It's finally over
Thx Tart and Nia for organizing.
My feedback on the tourney. (again it’s feedback.. not meant to be “ you made dis, I *** all over it post..” )
Wall of text incoming !
1. I liked soft antispam rule. On one hand I hate antispam, because it means weaker fleets overall, on the other hands it softens blow from overpowered or wrongly priced ships, that some mods or vanilla have. Better balance is worth it.
2. I don’t like vanilla weapons exclusion. Mods shouldn’t be balanced around its mods weapons exclusively, if your hulls are broken by vanilla weapons, its bad hulls for the tournament, or campaign for that matter. More weapon choices means more variety and more interesting builds in the tourney. For example I wanted to put flak canon in hujings turret. I believed it would be the best weapon for the slot in the OP budget I had. And flak canon is never considered OP or anything. Well I had Burst Flak Cannon in Tiandong, so I can’t use flak canon (tourney rules). Burst flak was unsuitable and was 10 OP. So I considered even a railgun or small needler. But sadly had to pay full 10 OP for HMG as it preformed best of all bad options. Sadly ship was probably 4-5% worse because of that. And this kind of sacrifices add up, some factions are arbitrary luckier that they have precisely the weapon you need for specific build and with specific flux/OP stats. Difference between your faction having +-800 range kinetic and HE medium ballistic weapon (which you are forced use) or not (which means having access to like 10 vanilla weapons instead) is an arbitrary advantage, by virtue of not more powerful weapons, but having a choice for more suitable weapon for specific purpose and flux/OP budget.
3. Some factions don’t have enough ships (this is exasperated by weapon rule) to execute multiple (or sometime even single) viable fleet style/strategy. For instance I don’t think high tech could really build a standoff long range fleet and its only realistic option is rush down wide fleet. Vanilla fighter split is arbitrary and unbalanced. I think if factions were bundled together it (something like VHT+ THI+ PRV) it would mean better tourney because of better balance and larger variety of ships and strats and more space for creative fleet building overall.
4. This ties in into 70% CR. Most fleets were not at 70% CR to really experience this issue, but it’s not a lot of time for “steady” or “aggressive” fleets that are standoff/long range to safely kill the wave. Which is one of the reasons we chose rushing “balls to the wall” wide strategy. For instance defensive kiting ora+sylph fleet might be very strong in this format, but for me as player it seemed too risky to go for, solely because of CR. Also phase ships, certainly phase frigates, even with hardened subs are not viable, because of 70 CR.
5. I don’t think the pricing of cruisers and capitals is correct. I’d do (at least!) -15% discount on capital ships and -10% on cruisers to make them more competitive. I feel that most players with capital ships would have gotten more points overall if they just spammed DD’s with some cruisers.
6. Refitting budget feels bad. I think it should scale up the less points you have so you can fix your fleet and come back. And overall ratio of testing and prep before rd1 and after rd1 combined was like 7:1 for me. There was basically so little to do after rd1, it felt boring. Paying for hullmods again is weird.
7. I don’t think multiple front attacks or constant switching of wave directions is good idea, maybe for boss wave. But overall it just screws some fleets over and forces things like SO on carriers. While some factions have a reasonably fast carriers from the get go.. it’s not encouraging wide array of ships and strats, it forces players to field more “generalist” ships.. And finally combined with huge battlespace it basically invites randomness in. Randomness anchored in AI *** ups. If every wave was top down, on smaller battlespace, I doubt you’d see -+4 points variability in fleets, because there would be less room for AI rng.
8. And finally maybe waves 1-4 should be known before the round, or even at the beginning of the tourney. And also battlespace. So participants can actually build for the challenge they’ll face. The jazz around building waves so there is a good spread of scores, seems by definition that it would discriminate against some fleets, while helping other fleets.. We don’t have 10, or 20 or 100 rounds. For most “generally capable” fleet to win, instead it’s the one who got lucky that it performs well enough on unknown battle space against unknown waves. Having waves known beforehand would also transfer work load to make it all balanced from the organizer unto the players, and would hopefully prevent some uncompetitive 1 point flops…
9. Officers. (I know they were implemented 5 minutes before the tourney..) I don’t think giving everyone same officers that automatically level up is good design. Officers and their levels should be part of the hull budget or some officer budget. Get 5 level 1’s. Or 1 lvl 5 or get another ship. As they were implemented you basically put an officer on your strongest ships, there was no min maxing or any real decision making involved. You could basically tell by looking at DP points of the fleet where the officers would be, and where the most experienced officer would be.
10. Hull budget, while I had enough good frigates to make it work for me so I didn’t have an issue spending most of my budget every round. But I had this issue when I tried to build a high tech fleet. Sometimes you just can’t field useful hulls for your desired strategy that would fill the whole budget and you have a hole of 30k unspent or being 20k over... Being able to spend increments of (1000 credits) on officer exp would help with this. Or being able to transfer funds to the next round… Again balance wise it’s completely arbitrary if hulls in your faction are capable to fill your round budget well or not, it’s another 4-5% chance of your fleet being better if it does.
11. And lastly I’m not a fan of vanilla tourney patches that change ships stats for worse. Like what happened to omen. If it’s was just badly priced. Just change the price, don’t break viability of a ship itself.