The underused capital ships
possible suggustions for ideas on various ways of slightly buffing them
Sins Forums
In responce to another post, i started writing this, and it got really long, and started to become offtopic, so i will post it here. (2 gigantic threads in less than 12 hours, man, i am on a role!)
We have to be careful when buffing the unused capital ships. i find use for the other capital ships occasionally, and it doesn’t take much from "occasionally" to "always".
nerving scramble bombers to 1.18 level is a great start, but we must also remember that the skrims, and the enforcers were rather nicely buffed as well, but for some reason, still rather unseen. this is due to phase missiles, and their amazing damage bonuses. I made a separate thread for my thoughts on phase missiles.
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/383347
now, about the other caps.
colony and carriers like you said, are good. Vasari colony cap’s colonize could be a little bittybit better… maybe a pop growth bonus, or 20/40/60 on the building build speed… but the Vasari don’t need buffing.
Kol. I like the kol. Its kinda hard to kill… but it also does little more than sit there. It is only used for flack burst. GRG sucks. How much does GRG suck? Death egg does 1125 hull damage while also reducing armor value so other ships do more damage. GRG… gets reduced by shield mitigation to patheticness. Ima suggest this: reduce GRG back to its previous damage (it got a little boost, remember?), get rid of the silly speed penalty, and simply allow it to ignore shield mitigation and armor. This will about double its current effectiveness. A kol that is able to do 350/550/850 damage instantly, and that I know will do exactly that much damage, might actually be useful, mind you it will never get more than 2 shots off before it is out of antimatter for the rest of the battle, but at least now *almost* brings up the kol up to deathegg level of dreadedness on the battlefield… and for some odd reason, a battleship might get close to beating a carrier cap in a 1v1.
Marza is fine.
Donov. I like my donovs. If they were not in space, I would go pet one like a kittycat. (that reminds me, did ironclad ever get anywhere with its capitalship plushy line? I really want a donov for a pillow, a marza to prop up my arm when ima reading a book, and a kol I can hang in the center of my ceiling.) ok, seriously, donovs are not that bad… except magnetize… and magnetize wouldn’t be so horrible if it could kill a single advent fighter squad at lv 1. (it cant… at lv 1, 8 targets, 9 fighters per squad, pathetic) it is rather ok vs Vasari, killing 2 fighter squads at lv 1, and almost 3 bomber squads. (4 vas fighter squads at lv 3, 5.33 bomber squads) I am not sure how much damage this ablitiy does, it kinda depends on the strike craft… but it doesn’t seem like its a lot (not nearly as good as, oh, idk… 150/300/450 AOE uncapped damage +50/100/150 antimatter removal) All I ask for the donov, is change “strikecraft” to “squads” and divide by 2. So, 4/6/8 squads are (possibly) removed from battle, and as the battle goes on, the ablitiy will return from meh level to sucky level as each squad is reduced to 1 or 2 strikecraft per squad…. So make sure it targets full strength squads if it can. Hey! If it didn’t cost so much antimatter, it would almost counter scramble bombers! If you felt like it, you could buff restore shields a tinny bit, by say, giving a nonstacking 2%/4%/6% max mitigation bonus… which would almost give the same damage reduction as an overseer with its +2 armor. I mean… lv 3 donov… 50 slots, 1 capital slot, and 500 shield restored… vs 2 overseers, 14 ship slots, MUCH cheaper, oh, and 500 hitpoints restored… ya… currently, its overseers all the way.
Advent…
progen, fine, halycyon, godly,
Revelation: reverie is great, clairvoyance is really nice for instantly knowing about somewhere for free… guidance… sucks. There are many ways to change it… it could be made into a passive aoe, but that’s radical, what if instead of 40%/40%/40%... we change it to 50%/75%100%.that doesn’t seem too horrible (remember, the way things stack in sins, 100% is 2x as fast).. infact it still seems rather sucky…. The issue is, if your spaming an ability faster, your draining your antimatter faster… and what good is ability speed up if you have no antimatter? What if we tried 50/75/100%... and lets throw in a 50/75/100% antimatter reduction usage. This means, that at lv 3, if cast on your progen, you could use shield restore twice as often, at ½ the am usage per cast. (note, since your spamming it twice as fast, the antimatter/second usage is the same) (or telepush twice as fast). While provoke hysteria is kinda meh, we cant really mess with it, so lets not, for now at least.
Rapture: This capital ship is GREAT, I don’t know why it is so underused, its vertigo is amazing (weapon cooldown increase and weapon chance to hit decrease… at max level, that means flack frigs are down from 75% chance to hit to 45% chance to hit… 25% in certain neutrals…. But all other ships are down to 49% effectiveness. Concentration auara is amazing… 10/20/30% damage bonus on strike craft… (and can hang out on the edge of the grav well with the carriers) that’s better than the haylcon, and vengeance is, if used properly, the best anti-strike craft ability in the entire game. (I kid you not, cast this on a starbase that Vasari bomber spammer is hold positioning on… and just laugh your head off… assuming he doesn’t have a skirantra in range using repair cloud… ) and domination… well, at a minimum you should be picking up a heavy cruiser every 60 seconds, but the support cruisers are fun too. It’s a good thing the advent players are so set in their ways that they don’t ever change, and that no one reads these forums, else some people might be calling for a nerf on this thing.
Radiance: This ship is decent, animosity is its weak point, but can you really do anything about that? Perhaps animosity could reduce the damage of the force attacking ships by 20% or something. Perhaps someone else could come up with a better solution for that. Antimatter burn is awesome. 200/400/600 damage done to the hull, (no armor/shield mitigation to get in the way), drains antimatter, interrupts, and disables. I mean, GRG currently does less damage, and doesn’t do any of that cool stuff, (my proposed buff to GRG does ~50% more damage, and does non of that cool stuff, which is why I think we can get away with it.) cleansing brilliance does less damage than missile barrage, and is harder to set up, but its also harder to interrupt, and it is easier for advent to set up combos with it. ( malice)
Vasari:
Eggy: fine. Skirantra: please, please nerf Scramble bombers!) Scramble bombers does… 9227 damage over the life of the bombers from a single cast! Ridiculous! For 50 antimatter! And has phase missiles! Kol does less than 1000 for more antimatter! Wtf? I mean, its over 9000! (First person with adobe to take that 17 second video and stick a skirantra onto of it gets a karma kookie.)
Kortul: this is a mighty fine capital ship, however, I have one quarrel with jam weapons… ships (or, strike craft in this case) can fire their weapons the second the very edge of the target gets in range, so while say, lv 1 jam weapons has a range of 3500 units, in order to be protected, a ship has to be within 3500-2400(range of strike craft before research) – radi of hit sphere. So, ill be honest, I don’t have numbers here, but basically the protective range of jam weapons is much much smaller than advertised. Lv 3 jam weapons hardly covers a starbase if the kortul is hugging it as close as can be (and try that when they are both moving) to make it worse, the higher the level, the faster the ability drains antimatter (if I did my math right, a lv 10 kortul with max antimatter research cannot constantly keep jam weapons up… and even then its only a partial protection ½ time at lv 1 to 2/3 time at lv 3.) I am going to ask for, either 500 increase in range for all levels, OR, 70/65/60 antimatter cost per level, OR, 20/25/30 duration per level. (the 500 range is the least of all, and would put the lv 3 range to 7000, a number it was previously at.) Vnanites is amazing, and does not need changing, and power surge is great as well.
Marauder: I like this capital ship, its fun. Its one of those cap ships I want to hang from my ceiling, but its rare, it doesn’t need much though. Subversion is much improved… but it sucks. The worst part about it is that you have to get close to the planet to use it (think about it… if your that close.. why aren’t you bombing it… and then you don’t want that buff still there when you capture it… but the buff will stay, making building repairbays a PAIN…) You know, the sova doesn’t reduce extractor income from the planet… maybe subversion could reduce extractor income by 33/66/100%, (doesn’t stack, obviously)… OR make the range unlimited… so you could skirt around the planet like a sova does with embargo. Phaseout hull is an amazing ability… but it has one issue: shield mitigation. If your trying to use phaseout hull to save your own ship, it is actually almost counter productive, because during phaseout, the ship loses shield mitigation, and hence, when it comes out of phasespace, it has a lower shield mitigation than when it started, and so, while it did get healed 200 damage, that 200 damage goes straight toward rasing that mitigation back up, and this effect gets worse the higher the level (more seconds for shield mitigation to go down, but the 200 damage doesn’t change.) I don’t want to change this so much that it becomes op (cause its really nice right now)… but I would ask for… either 10%/15%/20% increase (towards the normal maximum, not above) in shield mitigation for friendly ships on return from phase space, OR, 200/250/300 damage healed/dealt on return, OR, (and, heh, this might be interesting… think about it, you just sent them into phase space) give the ability a .05 second warm up before the phase out, during which time phase jump charge up time is reduced by 100000% on the target ship… aka, cast this on a ship trying to jump into phase space, and guess what? It jumped into phase space! Whoda thunk it?? I think that might make this ability a bit on the really cool side. (now, if you felt like it, make this insta-jump effect only work on friendly ships, so that phase out hull can still be used like ion bolt/reverie on enemy ships)
Desolator:
This is a weird ship, and I haven’t messed with it much, mostly because its just so meh. Its great at siegeing, but that’s about it, course, I guess there is nothing wrong with that, but lets take a look at phase missile swarm. 600/2000/4200 damage. Now that’s just weird. (well, if it didn’t autocast the second a single target got into range, making it actually do 200/400/600 on its first cast) You would also think that the phase missiles on a phase missile based capital ship with an ability that costs 90 antimatter would be slightly better than the phase missiles on the second rate rejects they put on bombers and assailants… but nope, these phase missiles on this capitalship, don’t phase one bit. So while the lv 1 of this ablity still does more damage than lv 1 or 2 of current gauss rail gun (rofls), the damage is still reduced by shield mitigation. How about 5/6/7 targets dealt 200/300/400 damage direct to hull (like a proper phase missile)? This means 1000/1800/2800 damage done (before armor, unlike proposed GRG, and eggydeath), which is a significant buff above what it is currently, but it puts it approximately in line with the 1/3 2/3 3/3 usual progression of abilities. (mind you, that is a lot of damage, but it is spread out to different targets, 5/6/7 hoshikos would heal all/almost all/more than half that damage before a second volley was fired.
I think that’s everything. Now, while I did do some serious thinking into this, I didn’t use the dev’s uber balancing spreadsheet thingy they have hidden away somewhere, but the goal here was to not change things too much, and hopefully make the other capital ships slightly closer to being chosen over the current choices. At the very least, I hope I gave a few new and interesting ideas on how to mess with the various abilities. (except animosity, ima stuck on that one)
So, thoughts, questions, comments? i tried to be logical, but i am sure there is a flaw somewhere. feel free to point it out, but dont throw out the idea because it is 10% to powerfull or something.
