bring those antimatter costs down to the point at which the Kol can spam them. Someone who specs a Kol with maxed out GRG should get something that scares other capital ships. Right now, it doesn't.

well, my suggustion would effectively double the damage of GRG (armor and mitigation bypass, but would still have to get through shields)... 1/2ing the antimatter cost would effectively grant the same damage/antimatter usage, but would increase the time in which that damage is spread over. in this way, you couldnt be just like bang, bang, 1700 damage, instead, bang,bang,bang,bang 1560 damage. (first number is 850*2, second is 975*.4) either way, its an improvment.... however i feel that my buff is more of a anti-capital ship weapon due to its mitigation bypass, which means that it does the same damageto a frig as a cap ship, while less antimatter would mean that the ablity would be better used trying to pop lrms (or whatever) due to the lower shield mitigation of those units... and if this were the case... lv 1 nano is still better than lv 3 grg, because lv 1 nano can pop lrms in one hit... an antimatter reduced cost grg OR my buffed GRG at lv 3 still cannont pop an lrm one hit. (ok, i take that back, cant pop an assailant, but lv 3 could pop an unupgraded javilis in one hit... something, ya, the egg could do at lv 1.)

Basicly, somehow, GRG needs to be buffed, I like both ways (maybe a combo of the 2?) but my way makes it more of an anti-capital ship weapon, while just reducing the antimatter cost, means that it would be patheticly effective against capital ships, and still not be able to pop the weakest ship in the game.

Dunov: Make shield restore self-targetable, and add a short-term buff to the target that raises mitigation to 90% (does not stack with anything). Magnetize needs help, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

I am not really a fan of making shield restor self-targetable, i kinda like the idea that you need twins (or tripplets) to keep the donov's themselves alive... its the difference from a support ship... to just a ship with a really really really big shield bank (think about it, your transfering antimatter directly into shield points) i did suggust slightly rasing the mitigation, but to 90%? that seems like alot. (glad it doenst stack, else youd have advent ships with 100%+ shield mitigation) perhaps a... idk, 30/40/50% phase missle block is tacked on, which means that, hey, maybe that extra shield will actually keep the ship alive. (when a vasari gets thier hands on a missle pact, i dont feel bad about this at all.)

Marza: Incendiary shells needs a buff. Missile barrage could always stand to be more noticable. Otherwise fine as is.

If you really want to buff incendiary shells, i mean, waht would you do? increasing its damage is just like increasing the dps of the ship itself... or if you give it a small aoe, then its just a passive radbomb... or a slightly more powerfull version of the advent HC's ablitiy... idk, i find the marza still often used in multiplayer (i mean, if you saw more than just vasari players)... i dont think it counts as one of the underused cap ships.

Sova: Rapid manufacturing needs a secondary effect. Right now the Sova has very little role in the late game, making it largely a legacy capital ship if it survives long enough (whereas Skirantra and Halcyon only continue to grow in their roles). Give rapid manufacturing some more application and power to make it part of the TEC's fleet. Maybe passive repairs to all units in the gravity well for the duration? Just throwing out ideas...

i love the new buffed rapid mfg. and i really feel like if you buff it again, things might get crazy. The lv6 sova for me is the ship that has done its fighting on the front lines, and now gets to take a break and become the stay-at-home capital ship (kinda like a lv 6 progen), who is now a happily sitting at your desert planet with 5 frig factories around it... just waiting for that supply pact to kick in.... the sova is definatly not one of the underused cap ships.

Akkan: If everything else is getting buffed, the Akkan should too. Maybe add some damage to ion bolt? I've always thought of the ability as Sin's version of storm bolt, anyways...

well, as ima arguing for everything else not quite getting buffed, and the akkan still a common choice, ima go with the no help needed catagory here.

Progenitor: Fine as is.

Halcyon: Fine as is.

Radiance: Animosity needs a rework. There's been some discussion about this before, but I'm really not sure what should be done. Its current function really isn't working very well.

ya, animosity is a wacko one. other possible ideas: the ability to cast it on a differnt ship (focus fire on that heavy cruiser/starbase and not me k thanks) works on strike craft (although this might make veneance or telepush just too powerfull when stacked...) or increase the num targets, idk.

Rapture: Not sure what should be done... it's abilitis are already pretty solid and it's one of my favourite late-game capital ships with vertigo. Probably fine if it gets the generic buffs I suggested above.

Revelation: reverie is a can of worms here; that ability is only held in check by the general suck of the revelation, and will probably need to be changed around to become viable. My suggestion is this: the target of reverie is still able to move, it just cannot use abilities or attack for the duration. This prevents it from being used to stop retreat, but allows it to keep the enemy shut down and effectively out of the fight. Reduce the antimatter cost and cooldown of clairvoyance, and then give guidance the effect of increasing the antimatter regeneration speed of the target for its duration.

Provoke Hysteria also needs help (since it's basically an inferior version of drain planet a good 90% of the time, and the 10% of the time it is useful you still need other bombard units in backup to finish the job anyways).

increased antimatter regeneration, or decreased antimatter usage, means to the same end, but, ya, guidance needs something

now... provoke hysteria... heres what i thought about it... how about... instead of -40%... we do... -30%... AND 17.5 bombing damage done per second. This means it will 1kho a 1000 hp roid, and do... 2500 damage to a maxxed out world... which is slightly more than its current 2400. does that sound decent? (basicly, it now does a respectible ammount of damage to small worlds, while doing almost the exact same ammout the the big worlds)

Jarrasul: Give its colonize ability a secondary function to make it comparable with the Akkan and Progenitor. I recommended negating planetary upkeep for its duration. This would mean that the advantage of the Jarrasul isn't saving money, but allowing you to delay the expenditure until later (which is very useful in the first few minutes of the game)

Kortul: Fine as is.

Vulkoras: Buff phase missile swarm; a lot. Otherwise fine.

Skirantra: Not sure how to change scramble bombers... really a tough call because I do believe the 1.18 version still needed work, and 1.19 got the spirit of it right even if the implementation was brutally overpowered. Other than scramble, the Skirantra is fine, however.

the space egg idea is a nice one, however i think the devs would need to code it in there, but still, a nice idea. the space egg doesnt need much buffing (i stil l see it used)... but i think that its colonize ability needs to get better at the higher levels, just like the other colony caps.

vulkoras: I dont feel like it really need to "scale as the battle size increases", else your left with a non-ultimate missle barrage. i feel that my buff is just enough to make it semi-decent, i mean, they are phase missles for cryin out lout, make them phase!

Antorak: I have no clue how to fix this guy. POH is probably fine as is, but I'm always worried about it becoming a death sentence to retreating capital ships. His other two abilities are pretty sucky right now and definitely need help. Distort Gravity can probably be fixed by adding a secondary effect that's useful in combat... maybe nearby friendly units have a small chance to be missed when they are attacked (which would also be a welcome stealth buff to targeting uplink, giving it a stronger role in the vs Vasari matchup). As for subversion, I just don't know what to do about it without making it infringe on the domain of Embargo.

My only issue with distort gravity is its phase jump immunity... basicly... all your ships start jumping... 1...2...3...4...5..6... and then distort gravity wears off... and suddenly... your ships dont jump at 7, but instead have to count all the way to 49. if your already 80% of the way there, and suddenly phase jump speed is significantly reduced, you should still be 80% of the way there... does that make sence? in other words... if you make it to 6 when the immunity wears off, you should only have to count a few more seconds till warp, and not a half min. (and i dont see that as a buff, more of a bugfix)

the maurader could use (and this is my exception to the change thing one at a time thing) the same antimatter regen rates of the other support cap ships.... (because, i feel that someone forgot to change the numbers when copying and pasting... which seems to happen alot... sounds being on the wrong ability seemed to be everywhere in 1.8... and everyone remembers the kortul jamweapons/rapidMFG wierd combo it had going for a while)

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ZombiesRus5

Join Date 02/2009

+340

Now, i wholhartendly believe that a battleship should beat a carrier in a 1v1, but i am not sure that a damage buff is quite the way to do this.

Is this too simple for battleships? Increase the weaponCooldownDecreasePerc and weaponDamageIncreasePerc. This doesn't make them a powerhouse early on, but gives some nice dps benefit for leveling it up.

I was looking at this too before you posted. The dunov should be the model for antimatter regen for support cap ships and maybe even a slight buff there too.

I think someone had an idea to add an extra temporary constructor at one time at higher levels which sounded good.

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Pbhead

Join Date 12/2008

+77

i like the extra conjstructor idea alot. idk, so many ways, to "fix", so many ways to "break"... its a tough balancing act.

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ZombiesRus5

Join Date 02/2009

+340

too true. Just roll back to 1.181 level and everyone would probably still be happy.

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course, if the carriers kite, in this case they should win.

The problem is: the carriers ALWAYS kite.

As I said in the other thread, the Kortul is one of the harder guys to balance since it definitely outclasses the other battleships both in terms of performance and versatility. It obviously needs less work than the others.

(it doesnt bring the dps of a kol up to the same dps of 10 cobalts... at lv 1... at lv 10, hoboy...)

Level 10's are always going to absolutely rock. I mean, a level 10 Halcyon gets 11 squads... compare that to three drone hosts that get only 9 squads (and it needs antimatter to replace them, Halcyon doesn't). All level 10 capital ships deserve to rock, and anyone who gets one has truly earned that power.

The idea that you'll be able to spam capital ships is obscene; at a certain point they interfere with each other for XP gain and will simply never live to reach those obscenely high levels.

If you think just upping the DPS by 50% is too much, why not instead give them additional weapon banks that let them shoot more targets? The total damage buff would still be 50%, but they wouldn't deal any more damage than they currently do to an individual target.

if you change 2 variables at the same time, you dont know which caused the change in the results...

We're not quite in that situation, because we have a lot of insights into the game that can tell us why things work the way they do. Most of us here are experienced enough to make sophisticated predictions about a very large list of changes (certainly not with 100% accuracy, but much better than trial and error).

The "micro-iteration" approach you recommend is actually my favoured approach and it's largely how I tinkered with my Warcraft III maps (though I would occasionally make large sweeping changes and then follow up with a flurry of small revisions to fine-tune them). The problem is, this isn't a user-mod, it's a professional product, and such rapid patching really isn't an option with corporate overhead and expectations of commercial-level polish in each revision. They're stuck with large and infrequent releases, and are mostly limited to internal testing anyways.

Moreover, patch 1.18 was an absolute monster in terms of size, and yet it's arguably the best balanced version to date (it's biggest flaw was the illuminator bug, which is of course a bug and not strictly a balance issue). So I think that shows that if it's well done, a single large patch can be very successful.

Basicly, there is 2 routes here, buff the cap ships, or buff the abilities.

I honestly believe that many capital ships need both right now. A lot of our "low tier" capital ships have royally gimped abilities (phase missile swarm, guidance, subversion, animosity, gauss railgun) that are simply non-starters or at very best highly situational, but most of those capital ships also need generic buffs.

I'd classify our capital ships into four tiers currently: top, high, mid, and low. The top-tier is the Skirantra, Halcyon, and Progenitor. Aside from nerfing scramble, these guys are fine as is (maybe buff replicate forces). Then you have the high-tier guys which only need a small amount of work, but each one has very different issues; they're the Kortul, Jarrasul, Akkan and Sova. For the mid-tier (that's Marza, Vulkoras, Rapture, and Radiance), most of them have one "gimped" ability that needs serious reworking, but otherwise they could get away with just some general-purpose stat buffs.

The low-tier guys, however (Kol, Antorak, Revelation, Dunov) have serious issues. Yes, all of them have redeeming qualities but they're very niche capital ships with generally sub-par abilities and attributes. I don't think they can be solved by standalone buffs to either abilities or attributes. I strongly believe they need a holistic buff across multiple abilities.

(now: wowoh wow.... the maurader starts with less antimatter regen and less antimatter regen per level than the other support ships...

The marauder has less antimatter consumption in general than other support caps, mainly because subversion and distort gravity are "one time use" abilities and phase out hull is the only thing actually draining antimatter on a regular basis. That's the best reason I can surmise.

1/2ing the antimatter cost would effectively grant the same damage/antimatter usage, but would increase the time in which that damage is spread over.

Well, I guess we'll have to disagree. I don't think you can justify a reasonable antimatter cost while this thing is a nuke, but if its damage is over time, then it's easy to justify a low and reasonable antimatter cost that a battleship needs from its abilities. Besides, I don't think nukes are particularly fun.

I am not really a fan of making shield restor self-targetable

Neither was I originally, but TEC has just such a hard time keeping capital ships alive in the late game that I eventually decided this change was really necessary. The problem with twin Dunovs is that this leaves the Dunov largely impractical if you can't afford to twin. As well, I feel the TEC capital ships have a theme of self-sufficience going on and I'd like the Dunov to actually pick up this theme.

idk, i find the marza still often used in multiplayer (i mean, if you saw more than just vasari players)... i dont think it counts as one of the underused cap ships.

I personally find the Marza at about the same strength level as the Kortul (a bit weaker before level 6 and a bit stronger after), but the biggest outstanding issue is that incendiary shells is largely gimped. I agree that any direct tweak to its current role would basically just be a damage buff or a passive version of radiation bomb, so maybe it could add an additional debuff to the target? Reduced armour, speed, or damage?

the sova is definatly not one of the underused cap ships.

The problem with Sova, as I mentioned, is that it doesn't scale very well into the late game, which is why I suggested giving its ultimate ability so more punch. A "stay at home" capital ship is largely a wasted capital ship, in my opinion.

ya, animosity is a wacko one.

As I said, I think it needs a complete rework to do something different from what it does now. Aside from the (rather forced and artificial-feeling) synergy with vengeance, it really has no role in the Advent faction currently. The fact that it's effectively useless in its current incarnation seals it for me; this ability should simply be replaced with an entirely new effect.

I'm satisfied with that.

else your left with a non-ultimate missle barrage.

Scramble Bombers is a non-ultimate Anima Tempest. Power Surge is a non-ultimate Finest Hour. Malice is a non-ultimate volatile nanites. Raze planet is a non-ultimate drain planet (okay the last one is a little contrived, but you get the point). A lot of ordinary abilities are really just toned down versions of ultimate abilities, I don't think there's any problem with that.

Really, the ability to compare PMS against is radiation bomb, and that ability has no target cap.

(and i dont see that as a buff, more of a bugfix)

Agreed, that strikes me as more of a bug.

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