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[xenoargh]

Medusa- no way, you're using Heavy Blasters and Light Needlers.  

Why Light Phase Lances over the Phase Lance, which is better, but still worse than the Heavy Blaster?  Not really following the reasoning here.

Aurora; seriously?  IR Pulse Lasers and Heavy Blasters, because ITU.  

Granted, I haven't played current Aurora, but it wasn't a good Beam-boat in 0.72 and from the sounds of the changes, it's not now, either.

Frankly, I think these arguments-from-ships are kind of BS, anyhow; "oh, but it's all right on this one squirrel-case build with OP ship" is not valid.



Anyhow... I tried out that formula (valuing shot-speed over 2X range at a ratio) and that puts the Flux cost per shot at 1100, a bit pricey, lol.  

Now I'm tuning until it's at exactly the Flux cost per shot of the original.  Fair enough?  I think that's far too expensive, given that Beams are inherently can't-miss; essentially, they're getting valued the same as other guns that don't miss the theoretical target, which I think is fine, especially now that that target is Destroyer-sized.  I think you're valuing this supposedly-awesome thing far too highly, frankly.  But I'll play along; it won't change Vanilla stuff but it might contain a few squirrel cases, so what the heck.

[xenoargh]

A quick note: "Does nothing against shields" is inaccurate. Ion Beam has a shield arcing effect that scales with hard flux. (Like the Tachyon Lance) And both have a modicum of energy damage.

Agreed, this will get handled differently, once I look at the code under the hood.  I'm not valuing that stuff directly just yet.  So it's probably OP until that's adjusted.

[xenoargh]

OK, that's valued at 5.25 (i.e., the shot-speed has to vastly-exceed range to be considered here). 

That doesn't close every squirrel case, but frankly, I think it's probably good enough.  I think the Lightning Gun is hugely underpowered for what you get (essentially, a HVD that never misses), but I'm willing to put it aside for now; essentially, it's a specific case where it's like a hit-scan gun with 100% accuracy.  There are bound to be more things like this as we move forward.

Another way to punish this would be to take the ratio, multiply it by some teeny number and add it to the cost; that's probably the most-elegant way, rather than this crude approach.  That would cover anything with shot-speed exceeding range significantly.  But that will punish LMGs quite a bit, as they're over 2:1 in Vanilla.  Probably 2:1 or lower needs to be a protected range.

[Tartiflette]

Frankly, I think these arguments-from-ships are kind of BS, anyhow; "oh, but it's all right on this one squirrel-case build with OP ship" is not valid.

Yeah, it's s*cks that it's like, you know, the most fundamental basic rule about balancing right?

[xenoargh]

No.  Weapons are the core.  After that, ships.  Crawl --> Walk --> Run.

Basically, you're arguing for never fixing anything.  So either present some math or go away.

[Tartiflette]

Sorry, I only present actual gameplay, not armchair specialist theory crafting and unreadable scribbles on a chalkboards.

[xenoargh]

I mean this seriously, not in a mean way.  

When Alex decided that what Beams really needed was 1000 range because I made a convincing argument about how underpowered they were, the fix broke the Hound, BMII, etc.; a whole group of ships got invalidated by one poor decision regarding weapon balance.  I'm as guilty as anybody for the current state of affairs, frankly.

I'm tired of watching this get done by crappy buff / nerf powered by a few trolls (including me), making the core game balance get more and more devoid of minmax choices that all work well because we're blundering around.  

The game's getting robbed of diversity of truly-good minmax builds as a result; it took 3 years to get the Hammerhead halfway decent again.  I don't want this game to hit Steam and get bombed for having a handful of "right answers" or being a game that's only OK "when you put mods on it to fix".  

So, science!  Start with the most-important thing; weapons in a combat game, followed by the combat avatars, followed by serious crunching on the remaining issues.

This ain't "armchair"; it's math; it doesn't care about what you want it to say.  You wanna argue about weighting, fine, let's have a grownup discussion.  Otherwise, go away, the adults are working here.

[MesoTroniK]

You cannot balance a combat system as complex as SS, with only math.

[Tartiflette]

When Alex decided that what Beams really needed was 1000 range because I made a convincing argument about how underpowered they were, the fix broke the Hound, BMII, etc.; a whole group of ships got invalidated by one poor decision regarding weapon balance.  I'm as guilty as anybody for the current state of affairs, frankly.

Yeah, you did a good job at making all vanilla beams the same weapon with different sprites, and the most overpowered one of the game. Tells you a bit about the validity of your "weapon first, ships after" method instead of the "take all the systems into account as a coherent whole, and then playtest the cr*p of everything you did" that pretty much everyone else uses.

[xenoargh]

Weapons are pretty simple systems, mechanically, if they aren't doing weird scripted stuff, which this allows for.  

Ships aren't; we're going to have analyze a lot more to arrive at good approximations.  We already know a few things about Ship balance that are very fundamental, like the value of speed and the number of guns on a given arc, the value of Flux reserves and so forth; most of that's pretty amenable to analysis.  The hard stuff is how to value the ship's sprite-size (not impossible, just annoying, we'll have to write some code to calculate the surface area or approximate from the collision ovoids, etc.; it won't be perfect without some complicated work).

Systems are going to be value-judgements, for sure.  Anybody sane's in agreement on this point.  

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't go there and do that, though; it just means the pitfalls are obvious and that this will be hard.

@Tartiflette:  the what?  They're more diverse than ever.  Please explain your reasoning, based on the current numbers.

[Tartiflette]

You are acting like the Tacoma Narrow Bridge civil engineers. Their math was "correct". Didn't helped the bridge.

[Midnight Kitsune]

Systems are going to be value-judgements, for sure.  Anybody sane's in agreement on this point.  

So I guess 90% of SS players are insane then

[mehgamer]

Xeno, are you familiar with the idea of "chaos theory"?

[Thaago]

To give constructive feedback:

Xeno, I think you are undervaluing armor stripping by a huge margin. Kinetics and Frag are massively reduced in damage by armor, and the AI is getting better at taking those hits on the armor rather than the shield. However, once you've stripped armor, the ship is obligated to keep its shields up or take hull damage. It drastically alters the behavior of the ship, its survival, and its offensive potential.

Also, I still think that using the flux efficiency ratio is the wrong way to do it. Ships get 10 flux per second dissipation per OP - that is the basis on how OP and flux efficiency interact.

So:  (Damage - Flux Cost)/10*factor + OP = other considerations (range, accuracy, alpha, etc)

[Alex]

Been keeping an eye on this thread (though not in super great detail, due to time constraints). I think what xeno is doing is interesting, an investment of time and effort, and he's coming from a good place. As such, I'd particularly appreciate if the discussion here was kept respectful and constructive. Disagreeing with something doesn't require tearing it down.