Hmm, you are right about the starting weapon issue. I like the idea of making swarmers available earlier. I'm having to rebalance damage in a lot of places anyway, and I would be ok with having swarmers be a medium mount that doesn't do a ton of damage and is just there to overwhelm PD. I'll do some testing.

I still think I am going to get rid of PDs being mountable on small mounts though. The opportunity cost of corvettes with 3 small PD mounts is too low for my tastes given how effective it is. Medium mounts would let you still do it, but at only 1 per corvette it makes the tradeoff better, and you are still free to load up a destroyer or something.

 

Paradox released a dev diary on Monday detailing what their plans are for the next few major updates. Looks like we've got a lot of changes on the the way.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...llaris-dev-diary-33-the-maiden-voyage.932668/

 

I take back what I said about Swarmers being good. I just took on an 8k AI fleet with an 18k fleet of Battleships with Swarmers, with a screen of defensive Corvettes I was throwing away rather than upgrade.

They had PD.

It wasn't even a contest. When the battle started, I was doing about 1/4th the damage over time they were, and I stopped dealing damage at about 13k. So much for "overwhelming point defense."

edit:

Oh my. The balance is so much worse than I thought. How bad? To counter PD with Missile tech, it is more effective to build 8 Corvettes with 3 Torpedoes (the slowest rate of fire out of all the missiles!) each than it is to build a Battlecruiser with 6 Swarmers. This will cost less, require less tech, deal more straight dps, bypass shields and have 33% more range! That's not even mentioning if you use regular Missiles instead, which are nearly double the effectiveness of Swarmers.

I was under the assumption that on top of their higher rare of fire, Swarm Missiles took multiple PD shots to kill because they were multiple objects. I was wrong. They still die in one hit, so it actually makes them the worst thing to build against PD when weighing ships by their naval capacity.

 

I kinda wish PD was a utility module(like armor and shields are as defensive objects) or since is has the "P" code, have it able to fit in either a weapon or utility slot

 

This is the only actual failing, the fact that despite being credited as countering Point Defense do to being a, well, swarm, they are actually a single object for the sake of Point Defense.

This is kind of like the weapon that is credited as being able to Chain(I believe 100% accurate and chaining, and Large mount only?), designed to counter Corvettes, you know, not actually being able to chain in the code, despite the description.

 

That sounds like a bug more than design.

 

I decided to load up a save right before attacking that same empire and outfitted my entire fleet with small missile mounts, which translated to about twice times as many PD targets in the air. It was by no means a slaughter, but I definitely came out on top this time, which I absolutely should have with over twice the fleet size.

If I were to approach weapon balance, I'd up the fire rate of Swarmers by an absurd degree, while lowering the actual damage to compensate. I'm talking like five times as fast, so they can really overwhelm far more PD per ordinance point. Have their overall DPS slightly lower than Missiles. Maybe a penalty to armor if they become too powerful? I'd prefer that the downside remain their short range though.

That being said, PD still definitely need a nerf. Even with an accuracy of 40%, a single PD Corvette can counter almost two entire Battleships of Large missile mounts. It makes me feel like weapon size should increase missile fire rate instead of damage, because it makes missiles favor small mounts to an absurd degree.

theronin

How do you feel about missile range being tied to type (Swarm, Missile, Torpedo, etc) instead of size, and fire rate being increased by size instead of damage? This can be easily justified by more firing ports instead of larger payloads.

 

Part of the issue with PD is that the listed 40% accuracy is incorrect. It has 100% accuracy hard coded in somewhere, and its damage is also hard coded to some unknown value (or maybe it's just 1 hit to kill a missile. Impossible to know because missile hp isn't a visible stat either).

Point is, PD is super buggy, so until we get a real patch to fix it you have to jump through hoops to make it reasonable. The one other idea I saw floated was reducing its range so it covers only a few ships instead of the whole fleet, but I'm not a huge fan of that approach. I'd have to do some playtesting to get a feel for how it plays out.

I like your idea of increasing fire rate instead of flat damage when size increases. Overkill will be an issue since there will be more missiles in the air when a target dies, but overkill is an issue anyways, and not one there is a fix for to the best of my knowledge.

Range in general is in a pretty weird place right now, because for the most part it has very little effect other than to give you an initial volley before the range closes at the beginning of a fight. But that entire first volley gets aimed at the front ship of the fleet, which is usually a Corvette, so you just get a massive overkill that wastes all the benefit you might get from range.

You can play with ship_behaviors to introduce a way for ships to actually try to keep their distance and fire at max range, but it doesn't really change much besides making it look prettier.

 

So it seems there's at least one build that can counter corvette spam. Battleships with a single large hyper shield and a bunch of shield capacitors regenerate the shields enough to pretty much ignore everything corvettes can throw at them, assuming you've got some point defence to catch those pesky missiles.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ing-larger-ships-useful.934638/#post-21218455

 

Hah, kind of amusing, although as the main poster even mentions, being a counter-design, it's sub-par against other large ships hitting them for heavy weapons due to the focus on sustain.
Burst>Sustain>Tank>Burst, or something like that, is a general concept for many games.
Unfortunately Sustain and Tank often meld a bit too well sometimes, and often make Burst a less viable playstyle(it's often a reviled playstyle when it is viable, to be fair).

---------- Post automerged at 09:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:11 PM ----------

On an unrelated note, as promised these are the current Mods I would most consider using, and might test some with a friend in just a little bit(aside from the myriad interesting Emblem and Race portrait Cosmetic mods):

Note, this is based off of just the first sixteen pages(sorted by popularity) or so of the Workshop, out of thirty-eight!

[Combat Balance]
Beautiful Battles
New Ship Classes & More
(or)
Ship Types Rebalanced (simpler balance mod)

[Traits]
Yet Another Traits Mod
(I kind of like this one, but it's apparently temporarily broken as of the last game version: Additional Traits)

[Misc.]
Linear Happiness
Fox Leader Mod
Expanded War Demands

[Cosmetic]
Six Tech View
Enhanced Ethic Tooltips
Remove Aura Graphics (fps helper mod, basically)
Unique Resources

[Random interesting massive-scale mods, not actually recommending to use, but impressive to look at]
Fight For Universe: Infinite Legacy
More Technologies
More Policies (submod of just three techs from the previous mod that unlocks three scaling Policy options)

 

There is a moderate to high chance that I won't be able to participate on Saturday. I'll try my best, but fair warnings

In such a case, is anyone willing to be a substitute player?

 

Can't make it on Saturday. By the time you finish up last week's game I'll be dead asleep I expect.

 

Well... An interesting devlopment happened in the course of the game... Two fallen empires got angry at me and both declared war on me. One just wanted to kill my leader while the other wants a lot more. Fun times.

 

Congratulations to the Collective for winning by the Fallen Empires defeating us.

 

Yes, so I was part of the winning team.

 

Federations kind of suck. I was literally 2 weeks away from declaring war on my AI neighbor, but then Jon had an uprising that declared war on him, so I could no longer do it because of federation rules. Then that AI was conquered by others later on so I missed out on 4-5 free planets.

This is what I had at the end of the game when the fallen empires attacked: http://imgur.com/GsMOXUc

 

Fucking Belra screwed us over.

Also, sorry for suddenly disappearing, guys. Some dudes bringing in some of the heavier gear downstairs dropped it on their leg and I had to go help.

New house rule: Never ally Belra, and kill him before fallen empires kill you.

 

I'm sure this is all some big misunderstanding.

 

Annuls of the East, Part II



The AI between Anarchy, Frank and I was like the balloon waiting to burst. The very moment war was declared on this poor defenceless civilisation, the entire region exploded into a flurry of battle. Combatants scrambled to tear a chunk out of the so-far peaceful AI.

The Highborn ascendancy to the south offered up parts of their newly claimed territory as a fig leaf to myself, to which Space England was space delighted. This cemented the very strongest of space alliances.

My neighbour Frank, however, was swarmed by the AI and lost his entire military fleet in one fell swoop. It was at this point that the galaxy smelt blood in the water.

Space England warred the AI, whose armies were weak from conflict. Her ally The Highborn Ascendancy, however, seized the rare opportunity a completely defenceless empire afforded: Frank was no match for these armies and was forced to submit as a vassal, and much salt was had by all.

England won her wars, settling comfortably into the new legroom her territory gave her, and the galaxy calmed for a moment. But trouble in the West arose... the Salty League of Villainy had poked at the wrong hive... they'd drawn the ire of not one, but two fallen empires.

As with the one small AI that started it all, blood was in the water. The galaxy is a vicious, vicious place, after all...

And The Collective took to it like space piranhas.

-

WINNER BY SUBMISSION: The Collective

-

But the war is never over...
​