Early game balance in Reb v0.9

I agree with everything stated.

For another solution option I would add

that you could make corvettes be unable to attack structures at all and their anti capital ship damage to be very low. 

Also what mecha forgot to mention is that corvettes fire very fast and while focus fire capital ship or structure they are still dealing significant damage to other structures or frigates.

With introduction of corvettes and their speed micro management during a fight became obsolete. 

While playing against AI try this. When you have inferior force get 20 corvettes and run them in circles. Their speed and ability to attack strike craft (if ai is not SC heavy) you can run around gravity well to delay confrontation indefinitely(build repair defence turrets even start building sb and upgrade it to full health...)

I agree with everything that Mecha has stated here.

I wouldn't say make them unable but at least make it so they do very little damage to them like capital ships.

I agree, especially with the fixes. Wouldn't want to see corvettes get nerfed so hard as to become obsolete. I'm not sure about decreasing their speed (maybe a little) as they are supposed to be fast, but they should definitely not be building killers. 

Title is very illusive as it sugest rebellion has a balance.

Kinda lol

Devs took our advices about titans and mass controll weepon, but also in quest of adding something new , aka corvetes , completly screwed balance

About balance u must remeber about embargo and sb rush. If u make corvetes unable to attack sb (structures) or very weak agaist caps we will se sova rush/ sb rush as the only opening cause sova supported with corvetes or sb suported with corvetes will be unbeatable

Speed would be important as they are quick response forces. Damage to capships and structures is another matter.

Im not saying nerf speed to titan level, but some adjustment is in order.

As it stands corvettes can chase and kill cap through half of map. That's not good either.

Still, I think if they're countered harder by flak, Sova/SB rush would be less of an issue, because you would be safer to build LRF. Besides, with speed nerf distance would be more of an issue while Sova/SB rushing. That's a big factor.

I agree completely with mecha lenin's analysis of the situation.

I would however like to add an option to what can be done to fix the situation.

I have outlined in this post:  https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/424340/

This post is about how you can buff turrets to make them strong against corvettes so that 2v1 situations are more manageable while not destroying balance.  The game currently has no relatively cheaply built defense to counter corvettes.

This would reduce the impact that corvette spams would have on the game.

What exactly do you mean by "countered harder"?  Flak vs. Corvettes is the hardest counter in the game (at least when looking at just frigates)...the issue isn't that flak can't kill Corvettes quickly, it's that flak can't catch them...

So what exactly do you propose to make them "countered harder by flak"?  Are we talking a damage table change here, a speed increase to flak, a weapon range increase to flak?

Note also that any changes to the composite weaponry in the damage tables will affect heavy cruisers as well....

Who said that YOU can't spam corvettes to counter those corvettes?

Flak doesn't need to catch corvettes, it needs to protect rest of fleet from them. It doesn't matter that corvettes can't kill flak. Problem is that it takes too long for flak to kill corvettes before they do damage. It's purely early game thing, as fleets get bigger it doesn't matter anymore. And yes, I meant straight dmg increase.

Excellent consideration, i agree wholeheartedly.
Especially the balance suggestions sound very reasonable  (except the speed nerf, speed should be one of corvettes USP IMO), corvettes should really not be that deadly against almost everything, so caps and structures would surely welcome better defense against them.

Not sure what i think about their ability to target strike craft.
While it may look like an ability too much on top of all the things they can do now, i personally never had much trouble with that.

Devs, please look into this again.

Been using aoe attacks and corvettes for the whole week as opening..using flak to counter them means having a tightly clustered fleet to draw as many in for all the flak turrets to bring as many down. 

They should lower there speed since they have lowered flak dps but also slightly increase the range of flak. 

Taking a queue from other games (largely Homeworld), Corvettes would carry bigger weapons than strikecraft but be slow enough for "normal" guns (not AA guns) to hit them. In other words while nearly as cheap as strikecraft, they'd be too big to really be strikecraft.

Translated in SoaSE terms, we could have Corvettes as a build option on Carriers / Caps / Bases, their damage being substantially higher than Strikecraft, and being Bomber and Fighter combined offensively. But on the downside, normal guns could hit them. Type-wise Corvettes would simply take low AA damage but normal damage from everything else. I know that reverses their combat role, they'd be anti-flak fighters / non-specialized fighters. But the balance works because it gives carriers something to build if your opponent is already countering your carriers.

I agree with Mecha-Lenin, but balancing corvettes is not a simple task.

The problem with corvettes is that, for the player using them, it's a no-brainer: click the "build corvette button a lot." Because of their low cost, you can have them out in a very short time, and because of their high DPS, a few of them go a long way, making it difficult for players who aren't either spamming corvettes or countering them specifically to do anything about it.

There are basically only two counters to corvettes (fighters and flak), both of which are limited in numbers in the early game and both of which are limited in effectiveness against corvettes, mainly because corvettes and fighters attack in passes, sharply limiting the amount of damage that can be done to corvettes before they **** you up.

There are a couple of ways we can deal with this:

1. Limit corvette availability somehow:
1. Increase cost/supply (ill-advised)
2. Though the community seems largely against this suggestion: make them strike craft (limiting their numbers in the early game based on the number of hosts typically available) and balance them accordingly
1. 2/3 the combined DPS of a squadron
2. 2/3 the combined health of a squadron
3. Their three weapons would each have a different damage type, good against specific targets
2. Limit corvette speed and turn rate, to make them easier to target
3. Put flak guns on certain capital ships (battleships, for example)
4. Nerf corvette damage output early on, then buff it later via research
5. Modify corvette damage types against specific targets

Of these, making them strike craft would have the most effect, followed by modifying their damage type. The rest are mostly "soft" nerfs, which are probably not enough.

You know, if the devs just added new weapon and armor types for Corvettes, this would be a really easy problem to solve...

There still an equilibrium point missing-where too many is effective and a few is not...corvettes need to be nerfed up to this point where price, dps , fleet supply, speed and build speed are just right vs there counters.

This means doing scenarios of flak vs Corvettes where building just enough flak within a specified time is able to counter  a number of corvettes built within that time period.

Or em i wrong?

The winner is then determined by the cap abilities they use. 

Sounds a lot like balancing bombers...

I only bring that up because, it hasn't happened yet...

I don't like one early unit being able to counter 2.  How much would it help if corvettes were not effective vs. light frigates so you have lf > flak > corvettes > lrf ?  having your lf survive longer would mean a harder time for enemy flak, but that might give them an incentive to build lrf.  forcing them to diversify more would pull resources away from corvettes, meanwhile they're trying to do the same thing to you.  I'm ok with spam being effective as long as I can counter it with a different kind of spam.

unless lrf should now just be used to snipe caps?

admittedly, I still haven't played much lately so I dont know how much the flak hp nerf has done.

I agree that corvettes counter too many things.  And due to their agility they are hard to actually mobilize counters against.

That said  I think they should counter LRF and capitalships well.  Their entire role was to form a counter for the two dominant factors of the diplomacy early-mid game: carrier capitalships and LRF- both of which previously didn't have a counter.  Honestly the changes I'd prefer seeing would be:

-Increase the speed/maneuverability of flak frigates a bit- they kill corvettes well, it's catching them that's the problem.

-Designate some capitalship class as "anti SC/corvette".  An easy way to do this which was recently discussed in another thread is for example by changing the side weapons-banks of the Kol/Radiance battleships to antilight damage type & allowing them to target strikecraft.  This would provide one capitalship who's weapons don't deal 25% damage to corvettes(and would add a new bomber counter option as well)

-Honestly I'd rather see corvettes made worse at killing LF/HC/carriers then worse at killing LRM frigates.  They are supposed to counter LRM, honestly I think the real problem is that their damage type is good against everything, meanign they counter just about everything.

-make them worse against structures or provide better static defense options against them.  They shouldn't be able to demolish buildings so well.

Also another thought: what if the tier of corvettes research were increased a bit- maybe to T2 for advent, T3 for TEC/vasari?  Advent need it a bit earlier as they get their LRM frigate late(which caused their pre-corvette early game issues), but delaying corvettes to T2/T3 would also give LRM frigates a bit of space tow ork with without actually removing their counter as they would for most races come out before corvettes hit the field.

I completely agree with what Bilun stated above. Those changes would make the game significantly more balanced if done properly. Thumbs up for good thinking!

Bilun, are those changes collective or alternate options?

Depends on the severity of the changes.  Honestly I think the best solution would probably be a suite of small nerfs to various areas & added counters rather then one or two heavy nerfs.  That said, with more severe nerfs it would be possible to achieve the same results by only nerfing one or two areas.

The battleship & flak changes especially could very easily be "one or the other", as the core goal with those changes was the same(add more effective counters).

 The reductions in corvettes efficiency against certain enemies you'd likely need at least one or two types of enemies though(the best choices probably being LF & structures), as the simple fact of the matter is corvettes are super effective against far too wide of a purview of enemies for an early game unit.

Well that's for the first dashed list anyway.  

Increasing the tier was an idea I'd come come separately from the other ideas(and is less part of a package then they are). Increasing the research tier would IMO warrant a good deal less of the other incremental nerfs as it would change their early game dynamic by causing them to come out later.  In particular having corvettes at a higher tier could justify them being strong against a wide purview of enemies(See bomers/HC for details), so increasing the tier would certainly reduce the number of "efficiency vs X" nerfs necessary.