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[Perq]

Hello,

I've been playing the game for last few days quite a lot. Maybe too much. D:
I have some feedback regarding the end-game/general balance.
For the record - I still love the game, and I will play it a loooooooooot in years to come.

Some background of my feedback - I'm quite experienced player, PoE veteran and overall theorycrafting nerd. I can't play games "the normal way" anymore - I min-max whenever I can.
My experience is usually "this game is too easy", and you may guess that this is what I'm going to imply here.
I'm aware that this is not universal for everyone, so if you find the game hard - good for you!

So, to the point:
I think the game is too easy in late game.
The early game, when you don't have much of a fleet and resources feels great - you have to watch out to not get stomped by larger fleets, you have to consider if you have enough fuel and supplies to get where you want to get and if it is even worth the time.

In late game, however, this changes and it gets a little boring.

What my min-max instinct got me into is fleet of 5 XIV Onslaughts (3 Heavy Needlers, 3 Hephaestus, 4 Annihilators, 4 Dual Flaks), 2 Astrals that pretty much can stomp anything and anyone, without any losses whatsoever.
So here is my problem one - I think capital ships are too good.
The reasons for that may be as follows:

- Flux mechanic is too polarizing. If your ship can handle flux to tank and shoot at the same time (Onslaughts), there is very little way of ever losing any fight. If you cannot, your ship can do nothing. Add massive armor, and there is close to nothing that can stand in your way.
- Capital ships are too good in too many aspects. I think that certain types of ships should be good at certain tasks, and not much else. I think that capital ships should be used to fight other capital ships and stations, and maybe overwhelm destroyers. They should not be good at fighting frigates/fighters.
I think the reason that they are so good at everything is that weapon sizes don't imply anything more than "this gun does more damage". Larger weapons should have far slower tracking speed, meaning they can easily hit bigger things, but not ones that are fast.
This would mean that larger ships would be easy to overwhelm with fast strike frigates, if not escorted by other ships that are good at destroying frigates - destroyers.
Overall I think this rock-paper-scissor is what would work best: Frigates are good against fighters/capital ships, but not so great against destroyers.
Destroyers are good against frigates and other destroyers, but get worse against cruisers/capital ships.
Capital ships are used to fight stations and other capital ships, and require escort.
Other aspect of capital ship domination is that they are too easy to maintain, given the staying lower and fire power they have.
I think that overall firepower of a unit in relation to its size/maintenance cost should be like this: fights to capital ships, by which I mean fights get the most fire power for their size/cost, while capital ships have less fire power, but far more staying power.

Regarding colonies:

- Raiding and destroying colonies is too easy. If anyone tries to send a raid against my colony, I just go there and raid every single building, until their stability is -20, which means that this colony will decolonize before it reaches any positive values.
Meanwhile, we have an option to use saturation bombing, that is claimed to be "atrocity". No point in using it, since I can just as well raid the colony 20 times which guarantees it will be gone in some time.
There is an option to stabilize it with money, but AI never uses it (not sure if AI factions even have "money" stat).
- Supplies/fuel availability is too big. This is somewhat tied to the power of capital ships, but maintaining such "I can kill everything" fleet is way too easy. Not sure what to do about that. Increasing cost of maintaining capital ships may be one option.
This is all I have for now, maybe will think of something when it comes to my mind.
Hope it helps D:

This is repost from reddit I made: https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/eulkhy/new_player_feedback/

[Grievous69]

Well the game doesn't have the real endgame yet, there's still to come, so it's not unusual your fleet of 7 capitals is dominating everything. That said have you explored high danger systems (ones with the red beacons)? Because Remnant Ordos are currently the strongest enemy in the game.

About capital ships being too good. Well they better be *** good since they're so expensive and have bad logistical stats. And they are vulnerable to frigates (especially the Onslaught), but the thing is you have 5 of them so making a deathball with officered Onslaughts is pretty easy. Try fighting any fleet bigger than yours and you'll see how vulnerable they really are. Funny how you didn't even mention Paragon since that's the capital everyone cries it's too good. Anyways if you got the hang of the game already I suggest trying out some mods for a real challenge. I assure you it won't be so easy then

[bobucles]

About capital ships being too good. Well they better be *** good since they're so expensive and have bad logistical stats.

Well, not really. A capital ship can cost the same as 4 destroyers to deploy, and they can definitely wipe out far more than 4 destroyers on the field. They also have strictly superior fuel and cargo capacity compared to smaller ships. Fleet size has a hard cap of 30 ships, that can be a swing of several thousand cargo capacity and fuel compared to flying small. It may not be as efficient, but it can keep a fleet going.

[TaLaR]

Try piloting an Afflictor. It's a frigate that can quickly delete capitals when properly player-piloted. AI got no clue to how to really use phase ships, so don't use them as benchmark. Chain deploy multiple Afflictors until all significant opponents are dead, then let your supporting fleet do the mop up.

Spark Drovers can also be efficiently spammed.

But other than these exceptions, yes, capitals are dominant and everything in game set up to put them into this position. Or at least 11 largest ships that fit your deployment limit, which means some lesser ships can be mixed in.
I mean you only have 10 officers and 30 ship slots total - efficient swarm fleets are already impossible at this point, since non-officered ships are fodder. Too many ships on field also simply bump into each other too much.

Current best solution to game being too easy is playing modded. Vanilla opponents lack officers, have smaller fleets with worse composition than most things you can meet in Nexelerin + factions.

[Grievous69]

About capital ships being too good. Well they better be *** good since they're so expensive and have bad logistical stats.

Well, not really. A capital ship can cost the same as 4 destroyers to deploy, and they can definitely wipe out far more than 4 destroyers on the field. They also have strictly superior fuel and cargo capacity compared to smaller ships. Fleet size has a hard cap of 30 ships, that can be a swing of several thousand cargo capacity and fuel compared to flying small. It may not be as efficient, but it can keep a fleet going.

All that becomes irrelevant when your fleet's burn speed becomes 7, that's the biggest hit imo. (which is totally fair, i'm not arguing there)

[Plantissue]

Large weapons generally have far slower tracking speed.

[Perq]

All that becomes irrelevant when your fleet's burn speed becomes 7, that's the biggest hit imo. (which is totally fair, i'm not arguing there)

I've filled my fleet with tugs, and now I burn at 20 with capitals, freighters and crew transports in.
Not really that much big of a hit, sadly.

Try piloting an Afflictor. It's a frigate that can quickly delete capitals when properly player-piloted. AI got no clue to how to really use phase ships, so don't use them as benchmark.

That is the problem - AI cannot use those ships to effectively attack my ball of death.
I also don't really pilot combat ships myself - I went full-on with logistics/support on my main character (I'm also really bad at piloting those things, lol).

[Grievous69]

I've filled my fleet with tugs, and now I burn at 20 with capitals, freighters and crew transports in.
Not really that much big of a hit, sadly.

''min-max'' - has 7 capitals with 4 tugs, LMAO

[jwarper]

Regarding capital ships, I think most capitals are currently fairly well balanced except for the Paragon.  A Paragon itself is not as vulnerable to smaller craft like other capital ships are.   Paragon is leaps ahead of any other capital both in offense and defensive capabilities.  It does cost more to maintain, but not that much more.   In my opinion, the Paragon should have its Hull/Armor/shield/flux ratings toned down or its costs increased even more.   It should be prohibitively expensive to own more than 1-2 Paragons since they can wipe entire fleets on their own.   

[Grievous69]

Regarding capital ships, I think most capitals are currently fairly well balanced except for the Paragon.  A Paragon itself is not as vulnerable to smaller craft like other capital ships are.   Paragon is leaps ahead of any other capital both in offense and defensive capabilities.  It does cost more to maintain, but not that much more.   In my opinion, the Paragon should have its Hull/Armor/shield/flux ratings toned down or its costs increased even more.   It should be prohibitively expensive to own more than 1-2 Paragons since they can wipe entire fleets on their own.

It has been mentioned many times, it's not the issue in Paragon but the AI plays too safe and just dances in its range. It takes like 4 destroyers to kill a Paragon if they all attack at once.

[intrinsic_parity]

It has been mentioned many times, it's not the issue in Paragon but the AI plays too safe and just dances in its range. It takes like 4 destroyers to kill a Paragon if they all attack at once.

If we are talking about optimally piloted and equipped ships, the paragon would probably kill two of the destroyers before they got in range. It's difficult to talk about 'optimal piloting' though because it never actually happens.

Also, the game doesn't have any goals/objectives or end game, so its really not possible to judge whether it is overall easy or hard other than whether you can successfully not die. It's definitely not hard to stay alive (although you can use the space start to make the beginning noticeably more challenging if you want). I'm not making any judgements about difficulty until the game is more complete.

Also to the OP: go farm remnants in a red beacon system (don't kill the station to keep them spawning) until you are mostly seeing fleets with 2-3 radiants, then see how many of those fleets you can kill at the same time. That's the best challenge in the game. In my experience, paragons are best in those fights, but I haven't tried onslaughts in a while. I generally consider onslaughts to be one of the weakest capitals. I'm also too lazy to get XIV ones so that could be relevant.

[xenoargh]

Hmm.

I don't see these as problems with Capitals per se; they should be very powerful by lategame.  The issues here are mainly cost-effectiveness.

Hard Fleet Cap means we want to stick the maximum power into our fleets.  That's going away, kind of, but how it's set up matters quite a lot.

Deployment Points for Capitals may be really off; it really shouldn't be possible to deploy 7 Capitals in a battle at once vs. AI forces that aren't decidedly superior in numbers.  It shouldn't be practical for players to build entirely Capital-centered deathballs. 

We have a lot of whacky stuff in the numbers for Deployment Cost that are probably behind this; I'd started initial work on balancing ships for DP (like my previous work on balancing vs. OP) but it's hard going and you can only ever get approximates because of the weird factors (ship size, Systems, the effects of Officers, etc.).  Essentially, my initial work indicated that the power curve for this stuff meant that DPs for Cruisers+ go up quite a lot, if (and only if) Cruisers / Capitals are also well-balanced in terms of what they deliver in combat (in short, weak "capitals" should actually cost fewer DPs in some cases, because they're just big targets, among other things).

[Alex]

Spoiler

Hello,

I've been playing the game for last few days quite a lot. Maybe too much. D:
I have some feedback regarding the end-game/general balance.
For the record - I still love the game, and I will play it a loooooooooot in years to come.

Some background of my feedback - I'm quite experienced player, PoE veteran and overall theorycrafting nerd. I can't play games "the normal way" anymore - I min-max whenever I can.
My experience is usually "this game is too easy", and you may guess that this is what I'm going to imply here.
I'm aware that this is not universal for everyone, so if you find the game hard - good for you!

So, to the point:
I think the game is too easy in late game.
The early game, when you don't have much of a fleet and resources feels great - you have to watch out to not get stomped by larger fleets, you have to consider if you have enough fuel and supplies to get where you want to get and if it is even worth the time.

In late game, however, this changes and it gets a little boring.

What my min-max instinct got me into is fleet of 5 XIV Onslaughts (3 Heavy Needlers, 3 Hephaestus, 4 Annihilators, 4 Dual Flaks), 2 Astrals that pretty much can stomp anything and anyone, without any losses whatsoever.
So here is my problem one - I think capital ships are too good.
The reasons for that may be as follows:

- Flux mechanic is too polarizing. If your ship can handle flux to tank and shoot at the same time (Onslaughts), there is very little way of ever losing any fight. If you cannot, your ship can do nothing. Add massive armor, and there is close to nothing that can stand in your way.
- Capital ships are too good in too many aspects. I think that certain types of ships should be good at certain tasks, and not much else. I think that capital ships should be used to fight other capital ships and stations, and maybe overwhelm destroyers. They should not be good at fighting frigates/fighters.
I think the reason that they are so good at everything is that weapon sizes don't imply anything more than "this gun does more damage". Larger weapons should have far slower tracking speed, meaning they can easily hit bigger things, but not ones that are fast.
This would mean that larger ships would be easy to overwhelm with fast strike frigates, if not escorted by other ships that are good at destroying frigates - destroyers.
Overall I think this rock-paper-scissor is what would work best: Frigates are good against fighters/capital ships, but not so great against destroyers.
Destroyers are good against frigates and other destroyers, but get worse against cruisers/capital ships.
Capital ships are used to fight stations and other capital ships, and require escort.
Other aspect of capital ship domination is that they are too easy to maintain, given the staying lower and fire power they have.
I think that overall firepower of a unit in relation to its size/maintenance cost should be like this: fights to capital ships, by which I mean fights get the most fire power for their size/cost, while capital ships have less fire power, but far more staying power.

Regarding colonies:

- Raiding and destroying colonies is too easy. If anyone tries to send a raid against my colony, I just go there and raid every single building, until their stability is -20, which means that this colony will decolonize before it reaches any positive values.
Meanwhile, we have an option to use saturation bombing, that is claimed to be "atrocity". No point in using it, since I can just as well raid the colony 20 times which guarantees it will be gone in some time.
There is an option to stabilize it with money, but AI never uses it (not sure if AI factions even have "money" stat).
- Supplies/fuel availability is too big. This is somewhat tied to the power of capital ships, but maintaining such "I can kill everything" fleet is way too easy. Not sure what to do about that. Increasing cost of maintaining capital ships may be one option.
This is all I have for now, maybe will think of something when it comes to my mind.
Hope it helps D:

This is repost from reddit I made: https://www.reddit.com/r/starsector/comments/eulkhy/new_player_feedback/

[close]

Hi, and welcome to the forum! Thank you for your feedback. I'll just echo an earlier comment that there's not much "endgame" stuff right now (aside from the REDACTED stations), so if the game falls off a bit once you get to that point, that makes sense - for most purposes, you've "won" by then.

(As far as Onslaughts and flux specifically - the Onslaught is actually pretty flux-starved in general, and needs to use its armor to tank, so I'm not sure that tracks. I mean, I'm sure it's working well for you, but probably not for that reason!)

[Perq]

I've filled my fleet with tugs, and now I burn at 20 with capitals, freighters and crew transports in.
Not really that much big of a hit, sadly.

''min-max'' - has 7 capitals with 4 tugs, LMAO

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

Thanks Alex! I've seen other people mention that late-game is not really developed much for now, and to be honest I don't really have that much of a problem with it, lol.
Also makes sense that at some point you have "won", as you said - can't expect to progress forever. But I guess some sort of "endless goal" with scaling difficulty may be possible some day.

That said - I still love the game and recommending it to everyone.

[TaLaR]

I don't see anything wrong with 7 caps, 4 tugs. That's exactly how many you need with Nav3 to get 20 sustained Burn.

Augmented drive field as tug replacement only makes sense if you want single larger ship that has one of highest OP values in it's size category (Paragon or Onslaught, but not Conquest or Odyssey) included into otherwise fast fleet.