as for the vasari even if they have gotten bogged down. they are still running and gathering resources. why do they need all of these resources because they need to build a bunch of mother ships. ala independence day movie.

By gunning them down, just like non-suicide ships. If these suicide craft coming from nowhere but your mind were so effective against the Vasari, why are they not in the game? Why are they not part of the lore, instead of that the TEC hit disaster after disaster for years?

I have to say that I was too hoping for a little bit of Warcraft III and a little less of Master of Orion where races were involved. The ideas that were presented in the first post, whether they are Vasari-related or not, actually make up a good suggestion how a "totally different" race would play.
If there are any differences in strategy and gameplay between the two races they are extremely subtle - which may be good... but you have to think about accessibility for new players. You're not making the good impression that you should be if for the first few days of playing people would think that the two races are identical.
If you are going with the way of Master of Orion, at least follow it through and add around 8 factions.

And is it me or does the story sound like the story from Freespace, Star Control 3, etc. etc.

the lore states that the TEC stopped the vasari doesn't say how.

and if you had nothing but trade ships and you lost like 500 or more trying to take out a frigate wouldn't that be a disaster.

and it could take years to come up with the weapons for a frigate if you haven't been designing weapons. and every time you came up with a new weapon you would have to put it on a ship to see if it worked against the vasari. another list of disasters.

Actually it does: "the resilient Traders slowly learned to apply their perfection of the economic engine into an ever more powerful war machine".


Yes, that would be a disaster. And you mean that ratio would successfully stop the Vasari huge fleet created over the span of 10000 years? Your theory with the suicide ships doesn't work at all.


That is sort of my point, you know. How does one "slowly learn" how to retool the economy to war, where several years are spent with "disastrously poor cohesion" and disasters costing huge amounts of resources, and arrive at something that rivals a war machine honed over thousands of years, in the course of a mere 10 years?

phew, discussion on the lore again. well, I remember that in particular organisational reforms contributed to stopping the vasari advance. remember the TEC is not the same as the trader worlds at the beginning. when the vasari first arrived the humans there were factioned i.e. they had maybe a dozen different governments negotiating with each other and so on. politics. it takes a really desperate situatíon to get people to give up their immediate rights and controlls. finally though they realised that they had to have a coordinated and united effort to stop the invaders. that effort was the TEC and by not just sending half a dozen fleets somewhere around they ordered some to defend, others to attack key targets, etc etc.

also: they applied their mastery of ecnomics to warfare ... that means nothing else than they had a huge industrial capacity for turning out consumer and investment goods and slowly adapted it to churn out frigs and so on. at that point I remember statistics of the US military output in WW II. just look at the numbers and how brutally they rise over the years. my guess is the TEC did the same and produced tens of thousands of firgs because they had the capacity and the resources to do so, because ... they were economists and knew how to produce efficiently at low cost and low use of res.

Roflcopter!

Subtle my rear end! As subtle as a phase gate being used to flank your fleet, or development mandate doubling your asteroid's logistic capacity! As subtle as your carrier crippling a systems economy or repairing all allied ships! As subtle as instantly rebuilding fighters or just having duplicate frigates instead!

The jump gates are pretty cool (jump gates, phase gates, whatever)... but the rest.. well, its still not the difference between Humans and the undead in Warcraft 3, for example... or pretty much every race on Warhammer 40k. The differences there are much more apparent.
Each race in SOASE has trade posts, refineries and such. Each race harvests the same type of energy sources and its economy is based the same. Every race has capital ships and 2 sizes of other ships. Each race has to do research in order to colonize in Volcanic/Ice planets (even in Master of Orion there was a race that could colonize every planet).

if all you see are the few base similarities of COURSE you arent going to see the differences. I could just as easily say that the protoss and zerg are exact carbon copy clones because "they have similar barrack, airport and tank buildings and similar ways to get materiel" doesnt mean its true.

I think the problem is that you and Ron are too close to this game. I see this in research often, another scientist will refuse to accept or look at other viewpoints of his work because he is too absorbed in the daily minutiae to look at the larger picture. When this happens, others in the field tend to discount the fellows opinions.

Bluntly, this is where your analysis is failing.

When a new player looks at this game, he sees a Vasari ship and then a TEC analog. Yes, the powers are slightly different and the exact roles may be different...but not by such a significant difference that a Vasari Missile Ship is different than a TEC missile ship.

Taking an example from molecular biology: The best demonstration of identical function of an enzyme is to take the unknown enzyme from the studied species and clone it into an organism engineered to lack that enzyme. If the enzyme that you cloned into the organism is similar in function to the one that the organism lacked, it will likely survive and rescue the phenotype. Use this test in Sins. Could I take the Vasari missile ship, swap it over to the TEC and have the race play in nearly the same way. The answer unequivocally is yes. Then do this to the other ships, in each case, the answer is again yes.

When one plays the races, they don't feel like two species with a completely divergent evolution, but rather convergent subtypes of a single species with the Vasari being the high tech spiky variant and the TEC being the 'vasari lite', 'buy one, get one free' variant. For many new players, this is what they see, and this is what they are reporting to the developers. All your denials and all your posts are coming from a person who is so deeply absorbed into the game that he cannot see what the larger picture is.

My analysis is that the problem is not that the races are not different, I'm sure that they are, but rather they do not appear to be functionally different enough to make a significant and fun difference within the course of a normal game. In my experience there are two kinds of people: those who look at something and see what it is right now, and others who see what it could be. We are all fans of this game and each of us has bought it already on faith that it will be good. There are many of us who are saying, 'Yes, this is the way it is, it seems the same and it could be much better.'

in the great words of Ron
"ROFLCOPTER"
let me referance you to eet, multi, kosc, ron, myself, Betalpha, annatar, Blair

some of the most experienced players of the game, all of them agree with... me, duh.

perhaps you simply dont have the experience with the game. your statement that we're defensive of the game is right, but that we're tunnelminded and impaired by it is dead wrong.

I believe I already told you this was an intended part of the design, so that newcomers would not be panicked by the drastic differences in races.

we all see what they could be, in fact differences are in the works. the problem is that you came in here blasting away on people that we're too close, and that there are no differences, except liminal nonsense, between the races. thats both an extreme exageration and insulting

the devs and the experienced players and I all agree theres stuff to be tweaked and differences to exagerate. doesnt mean the races arent already distinct, and thats something that becomes apparent to anyone who has played for a while. what you're describing is going to be an issue for when the demo comes out, not for the game itself.

oh god, you're some high school AP bio sophmore who loves toting his newfound knowledge. let me give you a hint: biology and enzyme manipulation are TERRIBLE comparisons for a space-age RTS-video game.

what you're making up for in large words and (simple) science analogs is your complete lack of formal knowledge of the game, and also any proper rebuttle. for you to come in here and dismiss the testimony of dozens of people on the account that we are all blinded by the same lack of neutrality is arrogant and incredibally biased. let me give you a hint Caael; get with the game before you question me, and never insult my intelligence.

*Sigh* You've proved my point. You've already told us that you've been here 'nearly a year longer' than everyone and then reference a group of people that includes a person who is making the game. Of course Blair loves the game, he's making it. You're absorbed into this game to the point of paranoia, there is no reason to attack those who are trying are simply writing to the developers in order to share our observations. Nothing less, nothing more.

I gave an example of how you can prove identical/homologous function in a complex system. I can't help that you can't take an example from one field and apply it to another, I won't really expand on what that indicates.

I can see that you're not taking this well. It's okay, its just a game, calm down and take a few deep breaths. As for who I am, it just shows how weak your argument is that you need to attack me personally. I can give you my Federal institutional research credentials if you'd like, feel free to PM me and I'll direct you to them.

I enjoy this thread and want it to be useful, stay on topic Schod. If you need to try to attack me more, send it to my PM, I'll read them there when I have the time and it won't distract others anymore.

Caael you want to keep this thread on topic do NOT insult people and act all high and mighty, that is a serious flaw that I cannot abide. your verbiage is nice and fine, but it irritates me when you use it to condescend others and then do not provide anything other than vituperating comments to backup your point.

you can say the vasari are similar to the TEC, I've listened to plenty of people say it and I've tried to see why they do not notice the dissimilarities and to help them along that edge, maybe even see if there is a flaw present that can be rectified. if you came in with that attitude of "i do not see it" instead of "its not there, and those who think it is there are tunnelminded defensive freaks" then we wouldnt be in an argument. you can make claims, but do it within the context of reality, do not insult me for being more experienced than you are.

this, as you know, can easily be condensed down to something that most people of standard vocab can understand. its obvious to someone of my measly over 140 IQ that you're jumping hurdles to use nice language, its a nice smokescreen but its damn irritating to me.

the problem is that you're dismissing all logical argument of anyone aside from yourself.

when you jump in with comments like this I'm quite certain that your competators arent the one who have issues with tunnelmindedness and ego-compensation

all I'm trying to say Caael is that you need to come back to reality. obviously no one is free of bias, but to think that several experienced people could be biased while the person of little to no experience is obviously correct is foolhardy.

now, if you want to get back to the discussion and explain how/why you think the current system is flawed without insulting Ron and I, then we can do that. until you begin to pretend that your intelligence is within a stonethrow of anyone else's and stop the condescension I doubt your point will get anywhere.

He happens to offend alot ppl, its something he has to learn that its not nice


sometimes your going waaay over the line man and when i read your post(s) where your going on a personal attack like this, it makes me sad and irritated as there are no reason for it.
So please stop this personal attacks and be the better person your trying to be.

Also i see his point, as some things gets blinded to those of us that are playing the game all the time. We get used to certain bugs and simply forgets them, thats also why i think its great with these beta stages so new ppl can come in an report them

More on topic i see the OP's problem and i concur that the lore is expressing something different then what we got, the lore will get better as i understood and will fix alot of holes. Also with the diversity of the races a decision Ironclad have made as its been said "so that newcomers would not be panicked".

I also got disappointed with the lack of diversity on how the Vasari is compared to the TEC, i was sorta expecting a "new game" but theres nothing to do about it as there are less then a month or so left of development time.
All we can do now is let the devs know what we would have liked to see, and hope for something in an expansion or sins 2

yes but they lost all of those ships to the unknown enemy. i used the number 500 as a random number.


but a historical reference is the sherman tank vs the tiger tanks. it took 5 shermans to kill 1 tiger. but we could put out 10 shermans to 1 tiger.


in reference to the game. if your suicide ship has an engine, a computer and a bomb just how fast can you build these things. and remember we were putting out a full liberty ship in 3 to 5 days. per yard. the fastest one was done in a day and half.

I've only been here a couple months, vasari have only been here a couple weeks. Only played about a dozen games with them so far, too lazy to play the ai much and I keep hitting ICO when no one is around. If I'm too attached to the game and can't see faults, that must mean there aren't any to see. Since I already have a text book explaining in detail what the minor differences really add up to, you can already read where I too am somewhat disappointed in having them start out the same. The fact is they are not identical or near identical races regardless of the superficial appearances.

Starcraft had primarily superficial differences, the tactical ones were still fairly unique, if partly ripped from warhammer, but getting your units from eggs and building creeps to alter the terrain and expand your base is largely superficial. Thanks to a complete lack of anything resembling realistic warfare, a small force is pointless, so a satellite base from the marines is just a weakly guarded free kill for the zerg, limitations in expansions are thus not really limitations at all. Having power distribution to get rid of against the eldar(oops, protoss) was a good one though. Now if that hadn't been the only thing they made unique about the side, since everything else was generic and stolen from the aforementioned wh40k side.

The tactical differences in sins far outstrip the tactical differences in starcraft, it's just severely lacking in superficial ones. It also starts out damn near identical in gameplay for each side. Of course, this is a staple of 4x games, and they'd probably lose a good chunk of that player base if they had three radically different from every perspective sides that never played the same even from the initial building.

Danielost, resources. You can build ten times as many factories just fine, you have to have the steel to make the tanks. The US didn't just have impressive production capacity, they had the resources to use it full bore. The vasari were stopping for a happy meal, they were low on resources already most likely. Using cheap suicide ships is even more costly than losing people. Building a ship, even an automated one, requires raw materials they were going to collect after creaming the TEC, by comparison, cloning new people(see the cloning tech in that list?) would probably be the lesser casualty to their resource stockpiles.

you mis read my post.


i said it was the TEC that could have used suicide ships to stop the vasari.


i was also thinking that the vasari are running from an unknown enemy. we are not talking a couple of hundred. we are talking millions to billions.

so if you have 10,000 ships how many of those ships are transport ships. how many are support ships and how many are warships.

yes they had been able to steam role over other races and empires. but humans specifically humans with American attitudes don't just role over and die.


so when the vasari scouts say the humans they say a bunch of trade ships and few warships if any. and they told their bosses that they could just steam role over the humans too. they didn't anticipate that the humans would fight back with what ever they had on hand.

sorry this was not meant as a slam to any non americans.

I find this really funny coming from Schod. And after these comments, even:

that was a grasping attack, duh I'm regretting it as its the only thing people have held onto. the guy was born in 83, he's probably a graduate, doesnt mean he's any more qualified.

if you've ever seen me in an argument I never talk down to people, throw around my IQ (that was a fake up there) or talk with gross amounts of nonsense. people mistake my confident manner for arrogance.

I'm fully willing to hit the reset button with Caael, but I do not want to hear about how I've been brainwashed because I play the game too much.

No, its just that wereas I am a tactless, arrogant jackass, Schod is a rude, tactless, arrogant jackass that doesn't even bother to control his own issues. I, at least, try. (AKA: don't take it personally, he's that way with everyone)



No, you mean humans in general roll over and die but a few die-hards exist in every single human population to date that end up acting as the leaders...



OK, lets ignore frigates -- we can all agree that there are some minor differences, but they are all (very) similar. Now, lets try swapping out the cruisers... the carrier / heavy cruiser are the same, but the two "support" cruisers are radically different. Play a game where you deploy either (or both) of those, and see the difference for yourself. They are totally different units.

Or, lets take something available in any game: cap ships.

Kol: Has shield absorption boost, Gauss Gun, Flak Gun, and finest hour Vs the Vasari analog: weapons / shield boost, weapons jammer, weapon interference, and increased damage / AoE explosion.

Shield absorption is partially analogous to the Vasari's shield / weapons boost -- it doesn't increase the damage output of the Kol, but the increase in mitigation might be equivalent to the increase in regenerations -- circumstance dependant. The Flak Gun and weapons jammer are both anti-fighter powers, both rather meh IMO. The Gauss Gun clearly is different from the weapons interference power -- in essence the Vasari ship combined both its DPS and shield power into one, gaining the ability to slow down enemy fire (which could be considered roughly analogous to the Kol's shield mitigation -- it reduces the damage of incoming enemy fire by a %; difference is the Vasari's power can only do it to a finite number of ships, instead of all incoming fire). Don't forget that the Kol's firepower is more heavily focused "front" than the Vasari's ship, which has what amounts to 360 degree fire coverage. (Edit: To try to clarify this difference, the Kol is basically a giant tank in the MMO sense with just enough DPS to make it a legitimate target, whereas its analog on the other side is designed to charge headlong into the enemy and maul them head-to-head).

I could go on with the other ships, but I haven't played enough with the Vasari to remember them off the top of my head. Let me just point out the difference between the Dunov and the Annarak (SP) -- one is a support ship, the other is a fast raid ship. The TEC have no fast raid ship analog whatsoever.

if I may quote here:

very true, but as I said, superficial differences are also important, and because they are superficial implementing them doesnt hurt except for taking away time from other issues, but seriously, race balance is one of the most important things in an strategy game anyway.

and no, starting similarities to ease understanding the game and races is not necessary. most of the people here are used to both rts and tbs and can cope with differencies and a certain degree of complexity. hell, it may not even have that huge an impact on gameplay if vasari had just one lab for both branches for a equivalent cost increaes (just an example, probably a bad one at that), but it creates "feel" and thats what people see when they first play the game and get their mind shaped on it.

its like going to a job interview and being the perfect candidate, but making a bad first impression.

I have to say, that after the ten minutes i've spent readin this crappy crap, I am dissapointed in all of the participants of this thread.

agreed, this is simply the "Vasari arent the Protoss" vs. 3.0, if someone wants to make a useful thread like "how to differentiate the Vasari more!" instead of more of these be-hatching threads then maybe we can have a little more usefulness, a little less confrontation and a lot less redundant and repedative whining.

i do wonder why its crap? as i see the title is called "How I envisioned the Vasari" nothing cappy about that.


As i said to TGE the title is called "How I envisioned the Vasari" it doesn't have to be useful, as ppl are just expressing there vision on how they thought the Vasari would have been. But i do agree on that it needs less confrontation as it else is good read.

I also think it is a learning experience for both Ironclad and Stardock, as to my knowledges something as this have never been done before. So if they are going to work together again in the future im sure they will make the lore will be better and less misunderstandable.

So to TGE and Schod, if you dont like this thread just let it be, as it will faint away with time. And there are no need to continue to tell ppl how the game wont be as they already know