Vasari tweaks

i think u have to play the other races for a while, and than think about balance

btw i like the vasari too

I don't play Vasari enough to comment on most of these, however, how is Reintegration bad?  Self-heals that stack with repair bay heals or capship healing effects, right?

Doesn't this keep enforcers alive a lot longer?

And I'd like an option to completely destroy neutral resource asteroids when there are Vasari scouts swarming around them.

Yes, reintegration stacks with Repair Cloud and the repair bays, giving you a theoretical 63 HP/s but that never actually happens in game. Either your carriers die right away (Online focus fire) or you dont need healing at all (Single player retreat-happy AI). As I see it, Reintegration is a way to draw enemy fire and keep them busy, and healing for 18 hull/s isnt enough to do much of anything.

Dont get me wrong, I love this game and it IS really well balanced. I just think some things could be made better without breaking the balance

Accuracy is not perfect, especially in asteroid fields where it is only 20%

I have some thoughts about this also...

First of all, the point of repairing stuff is to repair stuff, not to make things invulnerable. With reintegration you are talking about a T2 ability which lets the ship repair itself. If it was buffed too much, it would need to be moved to T3 or possibly T4.

I agree with the useless bonus for Vasari colonizing. It could be made more useful, iirc it doesn't even scale for levels except for it's duration, which is kinda lame.

It seems that Vas scouts capping neutrals should be nerfed somewhat, since they easily get very imba in maps with lots of neutrals and are pretty hard to catch if handled properly, unlike colonizing frigs, for example. (maybe restrict Vas scouts limit to 4-5, or increase capturing AM requirement by 10-20, or reduce antimatter capacity from 300 -> 200, or raise fleet cap req from 3 -> 5, etc.)

I find it kind of stupid anyway that there's just some totally invulnerable omnipotent resource extractors just sitting somewhere in deep space. Why not just make them neutral asteroids on which colonizing frigs / scout ships could actually build destructable extractors? Then maybe make it possible to build static defense next to them? Or make them upgradeable for a cost so they could have their own little turrets! (and possibly become tougher)

Deliv engine aint that big of a deal. Kostura could be made more useful, though.

edit: I just noticed you weren't really talking about capship abilities but synergy... Well, how about running around with a dozen carriers with the Marauder's speed boost for example?

i think u have to play the other races for a while, and than think about balance

End of quote

I agree with him also, your perspective seems to hold only the Vasari view. There's a whole lot of information to be taken in before trying to make balance suggestions.

One thing to keep in mind is that if the Kostura Cannon works on Starbases, it will become MUCH stronger once Entrenchment is out.

They're not some omnipotent resource. Get some navigators or col frigs of your own in there and they can capture them away from your enemy.

Does it even kill orbital structures (labs etc)? As I recall you need at least 2 instant shots to kill something. That means 16000/1000/1000 or something worth of resources to kill a couple of labs. More if there's repair plats. I would think starbases have a lot more HP...

(Plus I don't think it actually kills any ships, because they will easily jump away before the blast hits...)

...

You're missing the point, which was that they're invulnerable.

Before that, it's also good to look at just the one

For example, 18hp/s seems small, but it isn't. Since the comparison with an Illuminator was brought up:

- Illuminator does 53.5 damage from the front bank every 6.5 seconds, un-upgraded. That's 8.23 raw DPS.

- The cruiser will have maxed out at 60% mitigation by the time the ability is needed, so now an Illuminator only does 3.29 DPS against it.

That means Reintegrate on the Enforcer cancels out ~5.5 Illuminators attacking it. Not bad for a tier 2 research that even triggers on its own

I forgot about mitigation. I still think that its not all that great though. I've seen too many Enforcers die to only handfuls of ships. If my Enforcer gets the penalty of no moving and no attacking, I want it to have the buff of lots of survivability. Now they just get a little boost.

I want to play Vasari too, but Advent seem so much better in most instances.  Bah just play Advent.

The neutral extractor scuttle bug was explicitly addresses for 1.1 - now people want to go back to 1.05 behaviour?

Remember that a colony frig will kill a vassari scout!!!

I also find it funny that people bitch about the super weapons - first time I think I have heard of someone saying Advent's one is too strong.

Note that the Vassari one also DISABLES things as well as damaging them. The idea is to jump in straight after it hits and get some quick licks in while the opposition is stunned!!!

Which is rather amusing isn't it, that most people think it's worthless but it's the best of all 3, by far.

Returning Armada, Phase Stabilisers? Vasari ships might not be terribly resilient, but reinforcements can come out of nowhere, and quickly.

Wiping out planets really hurts an enemy who must pay to re-upgrade them

Getting mitigation and damage bonuses helps on the defensive

Now dealing a respectable amount of damage to enemy fleets will help on the offensive

The example of the Kostura Cannon does point to one command type that does not appear to be present in the UI, and whose omission seems fairly hard to logically ascribe to spacefaring races with both FTL communication and FTL drives -- the ability to synchronize operations using something more sophisticated than a stopwatch and reflexes.  It should be possible, for instance, to select a unit and given a movement order -- but delayed until the point where starting it would be expected to result in synchronizing a particular outcome (the unit entering a gravity well, say) with the outcome of another condition (like 'enemy fleet destroyed in this gravity well' or 'superweapon projectile detonation') plus a safety margin.  Logically speaking, the orders would be disseminated and programmed, and the programs would be executed when the sensors reported that they should be -- and likewise, ships would be reporting how long they expected to take to reach their next waypoint or so forth.   The 15 second shock would be more useful if one had a reasonable expectation of being able to actually use those 15 seconds.

The catastrophic-devastation levels do seem a bit low; physically annihilating planets should be difficult, but making them almost completely pointless for colonization (better suited for mining using disposable prison labor, or as isolated detention centers for interogating alien hostages) does not seem to be too implausible.  Along vaguely related lines, a 'finite resources' (resource yields slowly dropping, and perhaps tied to increasing credit costs) option would be sort of nifty, and hopefully not too code-intensive (compared to, say, actually changing the map by smashing asteroids or breaking pieces off of planets).  Finite resources would perhaps also help the Vasari, due to the resource-getting planet-hoover and the battle salvage, for what that's worth.

1) I wasn't talking about scuttling neutral extractors, I was talking about making them buildable and destroyable.

2) a colony frig will not kill a Vasari scout, unless one Vasari scout is stupid enough to attack it. However, 3 Vas scouts (maybe 2?) can kill one colony frig, which is ridiculous. You can run around the gravity well with a bunch of them, capture an extractor when you have enough AM and not get killed unless there's a couple of LRF's or fighters/bombers chasing them.

In any case it's always pointless looking at units 1 on 1. You have to look at the whole races if you want to address balance. Vasari can get an insane boooom for economy very soon into the game with their scout capping, if there's a lot of neutrals. This is simply because as Vasari you can build many many scouts without risking your own economy or fleet cap (225/20/0, 3 cap) - plus scouts' versatility allows them to move anywhere, including to the neutral mines close to your opponent and even the remotest roid fields. It's pretty hard to move a slow colony ship through heavily defended neutral planets.

Now I'm not saying "omg wtf remove vasari scouts!!1". I'm saying that they need to be nerfed somewhat, as I suggested in my earlier post.

Also, the Kostura stun ability is pretty useless considering that you have had subverters (which are much better and versatile in stunning since they can actually disable ships while you're fighting them) for a long time by the time you make a Kostura. As I said before, it doesn't really stun or damage ships, because it's pretty easy to jump them out long before the blast hits.

It's very situational. If you have an opponent who's turtling behind a mess of defenses and repair platforms, a Kotsura is your best friend. 3 minute disable on 5-6 repair platforms will make it a lot easier to get the turtled fleet.

The ship disable is rather inconsequential, though In any case, apparently the Kotsura is getting an overhaul to be more useful in Entrenchment, but Blair didn't say how

Well, right now, I'd still rather take 8000/600/550 (?) worth of subs than a Kostura.

Or use those resources for pretty much anything else.

I find Vasari scouts to be balanced, actually. Vasari ships cost a lot more than their counterparts, and there arent usually enough neutrals to really get a huge income off of anyways. Some maps it can be OP, but others its useless. So it balances out

You can for example easily get a +5-10 metal/crystal income on any random large map (or any large map or even a random medium map) 10 minutes into the game. Most of the time. Balances out?

Well, IIRC the change in 1.1 applied to neutral mines as well, so they should be held to the same allegiance penalties as planets so the number should be smaller. Can't say I actually looked at whether or not neutrals have an allegiance penalty now, though.

I just tested this, and you're incorrect. An extractor 2 jumps away from my HW showed 0,69 metal/sec while a 100% extractor in HW's gravity well was 0,52. However, this kind of a change could perhaps correct the problem...

If something is too OP, it needs tweaking. It doesn't matter whether this is a map related issue or not.