Dr. House De-Motivational poster

Ask and you shall receive....Bison....

Fu...

cking...

Awesome!

stant, I have gotten SO SICK of the stupid idiotic morons that keep posting the Lost Angles Anaomous, that I REFUSE TO SEE OR READ SUCH BULLSHIT.

good on you

harpo

I champion crushing that myth.  I will not stop until the work is done.  Feel free to link to any of my posting on the subject to refute anyone posting about it being the fix.

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/335474/page/137/#2670665

is a good one since it references all of my past commenting on it, as is the most recent one.

 

Whaddup G?  Saw that one but it's not the one I want.  I'm probably just going to make it myself.  Though that one I have used before and I still laugh every time.

Dr. House meets Monty Python. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Sigh, well I tried to prevent the jihad. Guess I cant stop the Rawk until the masses are tamed. lol

 

 

And now for something completely different:

 

 

An word on the next update.

 

Its going slow. (As if you didnt already know that.) But as of right now, there is an unoffical update. Created for MP. It does change some things around, gameplay wise. And is a crude attempt to smash the TSOP and DS together. Those who have been using it so far and not hunted me down with pitchforks and torches...yet. So, I take it as it ok.

 

If your intrested please see our MP topic. We are having a run of MSN/email tag going on, due to most of us working long hours on vastly different time zones. But its still slowly chugging along!

The mod could use some balance tweaks, mostly on the capital ships. In every game i played, with 2 to 8 people, i've never seen more than 4 capital ships built all times, thanks to the poor ratio hp-dmg/price. Also, the sight of a support capital is very, very rare, as most of the abilities are not worth the money that could've been used to buy a carrier or a colony cap. Yap, most of the games i see only those 2 tipes of capitals, as thei're the most cost-effective by far.

Let's compare the Kol Battleship with Sova Carrier.

Kol costs 5500/1000/750, while the Sova costs 5250/1450/1000. The price difference is small enough to make you wait for a Sova instead of buying a Kol right away.

Kol has 3750hp/1500sh/5armour while Sova has 3550/1350/4armour. Here also, the difference is very small, as Sova will fall about 10s before a Kol without the shield ability.

Kol has a 225 "manapool" while a Sova has a 270 "manapool". This is a very bad thing for Kol, as he has 3 abilities that are very antimatter draining with a low cd, while each of it's abilities are not game-braking as the Sovas.

Kol has 81dps while Sova has 48, still this doesn't mean Kol does more damage. With a 2 bomber squadrons and using kiting tactics, a Sova can easily outdamage and outlive a Kol, even with its abilities.

This is just an example that shows why Carriers/Colonizers are always used and the other 3 type not. I think there should be more important differences between, let's say, a Battleship and a Carrier. A carrier should be alot more expansive than a Battleship and sacrifice alot dps/hp in exchange for strike craft capabilities. Also a Battleship should beat a Carrier in direct battle, even with it's strike craft support. Also, the carrier should be an ideea slower, so that the Battleship could actually get some hits.

There are many balance problems with the mod, it would take a page just to reveal them without even mentioning a solution/proposal. For now, there are 2 problems that come into my mind. The capital ship one and the Bomber Spam. Recently, i've been playing with some players that just spammed cruiser carriers with Bombers, without any fighter suport. In one ocasion, there were 20 cruiser carriers with 3 bomber squadrons each against a Cap Carrier filled with Fighters/Gunships and like 25 flaks. In like 3-4 passes, the Carrier was dead and the enemy lost about 5 squadrons and there weren't any sigs he will lose any more than this. As of now, Bombers are too easy to be replaced and thei're too hard to be suppresed in high numbers. I would suggest adding a small splash effect to anti-strikecraft frigates (it's ironically they called one of them "Flak frigate" without giving it splash effect) and/or add abilities to the gunships to disrupt large amounts of Bombers or allow them to target multiple targets. Or, the antimatter cost to replace the strikecraft can be upped and the cooldown increased. As of now, cruiser carriers pretty much eliminate any Capital Ship in an instant and can't be countered with ease.

You could look at this mod https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/389291 and inspire from there. There are alot of changes and ideeas that could make the balance of the game better.

I'll be posting other balance problems me and my fellow players have been encountering since we started the game, and we hope our feedback will be taken in consideration. Even with it balance-not-so-perfect, the mod adds depth to the game and make it really enjoiable

We thank you for the compliment and the suggestions. As seems to be always the case with this game, we're trying to find ways to balance out the use of fighters/bombers without making them useless. It's been exhausting for some of our modders. Luckily, not me.

As for the capital vessels, I can say we have some common ground and some disagreement there. I have seen more extensive use of caps, especially support caps, in our multiplayer games, but depending on how the enemy operates, the cost is sometimes negligible. I don't see them as worthless compared to cruisers, but the fighter/bomber spam is one of the biggest factors in that.

As regards the capital to capital balance, I can see your point. I've always thought it hilariously bad that a carrier can go toe to toe with a battleship in any form or fashion. In any case, I do believe the Hp and Dps should be pulled back a bit. The strikecraft should bear the brunt of the combat, even if that means slightly upping the squad count to compensate. Moreover, I believe that in line with modern carrier designs, the carriers (maybe not as much the Marauder due to its more rounded nature as a support vessel) should focus on anti-SC fire. As for the Flak frigate, it actually fires an autocannon, so I really have no idea how to make that work out unless we redesign it to use rapid sweepers (auto flak cannon with low caliber shells).

As for the speed of the carrier, I would not support it being slower. Although carriers are larger volume than battleships, their tonnage, even with fighters, is significantly less. In real life, these vessels would achieve the same maximum speed, but at different rates of acceleration. In game mechanics, acceleration is negligible and top speed compensates for the inaccuracy. Given that a carrier can accelerate faster than a battleship, both at sea and space, I think the speed of the vessels are fine as they are.

We're always trying to better balance the scenario without doing too much damage to the core game. Some of us can give that other mod a glance and see what we think. Thanks for the input.

What you are seeing problems not with the mod but core game.

 

This mod amplifies everything in the game. Damage is bigger, HP are bigger, Racial differences are bigger, and so are the bug/exploits.

 

Your seeing something thats been a problem IMHO with the core game since forever. The vast power of SC. Again, this mod amplifies even the  smallest issues. And SC are not a small issue.

Flak ships are great as is. The problem is not their ability to shoot down SC (Fighters or Bombers) its the simple ability to host hordes of Carriers, which means hordes of SC. I have my personal views on how to revert the Carrier Cruiser back to a support role and not a primary ship in fleets, but discussion among us ICO MP'er had me not go that route yet.

Gunships already target more than 1 target. They have Anti-SC horde abilites. Again they work well.

 

At any rate, we could attempt to 'balance' the game as we see right. But that would require many things in the core game to be changed substantially. That is not the intent of the mod. We are here to Expand on what the core gives us, even if its not perfect.

 

At any rate Ive been keeping up on the recent Balance topics. I am bias already on to how to implement balance changes. Ive only made a few changes in the MP update. Small changes that were discussed as we played on ICO. I plan to further this patch as time dictates.

 

Also there is nothing stopping you from creating your own tweaks to the game for your group use. If you hang out some of us DS guys you learn that we all have like 3-6 different Version of DS in our mod folder. Some are personal tweaks, some are testing, some are MP, etc etc.

This may have been covered elsewhere, but as I do not feel like traversing nearly 150 pages, I'm just going to ask - what is the title of the piece playing in the menu of Distant Stars? 

Refer to the original post at the top of every page.

Inbuilt Mini-Mods:
Sound Effect Replacement MOD:
Enchanced and/or replaced sound effects and replaced Battle music, it mostly consists of the remastered versions of the Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage OST, Band Of Brothers OST and the menu music is from E.S. Posthumus.

 

You want the last one mentioned.  Which song exactly?  Dunno, never really paid much attention, but you should be able to sample a bunch of tracks and figure it out.

 

Edit:

Looked on Google, sounds like Ebla.  So I guess E.S. Posthumus - Ebla is the answer.

There was some discussion on cap balance in the general forums a while back.  I largely lost interest due to the stagnation of the game (this mod is the only reason it's still on the my drive), so I don't know what became of it.  There were some generally agreed upon changes regardless of how bomber and LRM spam warp the metagame, like rebalancing the Kol shield ability to a passive, major ability buffs to most of the support caps, throwing Animosity into the garbage and coming up with something entirely new for the Radiance, etc.

 

May be worth looking at if you need some ideas for the next major DS patch.

Is there a location I can get some specifics on stuff like EWS Bombers (I know what the special ability does, but how do they stack up to regular bombers, damage wise?) and how the "Elite" strikecraft carrier capships can build differ from regular? What about stats for Gunship strikecraft, how much better vs. strikecraft are they over Fighters? Are they decent against anything else? Just tried the mod last night and loved it, but had lots of questions about the new stuff. Thanks!

Well you can get a lot of information about the mod from it's Wikia page.  It's not fully comprehensive and probably wont be as long as the mod continues to be developed, but it's usually good enough for most people's questions.

Specific differences can be deciphered from comparing that one to the wiki for the original.

TBH I almost NEVER have Kol's in any of my fleets, I always have Marza's, Dunov's, Sova's and Akkan's, but never Kol's. I honestly never saw any use for them, Garda's provide enough flak, Marza's and Sova's do enough damage, and Akkan's and Dunov's increase the battle effectiveness and capability of the fleet alot more than any Kol could.

Xer0 \^/

My example with the Bombers-Flaks-Gunship was meant to show how fast the Bombers are replaced and there is very, very hard to counter them in huge numbers. So my solution would be to increase the respawn time/cost, so you would actually need to micro them instead of "LETZ SPAM MOR CARRIARS".

The Kol could really would use some love, also the Advent 2nd Capital and the Marauder need some buffs to even make them a little useful. The Kol could use some increase in dps/hp, also its first ability should stop the sublight engines, so it would make it a capital-counter; this would make you think twice before getting a first Colonizer/Carrier capital. For the rest, i'll go look at that mod and suggest some slight buffs or nerfs, so that the balance of the mod won't be fundamentally changed.

As i haven't mentioned, me and all the people from my group use the DS 0.7 beta + 1.1 MP patch. I think these changes, if they will ever be implemented, should be added to the MP patch.

Also, a quick question : can the pacts be modified, so you can make multiple pacts of the same type with different people ?

I wish pacts could because it would be really nice and the number one thing on my list to fix, but I'm reluctant to say yes.

 

Edit:

Oh, and about the Kols, I find them to be useful as roadblocks and speed bumps.  When you have to slow an advancing fleet so you can assemble yours, sending in the battleships to soak up a lot of punishment buying you time can really help in a pinch.  Probably more helpful on the bigger maps with more opponents when the possibility of your fleet being stretched thin is a constant problem.

The first ability of a Kol would be the railgun, correct? That does stop sub-light engines, I believe. It just doesn't last as long as an ion bolt or such, but since it does damage, that seems fair.

The damage is pretty low, also the Kol's manapool doesn't allow it to spam the ability more than 2-3 times, after that the Kol becomes a glorified Kodiak. And let's be serious, the damage is neglijable, after shield mitigation/armour it barely scratches a frigate, let alone a capital. Also, it just reduces the max speed to 0; that's a different thing from disabling the sub-light engines. The ship may not move from its curent position, but it can rotate, making flanking a capital ship an imposible tactic.

Also, not just the cost of the capital ships should be tweaked. Supply is a very important factor in the game and the capitals should reflect that. A colony ship should have the max supply cost, while a support cap should have the least, in my opinion.

@Stant : The problem is, even if i build a battleship, the oponent focuses on other ships/capitals because they know it doesn't poses a threat and it's better to kill the suppor/carrier cap or the frigates. As i said, a battleship should be a force to be reckoned, with high dps/hp, made to stand in the frontlines and to actually make a difference.

I feel that being able to spam any ability would be a mistake from a design point of view. With a few Dunovs and an Akkan, I find my Kols serve me well, taking out many frigates before it potentially falls apart. As for supply, I do agree taht the colony ship should take a bit, but the frigate is cheap for the sake of getting the game rolling. A support cap would not have the least because of technical aspects. With automation, a Marza would require fewer operators than a Sova or Akkan. Dunov is perhaps debatable. If you're talking least support cost of all ships, a frigate should never compete with a cap for crew.

Again, just my opinion. As far as balancing the game, it would (if done at all) be done in small increments to determine the best effect.

I'm not refering to "spam" as using the ability like 30 times/battle....but at least 10 times would be nice, now it's a wonder if you can at least 4-5 times. Its manapool simply can't support 4 activables, so we can either make one of them passible, as they made in Project Equilibrum (They made the 3rd ability passive) or we can lower the mana cost...or we can do both of them. Right now i see the Battleship alot weaker than a carrier in combat. I even made a test to see if i'm wrong. I attacked a powerful neutral force - 2 heavy cruisers, 4 flaks etc. first with a Kol, after with a Sova. The Kol barely killed them all with like 1000hp, while the sova was at like 1700 and the latter killed the neutrals alot faster.

So...my ideea would be to make the 3rd ability passive...and add like 10-20 dps to its autocannons. Also, descrease its supply cost by 10, the cost by 1000/200/200 and i think i will actually build a Kol instead of a Sova Or we can leave the cost like this and massively increase the hp/dps. Well, what do you tihnk ?

I'm more for increasing the HP/DPS end of it, cutting the cost wouldn't seem right for a capital. 

Keep in mind that Dunovs can cut down on AM cost.

How many games you get a Dunov to lvl 6 ? Right, just 1 of 10