Yea if your close range flotila is in the wrong lane then they just scartching their bum, doing nothing.

I think evasion base is the key to missles being viable. Resource missles increase there evasion chance, not crit, more dps, or anything else.

I have a feeling missles dps is ok, flak either needs to miss much much more which adds different dynamics to the balance, or add evasion, and then on resource missles increase the evasion slightly more or give them penetration.  IMO if some were gauranteed to hit, and the less flak you had the more get through, being accomplished by adding evasion to missles, would give a sense of realism and a sense of worth on thr idea that if i build a missle fleet it has to be stacked with missles to ensure there success. High risk high reward right there. 

Yes, this might be out of scope for now, but I like the idea. :)

IceGremlin wrote:

Magazine Modules: Not a fix, just a new idea entirely. As an alternative to Boosters with their Damage and Crit Chance, Magazines shorten the cooldown on weapon firing but decrease base damage. When using Flak, Magazines can improve your ability to switch targets and deal with volume of enemies; on Missiles it does exactly the opposite, increasing the number of unique targets enemy Flak has to deal with. With Lasers it means more chances to get a Crit, but with Beams and Slugs it doesn't help much since the former is a poor choice for Crits and the latter a poor choice for hitting at all.

Yes, I thought the same thing as soon as I saw the swarm missiles in the free week-end module thread.

The visual effect of the swarm missiles is so cool! How much cooler would it be if you could swarm-ify any of the existing missile weapons?! Besides, this way there would be one new module (call it a swarm targeting module) that would work for any missile weapons fired from a ship with the swarm targeting module equipped, instead of specific swarm missile weapons. This makes the mechanic more generally applicable throughout the game.

However, this mechanic would currently only have a tangible effect for missile weapons because of the unique nature of flak. For all other weapons, it just changes the shape of the statistical distribution without changing the average value of damage dealt, which is not very interesting or useful. (Dealing damage in a larger number of smaller shots only smoothes out the randomness and decreases the standard deviation of the distribution. )

If armor and shields worked by nullifying a base amount of damage from every hit (e.g. damage received = max(damage - armour, 0) ) , then this swarming mechanic, combined with evasion and other mechanics, would be an interesting and meaningful gameplay choice for every weapon type - but that would probably be too much of a change, so it should probably just be left to missiles.

No no, not fleet repair modules, ship repair modules.

Right now we have one ship repair module available for Attackers, which is the first and to my knowledge only one we get. If we could equip more repair modules for our individual Attacker ships, that would give us something to do with those slots other than stack Boosters all the time, and give us a better way to deliver short range weapons to their targets.

On another note it occurred to me that on the question of short range weapons being too useless and Boosters being the default best solution in regards to Support slots for Attackers, mid-battle self-repair modules for Attackers would go a long way to making short range more useful and giving us something else to do with those slots. Currently we only have one such module, to my knowledge, and it's a weak starting module.

If short range damage is greatly buffed so it can get more total damage in a battle when it finally shows up, and ships can be equipped with modules to repair themselves while approaching short range, that combo should become reasonably competitive with the long range-boosters combo. Then we'd still have the problem though that the only short range weapon any more is Slugs, when it used to be Beams as well.

Good catch on Missile Health not increasing with weapon size. Will put this in the "to fix" list.

 if this was easy to implement a very light AOE damage on a given flotilla due to a missiles destruction could be really interesting. However I can't stress this enough changes made in this fashion need to be very delicate because as we have found out it's very easy to swing the pendulum one way and then back to the other

I wish medium and heavy slot increase the number of missiles per salvo rather than increase it's damage.

Xen0n wrote:

Not wanting to bring up an "old" thread, but after finally unlocking the Carrier class hulls in a game, I had additonal thought regarding the current FLAK effectiveness against Missiles.  For "Heavy Mount" on the Carrier hull, I understand it is intended to mount a single weapon module, albeit with 8x the stats of a normal one.  However, when mounting a missile in this slot, the DPS increases while the salvo health remains the same.  Assuming this isn't just a display error, that would mean the "Heavy Missiles" from that modules could get shot down just as easily as regular missiles, without the benefit of making multiple projectiles that need to be intercepted.

I doubt that this particular issue is a significant aspect of the current underpoweredness of missiles, but figured if we're aiming to fix them up that might need looking at.  I assume the thing to do would just make "Heavy Missiles" have 8x the salvo health as normal ones?

Hmmm...I never looked at it like that. I thought the number of missles actually went up with every slot size increase, thus increasing the health of the salvo against flak.

Wow, there's a lot... A lot of things to unpack here. Keep it coming - this is invaluable feedback! (But I might be slow to answer to specific people as there's so much to sift through :D )

So looking at a bunch of this going around, I see some places where multiple problems can be solved together. I would like to note that everything I say here is based on my still utterly dense understanding of how the heck most of this games combat stats and readouts even work, so please take these suggestions with a grain of salt.

Flak: Flak may be in a good place with damage, but too accurate. While adding an Evasion chance to missiles could help, making Flak less accurate would simultaneously soften its counter against missiles, Fighters, and Bombers in one go.

Fighters: Fighters must kill Bombers to inhibit them, but if Fighters kill Bombers then nobody bothers building Bombers. So Fighters need to inhibit Bombers in a way not attached to damage; I suggest a harassment effect, where Bombers lose accuracy and/or damage only when targeted by Fighters, as Bombers must sacrifice accuracy for evasive maneuvers that Flak doesn't call for. Fighters and Flak then serve different purposes, the former protecting your fleet and the latter killing their squadrons.

Beams and Lasers: I've noticed that in general, Lasers seem to have higher critical hit chances, which makes sense as they're essentially our naval guns in style and appearance. I would suggest leaning into that over pure DPS by raising damage and cooldown and increasing Crit, which ties directly into another suggestion of mine. If Slugs are the Shotgun of ES2 and Beams are the Assault Rifle, Lasers should be the Marksman Rifles, plinking enemies in search of the almighty crit.

Separation of Defenses: I've found it baffling that the concept of "absorption" has been applied to Shields as it has. Shields already can only absorb a limited portion of damage due to limited capacity, they don't need to let a portion of all damage through as well, that should be up to the attacker to bring along a piercing effect. Armor should have Absorption as its specific thing, and Shields should just be the usual regenerating ablative hit points we see in other games. This would make them completely different to each other, and make more sense. Then don't let Armor affect damage dealt to Shields; the Shields absorb all incoming damage until they fail, then Armor can have its time in the lime light, never the two to meet.

Attacker Modules: One thing that occurs to me is to let Attackers have some Squadron slots, but that could be difficult. Another idea that occurred to me while thinking about Missiles and Lasers is what I'll call the "Magazine" module.

Magazine Modules: Not a fix, just a new idea entirely. As an alternative to Boosters with their Damage and Crit Chance, Magazines shorten the cooldown on weapon firing but decrease base damage. When using Flak, Magazines can improve your ability to switch targets and deal with volume of enemies; on Missiles it does exactly the opposite, increasing the number of unique targets enemy Flak has to deal with. With Lasers it means more chances to get a Crit, but with Beams and Slugs it doesn't help much since the former is a poor choice for Crits and the latter a poor choice for hitting at all.

Short Range: I like the idea of adding a standard defensive bonus based on flotilla range. Very simple solution if it works.

Tactics: I find it a lost opportunity that Strategic weapons are made mutually exclusive, but Tactics are not. I envision two major pairs of Tactics, each on a tech mutually exclusive with their counterpart- Quality vs. Quantity, Aggression vs. Subversion. Tactics that let us customize our militaries to a particular strategic style that isn't just dedication to a damage type. I've actually got both written up in a basic draft form, but the basics are: Quantity rewards loss of ships like Fewer the Proud, Quality rewards using ships that have lived and leveled a long time. To paraphrase Warhammer, Subversion tactics hit you when you're not looking, while Aggression tactics hit you really hard when you are. I'd much rather have these interesting Tactical paradigms based on mutual exclusivity than weapons. In Tier 3 you could have some Squadron exclusive tactics; in Tier 5 you could have Tactics that consume Dust and Strategics for more powerful "Secret Weapon" tactics. And why has there never been a Tactic that summons temporary additional ships or squadrons? Whatever the case every single Tactic needs to be looked over and asked "How does this tactic help, and how does it shape the players wars?"

Weapon Techs: How is intelligent switching between weapons supposed to work when said switches are disallowed by the tech organization? If I or my opponent pick a Strategic weapon tech, the other person can just research the corresponding Strategic Defense at no cost, because Defenses aren't mutually exclusive. It'd be better to just put all the Strategic weapons on one line of techs and the Defenses on another, and let us pay in Strategic Resources for that combination of power and flexibility. Meanwhile, buff Strategic weapons so they actually present an upgrade over White weapons, and just completely remove all of the White quality Weapon and Defense modules from the tech wheel and make them Stage unlocks like in EL. Researching Basic Lasers is not interesting or rewarding, it's in the name- they're Basic. There are Empire Improvements, Defense Buildings, and Support Modules scattered across the Tech Wheel that really belong in the spaces currently taken up by White quality weapons.

SuperMarloWorld wrote:

Somebody told me that bumping things make patch slower. Bumping things is actually a very dark act, coming from the deepest time of humanity, before the rise of civilization, when we were only slaves from gods of the evil. Stop bumping things. It scare me.

There isn't much going on in G2G forum too. Bump isn't necessary from what i been in for the past 4 years.