CommanderAdama CommanderAdama

v1.04 is great. These are my personal HUMBLE thoughts on what could be nice in the future.

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v1.04 is great. These are my personal HUMBLE thoughts on what could be nice in the future.

My checklist Oo

from Sins Forums
First off, let me say, I am just 1 person and i know my opinion means nothing in the grand scheme, but i'll say what i have to for myself anyway.

balancing has definitely been improved greatly. As a strictly Advent player (well tec sometimes in 1.03 when it was a small map), I LOVE this patch. I feel like advent now finally has a fighting chance to survive early game.
Thank the Lords of Kobol Oo.
I dont see any balancing problems yet with what has been done, and it seems like the game is really quite balanced at this point, so:

On the list for things for Ironclad to do, imho (please dont think me bossy. if IC never came out with another balancing patch i'd be okay)

1. Futher nerf returning armada. say allow it to make only 1/2 of the fleet capacity, or some percentage figured by math and science.
2. Make strike craft more viable. 1.04 made them a little bit cheaper, and a little less likely to be countered automatically by flaks, but strike craft could stand to play a more prominent role.
3. Culture is weak, as is deliverance engine. 200% or more culture effect to make broadcast centers actually worth it.
4. An ability to downgrade fleet logistics, maybe for free but takes time, and requires paying money again to upgrade. Haven't put much thought into it, but fleet logistics being too high will knock a player out who needs to recoup from a loss. It basically creates a snowballing effect.
5. Make Siege effectiveness research cheaper and easier to access. Since siege frigates aren't really viable options, it's more important to get upgrades so capital ships can do the planet killing. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if siege frigates were removed altogether. Everyone knows that no one uses them.

Then of course there's all the stuff that doesn't affect balancing, such as AI, minidumps, network.
Looking forward to higher res textures too.

and:

PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
and
Make custom maps made in galaxy forge automatically upload to other players so that the process of playing a custom-made map isn't so impossible.
And that all ties in with the ability to preview a map ingame before launch of the match.


Thanks IC. You guys are great. Never personally played a game that got patches so frequently, and had developers chillinn in their own game's forum.
67,638 views 44 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
4. An ability to downgrade fleet logistics, maybe for free but takes time, and requires paying money again to upgrade. Haven't put much thought into it, but fleet logistics being too high will knock a player out who needs to recoup from a loss. It basically creates a snowballing effect.
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This is a good idea I have been in the situation where you have a large fleet and the planets to back it up. Then you lose a few planets and some ships and your economy comes to a stand still. Instead of downgrading your logistic research you could basis fleet cost by the actual size of the fleet instead of level of your fleet logistics.
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
This is a good idea I have been in the situation where you have a large fleet and the planets to back it up. Then you lose a few planets and some ships and your economy comes to a stand still. Instead of downgrading your logistic research you could basis fleet cost by the actual size of the fleet instead of level of your fleet logistics.
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Right, so you only pay an upkeep rate for the highest logistics level your fleet currently needs. Seems fair to me. Get 'er done, Ironclad. :CONGRAT:
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Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
No, that would remove a fair portion of the decision making process... Right now, when you're tapped out, you need to actually inform yourself and make a decision wether to commit your forces or not, as losing them is very,very costly.
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top
PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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Sooo... that's the request for every time you made a patch and ignored it. Why oh why is this STILL missing in Sins? it's so simple..

WE WANT TO CHOOSE WHERE WE START SO THAT IN A MULTIPLAYER GAME YOU CAN SIT NEXT TO YOUR ALLIES.

Is this clear enough? HELLO STAFF... stop the ridiculous 0.10010011 nerfing of siege vessels,
PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top
I'm glad RA was nerfed, though I'll have to see how effective it is. Maybe this means I don't always have to organize everyone to kill the vasari in FFA and team games =)

It would be nice to see culture have more of an effect, though. Making it spread somewhere between 5-10 times as fast and decrease allegiance 5-10 times as fast would probably do it. This does seem like a big change, but culture is really quite useless atm (+10% resources eventually is ok, but usually a tradeport is better).

I don't think you should be able to downgrade your fleet/supply whenever you feel like it. Right now, increasing your fleet size is one of the toughest decisions you can make, and letting you undo that decision would remove a very cool dynamic from the game. This isn't to say I'm completely opposed to the idea, as the supply system makes it easier for a small victory to snowball into something far more.

This can probably be addressed by decreasing your supply a little bit once you are no longer taking full advantage of your fleet size. I don't mean that if all your fleet dies you stop paying upkeep, because that would make it incredibly hard and frustrating to finish someone off, and would generally stretch the game out forever. Instead, I think that you should be able to drop just one level off upkeep payments. I.E. if you have the 5th fleet upgrade but half of your ships die, you'll only be paying as much upkeep as you would if you had the 4th fleet upgrade, but your upkeep wouldn't go any lower than that.
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top
No, that would remove a fair portion of the decision making process... Right now, when you're tapped out, you need to actually inform yourself and make a decision wether to commit your forces or not, as losing them is very,very costly.
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Not if you're losing said upkeep cost, and it could take time and money to downgrade, and have a timer preventing you from upgrading it again for a certain amount of time.
Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
PLEASE PLEASE GOD PLEASE. ALLOW US TO CHOOSE STARTING POSITIONS.
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QFT

Except it's not, though debatable for the TEC. The culture bonuses for the Vasari (+damage) and Advent (+shield mitigation) for your entire fleet will give you a much higher return than a few extra hangars around some planet. The AM recharge for TEC isn't bad, but not always needed.

As for the Deliverance Engine in regards to the OP, stop trying to think of it as a planet killer and think of it as a weapon that denies your opponents his culture bonus anywhere on the map, and grants you your +6% mitigation. The combined effect isn't as dramatic as "Hey, big boom on a planet", but you can't argue that it's not useful
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Yes, the deliverance engine works for that.

It just doesn't justify its exorbitant costs (all the research necessary for it).

Also what is wished for, is for culture to be an additional way of playing the game. Currently culture only exists to give you a little increase in resource income and a little boost to your military. Nothing else.

You only need to build one broadcast center at your border planets, and your effectively safe to enemy culture for a very long time.

Destroying planets with culture? Not gonna happen. (And why got planet flipping removed anyway? It's not likely gonna happen anyway.)
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top
Why not just make the upkeep scale automatically to the # of ships you have out? So if you drop below the limit of the previous logistics, your upkeep also drops. Fleet logistics would act more like tax brackets instead of permanent upkeep increases. Makes logical sense (less ships, less upkeep), and there's no micromanagement involved.
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Wouldn't that make games last a LOT longer by making enemies have a better chance of rebuilding their fleet?

I could see it scaling back a small fraction to give the weaker player a bit of a break, but from a "reality" perspective, an empire that had a logistical supply chain that could support a fleet of 1000 ships, and 900 of them got killed, would still have a lot of the graft, transportation costs, security requirements, infrastructure, and such to ship food, parts, munitions, defenses, and other logistical needs to 1000, and it wouldn't suddenly *all* vanish. Big empires get old and stagnant, and they have a tendency to get in their own way a lot when decisive action is required.

So, as a compromise, maybe something like this (using artificial numbers)
- if max fleet supply is 1000 and you normally pay 50% upkeep:
---> if you have 1000 supply *used*, you pay 50% upkeep
---> if you have 500 of the 1000 supply used (50%), you pay 37.5% upkeep
---> if you have 0 of the 1000 supply used (i.e. your entire fleet got killed), you pay 25% upkeep.

This would actually penalize players that spam their military a bit, which might not be a bad thing.

-- Retro
Reply #34 from Sins Forums Top
It just doesn't justify its exorbitant costs (all the research necessary for it).
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The research costs justify themselves, due to the added shield mitigation. Researching the extra tech for the Engine is icing on the cake.

You only need to build one broadcast center at your border planets, and your effectively safe to enemy culture for a very long time.
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I'm not sure about your games, but when I play only building one is suicide. I build 2-3 sometimes and it's barely enough to hold enemy culture off.

No, Culture is not your "Sit back and win" mechanic, but it is useful offensively. The only way Advent culture can be beaten by the other races is with capitals, otherwise unless you're trying to push culture from an asteroid against a desert or something, you're always going to be winning a culture war from a developed tech tree. It's so easy to engage the enemy fleets on one side of their empire, and push culture from the other where they can't send capitals to fight it off. Especially with the Deliverance backing it up, you can flip and prevent colonization on several planets while your fleet is still making progress on the other side.
Reply #35 from Sins Forums Top
whats up with everyone saying RA was already nerfed? RA was NOT nerfed. It STILL takes longer to recharge the AM to use dark armada than it takes for the cooldown to expire. It takes approx 8 & 1/2 minutes to recharge the AM, and the so-called 'nerf' bumped the cooldown up to 8 minutes for first level, 6 minutes for second. With all antimatter research(which is a LONG way down the milit tree, and has no bearing at all in a short game) it takes longer than 6 minutes to recharge the AM. Sooooo explain to me where the nerf part comes in?
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
whats up with everyone saying RA was already nerfed? RA was NOT nerfed. It STILL takes longer to recharge the AM to use dark armada than it takes for the cooldown to expire. It takes approx 8 & 1/2 minutes to recharge the AM, and the so-called 'nerf' bumped the cooldown up to 8 minutes for first level, 6 minutes for second. With all antimatter research(which is a LONG way down the milit tree, and has no bearing at all in a short game) it takes longer than 6 minutes to recharge the AM. Sooooo explain to me where the nerf part comes in?
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Its nerfed for when you've hit fleet cap and AM has had time to recharge.
Then when you lose ships and the fleet cap is no longer reached, it takes longer than it did before to replace them.
Reply #37 from Sins Forums Top
The other 'nerf' (though really it's a fix) is that now it checks fleet supply after every ship spawned, so while before it was possible to go fairly far above the max fleet cap by activating the autocast simultaneously, now it won't work :P
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
whats up with everyone saying RA was already nerfed? RA was NOT nerfed. It STILL takes longer to recharge the AM to use dark armada than it takes for the cooldown to expire. It takes approx 8 & 1/2 minutes to recharge the AM, and the so-called 'nerf' bumped the cooldown up to 8 minutes for first level, 6 minutes for second. With all antimatter research(which is a LONG way down the milit tree, and has no bearing at all in a short game) it takes longer than 6 minutes to recharge the AM. Sooooo explain to me where the nerf part comes in?Its nerfed for when you've hit fleet cap and AM has had time to recharge.Then when you lose ships and the fleet cap is no longer reached, it takes longer than it did before to replace them.
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Not by much, the amount that it is delayed is negligible as the CD on all of your gates is likely to be up if you lose a bunch of ships... likely at that point they will be replacing ships as fast as you lose them even if the CD was 10 mins + simply because of the number of gates you are probably going to have up.

Plus it caps out @ 100 AM extra over the first activation, and you are only delayed about 2 mins 54 seconds for the second lot of ships(if you have RA lvl 1 and no am research, 54 seconds for level 2 ra, no am research) giving it time to recharge approx 85 AM, or on the second case, which is likely to happen, 26 AM. Then its gonna take 5 mins 37 seconds and 8 minutes respectively to recharge the AM(aka the cooldown has been gone for 2 minutes before it can fire again anyways). Its a SLIGHT nerf for ra lvl 1. For ra level 2, it may as well not have been done. THIS is also only if all your gates are balls to the wall producing ships, which is unlikely to happen, and if they aren't the extra cooldown makes no difference whatsoever anyways.

Even with antimatter research maxed it doesn't make a whole ton of difference, just RA level 2 is then delayed by about the same % of time as ra lvl 1 is without it.

So, in effect, for the early game, which is the only place you'll probably be burning cooldowns back to back rapid fire, it makes no difference at all, and late game, the difference that is made is small, and you are likely to see no difference at all.


Bumping the CD up to 10/8 minutes would have been a halfways decent nerf, would still have not done much other than force an RA rusher to tech lvl 2 ra right away and delayed him by the amount of resources that cost. And thats at DOUBLE what the actual nerf was. Now 12/10, that would be a nerf, and probably eliminate RA as being completely overpowered, and the only counter being to suicide at the gates as soon as they are up or just kill the vas player off before he can get it up
Reply #39 from Sins Forums Top
The other 'nerf' (though really it's a fix) is that now it checks fleet supply after every ship spawned, so while before it was possible to go fairly far above the max fleet cap by activating the autocast simultaneously, now it won't work
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thats a fix not a nerf, the ability to do that was never intended and was an exploit to begin with.
Reply #40 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, that's why I put the 'nerf' in '' and added that it's actually a fix :P Which you seem to have read over ;)
Reply #41 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah, that's why I put the 'nerf' in '' and added that it's actually a fix Which you seem to have read over
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I just felt the need to add that it was an exploit ^_^. I read the post through.
Reply #42 from Sins Forums Top
4. An ability to downgrade fleet logistics, maybe for free but takes time, and requires paying money again to upgrade. Haven't put much thought into it, but fleet logistics being too high will knock a player out who needs to recoup from a loss. It basically creates a snowballing effect.
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Actually the best way to do this is to automatically step down logistics whenever your fleet level drops below the threshold.

So, let's say I'm only using 500 supply, but I have 2000 capacity, I'll only use the percentage up to whatever 500 supply is.
Reply #43 from Sins Forums Top
networks on ANY backend can hardly handle a full RA armada. You're talking about 6+ people with full fleet capacity? That would be unwieldy.I dont know what games you play, mines end before anyone reaches full fleet cap. And what would that have to do with anything? Making other end game techs better would benefit the game overall, allowing for more dramatic endings and better strategies.I don't know what games YOU play
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Why would they wait to hit fleet cap and get huge upkeep instead of just having simply a lot more than the enemy?..

800 supply of ships is enough when the enemy only has 400.

So yeah, what games are you playing?
Reply #44 from Sins Forums Top
Am I the only person who plays big or goes home? I mean seriously to me RA is barely useful. Free ships are nice but by endgame I have a huge pumped econ with ANY race(Of course a decent player would kill me but I digress).