Ion Bolt Buff Request

There's a difference between phase out hull and reverie and ion bolt.  The former two abilities interfere with your ability to attack the target (reverie will time out prematurely if you're attacking it).  Ion bolt, on the other hand, has no such limitations.  You can stun and focus fire with impunity.  I don't think the ability is too weak at all; if you want to buff the Akkan, look at its pathetic colonization ability.

Remember, these stunning abilities are often free kills against a retreating enemy, and often will snag you a capital ship.  Reverie and phase out both have weaknesses that an enemy can work around; if they get hit by an ion bolt, they can do nothing but wait for the duration to expire.

i agree with Darvin.

Reverie and Phase Out Hull are balanced by granting (more or less) damage immunity to the target for the duration of the disable. Ion Bolt lets you keep on pounding away at them. thats a massive difference and makes Ion Bolt much better than the other two, in my opinion anyway.

Reverie and Phase Out are more like combat exclusion abilities that are intended to keep a ship out of the fight until you're ready to deal with it later. Ion Bolt on the ohter hand is just a vicious vicious stun that more or less marks its target for death if you've got a decent focus fire going.

and yeah, buff Akkan's Colonize. its the weakest of the 3 colonize abilities by far.

Hence I still give it the least duration of the three.  As it is...it's only good as an interrupt.  3 seconds is aweful short.  7 isn't really long enough.  If in practice it turns out to be unbalanced, it could be tweaked by adjusting the cooldown time or the amount of antimatter it needs to fire.  My stance on this is, I should get a little more bang for my buck when it comes to Ion Blast.

Note I'm giving Phase Out Hull a slight buff too.  I don't buff Reverie as it is a 40 second disabler at it's highest level...unless you're firing on the target.  Then I imagine it falls somewhere close to where I'm asking for Ion Blast to be.

*edit* Well, I'd like to see the Akkan have a slightly different flavor.  Making it's colonize the same as the others sorta makes it vanilla.  Leaving it's colonize sub par and buffing it's offensive abilities differentiates it from the other colony capital ships.  To me, that is more fun than mirror balancing...

i think Phase Out Hull and Reverie are in great shape right now actually. wouldn't want to change a thing on either of those. i'd love to see the Antorak and Revelation ships changed in different ways to making them more appealing, but those two abilities are the real appeals of the ships they're on right now.

the sort of change for Ion Bolt I would be more likely to support would be a small reduction to its anti-matter cost. as it is currently, level 3 Ion Bolt can keep a ship disabled and vulnerable for 7 out of every 14 seconds. this is exceptionally strong and really dooms the ship you are targetting. the issue is more that you just run out of AM very quickly (particularly for a low level Akkan) so it can really feel like you're not getting much utility out of the ability if you can't fire many shots of it.

more Ammo for Ion Bolt (i.e. lower AM cost) could add utility to it without fundamentally changing what its purpose is or how it affects battles. in particular i think you might only need to lower the AM costs of level 1 and 2 Ion Bolt to better allow low level Akkans to get a decent number of shots off. you can probably leave level 3 exactly as it is since a level 5+ Akkan has alot of AM and can spam alot of Ion Bolt shots.

I agree with the previous two responses. ion bolt not only disrupts channeling abilities, it also disrupts a phase phase loading which means you can gain quite some time for destroying the enemy, because you can shoot him during the ion bolt and then again when he charges up his drives, which also takes a little while.

and yes, a buff to akkan colonisation is definately needed. iirc the lvl does not give any bonus whatsoever while the other races' colony capships even get a bonus at lvl 1 (though I'm not a huge fan of the vasari's bonus. it's highly situational). the least would be a free extractor at lvl 1 already and more on higher lvls. this of course leads to a slight problem for lvl 3, if there are only 2 deposits. personally, I'd like to see a slight bonus to building cost instead. maybe for logistic buildings only, at least at lower levels. if you don't make it too drastic, and of course timed, if would be quite useful indeed and make the akkan a much more preferable early ship to pick. because right now, I for one don't think that the pure colonisation ability compensates its other weaknesses. better go for a kol or marza and colony frigate.

Hrm..   Lowering the antimatter cost would probably do what I want it to do..that is make the ability more useful.  At level 3 it's pretty ok, but it's useless at level 1.  By giving me the ability to get more shots off at level 1 you'd probably make me happy.  I'd go for that. 

Now if only the powers that be are watching....  

Hi!

I tried to mod that for Entrenchment (BuffTechCapitalColonize.entity), giving 1, 2 and 4 free extractors, but I can't make it work. Akkan correctly shows it will made 1 free extractor at first level, but when I colonize with it, there's none. Hardcoded ability?

BR,  Iztok

Buff Ion Bolt? The only thing we could do to make it more powerful is to allow it to target starbases.

What about construction ships instead of extractos?  I think one per level would be a nice reason to use the Akkan.  The way to balance extra construction ships is to have them only be replaced when destroyed if the planet has enough upgrades for them.  EX colonize asteroid and get 3 constuction ships which can put to work bulding extrators or other structures.  For the asteroid if it gets no upgrades to increase the number of constructors and the enemy destroys all three, then it can only rebuild its default one.

I think being able to get several structures building right after taking a planet would be a good reason to take an Akkan, especially if its a planet you just took from the enemy and need to get defenses up quickly.(Plus considering the TEC research for cheaper extractors means free ones are less of a deal for them then for other races.)

Ion Bolt shutting down starbases would be a bit too powerful.  However, having it partially work on them might be nice.  Having it disable abilities and movement(for the Vasari) while leaving weapons alone might be worth thinking about.

Agreed total shut down of a starbase would be too powerful. Maybe Disable Abilities and/or Disable HP, Sheild, AM regeneration.

The Akkan's colonization ability does not need a buff.   The research tech, Expidite Permits, cuts structure build time by 33% and with extra contructors for every colonization level will make any attacks to regain the planet impossible.

I prefer reverie by afar : if the ennemy has two capitals, you can disable one enough time to take care of the other or eat the ennemy fleet when his Cap is offline if he has only one cap. By the way, it also disables phase jump. Compared to that, Ion bolt is just funny.

What are you talking about?  You don't get extra constructors when you use the Akkan's colonize.  You get extra extractors, the little resource buildings that cost a paltry 250 each.  Zero at level 1 (yes, it does nothing special at level 1), one at level 2, and two at level 3.  That's it, 500 credits worth of basic structures for a level 3 colonization ability.  It's virtually worthless right now.

Even if it did provide extra constructors, that would hardly make the planet unbeatable.  If the conquering player wanted to fill it with static defense, he'd still have to pay for it.  That doesn't come cheap at all.  If colony frigates actually had decent anti-matter to do its job right, no one would get this ability at all.

But if you attack the reveried ship, it will break free and can run away.  Ion bolt doesn't have this weakness.  I can have my entire fleet focus fire the target ship and kill enemy caps with ease.  Early game, reverie is definitely the stronger ability, but later in the game a team of two Akkans can shut down an enemy capital ship completely, while still allowing you to focus fire it with impunity. 

It's a different ability completely, you can compare it all you want to Reverie, but the fact remains that if you attack the reveried capital ship, the ability goes away.  There's nothing that can be done about ion bolt.

It gets worse if you take into account the research the TEC gets to reduce extractor cost for just one lab(I think the price is reduced to around 150 per extractor, so its 300 credits worth of basic structures)

The extra constructors was a response to my post proposing that as a change to the Akkan's ability

perserverance

I was responding to reply #9

I say its balanced because TEC can research cheaper frigate factories and increased structural build rates whcih is permanent, as long the civilian research stations don't get destroyed, compared to Advent and Vasari's time limited colonization abilities.

Nothing says "Unfair!" when TEC grabs a desert planet and gets 9 frigate factories up and running if they get extra constructors with the Akkan colonization ability.

I'm an Ion Bolt/Akkan fan, and would love to have the Ion Bolt buffed a second or 2, but I have a question regarding balance and synergy.

I recently used an Akkan after a Dunov used Flux Field.  The Akkan spammed Bolts like mad.  Was tons of fun, and pretty nasty.

So, again, while I'd like to have the Bolt buffed, I ws just curious if anyone knows how much a factor synergies are taken into account with strengths of abilities.  Perhaps the Bolt was factored down with the potential of the Flux Field?  and, if memory recalls, didn't Ion Bolt originally more AM to use?  (Same thing with the Kol and Gauss shots, AM cost becomes minimal with the Flux field).

DH

Well, that's true that if you focus fire, the ship would get free after a few seconds. But if you think about it, do you really need ion bolt to destroy a fleeing cap ? Personaly, the moment i see a fleet trying to escape, i shot reverie to a cap and then go after the fleet. The cap would get free after 10-15 seconds and would have to get to the edge of the gravity well where my fleet is waiting for him. Moreover, he would be completely isolated from his fleet.

If he succeds into preparing a phase jump, the moment i see the phase effect appear in front of his ship, four seconds before he jumps, i order my ships to phase jump to the planet he is trying to go. It means his cap and my fleet would arrive in the same time and this time, he would not escape from me (ok, if he is retreating to a heavily defended planet, maybe i am not going to run after him but you see what i mean).

You don't really need ion bolt to destroy a cap : if a cap have to retreat, it means you have won the battle, right ? (well, there are exceptions, you may be losing a battle and in the same time make heavy damage to a cap but if you are losing, going after the cap instead of taking care of the fleet is a risky bet). My point is : ion bolt is an ability to kill an already half-dead cap after you have won a battle, it is kinda cool but reverie can take out an ennemy cap for a lot of time and allows you to focus fire on his LRM, support ships or heavy cruiser. I have been playing a battle against three caps and there was at least one of them and sometimes two who where disabled during a big part of the battle.It means a lot of DPS out of the game.

Dunov with ion bolt is a cool combo but so it is with rail gun, flak, not ion bolt in particular. Reverie IS great : its main point is not preventing caps from fleeing but helps winning a battle.

By the way, i am an advent Fan and as a conclusive argument, nothing is better than just : the Unity rules everything!

And don't forget the egg's grav warhead! i ussually use that ability in a similar way as RS-fx uses reverie, or even trade off using that and phase out hull if i have both the egg and the marauder in the well.

the main thing wrong with Akkan's colonize is not what it does. free extractors is fine, no need to change that. the main thing wrong with it is that it provides no benefit at level 1, which is an asymmetry compared to the other 2 capital colonizers which do provide some benefit at level 1. 

its been suggested many times by many people so i can't take credit for the idea, but i think the most popular change i know of is to go from 0/1/2 extractors to 1/2/3 extractors. 

Yeah, that would work just fine.  That would put it about on equal footing with the Vasari colonize, but Advent would still be king.  A very reasonable and conservative buff.