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Author Topic: Unify fleet points and deployment points?  (Read 4278 times)

Morrokain

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #15 on: February 20, 2020, 04:38:14 PM »

I like how that in-dev fleet is composed. A few capitals as the meat of the composition with a slight emphasis on cruisers- alongside some destroyer and frigate support. Good stuff!
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Lucky33

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #16 on: February 20, 2020, 09:19:17 PM »

The problem is that it looks like the first wave of the current top tier Hegemony bounty. Only weaker due to d-mods. Difficulty wise its a breeze for the standart three battleship deployment at 300 dp battle size. And perfectly doable with two. More importantly, its much more susceptible to the SO rush.
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Plantissue

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #17 on: February 22, 2020, 10:06:26 AM »

It does look relatively much weaker. Not only are the ship DP about 70% of the biggest fleets, it is primarily composed of cruisers, so is weaker than a DP total. "Realistically" speaking, a fleet for battle would have the majority of its power in capital ships not cruisers.
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Morrokain

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #18 on: February 22, 2020, 01:53:43 PM »

I'd say going up to ~5 capitals per fleet would be fine, but remember that nearby fleets support as well, so too many capitals makes battles a little one dimensional considering how deployment works. If the major composition element is cruisers, it keeps all classes of ships more relevant in the late game, imo.

I will create a separate topic for this if it proves necessary, but radical idea incoming based upon the last few responses!  ;D

The player may feel the need to deploy as many capitals as they can if the enemy fleet generally doesn't have an overwhelming number of them too. The idea here is that the player assumes that would give them an advantage considering their oftentimes numerical disadvantage (arguable). Quality over quantity since quantity cannot be achieved.

To discourage capital spam by the player (completely arbitrary limiters are generally bad, but I don't think this suggestion would fall into that category) would it be possible or easy to make it so that a skill is required to deploy one? So that a capital must have an attached officer with the necessary skill to be usable in battle?

It would obviously be under leadership, and might make that more attractive and serve to partially balance out the power creep from the combat skill line.

Now, because that by itself would probably feel really bad or too limiting to a lot of people, the caveat would be that the player could use an undetermined number of story points to personally pilot a capital (or maaayybe to deploy one either without an officer or with an officer without the necessary skill) to circumvent that requirement with another resource cost to discourage doing it too often.

Idk, there are probably a lot of holes I haven't considered but the intent is to generate discussion.
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #19 on: February 22, 2020, 02:06:36 PM »

I don't think that would do anything to change fleet compositions, it would just be a skill tax. Unless you could spend those skill points in a way that would make a fleet with no capitals consistently beat a fleet with capitals, you would be forced to take those skills. It seems very unlikely for that balance to ever be achieved. I never deploy un-officered capitals either so, this really just sounds like a mandatory skill for both the player and officers.

Edit: not all officers. There would be a choice about how many officers to take the skill on, but that would be about the only decision created by the skill IMO. I'm also not sure how it would work with the new skill system.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2020, 02:21:36 PM by intrinsic_parity »
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Grievous69

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #20 on: February 22, 2020, 02:16:27 PM »

@Morrokain
Sorry if it seems I'm immediately *** down your throat but honestly that seems like a bad idea. I mean it would sound ok if the target was some super ship or dreadnought, but vanilla doesn't have those. The issue here is that there's a huge difference in some capital ships (more so than any other class), on one side you have Atlas MkII, and on the other the Paragon. Both are obviously capitals and both would need a skill to be usable which is absurd. You're punishing the player for using weaker capitals and then only thing you'd see are Paragons and an Astral here and there. Your suggestion creates more problems than it ''fixes''. I'm using the word fix like that because there are constant posts about capital spam acting like every single player has a 10 Paragon fleet. Well good job you found a strat that works, here's a cookie. Then using carriers is a problem, SO fleets are a problem, Sabots are a problem. - to everyone who thinks having more than one capital in a fleet is a mortal sin

(Obviously balancing is always a concern but I'm really tired of the exaggerations.)
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Alex

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #21 on: February 22, 2020, 02:34:52 PM »

The question is, what will a typical player fleet look like after the skill changes? Consider that the fleetwide effect skills - while strong - will start to drop off pretty quick if one stacks a large number of capital ships. And that a number of fleetwide effects boost smaller ships in the first place, or let smaller ships boost larger ships.

(I do see where the idea for a "can use a capital" skill is coming from, though - it's a way to reduce capital ship power indirectly. But I'm not sure that locking an officer into "only ever useful on a capital ship now" is good. An alternative way to go could perhaps be to reduce the impact of player/officer skills on larger ships; it kind of "makes sense" and would do roughly the same job. Not sure that it's necessary, though.)
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Morrokain

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #22 on: February 22, 2020, 02:50:32 PM »

@intrinsic_parity Yeah you do a good job of pinpointing some of my own thoughts/hesitations. The idea, and you already touched on this, was more that players taking things like combat skills would reliably beat capital fleets in smaller ship compositions and players using capitals through the skill would be just as combat viable. To it being a hard balance, yes definitely, but we already have that concern from frigate captains. I'm not trying to advocate either way, to be honest, this is just getting my thoughts out there. If you are curious as to my personal play style, I would be in the camp of several capitals, the rest cruisers, with a "rear guard" of sorts when using destroyers and frigates. I think capitals are only interesting, in a way, when they require support from other ships to truly get their worth out of them, but that's just my opinion and I definitely agree it can be hard to do. On the other hand, I don't want capitals to be completely disregarded (like before we had burn speeds and campaign boost skills) and if combat skills and other story point options are "just better" that is likely to happen. I do think that those who want to fly frigates all game already feel that way, and are often more vocal in the community as a result, though.

@Grevious69 You're good, but thank you for the clarification of intent and overall civility. :) The point was to brainstorm more than thinking it was a rock solid idea. You have a really good point regarding the strength differential between capitals. I'll add that- considering the idea of dreadnoughts is something that crops up in mods all the time (and really the paragon fits the bill) I was thinking of ways to make those not just the best option (often locked by rarity or in game expense) and promote other composition types. No most players don't fly around with all paragons, but if you could you probably would if you didn't take into account personal flavor preferences or aesthetics. Power wise it feels like a no brainer to me- and to further clarify that I want to say I think there is nothing wrong with that and it is exactly how a dreadnought should operate, truthfully. REDACTED ships being pilot-able by story points was sort of in line with this idea (low max CR in those cases though), so figured I'd at least put it out there.

*EDIT*

@Alex That sounds very interesting considering your description. I'm excited to see how all of that works out!
« Last Edit: February 22, 2020, 02:52:51 PM by Morrokain »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #23 on: February 22, 2020, 03:03:44 PM »

TBH, I think the way to solve a capital spam problem (if there is one) is ship availability. Make them rarer, both to fight against and to obtain, and then its ok that they're very strong. I might actually make another thread about ship availability, I've been thinking about it for a while. I personally have rarely felt the need to have more than or two capitals. The only time I really want them is when fighting big remnant stacks, and then its just to abuse DP mechanics so the pilotability thing wouldn't even matter all that much.
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Morrokain

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #24 on: February 22, 2020, 03:46:38 PM »

I would tend to agree regarding ship availability. Fighting less capitals would probably reduce a new and inexperienced player's demand for capitals, too.

Iirc, I made a suggestion a while back that open markets (no matter the colony size) ideally shouldn't carry capitals or especially rare cruisers. I think that would be better served by being locked behind military markets and very, very rarely made to be available on the black market in the largest of colonies. It makes owning a capital feel more like a big accomplishment. I remember back in the day the lore kind of hinted at that being the case too, but that may have changed since then.

Regarding the skill changes:

Alex, if I may make a small suggestion there: Try and emphasize fleet synergy in most cases rather than compartmentalizing boosts to specific ship types (frigates, carriers, capitals, etc). The reason for this is that it will prevent even minor subjective "imbalances" of skill strengths from causing specialized fleets using one type to be more attractive than diverse compositions.

(I think you are already doing this considering your description of how the skills tend to work, but it's pretty easy to fall into that trap if past games I've played- looking at you, WOW >:( - are any indication so I figured I'd point it out as being a potential pitfall of this kind of system.)
« Last Edit: February 22, 2020, 04:41:58 PM by Morrokain »
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Megas

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #25 on: February 22, 2020, 04:15:44 PM »

A major reason why I use capitals is PPT - they have the most.  Another secondary reason is Officer Management.  Player can get away with none, although I would want one at least for six.

Want to make smaller ships more useful, don't make endgame fights take too long to win if player does not use high-risk death-or-glory builds like SO berserkers.
« Last Edit: February 22, 2020, 04:17:36 PM by Megas »
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intrinsic_parity

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #26 on: February 22, 2020, 04:51:10 PM »

I definitely agree that ppt needs to be changed to match intended fleet size and battle size, and I don't think that is currently balanced, but the changes to skills and fleet generation could alter all of that on the next patch. I don't mind ppt as a mechanic but I think it should be aimed at limiting cheese and solo strats rather than having a major effect on fleet composition.
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Morrokain

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #27 on: February 22, 2020, 07:00:48 PM »

I definitely agree that ppt needs to be changed to match intended fleet size and battle size, and I don't think that is currently balanced, but the changes to skills and fleet generation could alter all of that on the next patch. I don't mind ppt as a mechanic but I think it should be aimed at limiting cheese and solo strats rather than having a major effect on fleet composition.

+1
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Plantissue

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #28 on: February 23, 2020, 06:52:33 AM »

I don't really see a problem with the player using capitals. Why try to restrict what other players may want to do? Why restrict player choice to match a personal coneception of what your own fleet should be?
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Alex

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Re: Unify fleet points and deployment points?
« Reply #29 on: February 23, 2020, 08:23:25 AM »

I think you weren't talking to me directly, but just wanted to say: to me it's about incentivizing using other ships more, to me; capitals are a bit too good right now and there's less variety - and thus less good choices - than there could be.

That could be approached by making other ships better, capitals worse, something indirect like ship availability, or a mix of all these, but regardless - as with most balancing, the goal is to increase the number of viable choices!
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