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[v4l0rus]

agreed, nerfing OP things as if this was a MOBA doesn't result in more fun imo

[pairedeciseaux]

I think it’s hard to evaluate Tempest alone, some form of comparison with the competition is necessary.

Have a look at some of the existing 0.95 frigates stats:

Spoiler

[close]

I find it interesting that Hound and Tempest both have 180 max speed. I we ignore phase ships and mobility-oriented ship systems, the next below are Omen at 155 and Wolf at 150. Also Shepherd and Tempest both have drones. And, IMO Tempest does not have strong weakness. Of course Hyperion has crazy flux stats.

In previous versions of the game Tempest was the de facto practical / general-purpose super-frigate of the game. What made it and still makes it so strong? It is very small and very fast, has high burst damage with appropriate weapons used together with its ship system, has good sustained damage with appropriate weapons (which is was mostly unique for a high-tech frigate), it comes with 2 good “free” drones, AI is quite good at managing it.

I can’t stress enough how small size and high speed are important both offensively and defensively. This with the free drones, high burst damage and no weakness (see above) seem quite unfair to most other ships.

Now in 0.95 the new Hyperion is king. But there are other high performance frigates: Omen, Scarab, Shade and Afflictor. And arguably, all those 5 DP to 15 DP high-tech frigates over-perform in various ways. Mainly because of their mobility and high burst damage potential. Omen worth 6 or 7 DP? Scarab and Tempest worth 9 or 10 DP? Shade at 11 DP and Afflictor at 12 DP?

High-tech frigates used to have a true downside: lower peak performance time. But through officers and various skills, and possibly built-in Hardened Subsystems, the downside has mostly vanished. I do not consider the higher DP a downside, considering current performance.

(not to mention the boost given to Pulse Laser, IR Pulse Laser and Ion Pulser)

Trying to answer the initial question, as an alternative to or in addition to removing/reducing drones and the ship system, IMO another acceptable option would be to reduce Tempest max speed to 160 and downgrade the other mobility stats. Also, consider applying a peak performance time reduction to all high-tech frigates and then adjust the DP so that DP is better aligned with actual performance. An alternative to this would be to reduce the effect of the various PPT boosts. This could be viewed as an indirect buff to low-tech and midline, by asserting that they are the ones that can stay longer on the battlefield.

Direct buffs could also be applied to low-tech and midline. +10 or +20 max speed here and there. A deeper flux pool without changing dissipation could also be appropriate, especially for Hound, Lasher and Vigilance. Actually, thinking aloud here, maybe equalling or even reversing the max flux situation with respect to the various tech levels could help bring some balance: bigger flux pool for low-tech, leading to longer sustained damage output. Though that would mean tweaking shield stats. Hmm, maybe I’m just crazy.

[Megas]

Absolutely not on less PPT.  Frigates (except maybe Lumen/Glimmer) do not have enough PPT without skills, especially if they need Safety Override to use their weapons (or teleporter in case of Hyperion).  Frigates should not need to min-max for PPT just to make them last long enough in a fight.

It is bad enough that carriers are mediocre without skills.  No need to make more ships gimp unless player hyper-specializes into them.

[Ad Astra]

Stop. Nerfing. Stuff.

Like really.

Just stop.

Preach I say! Preach!

But yeah, over balancing is a thing and we can see it clearly here, excessive nerfing makes things boring, and trying to balance everything results in nothing balanced.
You can't male things equal in efficiency or effectiveness, that doesn't happen, won't happen, even an alpha AI core wouldn't be able to make that happen, so instead lets try to make the choice interesting.
The Tempest is fun, don't ruin it. Nerfing the Tempest won't make you use a Lasher, won't make you use a Hound, won't take attention away from high tech because other tech frigates are usually boring as hell. If the Hound had the capability to survive any confrontation at all maybe it would get used, if the Lasher didn't outflux itself the moment you strap some decent firepower in it, it would get used (make a ship system that reduces its flux instead, it already has enough firepower), if midline frigates weren't a weird attempt at a mini tank that in the end cannot stay, they would get used.
High tech frigates are used because they are what a frigate should be, fast and dangerous but fragile. Except they aren't so fragile anymore since skills make them able to have staying power, it would be understandable for a thing like the Monitor, but its just not reasonable for a high damage, high speed ship.
And now, instead of looking into other ships and revising these weird skill behaviors, we want to go around breaking stuff, see if the "too goodness" that came out of entirely different factors, goes away by disfiguring one of the coolest ship concepts we have.

If anything, at most touch its flux stats and shield efficiency, anything else will ruin the ship, leaving the place it occupied empty, we would lose something without winning anything.

tl;dr: Most frigates are uninteresting and skills interact with them in weird ways, the Tempest itself is actually perfectly fine.

[Igncom1]

I'd also say be cautious of balancing the fun out of a game.

If everything is equivalent, then why bother using anything different?

[Rauschkind]

tempest is quite strong, but also quite squishy. so nerf has hit it really hard too because it does not have a lot of op but benefits greatly from a lot of tank modules.

at 8 dp the only reason to pick it over the medusa at 12 is the fact that it is a frigate.
dunno. certainly one of the better frigates but i dont think to the point where it becomes a problem because it outclasses everything else.

[Rauschkind]

If everything is equivalent, then why bother using anything different?

of course, the opposite is true as well. if one is just plain better then everything else, why bother using anything else?

[Igncom1]

If everything is equivalent, then why bother using anything different?

of course, the opposite is true as well. if one is just plain better then everything else, why bother using anything else?

Not sure that applies as much to a SP game, but I do get what you mean.

Of course how often is it that people use fleets of nothing but Dooms despite them being the best ship in the game?

[SapphireSage]

First, I will start by saying that I am running a pure combat frigate playthrough at the moment, so I am somewhat biased, but I will say that I think balancing focus should look more toward the extreme outliers like Phase (Afflictor can kill all capitals in real-time seconds, Harbinger can solo Ziggs, and Doom can literally solo anything it wants to with little to no counterplay possible), Derelict Contingent destroyers tanking a fleet's worth of reapers, or Carriers that are unable to handle end-game due to all the anti-fighter skills and weapons added before looking at stuff that's on the top end of regular effectiveness.

For my playthrough Tempests are my general go-to for officers mostly because, aside from phase frigate and scarab, they seem to receive the most bonuses from officer skills and WolfPack Tactics. Omens are mostly there for EMP, PD, and shield efficiency but it gets very strong shields even without officers and can't do as much long-term with only two light weapons and the only skill that seems decent on a monitor is Point Defense. Arguably Brawlers might be a decent contender shelling from a distance with Ranged Specialization and Gunner Implants, but Tempests make the best general "line" ships for the frigate force due to a combination of their high speed and strong, bursty firepower.

Terminators, alongside Monitors and Omens, can help hold off nasty fighter swarms until their carriers get nuked by an Afflictor or Hyperion, but will falter if the parent carriers aren't dealt with soon enough and the two medium weapons allow them to pressure larger ships with backup to keep the pressure on while they back off for round two, but are limited on their own since a Tempest will only get a couple rounds off on a shield at best before having to retreat letting the target recover its flux. The officer tempests do decent against the officer spam so long as they have backup or other tempests to assist, but are limited against what they can do to other larger targets on their own unlike the other 8 cost ship, the Afflictor, which is able to effectively crush large bounties mostly unassisted.

[Ad Astra]

If everything is equivalent, then why bother using anything different?

of course, the opposite is true as well. if one is just plain better then everything else, why bother using anything else?

Not sure that applies as much to a SP game, but I do get what you mean.

Of course how often is it that people use fleets of nothing but Dooms despite them being the best ship in the game?

I'd think the focus should be about "flavor". To explain this because its a very subjective notion, I'd look at how capitals compare to one another, what you see are relatively competitive ships to one another but with clear gameplay differences which make them fun (if you like piloting capitals that is).
When contrasted to this, we don't see the same with frigates because aside from high tech, other frigates are very often useless to deploy, after there is certain amount of firepower in the field, a low or mid tech frigate will disappear the moment it gets into firing range. Armor tanking and low mobility are good for differentiating bigger ships, frigates can't afford either of those, so trying to make it happen is what gets us into this mess.

[SCC]

By the way, is it just me, or are Tempest's drones more fragile in this version?

Not sure that applies as much to a SP game, but I do get what you mean.

Of course how often is it that people use fleets of nothing but Dooms despite them being the best ship in the game?

Fleets of nothing but Dooms don't seem common, but a lot of people seem to be using Doom(s) in the endgame, some are saying they are the answer to everything and there are people (like me) who refuse to use Doom on the principle. It certainly is an outlier, hardly any other ship seems to find its way into so many fleets.
Fury might need a look into, too...

When contrasted to this, we don't see the same with frigates because aside from high tech, other frigates are very often useless to deploy, after there is certain amount of firepower in the field, a low or mid tech frigate will disappear the moment it gets into firing range. Armor tanking and low mobility are good for differentiating bigger ships, frigates can't afford either of those, so trying to make it happen is what gets us into this mess.

Centurion is doing okay later in the game, though it indeed is no Omen. Highlighted bit in particular is interesting, because high-tech capitals are doing fine, despite being at odds with their design philosophy. Paragon gets by with cheating high-tech (low range? ATC lol) and Odyssey gets by with its incredible mobility (caps are supposed to be slow? maybe yours). Small low-tech ships could likewise cheat/"cheat", similarly to the Centurion with its damper field.

[Amoebka]

I feel there's a difference between "overpowered" and "broken". Tempest might be outclassing all other frigates (don't think even that is the case), but that makes it merely overpowered, which is fine for a SP game. You can't beat every challenge the game throws at you by spamming Tempests (inb4 high tech best tech video, which had the author mod the ship limit and also use Doom, Aurora and pre-nerf Astral).

It's broken stuff like Doom (all phase ships, really) that needs adjustments.

[Hiruma Kai]

By the way, is it just me, or are Tempest's drones more fragile in this version?

More officers means any given enemy is more likely to pick up the PD skill, which will in turn increase damage against fighters and drones by 100%.  There's also the loss of the fleet wide -15% damage to fighters skill and 15% replacement rate that most player likely took.  Those would seem to be the major contributors (unless you had officers in tempests with carrier skills).

More on topic, it's a bit hard to separate the frigates from the skills in 0.9.5a.  It strikes me, if ships are balanced in the absence of officers and skills, then the skills aren't scaling properly with the base ship.  Of course, it becomes more pronounced if it requires an officer to get the benefit.  Assuming a ship is perfectly balanced without officers and skills, as soon as you introduce them, the high DP ships become more valuable, simply because officers are a finite resource.  10 officers in 80 DP worth of ships is better than 10 officers in 40 DP worth of ships.

Imagine if Wolfpack tactics did not require an officer but instead was a 60 DP limit skill not unlike Phase Corps, but applying to frigates. Suddenly 2 LP Lashers without officers against a Tempest without officer doesn't look quite so bad in that comparison.  At which point, the higher DP cost would be a downside.

Then there's the peak performance time.  With 3 (or 4 if phase) skills that can provide flat PPT bonuses (as opposed to the percentage bonuses on Hardened subsystems), they're naturally going to provide a larger benefit to ships with already low PPT.  One question to Alex might be, how does he choose when to use flat bonuses versus % based.  Crew Training is flat, presumably to help bias towards smaller ships (although at +30 is a smaller effect).  Reliability Engineering applies to a single ship at a time, so presumably is flat to help convince you to put officers in a 4 or 8 DP frigate instead of a 15 DP cruiser.

As far as I can tell, Wolf pack tactics has no need to be a flat PPT bonus.  It only applies to a single class of ship already, frigates with officers in them, and could just as easily been % based.  Making it flat simply biases it towards low PPT frigates, which are the high tech ones.

240 vs 180 seconds is a noticeable difference (Lasher vs Tempest, 33% more time).  Wolfpack + Reliability means  420 vs 360, which is less noticable (16.7% more time, and more importantly, both are starting to get close to cruiser PPT).  But you could replace the +120 seconds of Wolfpack with +67%.  180 still gets +120 seconds, but 240 gets +160. 400 vs 300 base, then the flat bonuses come in for 460 vs 360.  Now 27% more time.

So, I would probably be asking different questions than this thread.

One, are Tempests balanced well enough around their DP in the absence of skills and officers (keeping in mind a 1 DP shift is a 12.5% effectiveness swing - which is a lot in AI vs AI match ups).   Two, how do we make skills which are intended to help a category of ships (i.e. frigates) help them roughly equally?

[Megas]

Fleets of nothing but Dooms don't seem common, but a lot of people seem to be using Doom(s) in the endgame, some are saying they are the answer to everything and there are people (like me) who refuse to use Doom on the principle. It certainly is an outlier, hardly any other ship seems to find its way into so many fleets.

I like Doom, and I would like one or two in my fleets, just like last release.

However, since it can solo (or rather, cheese with chain-flagships) three Radiant Ordos that a more conventional fleet would wipe against, I have no qualms stuffing my fleet with eight or more Dooms to deal with endgame fleets, which I just did after confronting large Ordos with Radiants.  Full Ordos with Radiants are significantly stronger than normal human endgame (300k+ bounty) fleets or even the duo Tesseract bruiser brothers.

And my Dooms are not optimized.  Only one s-mod (Hardened Systems) and a 5/5/5 in Combat/Tech/Industry.

And this is all due to Systems Expertise and elite Phase Mastery.

There's also the loss of the fleet wide -15% damage to fighters skill and 15% replacement rate that most player likely took.  Those would seem to be the major contributors (unless you had officers in tempests with carrier skills).

Also, Expanded Deck Crew got hit hard even though it is still must-have for carriers.

Carriers become a lost cause once objectives start appearing and officers are on most ships.  Before then, they are okay at beating up weak pirates.  I dumped carriers completely late in the game.

[Amoebka]

how do we make skills which are intended to help a category of ships (i.e. frigates) help them roughly equally?

Instead of tying skill bonuses to ship sizes, make them scale based on the individual ship's DP.

So 5 DP frigates receive full bonus, 8 DP frigates receive a smaller bonus, 8 DP destroyers receive the same bonus as 8 DP frigates, 15 DP Hyperions receive almost nothing.