Torpedo cruisers should cost as much as a Cap ship......

I would agree with you for a massive rise in the cost of anti-structure ships if there was also a scaled-up rise in their survivability. Otherwise, they would be far too easy to target with strike craft or whatever, and far too expensive to justify building.

I have to say that I consider your suggestion awful. Torpedo cruisers are not only cruisers, they are just the wimpiest and weakest cruisers around when it comes to defenses, having hull, shield, and armour like a LRM frigate and dying easily to a minimum amount of focused fire from cruisers, cap ships, strikecraft, and even frigates. Increasing their cost to make them prohibitively expensive, as you suggest, would render them completely worthless in any and all circumstances save those where you are unopposed. There's no way a mere 2-3 Torpedo cruisers should be allowed to survive for more than 20-30s of combatr in any defended gravity well - if nothing else, they make excellent targets for strikecraft.

As for Torpedo cruisers shooting at other ships, while I would prefer it if they did not due to aesthetics (it looks wrong and the only reason they are doing it is to avoid the micromanagement of having it as an activatable ability), the damage they deal to non-structures is miniscule: 1%. They are supremely irrelevant in a fight between two fleets duking it out. It looks impressive but you'd deal much more damage by having a third their number in scout frigates - a base 3 laser damage from the scout is a very significant damage upgrade over 3 Ogrovs when fighting other ships.

Torpedo cruisers are moderately expensive, have low survivability, and have only one single role they are good at - and that only when brought in large numbers or when the enemy ignores them in favour of other targets.

The only really big issue I see with Torpedo cruisers right now is that the AI does not assign them a high enough priority for destruction allowing a human player to get far too much mileage out of them.

They're not THAT powerful. Strikecraft rip them up, as do other ships. They do one thing well, and thats it.

I'm guessing that their current stats are placeholders.  In other words, look for their stats to change when the final version of the game is released.

It seems to me that the correct balance for them should be like siege frigs, i.e. make their armor paper, and make their popcap (or other costs) high.

There not op at all if you counter with fighters. 10 squads take em out in one pass.

Plus with entrenchment to dislodge a fortified player you will need them. Vasary can always bypass the world with their kotsura cannon. Or their can build their own starbase there take time and is risky but their suposed to be more powerfull.

Renderign them useless by over pricign them would only make entrenchment a big pain in the ass, as their would be no way to disloge a fortifed enemy other then to duke it outt he old fashion way which is time consuming expensive and the odds are going to be in his favor and not yours. These ships rebalance the odds, btu weather or not those odd remain depends on the tectical decision made by players on both sides.

The missiles are def too big. With their size they should be able to attack planets too.  Also Vasari need torpedo cruiser class.  And, price should be a little more.

-Phalnax

Yeah, Just gotta disagree with you. Horroble idea.

Torpedo cruisers are NOT op.

Starbases don't die within seconds.

stop crying wolf.

They tear through things like the original planet bombing frigates. They do the one thing they do so well, that geting a lot of them should be very expensive.  I think they should be powerful, I don't have a problem with that, but I think they should be costly.

Verybad, just how costly do you think the torpedo cruiser, that have the survivability of the LRM frigate and does negligible damage to everything except structures, should be?

You can't make them very costly or change them to require large amounts of supply while still being so vulnerable or nobody will use them, since you'll be better off just buying ordinary frigates that can output serious damage to all types of ships.

I'm not suggesting that the current pricing/supply/damage is perfect, but these "make them very expensive" ideas seem to ignore that nobody sane would use them if they were very expensive - but perhaps my idea of what you mean by "very expensive" doesn't match yours, so what do you think would be a reasonable price for the torpedo cruisers given their current stats?

The bottom line is this. No one should be able to build 15 of these in every fleet you have and wipe out Starbases in a minute. I always pictured starbases as being something you might have to make mutiple passes at, or have to retreat and come back again.

But to sit back a KNOW your cruisers are going to go thru the enemy bases quick is kind of a letdown. It appears some of us want to tear thru systems and some want to fight our way thru.

Wbino, do a mere 15 torpedo cruisers wipe out your own starbases in a minute - or are you talking about killing AI starbases?  Are you talking about starbases that are part of a defense network with some mobile unit support or are you talking about starbases fighting alone? The purpose of static defenses have always been to secondarily free up mobile units and primarily delay the enemy by tieing them up in a position for some time, not to defeat an enemy on its own.

The situation you describe with 15 torpedo cruisers crushing all in their part is foreign to me - the closest I get to recognizing it is the poor prioritization the AI has with regards to killing anti-structure ships, but that's' an AI problem, not a cost/benefit problem with starbases or torpedo cruisers.

Torpedo cruisers also do far too much damage to cap ships, theyshouldn't  be able to shoot anything other than structures.

Have you actually checked where the damage to your capital ships is coming from or have you been looking at the huge explosions? I'll freely admit that I have not conducted actual torpedo cruisers vs. cap ship tests, but unless there's something terribly wrong in the game, anti module attacks (such as the torpedos) should do 1% damage to capital ships (see /gameinfo/gameplay.constants, the ANTIMODULE section) and, as such, be practically irrelevant (less than a single scout's damage).

If you had 10 squads... then you probably left your fleet elsewhere... letting antifighter frigates rip up your squads... got badly whooped... and now want revenge...

just kidding.

Torpedo frigates are specialists in a BETA OF A GAME!!!!!!!!!

Get it?

I disagree with the proposal to make torp ships cost as much resources as cap ships. However, I don't think they are adequately balanced either. I think what may help rehabilitate them to a more balanced place(because now I think they are too good at ripping apart a fully upgrades, super-expensive SB -- fleet support or no) in  TEC fleet dynamics would be to significantly increase their supply cost, while leaving resources and stength the same... maybe 20 (+/-4) or so supply for each ship. They are adequately constituted now, they are specialists (and good ones), but it is too easy to get too many of these things.. they should really have to be defended well by a fleet of ships, and not be so easily spammed to make SB's fall in a minute. I would much rather that starbases last at least a little while; at present they can drop faster than a weight against even just 7+ torp cruisers.. even without fleet support, a SB should pose a significant strategic PROBLEM -- not an impassable one, but one that is at least difficult to manage. Significantly increasing supply costs for torp cruisers should do the trick.

One thing that would help is if the fighter AI would prioritize the structure-killers.  I played a single player game yesterday, and it was really annoying to have to go to every gravity well that a fleet was attacking and baby-sit my fighters so they'd take out the 5-6 torpedo frigates the AI had brought along ASAP (if I didn't do that, they would pointlessly chase the enemy fighters around the gravity well while the starbase was being decimated).