jhell:

Thank you for clarifying. I have not touched the Balance mod since Fighters & Bombers hit, so that explains why the Consumption change surprised me. Please consider, however, what I wrote about prioritising Food expenditure (Consumption>Manpower>Outpost>Growth) instead of applying a negative Growth penalty for any shortcoming. As to combat changes, I like them as I now must put a little more thought into how to engage the different Pirate fleets (I have not played long enough to meet significant AI-race fleets). Multiple missile launchers needed to overcome flak defenses is a plus and encourage Small ships to be either missile ships or blaster boats rather than hybrids. (As an aside, for several patches now Unfallen expansion is hit or miss--the AI seems to have a difficult time dealing with Pirate fleets, and lose their vineships easily.)

CyRob:

Not Balance discussion, but thank you for making the mod. Your Food settings seem to produce a game pace that I enjoy. One item I note, however, is that with such changes it is better to supply an Outpost from a new Colony than from an established Colony, again to avoid negative Growth. On Outpost growth and expansion in general, I would rather see a system whereby Outposts grow only as much as the player is willing to supply them with FIDS, and such a system might replace the artificial Overexpansion limits altogether, but such ideas are probably incompatible with multiplayer.

Sotnik wrote:

I wonder how the mod/game is going to deal with the issue of the troops you leave at the conquered planets. Actually, I don't much understand how it works at the moment: are they returning to the orbiting ship? Are they lost? are they returned to the empire manpower pool? do they contribute to ownership?

This is already sorted. When you invade a planet, any troops left from a successful invasion are sent back to the fleet. If your fleet leaves, and the invasion is successful, it's transferred back to the pool. If your system is being invaded, and your fleet arrives, it transfers the troops to the invasion defense forces, and returns them to the pool once the invasion is over.

Hope this helps.

WeLoveYou wrote:

This is already sorted. When you invade a planet, any troops left from a successful invasion are sent back to the fleet. If your fleet leaves, and the invasion is successful, it's transferred back to the pool. If your system is being invaded, and your fleet arrives, it transfers the troops to the invasion defense forces, and returns them to the pool once the invasion is over.

I actually didn't know that. That's good to know.

Ship balance needs to be addressed in the next mod or patch. Reason being is the ai can be improved by allowing the tools of the game to be used to there fullest. Allowing fighters and bombers to be a viable strategy in ship construction. The detune of beams and some hp buffs would really have a positive impact on the ais ability to design and use ships as well as giving the player different avenues to chose from that are effective. Like rushing medium ships or carriars, which is not viable now. Increasing the use of f and b making them viable. The better balance weapons and space battles carry the more important battle cars become which was the intention in the first place. Just hope they are on the way soon. I very much appreciate the work gone into the game to flush the bugs out and add new content.  Now that its there it seems like a good time to make the games tools orientated with battles ship design and space combat all viable. I hope anyways :

There are some issues with your suggestions and observations ridesdragons.

First. It's not true that you couldn't get in close with beams if your opponent chooses long range. A long plus a short equals a single round of everything, ending at short (long, medium, short). Beams simply fired only in the short round. At medium range, beams now hit with full force, but fire less often during that round.

The devs have stated that they cannot make beams do PD against missiles because of the limitations of the combat system. There is no provision for it visually and I suspect that there would be major clipping issues. Kinetics in any space game have never behaved the way they do IRL so referencing Newton doesn't really get us anywhere since beams have great range in space too due to having no atmosphere to diffuse them faster than normal. Still not relevant because we need a gameplay solution that works within the confines of the combat system we do have.

That's actually what I believe is the current problem with combat. We went from 3 distinct damage types in ES1 to 2 which causes an imbalace because they are 4 different weapon types. What we should have is energy, kinetic and explosive damage types with a corresponding defense for each one. It is mostly kinetics (guns) serving two purposes that creates the real issue and causes problems when weighing it against other weapon types. Ideally, beams would be the only weapon with PD making short range ships more viable because they could shoot down missiles in the long and medium range and then rip into the enemy ships at short range. Unfortunately, we're stuck with some very annoying combat engine limitations. Flak should simply either be its own separate modules type or have each ship equipped with a default set of flak with support ships having more and or the ability to boost their own flak values via modules. 

ridesdragons wrote:

The problem with that is that short-range weapons will never see action. the whole "shoot down missiles until they get close so they can tear them a new one" only works if the only attack they're dealing with are missiles. my weapon loadout has always been kinetic/lasers, providing a 90/100/90 efficiency. I didn't beat short-range fleets because I used missiles, I beat them because I used long-range cards that they couldn't possible counter. they'll die long before they get close enough to do any damage. And that's assuming beams can do PD, which right now they can't. However, now that kinetic weapons are in the same spot that beam weapons were in, kinetic weapons are the new chump change, and beam weapons, which can be used at all ranges equally, are now the superior pick, because kinetic weapons will die long before they get within range to deal any damage, while beam weapons don't lose any efficiency if they fail to kill the kinetic ships by the time they get close enough, unlike missile-based designs. beam ships can kill a kinetic ship in that final phase. missile ships cannot.

The thing is that going short range SHOULD be a viable strategy. There just was very little thought put into how that would be achieved. Currently there are really no module selections or battle plays that cater to this. Typically, if you want to get up close to do short range damage, you would either rush through with superior speed (not applicable within the current confines of the battle system), have high enough defenses to survive until you get close (currently doesn't work well), or use stealth/sensor jammers to confuse your enemy until you get close enough to open up with your short range barrage. The latter could possibly be viable in our combat system with the right modules and battle plays available. 

Again, I'd love for beams to do PD. It makes sense and would balance out combat nicely, but that was one of the first things we asked the devs and they said no to. Feel free to ask again. Maybe they found a solution.

Slashman wrote:

Typically, if you want to get up close to do short range damage, you would either rush through with superior speed (not applicable within the current confines of the battle system), have high enough defenses to survive until you get close (currently doesn't work well), or use stealth/sensor jammers to confuse your enemy until you get close enough to open up with your short range barrage. The latter could possibly be viable in our combat system with the right modules and battle plays available. 

yea, this is what I meant when I said "This isn't Stellaris where equipping kinetics on your ships when the enemy's using missiles means you need to get closer while they're firing on you, because here you can't do that". especially about the part where you can't use superior speed. even if technically the 3rd phase of battle will give them a chance, it means nothing if they can't survive until that point. since you can't be faster than your opponent, all ships of the same class are equally tanky, and you can't just be invisible for 2/3 of the battle, short range can't be viable. it just doesn't work in the existing combat model. this is why I suggested keeping the 100 efficiency at close range, but maintaining some level of effiiency at the longer ranges. while they won't be doing as good as they would be at close range, they can still do something. personally I feel that 100/60/20 is far too weak to solve the issue, but that's also why I suggested having higher-tier weapons having better efficiency. better guns would imply a faster muzzle velocity, thus making aiming much easier at longer and longer distances, shortening the firing time to near-perfect levels, and advanced plasma technology could prevent the unstable plasma from separating at longer ranges, raising it's effectiveness at longer distances.

if we're focusing on the combat model that exists, having 0s on your weapons simply doesn't work. doubly so for 0s at long ranges. making them viable would require a completely different combat model. one that would allow speed to play a role. close range should be viable, but it just can't be in the current model. there's no way to make it work, aside from making the first phase always close and making the 3rd phase long range, which would just reverse the problem, making long range weapons useless. if instead we say that the weapon fires like normal at medium range, is poor at long, but especially shines at close range, that would work. they would be scary if they could get within close range, but aren't helpless if they can't either. technically medium would be 100% and close range would be 166%, but since values higher than 100 aren't possible, instead we raise the damage value of the weapon but lower the effectiveness in such a way that the 100% is actually higher than what's normally intended for the weapon

Ok, short range weapons were the only way to go, I have yet to play this mod, doing so tonight.  In real life, which games aren't, your correct.  However, in ES2 the current combat system (pre this g2g mod) beams were the uncounterable choice in MP combat, if you want'ed a fleet to win against a human, it was whoever brough the biggest beams to the table.  There was no strategy to it, fighters and bombers had zero functionality ect.  Missles and Kinetics did as well.  So these changes are for the better.  

Just played first game with g2g mod on, love it.  

The change to the 100/100/100 lasers is great, now we have a base weapon that does minimal constant damage.  This is needed.  Because you can use a simple weapon like this to counter your opponent by proper card/flotilla choice if his fleet is stacked a particular way, IE short range, long range, ect.  

The damage is not suffiecient enough to overpower everything else.  This strategy is now easily countered by the use of higher damage lasers 50/100/50 or the proper use of shields/flotilla's and range cards.  Again, making the cards matter.

It seems now variaty is the best way to go.  Assign your nuke ships to the proper damage lane they belong in, whether its short/long/medium/whatever, assign your tank ships to there lane, and the base damage fleet to the lane that you feel your opponent will focus on.   Great, everything so far has increased the use of cards and tactics over who has the most beams.

Kinetics rock, they are deathly scary if they get into range, however, missles suffer, not sure where the fix in that belongs.  Maybe upping the range efficiency to 100/40/20.  I know kinetics are a hard counter to missles, but this opens up a very large window for that mentioned laser fleet to easily walk through a kinetic fleet with proper cards/ect.  Missles do counter beams, but it is also easy to counter the missle fleet with a single kinetic loaded per ship.  

The dropping of the resources, great move, now MP games we get access to classes of ships rarely seen due to resource limitation.  This also improves a cost/benefit analysis of how you want to construct expensive ships.  

Cards like prudent, or hard target, now make fighters and bombers more effective on the large ships.  If you have a resource loaded defense coordinator or carriar you can now live long enough to have your fighters and bombers do ample damage to your enemy.   

However, the counter to this is again, small ships.  After testing with jones and another player, we found that small ships stacked with beams and a single kinetic, usign proper  lane assignment/cards to still be the most effective strategy because of the relative affordability.  

All the changes now create a situation where multiple types of ships will create the strongest fleet, you'll need fighters, bombers, ect.  Or unfortunatly, you can still use only small ships due to there inherint defense to fighters and bombers and there affordability.  

Missle health seems a bit fragile, because of the strong buff to the kinetics the missle strength should be improved to match the improved defense power of the kinetics.  I wouldn't mind seeing a mild range increase on kinetics, with a nerf to the output so we don't see the same scenario in the live version currently where beam fleets are the way to go, something along the line of 20/20/100? 10/25/100? while taking a 5% damage nerf?

Now the only complaint I have is the ark rush.  There is no counter, you need at least 7cc and a resource based weapon to kill a starting ark.  I have never seen that done in less than 20 turns in any game ever.  Not sure how that can be addressed, but it is a rather annoying problem if a player really wants to be a ass.  

The rework is infintely better than where it was, but after the first game and some testing, it seems missles could use some love, kinetics could use some range love, and small ships need to have there vunerability to F+B increased, because simply, if one drops, its replaceable. 

As it seems now, F+B are great against mid/late game scenarios with medium ships and above, however late game with big resource weapons, IE terraco lasers/antimatter beams ect stacked on small ships while somewhat ignoring your ships defenses still seems the strongest tactic, because again, of the bang for your buck.  The lowering of the resource access to adamant and antimatter greatly help this however, because it makes the medium ships affordable as well.  Which was a issue I argued for in the past.  Glad to see it, much much improved!  Had a blast having to use a fleet of long range nukers/carriars and short range defense and offensive designs to have the most survivable fleet.  

All of these changes, bottom line, has greatly increased the importance of your choices of battle cards and how you manage your flotillas.  That I believe was a design goal, so hurray!?  In all seriousness, the cards now play a huge role in the outcome of battles, which tells me the weapons are falling into a more balanced place.  Still a big of tweaking to be done, more feedbackk to come. Thanks for the rework!!!!

Thanks for the very in detail feedback Plutar.

Do you feel like the defenses (Shields / Hull plating) are at a better place now ?

We still have some modifications we want to do, the beams & missiles might be slightly underpowered currently. I like your proposals. to have wider ranges, if less precise - it's something I've been thinking about, having weapons shoot all the time, just with very poor accuracy (because even if you weren't sure you'd hit, you'd still want to fire right?). It wouldn't be a problem missing with kinetics / missiles eithers, which is something we couldn't allow with beams for visual reasons.

What do you think of the HP bump of larger ships? Are you sure T2 Small attacks stacks still the best DPS, despite the x2 & x4 on Medium / Large ships?

Cheers,

hera35 wrote:

... premature Conquest victory. My game was Twin Elliptical, Medium Size, High Density galaxy with 8 factions and getting victory required conquering measly 18 systems. (I'm the green player on top)

Agreed. Conquest thresholds do seem a bit low.  I find myself turning off this victory type as it is far too easy to "win by accident".  

Kynrael wrote:

Do you feel like the defenses (Shields / Hull plating) are at a better place now ?

I've been lurking on this discussion, and my feeling is that a significant issue is that defense doesn't scale well - and so early-mid-game, weapons vastly outclass defense. I.e. if both sides have two wildcard slots, the one who fills them with weapons is going to beat the one who picks defences every time - even if it's the "right" defense for the damage type.
When I look at the battle postmortem screen, the percentage of damage prevented by defences always seems minimal, even when I've put a solid investment into them. And it seems like I could have prevented far more damage by killing the enemy quicker.

For example, putting two units of basic armour onto a small defender gives me 18% plating absorption, which will probably reduce my ship's damage taken from kinetics by ~14% (and ~20% with the appropriate battle card). This is against the weapons that it is specifically designed to defend against, mind you - it will protect barely anything against lasers. It's only when you get to the tech tier 3 blue/yellow armours - that use resources to boot - that you get really significant protection.

So this creates a couple of issues -

For a significant portion of the game, defences are next to useless, and investing in extra damage is a far better way to go.

Short range weapons aren't really all that viable, since combat is so deadly that few ships survive that long
You can also get away with investing in only a single damage type, but you need to invest in both defences to have meaningful defensive capabilities. 

It seems to me that the ideal calculation would have defences scaling with weapons of the equivalent tier. So that starting armour might soak (and these numbers are just for illustration) 50% of the damage of starting kinetics and 10% of the damage of purple kinetics, and purple armour might soak 50% of the damage of purple kinetics and 90% of the damage of starting kinetics. 

I don't know how possible it would be with the current system, but a damage formula more along the lines of e.g. (weapon damage^2/(damage absorption+weapon damage)) would negate half the damage when weapon and defense are equivalent strength, but only 1/3 of the damage when the weapon is double the strength. 

This formula would treat the absorption value as a flat value rather than the current percentage value, and obviously this sort of change would need a pretty hefty tweak to the numbers as well. But it would allow starting armour to provide useful defense against starting kinetics, while still letting purple kinetics punch right through it (and likewise lasers).

Brdu wrote:

I've been lurking on this discussion, and my feeling is that a significant issue is that defense doesn't scale well - and so early-mid-game, weapons vastly outclass defense. I.e. if both sides have two wildcard slots, the one who fills them with weapons is going to beat the one who picks defences every time - even if it's the "right" defense for the damage type.
When I look at the battle postmortem screen, the percentage of damage prevented by defences always seems minimal, even when I've put a solid investment into them. And it seems like I could have prevented far more damage by killing the enemy quicker.

Just to be sure, are you using the current balance mod? Shields have had their values tweaked as well so defenses should not be quite so pointless early on. Granted that if defenses were that much better early on, things may lead to a slog where battles had no winners more often than not.