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Author Topic: Ship classes balance  (Read 12375 times)

TrashMan

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Ship classes balance
« on: August 31, 2019, 09:18:23 AM »

Is it just me or does it seem off?
Capitals are a must, smaller ships cannot compare unless they have a cheap gimmick like phasing, teleporting/time manipulation. This is for two reasons:

1) Capital ship range. Big ships have longer weapon range. The Targeting modules have a greater increase for larger ships. This seems wrong to me. Why would range be determined by ship size, rather than specific weapon?
Should range be completely weapon specific, with larger weapons having more range and the Targeting modules having a fixed weapon increase? That way, a smaller ship with a large mount would have the same range as a capital ship.

2) Big ship mobility modules. Some have them and are a pain in he ass to deal with. Your small ships start getting damaged before they get into range, and they can't retreat fast enough. Mods make this even worse, as a lot of them have such modules. For vanilla, remnant ships are a prime example of cheese. Smaller ships are a walking coffin if brought against them (Radiant being the most cheese, being able to teleport into your formation, blast a frigate/destroyer to bits and teleport out).

Smaller ships simply do not have the shield and armor to stand against capitals and increased range and capital mobility simply make it worse. Just look at the best small ships the player regularly use. They all have such "get out of trouble for free" card gimicks
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TaLaR

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2019, 09:43:22 AM »

1) A capital without range advantage can't do anything against a much faster DE. As a DE I'd just attack from exactly max range retreating just a bit when I need to vent. 2 DEs could easily tag-team any capital that doesn't one-shot them with TLs.

2) Radiant is OP and there is nothing else to say about it, but other mobility system's are generally avoidable. AI is just not smart enough to anticipate their use to be able to avoid in time. This mostly means reserving mobility system charges and remaining close enough to allies.

It's not that smaller ships have unusable stats, but they need much more precise range/speed/flux management and threat estimation (how and whom to engage and who should be simply avoided). 'Let's try and see where it goes' that AI practices is not a workable approach in a fight against an overall superior ship.

Plus game mechanics pretty much plain prohibits small ship fleets with 10 officer limit.
« Last Edit: August 31, 2019, 09:45:22 AM by TaLaR »
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Thaago

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #2 on: August 31, 2019, 09:51:18 AM »

The game made the choice that bigger ships are slower. With how combat works, this means they MUST have longer range to compensate. Capitals without escorts are still easily swarmed, flanked, and killed by equal DP of smaller craft, its only in a battle line that they stand out.
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Grievous69

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #3 on: August 31, 2019, 10:07:02 AM »

Don't forget that small targets are also harder to hit unless you have beams. And I don't get the issue, you need big ships to fight the most difficult enemy in the game currently? Well no ***. That's like complaining why frigates are a thing in early game. Besides, we already know the new skill system will help smaller ships/fleets more than now.
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TrashMan

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #4 on: August 31, 2019, 10:36:23 AM »

1) A capital without range advantage can't do anything against a much faster DE. As a DE I'd just attack from exactly max range retreating just a bit when I need to vent. 2 DEs could easily tag-team any capital that doesn't one-shot them with TLs.

A capital would still have more long-range firepower, since he has more big guns.

ON a another note, do you think the ship COUNT limit should be replaced by a total FP limit (for player). right now, because max fleet size is determined by a number of ships, everyone endgame fleet is all capitals to make max use of it. But if you run that into a FP limit, then you could have a larger flee of smaller ships.
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Grievous69

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #5 on: August 31, 2019, 10:37:59 AM »

1) A capital without range advantage can't do anything against a much faster DE. As a DE I'd just attack from exactly max range retreating just a bit when I need to vent. 2 DEs could easily tag-team any capital that doesn't one-shot them with TLs.

A capital would still have more long-range firepower, since he has more big guns.

ON a another note, do you think the ship COUNT limit should be replaced by a total FP limit (for player). right now, because max fleet size is determined by a number of ships, everyone endgame fleet is all capitals to make max use of it. But if you run that into a FP limit, then you could have a larger flee of smaller ships.

Alex already said he'll be removing the 30 ship hard cap in the next update.
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Megas

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #6 on: August 31, 2019, 10:43:55 AM »

Alex already said he'll be removing the 30 ship hard cap in the next update.
The penalties for excess will probably be severe like it is for exceeding cargo.  The soft cap will probably be most useful for fleet shuffling immediately after player recovers a bunch of ships or swaps ships at his base.  It stinks not being able to recover ships (dead enemies or that derelict Legion XIV) because you were at the fleet cap.

It is probably less work for Alex for a soft cap than it is to check for everything that plays nice with hard caps and other features hurt by hard caps (like no ship recovery).
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Grievous69

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #7 on: August 31, 2019, 10:47:11 AM »

Alex already said he'll be removing the 30 ship hard cap in the next update.
The penalties for excess will probably be severe like it is for exceeding cargo.  The soft cap will probably be most useful for fleet shuffling immediately after player recovers a bunch of ships or swaps ships at his base.  It stinks not being able to recover ships (dead enemies or that derelict Legion XIV) because you were at the fleet cap.

It is probably less work for Alex for a soft cap than it is to check for everything that plays nice with hard caps and other features hurt by hard caps (like no ship recovery).

Wait is that right? I just remember him saying that he'll get rid of it to see how it plays out, since supplies/fuel/crew are already kind of a soft cap. Don't recall seeing anything about penalties.
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Tackywheat1

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #8 on: August 31, 2019, 10:49:12 AM »

You forget that capitals also have very high supply and fuel costs as well as slowing down fleet burn speed (something remedied by tugs which use horrific amounts of fuel).
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Alex

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #9 on: August 31, 2019, 10:50:29 AM »

The penalties for excess will probably be severe like it is for exceeding cargo.  The soft cap will probably be most useful for fleet shuffling immediately after player recovers a bunch of ships or swaps ships at his base.  It stinks not being able to recover ships (dead enemies or that derelict Legion XIV) because you were at the fleet cap.

It is probably less work for Alex for a soft cap than it is to check for everything that plays nice with hard caps and other features hurt by hard caps (like no ship recovery).

This is exactly correct, yeah.
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Megas

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #10 on: August 31, 2019, 11:04:16 AM »

Wait is that right? I just remember him saying that he'll get rid of it to see how it plays out, since supplies/fuel/crew are already kind of a soft cap. Don't recall seeing anything about penalties.
True, but whenever I exceeded something for cargo due to looting too much, supplies just bleed like crazy (and burn might be slowed), and it is a very good idea to jettison excess as soon as possible to stop the bleeding.  If exceeding cargo is punishing enough that you usually want it to avoid at all costs, I think ships following similar rules would make sense.
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Tackywheat1

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #11 on: August 31, 2019, 11:07:27 AM »

Wait is that right? I just remember him saying that he'll get rid of it to see how it plays out, since supplies/fuel/crew are already kind of a soft cap. Don't recall seeing anything about penalties.
True, but whenever I exceeded something for cargo due to looting too much, supplies just bleed like crazy (and burn might be slowed), and it is a very good idea to jettison excess as soon as possible to stop the bleeding.  If exceeding cargo is punishing enough that you usually want it to avoid at all costs, I think ships following similar rules would make sense.

Excess cargo is not always punishing. If I don't have enough cargo space but there is excess supplies I take them on even with the supply cost debuff because they provide a nice buffer
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Megas

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #12 on: August 31, 2019, 11:12:05 AM »

Quote
Excess cargo is not always punishing. If I don't have enough cargo space but there is excess supplies I take them on even with the supply cost debuff because they provide a nice buffer
If I loot excess supplies, then fine, they get brought alone for the reason you posted.  Usually, it is something like more metal, more fuel, or other junk from salvage or raiding.  I do not want to trade supplies for such trivial junk.  If I bring too many supplies from base and did not check, I redock and put the excess in storage.
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Thaago

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #13 on: August 31, 2019, 11:15:51 AM »

1) A capital without range advantage can't do anything against a much faster DE. As a DE I'd just attack from exactly max range retreating just a bit when I need to vent. 2 DEs could easily tag-team any capital that doesn't one-shot them with TLs.

A capital would still have more long-range firepower, since he has more big guns.

ON a another note, do you think the ship COUNT limit should be replaced by a total FP limit (for player). right now, because max fleet size is determined by a number of ships, everyone endgame fleet is all capitals to make max use of it. But if you run that into a FP limit, then you could have a larger flee of smaller ships.

But capitals don't, as a rule, have bigger guns, because lower ship classes also have large mounts. And the range difference between medium and small isn't that big. And a lot of the firepower of capitals is in other mounts than just their larges. And there are long range mid sized guns - HVD/mauler come to mind. Not to mention beam spam at 1000 range, though thats less of an issue as its soft flux.

There would need to be a complete rework of the weapon ranges and mount composition of ships to compensate. There would need to be lots more weapons and mount types, because there would need to be a variety of weapons on cruisers/capitals for it not to be boring, but due to the range/speed restrictions they wouldn't be available on smaller ships without severe balance problems. Would cruisers even get capital weapons? If so, then they are faster and longer ranged, not good.

Its a lot of work for marginal gain. We can use years of hard earned knowledge: slower speed --> longer ranged maintains balance.

As a case study, look at the Falcon. It has lower firepower than several destroyers combined with weak defenses for a cruiser, while costing 15 supplies/DP (and 3 fuel/ly). Its ordinance points are low while its hullmods are full cost, and its flux stats are nothing special. What it has however, is range and speed combined: even with all of the deficiencies I listed, the range + speed combo makes it a darn good ship against every class of enemy.

For the side note: Personally, I think the combat system fails to work when the battle is too crowded - ships get in each other's way, pathfind strangely, and just generally the AI derps out and fails to make good choices because its too crowded. While it is a bit 'gamey' to limit the ship numbers, because I feel that it makes for more exciting, better gameplay, I am a supporter. The only exception is that it also messes up the salvage opportunities for industry fleets - I think the new system fixes that? I hope?
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Nysalor

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Re: Ship classes balance
« Reply #14 on: August 31, 2019, 11:19:32 AM »

Range being determined partially by ship size makes perfect sense; remember, this is space. Nothing ACTUALLY has a maximum range, just a range beyond which targeting error makes it vanishingly unlikely to hit anything. Bigger ships have more powerful targeting computers, and the spare space and mass to mount specialized hardware that smaller ships can't afford.

For balancing purposes, too, it makes good sense that your big slow line-holding ships have longer range than the fast light flaming and harassing ships - and the way flux works means that even with longer range, if four or five smaller ships get the chance to gang up on a capital they can tear it apart pretty quickly.
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