Vasari its bout balancing it. Im not saying give fighters 100 hp.Bombers are fine the way they are. If you increase hp of fighters it would take longer for them to die by fighter or flak and that is what we need.Fighter need to stay alive longer to kill lrf.People will have to allocate more fleet to flak or fighters to kill fighters instead of 80%lrf and 20% flak.

The only real difference between what im saying and what your saying is that once you kill fighters they stay dead for awhile.If you increase build rates its the same as increasing hp because as soon as you kill one another takes its place.

Let me give you an example.

Say your flak does 10 dps to a fighter of 40 hp.It will take 4 sec to kill said fighter.If its build rate is 4 sec then your hp rate is 10 a sec.

Now say your fighter has 80 hp it would take it 8 sec to destroy it.Say it takes 8 sec to rebuild.Hp is still 10 a sec.

So instead of having a fighter every 4 sec that lasts 4 sec you have one that lasts 8 and takes 8 to replace.That means you have longer amount of time to use bombers inbetween fighter waves.You get same dps for same amount of time it is just more important to not sacrifice fighters in case the enemy wants to use bombers.Also you can still achieve no build penalty by jumping into a neutral system.Then its a tactical choice of how you use your am.The old build was just sit back and watch it do its thing you didnt really have to watch how you used carriers.

What they did when they introed build penalty is took a fighter that lasts 4 sec and put an 8 sec build on it.

Actually mind that might work.

right now it is probably closer to 4 secs to kill the fighter and 1 minute to build it back due to bugged antimatter regen rates on vasari and TEC carriers.

but it would bacically solve the problem of fighters being useless.

Again you nerf tec flak burst and advent push.  Why not just decrease build penality. Its 1 step vs trying to balance 2+ different things.  Asking the devs to try to balance differnt things just to fix sc will be asking too much.  They may end up breaking other things

Yeah doing any changes tot eh fighters them selves will only cause more balance problems.

Give them more HP great they live longer againts flak, but they like longer againts flak burst and againt otehr SC as well.

So boost their damage well okay no they cna kill each others. But their massakering LRFs.

So boost LRFs HP now they survive SC but their to hard to kill with anythgin els enow.

And it goes on until you are rigth back were you have started. Thus goign down that path is a dead end. Doesn'T get use anywere near a solution.

What will bring us a solution is takign off the build penalty but increasing the scuttle time. That wya carriers keep their power in combat to keep the game balance and people cant just switch bettew fighters and bomber. Make the scuttleing 2-4 minutes long and you cna bet people won'T be scutteling in combat. Also to have that mecanic out scuteling should automaticaly call all SC into hangers and prevent lunch unless scutteling is canceled.

Well flak burst and telepush damages can be adjusted to fighters only because they have different armor then bombers and Its like I said ead you dont add 100 hp.Just enought hp to bring them back to the level they were at before.If they take longer to kill and kill more lrf then people will have to get more flak and fighters for themselves to counter and thats what we want.It will break the spam chain.If you send all your fighters to attack his lrf you may massacre them but your fighters will be dead and it will take awhile to rebuild and thats where balance comes in cause now the other guy has a chance to beat your carriers instead of them rebuilding the entire fighter force super fast and rolling over you.

Flak will stay important because if you just get fighters to counter and you lose your fighters you will be defenseless.Flak will be important part of the fleet.The other guy will have the option of do I clear out fighters so mine dont die but then his lrf are killing your carriers.The game will have strategies when it comes to carriers and that is what I would like to see.

Well Minds Eye what you just waisted yoru time saying and explaining is exactly what wer currently have going on right now. So that change yoru proposing isn'T a chnage it'S a status quoe. Does dig shit game remains a LRFs spam fest because the counter chain is broken were carrier can kill their intendent targets because  a few flaks is wiping out all the fighters. Witch means LFs are still useless and con'T performt heir job because of the LRFs spams that are invulnerable because of flak that is OPed because carrier can'T rebuild their shit int he first place. A Small HP buff to fighters will do dick squat. Dong just that will only have to further invalidable fighter vs fighter and fighters vs bombers.

ME and JJ are telling you any changes made otehr then the removing on the build penalty is going to have repucutions all the way  down the food chain. And from my math and calculation those changes take us no were fast. Like riding a stationary bike and trying to pedals has ahrd as you can. Your tired and burnt alot of of evergy but you still were you started off.

Not really ead. If you have about 20 bomber squads it takes alot of flak and it takes them awhile to kill them all.So you can do alot of damage with 20 squads.If fighters were the same then you could kill most or half of the lrf before they are takin out.The fighters have served their purpose and you can clean out the flak with lf.If you can take out most lrf even if he has flak then carriers have served their purpose and you can clean up with a mixed fleet again.The stronger fighters become the more balanced a fleet must be.But if they have no weakness and can be spammed then they become to strong and its unbalanced.

With that said I agree that things I say are just an opinion and you actually have proof via previous versions of the game but It was also proof that old build rates made carriers op and everyone complained like they are about lrf now.I am also right about the bomber thing if fighters have no weakness because it was true.So there is proof that what you are saying is wrong and right.Take the good and improve on it is what Im tryin to do.

Even with your suggestion of long scuttle times its almost the same as before cause you can just spam fighters and kill most things.It will just take longer to switch to bombers to kill a sb with long scuttle time.

Anyway I really dont see how adding hp to fighters and making them last longer would have reprocusions down the whole food chain.Your talking about a more radical approach by making fighters have no weakness.

I've read probably a billion comments on what to do (if anything) about this issue and its been debated endlessly here at Ironclad as well. Anyways, here it was is changing in the 1.03 patch:

-Carrier's squadron buildrate penalty with enemy units in the gravity well reduced from 25% to 15%.

Now before I'm bombarded with another billion comments, let me explain the situation and why we've made this course correction.

First, our inhouse testing and modelling tells us that 25% is the value we want to balance the flak/lrm/carrier triangle. However, our stats tracking and your feedback suggests it's too harsh. (In terms of stats tracking we can see that the ratio of carriers to lrm over all games played on ICO since the carrier change is not where it should be). This means that we are clearly missing something in our model and in our playstyle. We don't know what it is and it is very frustrating. So what we want to do is reduce the value and see what happens. Based on those results we will either move it back towards 25% or closer to 0%. Expect a patch that does nothing but change this value by 5% in either direction in the near future once we've got more data and feedback. In the meantime we'll be trying to figure out what is missing in our model and playstyle.

Now just to clear up a misconception:

The build rate penalty was not 75%, it was 25%. The value in the gameplay.constants file was -1.0 which means when plugged into the code "1 / (1 - x)" it results in a scalar of .75 which is a 25% reduction. The new value of -.176 will result in a scalar of .85 which is a 15% reduction.

Finally, just so its explicit: we have considered changes to flak, seperate modifiers to fighter/bomber build rate penalties, fighter buffs, lrm nerfs and a lot of other ideas some of which were pretty conservative and some of which are pretty wacky. We do feel this is the best direction after examining all possible alternatives. If this iterative process doesn't give us the results we want we'll open the door again to the other possiblities.

Thanks Blair Im glad you are listening to the community.

also thanks for explaining how the build penalty actually works.

good to see that you saw the critique and that you respond with an according change. also good to know you considered a lot of different options and further monitor whether the change results in balance or whether further trimms are needed. and lastly, thx for clarifying how the penalty works. too often -75% penalty was posted, when, if fact, that's never been the value.

Thanks Blair!  

I think this is the best way to go as well.   If you change other values of other units in the "flak/carrier/lrm" triangle, you run the risk of some other imbalance appearing. 

I almost didn't get to play since the inception of 1.02, and when I got back recently to play some Entrenchment, it was like night and day how nobody was making fighters anymore and when they did make carriers, they were making mostly bombers.

The old paradigm was that bombers were worthless, because fighters were king and would destroy them.  The new paradigm was fighters were worthless because they got killed by flak too fast, so if you made a carrier, you eventually gravitated to all bombers.  The effect I have been seeing is it is dreadfully hard to counter both LRM & Bombers late game.

The 15% build penalty may well be the tweak to restore balance.  Fingers crossed.

Feel free to kill me for my ignorance / stupidity /etc. but couldn't a solution be to remove all build penalties and charge a small fee for strike craft replacement? Just because the Aircraft Carrier cost $20 billion doesn't mean the strike craft didn't cost $20 million, so to say.

DrGonzo

 Im glad to hear this and I hope it works.Right now my comp is down so I wont be playin till I fix it but since I saw carriers were gettin nerfed more I didnt mind.Now I need to get it fixed asap so I can play.

I would much rather have the fighters rebuild very slowly but be tougher for Flak to kill. I just don't like the idea of expendable ships doing suicide runs and rebuilding quickly for free.

Even now you can do a fighter suicide run to knock out as many LRF's as you can, dock them for a bit and repeat in the same battle.

I agree with you hound but not many agree with us for some reason.I actually had alot of fun with bombers...majority rules but either way it will improve the lrf situation.I dislike not using carriers.

posponed. move along.

Thanks for making a tweak to carrier build rate penalties and giving it a chance to see how it goes. Flak seems to work well now so that is one of the many positive changes in 1.02. I understand this balancing act is a tricky business and the need for patience.

I apologize for my misunderstanding of the build rate penalty and replies I made to perpetuate the misunderstanding.

All Hail Blair!

All Hail Blair!

Seriously, sounds awesome....but it's tuesday (and you said late this week) I want mah patch!

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