@Goa: I was thinking more about cpu lag and what happens when tons of strike craft are up.  At present, no one uses the hangars in grav wells or star bases and they need beefing up--but if you add more strike craft, then more will be used and then we have more lag with even more fighters up than before.

No new models have to be added--just a new entity file.  It also makes sense that a planet could field larger orbital craft than a ship.  So my suggestion doesn't add more models and textures into the mix.

I wouldn't want to make planets into total turtle havens but for a key world, you shouldn't be able to fly a little skirmish group in and devastate it.

I do kinda feel like there is currently too much incentive to keep your entire army in one large group.

i would say orgovs may be slightly overpowered, and ma need a slight speed reduction, but honestly i do not feel they are earth shatteringly hard to contend with, though i am a player who builds at least 2 hangers on every world. so i am more of a turtle player than some other players and i do so like my mines. 2 bomber squads and 2 fighter squads can deal with one or two orgovs before they take out your entire planet's structures, but more that one or two torpedo ships, you need what i find most effective are scouts and light frigates, cobalts for me as a Tec fan.

the starfish ships, adjucators i believe they're called do less damage, but in the middle of a base they fire in nearly every direction. i had a cruel ai with 3 of them firing in nearly every direction and while the damage wasn't as bad as if they  were orgovs, they were hitting around 4 structures at once.

on the note of adjucators being underpowered, i would agree with greyfox, if you power them up to be near or even equal damage of the torpedo cruisers, then take away a few of their banks. for example give them equal damage as orgovs, but split that damage between 2-3 targets, doing say 50% of the damage to the main target and 25% to each of the side or alternate targets.

sinperium was saying that more "artillery" units provide for more damage because of the volume of projectiles, and so more ships should give a damage multiplier. this i disagree with, but it would explain why the orgovs do more damage that the adjucators; their armaments are all going in one direction.

and a side note to the "heavy bomber" suggestion, there was a thread i was reading on what corvettes may possibly be in rebellion, and what i thought would be interesting, as a combinatin of many ideas was a heavy bomber/anti bomber ship (attacks like a bomber and a flak frigate, flak cannons on top, a payload below) that cannot phase jump and therefore have to dock with a carrier capital ship or titan and wouild attack like a fighter/bomber, not stationary, but able to be attacked by normal frigates and such.   of course none of this may come about, as its all just specualation at this point, but it would give us that "heavy bomber" that was suggested rather than revamping hangers completely.

Holy shit, this ftw.

I agree with the sentiment on the anti-structure cruiser situation, the Ogrov Torpedo Cruiser is extremely powerful while the Solanus Adjudicator is pathetic in comparison.

I believe Hanger Defenses are indeed underpowered, they cost so many Tactical slots, for very few fighters and/or bombers.

Honestly i just hate it when people lose an rts game due to a specific strat and the first thing they do is run to the forums and scream "ENTER UNIT NAME HERE" IS OP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

sanchez if you knew how to scout you would see them coming they really are not that fast and they take awhile to build, as vasari pji is easy to get so build a couple pji

there is no difference in this strat and the seige frigate mass rush (which i see alot of online), some pji and scouts or light frigs rape both

and you can easily kill them off at a much lower cost than it took to build them

so stop whining, start scouting and maybe dont turtle every single game no matter what lol

Let's avoid the sh!t talk, shall we? 

I have to agree with Sanchez on PJI's and siege frigates.  Any form of static defense is going to lose to Ogrovs, and PJI's are no exception.  It will certainly make a good capstone for a trap, but the "teeth" of that trap will need to be frigate-power.  Siege frigates are also a poor comparison; the damage they deal even to a 1000 HP asteroid pales in comparison to the damage an Ogrov will deal when it pounds on a trade port or other equivalent structure.  In terms of the damage they're dealing, the Ogrov is much faster acting and it comes at the same price point as a Krosov. 

However, I disagree with Sanchez on his other points.

The Ogrov doesn't really stand out by comparison with TEC's other daunting early-game and mid-game strengths.  The 2-lab trade port, the LRM, the hoshiko, the Akkan, the Sova... they all come together in an excellent synthesis to give TEC a brutal game plan.  The Ogrov is definitely a strong unit, but it doesn't stand out compared to the rest of the crowd.  It's really the combination of all these strengths that makes TEC so deadly, not any one in particular.

I think one of the big problems was the new faster speed.  It used to be that plotting down those trade ports at the start of the game would significantly slow down your early colonization, so Advent and Vasari could keep up by focusing on expansion until they reached the higher lab levels.  In Entrenchment, I had no problems playing Advent or Vasari in an economizer position and being competitive with TEC (map layout permitting).  With faster game speed, you can largely have your cake and eat it, too.  TEC can have those trade ports up at the start of the game and still be colonizing everything in sight.  Now Advent and Vasari really are behind and there's not a lot you can do about it unless you get a great start location.  I'm beginning to think that either "faster" speed needs to be toned down or trade ports need a nerf to bring fast trade (and by extension TEC's advantage with it) into line.

Complaining that Ogrovs are good against starbases is disingenious; that's what they're supposed to do, and I'm completely with Derek on this one.  If the TEC has totally overwhelmed you such that you cannot adequately support a starbase to survive an Ogrov assault, then you've lost.  If you're going to blame a balance issue, you probably should focus on the LRM and trade port that let TEC get to this point.  If you have a remotely competitive fleet, the Vasari defensive array is extremely dangerous and TEC definitely needs the Ogrov to punch through.

I definitely agree that the other factions need help, but I don't think that necessarily needs to be a TEC nerf.  The supply pact is probably the only thing I'd hit hard with the nerf stick.  I could definitely see tweaking a lot of their units, including the Ogrov, but nothing drastic.

The starfish are just as fast, only 3 tiers, and will kill buildings faster per supply point. (if they can use all thier banks)

Using this strat with advent would prolly be just as deadly.

It is not often that trade and labs are built in clumps to have all banks firing.  Most people ring their planets rather than put them altogether with nonmilitary structures.  Military structures are different however.  This works out just fine if its stationary SB like the advent or TEC.  It does not work with vasari SB because it just does not do enough damage to 1 target to make it worth the investment.  The vas SB will just move out and kill the starfish before they do much damage.  With ogrovs however there is a decent chance you will kill the SB before the ogrovs are dead with comparable numbers.  The advent SB can still meteor starfish to death or snipe them with whatever fleet is handy before you kill a structure especially if they got shield bestowal to mitigate damage.  TEC is a little different but all it takes is a few LRMs to kill them in safety range or SC of course.  A handful of Ogrovs guarantee you that at least 1 structure is gonna die.  Starfish will damage a lot of structures but gives plenty of opportunity to repair or otherwise survive the encounter before the starfish are killed.  There is good reason why ogrovs are used and starfish are not.

[_]-Greyfox

This

I agree with Darvin that the faster speed is a big culprit in ruining game balance...the balance between vertical growth (like trade ports) and horizontal growth (like planet expansion) becomes severely distorted if the same rules apply to slow/normal and faster game speed...another area this becomes an issue is abilities because their duration doesn't change even if ship speed is (which also affects how fast ships damage each other)...construction time (both for frigates and SC) is also plagued by game speed as the proportions of different construction times change based on build rate speed...

Scramble bombers was OP before v1.2, but part of what made it so powerful was that many people on ICO were playing on faster speed...on normal speed the bombers do less DPS and therefore were not as useful considering that the duration does not increase for slower game speeds...

One possible way to deal with trade ports is to reduce the bonus related to how long your longest trade port chain is...this at least wouldn't make building trade ports conducive to acquiring more planets...

Ogrovs are very powerful, yes....but they require you to dedicate a lot of fleet supply to a unit that is useless for anything but killing structures.  If Ogrovs ever got nerfed, players would not find enough justification to make them instead of some multipurpose frigate that can contribute to fleet fights. 

You have to have a healthy economy to field a sizable force of Ogrovs.  They are great for cracking heavily defended worlds, but they tend to die pretty fast as well, so if you gimped your fleet to make them you could be in big trouble.  However if your opponent also gimped his fleet to put unsupported starbases everywhere......  

I believe the statement on game speeds affecting scramble bomber damage to be inaccruate.

As far is i am aware, game speed does not affect battles in any way other than faster ship movement.