View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0002323 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Balance Tweaks | Jan 9, 2011 12:13 pm | Jan 17, 2011 11:52 pm | |
| Reporter | mr_lolz | Assigned To | keith.lamothe | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 4.064 | ||||
| Summary | 0002323: Balance: Spire Stealth Battleships | ||||
| Description | These are much too cheap in the players hands and overpowered in the AIs hands. *** COST *** an MK I spire stealth battleship costs 16,000 Metal 6000 Crystal 1000 Energy this is _ridiculously_ cheap compared to any other starship, eg, the light starship, which costs 4x as much and is worse in every possible way. at MK III, they have 2x the DPS of a flagship while costing much much less. at these prices the player should ALWAYS unlock MK I - III off the bat and try and get a factory for IV as soon as possible, because these are hyper cost effective and eaisly microed to escape, cloak and repair. imo they should cost sameish as light starships --> zenith starships as they go up in MK. *** DPS *** with the 2 second reload time, is VERY high. pared with their stealth, dampening and by no means fragile hull this makes them very powerful. *** USED BY THE AI *** the primary thing that alerted me to how insane these are is when I got an AI that had them unlocked. firstly, the AIP 10 waves often included 2-3. bearing in mind that 2-3 spire battleships is 100%-150% of the shipcap, thats the equivlent of 200-300 bombers on its own. AI planets often have ludicrous numbers of these ships - 7 on the first MK III world I entered at AIP 25. that is 350% of the player shipcap- the equivalent of 350% shipcap of bombers (700?). result: instadeath at the hands of a ridiculous concentration of 'fleetship' starships I would add here that similar concentrations occour of other low shipcap ships (ie, the other spirecraft & zenith bombers/frigates) and this has often been a problem ffor players. reinforcement of each shiptype really needs to be more proportional to shipcaps. (ie, 1 battleship for every 100 shipcap 200 ships, not 10 battleships for 100) | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Well, I balanced these as a bonus ship type rather than a starship type, and haven't really tried to apply the same rules to starships (not entirely sure I _should_, of course). Anyway, here's the rationale: They're a 0.03x ship-cap type, and don't scale with ship caps. Anyway, the mkI cap is 198 * 0.03 = 5.94 ~= 5 (since it rounds down). I can't actually check in game right now because I've got some unstable changes (I've got an older stable version but don't know if it has the current ship cap for these). So, a stealth battleship mkI should have a balance in the same general ballpark as about 39-40 (on high caps) fighter mkI, bomber mkI, or missile-frigate mkIs. And since it's a bonus type instead of a triangle type it should actually be roughly 1.5 times as useful, though that's not necessarily going to be in all areas (hp, dps, cost, specials etc); in general the "cloaking" ability counts for a significant chunk of that extra utility but certainly not all of it. So, specifically: A cap of mkI stealth battleships has around 9.6 million hp. A cap of mkI fighters has roughly 16 million, a cap of mkI bombers or mkI missile frigates around 15 million. So the battleship is actually significantly on the low end here but that's ok, particularly for a cloaking type. Also on the subject of survivability, stealth battleships have 0 armor, where fighters and missile-frigates have 150*mk and bombers have 600*mk. One last note on survivability: stealth battleships have the UltraHeavy hull type, which is one of the poorer ones (at least, last time I checked) with a fair number of things having strong bonuses against them. A cap of mkI stealth battleships costs about 110,000 metal+crystal to build and 10,000 energy to run. For fighters it's 39,200 and 9,800. For bombers it's 156,800 and 19,600. For missile frigates it's 156,800 and 39,200. So a good chunk cheaper than average, particularly on energy. But within the ballpark. Offensively, against hull types it has no bonus for, a cap of mkI stealth battleships will do about 90,000 DPS. A cap of mkI fighters does about 58,000 to non-bonus, bombers and missile-frigates about 31,000. Bonus wise, stealth battleships get 1.4x vs Structural (which includes FFs), Artillery, and Composite. A cap of mkIs has about 125,000 DPS against those. Fighters get about 140,000 DPS against bonus targets, and bombers and missile frigates about 310,000. Stealth battleships also lack armor piercing, which isn't as big a deal for them since their per-shot damge is pretty high (4000*mk). Still, against high-armor bonus types (around 600*mk or 750*mk) the lack of armor piercing can mean a 15% reduction in dps. So stealth battleships are a good chunk better than triangles for general purpose damage (which is a big chunk of their "bonus types should be better than triangle"), but triangles beat them handily when working against bonus targets. Looking at it as a whole, I do agree that they're a bit cheap (particularly in energy) but not so much as to call for a major change. Being moderately cheap is just one of their advantages. I haven't mentioned Light-starships/Flagships since I haven't even begun to rebalance starships or re-examine their baselines, etc. Honestly I'm not sure how they'll compare to bonus types, or to what extent they should. Obviously it needs to not be a no-brainer to "always tech starships" or "always tech fleet ships", but the statement "mkII stealth battleships are massively better than flagships" is not fundamentally more true than "mkII triangle ships are massively better than flagships", right now. For the AI, it's really really supposed to be limiting the number the AI can have on each guard post to 4 (per mark, though generally AI planets don't have multiple marks of the same ship type). If you're seeing more than that on a specific guard post please let me know because that's a bug. If you think that number should be lower, let me know, certainly can consider it. If you're seeing excessive numbers in waves please use the Advanced Logging thing to get the wave calculations and post them so we can scrutinize the specific numbers. Thanks :) |
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Oh, the radar dampening ability does help their survivability quite a lot (not so much in small fights, it's 8000, but when the entire AI planet is going nuts on you or if it's the AI using them against you), that's a good point. |
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'A cap of mkI stealth battleships costs about 110,000 metal+crystal to build and 10,000 energy to run. For fighters it's 39,200 and 9,800.' mkI stealth battleships cost 16,000 metal & 6000 crysal. They have a shipcap of 2. a full cap of mkI stealth battleships costs 32,000 metal & 12,000 crystal, and uses a total of 2000 energy. that is VERY cheap! (note, high shipcaps- it might be affecting the price?) 'For the AI, it's really really supposed to be limiting the number the AI can have on each guard post to 4 (per mark, though generally AI planets don't have multiple marks of the same ship type). If you're seeing more than that on a specific guard post please let me know because that's a bug' keith.. a planet with 5 gaurdposts could have 20 stealth battleships. thats 10x the complete shipcap. thats 20x the total DPS of a triangle shipcap. consider that can be 20 MK IV stealth battleships- that is more DPS than the player can unlock in a normal game on one AI planet! more than 1 shipcap of these guys is horrifiyingly brutal- play a test game against two of that AI that only use spire fleet ships and swiftly realise the meaning of pain :p |
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There's a bug in the lobby tooltips when displaying ship caps. I just started a game with SSBs and unlocked mkII and mkIII to check the caps. It was 5 MkIs, 5 MkIIs, and 4 MkIIIs. For the guard-post-cap, I'm happy to drop that from 4 to 2 or even to 1, I didn't go lower earlier because I didn't want to nerf an AI that happens to pick them. |
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Their max-per-guard-post was halved lately, iirc. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 9, 2011 12:13 pm | mr_lolz | New Issue | |
| Jan 9, 2011 4:10 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0008086 | |
| Jan 9, 2011 4:13 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0008087 | |
| Jan 9, 2011 4:17 pm | keith.lamothe | Assigned To | => keith.lamothe |
| Jan 9, 2011 4:17 pm | keith.lamothe | Status | new => feedback |
| Jan 10, 2011 10:41 am | mr_lolz | Note Added: 0008131 | |
| Jan 10, 2011 10:41 am | mr_lolz | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Jan 10, 2011 10:43 am | mr_lolz | Note Edited: 0008131 | |
| Jan 10, 2011 10:47 am | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0008134 | |
| Jan 17, 2011 11:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0009025 | |
| Jan 17, 2011 11:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Status | assigned => resolved |
| Jan 17, 2011 11:52 pm | keith.lamothe | Resolution | open => fixed |
