[Poll] Rate These Suggestions

All this talk of balance is USELESS. Just face it: The devs don't give one shit about Rebellion anymore. You heard blair yesterday; they would rather keep all their cool new toys and improvements for a sequel rather than improving this one. When they can't even fix something as simple as the maw bug, or even implement an in-game clock, or even respond to their own tech support email (8 MD files sent in, no response, lmao) what makes you think they would actually spend the time and "debate" these ideas in the office? Plus, I don't think the devs even play multiplayer, so they would probably think DN and PM are balanced, which they aren't. 

It is very sad to see a game with so much potential die like this due to crap dev support. Sins could have been one of the great multiplayer rts of this decade. Instead, the game is struggling to keep 2-3 multiplayer matches going on at any time. All the new players from various steam sales have left. The old guard are starting to trickle away. I predict in 5 months active player count will be down to 80. 

Just think about it, if SOASE had retained even a quarter of the new players from the 5-6 steam sales, we would have about 1500 in multiplayer people at the moment. Sadly, the primitive multiplayer system (no leaderboard or matchmaking, WTF) and MDs/DCs scare away all the prospective players.

P.S. Also, sins is NOT a "4x hybrid" game. This is marketing fail 101. It is an rts. Good job on turning off the rts crowd with the stupid and deceptive ads.

Sinkillr,

I lack sufficient data to determine the likelihood of the developers reading this thread, responding to this thread,  implementing the changes I suggested, or implementing more general changes. The release of a balance patch not two months ago indicates that they still intend to support Rebellion, regardless of whether or not a sequel is in development; if the DLC was sufficiently profitable, we actually might see an increased incidence of new content.

The fact that the developers do not intend to implement 64-bit processing in Rebellion is a product of the fact that doing so would require rewriting the engine -- essentially, coding a new game. If they're going to code a new game, they might as well make money off of it, hence the alleged sequel.

In the meantime, you have not indicated whether or not you like the suggestions, which is the purpose of this thread. After all, we know the developers read these forums; if they are continuing to develop Rebellion, and if they see a thread that contains suggestions that are simple to implement (which these are), potentially profound (which these could be), and popular within the community (which this poll purports to find out), then they might be tempted to make a few changes.

Regardless, creating and participating in a constructive thread is better than doing nothing -- or brooding.

All your suggestions have been discussed extensively in at least two threads... the devs have not even commented once.

I like #2 btw.

At least three, by my count; but there's no harm in creating a thread requesting feedback on these specific issues, which seem to me to be the most profound and least controversial changes that could be made.

They've commented....

1. No. I like Phase missiles on them, looks awesome, wave would be strange. Solution would be to reduce their base damage drastically (as the shield negation techs will give huge increase to their effective power, this would not be unfair, and would fit Vasari concept of starting weak ending up strong).

2. Maybe, though I'd prefer someone's idea that the missile platform should be focused on the target, so it should have  a duration matching that platform's firing rate (a small cheap platform should not be able to disable multiple capital ships, frigates and cruisers simultaneously, and for 5 minutes...).

3. Maybe, though have you tested it, will it really give fighters an improvement that will make them actually worth selecting over (pure) bombers? I think increasing their base damage by 100-200% but decreasing their bonuses against every other target than bombers by the approppriate amount (so if fighters will attack 2 times bigger than now, they will get a penalty against long range and etc, so they will attack the same against those like before the increase). FIGHTERS MUST BE ABLE TO KILL BOMBERS IN 1 SHOT. Decimating the enemy bombers in the first strike, not decimating them when they have actually killed all your important stuff, and bombers are free, and fighters have fighters, flak and cap AoE as counters.. This would greatly encourage fighter escorting (like in reality), as your pure bomber fleet will be killed within 2 or 3 fighter wave attacks, and would make room for mixing heavy cruisers in your fleet, and not having to worry about losing your capital ship even before it reaches the battlefield..

Currently 3v1 ratio is needed (fighter-bomber) (my guess) to decimate bombers in the first strike and to crush the bomber swarm, and this is not likely to happen with late game fleets.. At best you will have 1v1 ratio, and this is not useful at all.

EDIT: and maybe make flak more durable against titan fire (basically they are small absolutely armored tanks), so Titans should have a huge penalty against flak not to feed enemy titans if you face strike craft and a titan. And maybe make flak worthless against titans, say they should attack 1% or even less of their current damage against them, they are not meant to be threats against titans, so this would evade a 200flakVStitan unfair match

#2 in the OP is already implemented for the next update.

That's a really good news, even against a Vasari AI that ability is too strong.

1. Approved
2. Approved
3. Approved

@Frostflare and ARESIV- 

Do you guys even play multiplayer? There is no conceivable way you can support buffing fighters over bombers if you do. I rarely see bombers getting built anymore, usually its just all fighter compositions (even vasari). Bombers are just free exp for titan whenever fighters come along. I suggest you hop on and play 3-5 multiplayer matches to get a feel of the current metagame. Theory-crafting and number crunching can only get you so far.

@Yarlen-

Maybe I was too harsh in my first post, although I will reserve judgement until the update actually gets released.

How do you know this would improve anything?

Fighters already are faster and accelerate quicker. Have you tried any value changes?

why are the kol and radiance unusable?

Because some people haven't figured out how to use them.

Please upload a replay of the kol being used effectively... I bet you can't even find one.

They're not "unusable", they're just disappointing. They both have one useful ability (Flak Burst on the Kol, Detonate Antimatter on the Radiance) as opposed to other caps that are useful in more ways. They're also not "battleships" that do extremely well at single combat and tanking - the Kol's direct combat abilities take up too much antimatter for it to keep using, and the Radiance just has plain crappy ones (apart from Detonate).

Compare this with the Kortul, whose Disruptive Strikes and Power Surge make it excel in single combat offensively - and Disruptive Strikes, Jam Weapons and Volatile Nanites give people a reason to target it, upon which Power Surge also makes it fantastically resilient. The Kortul is a proper battleship and is useful in all the roles it seeks to accomplish.

Same thing with the Revelation. Unlike the other siege capitals, the Marza and Vulkoras, it's not a tool of wide destruction, it doesn't even have a siege ability until level 6, again it only has one useful ability (Reverie), and it looks like a goddamn jalapeno in space.

In short, they're crappy ships that each only have one situational redeeming quality.

When did I say that? I suspect you are drastically misquoting and misinterpreting my statement in this thread: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/447481/page/1/#3388857 

I was referring to major user interface redesigns (like a new empire tree), improved interface tutorials and new interface aspects that don't even apply to the existing game design. Was the context of the discussion not obvious? We can't be making such drastic generalizations.

As for not providing new toys and improvements I call bullshit. Ironclad and Stardock have constantly provided excellent support, new content, fixes and updates for the Sins series since 2008. I can count the number of game companies that do that as well as we do on one hand. Just because our priorities of what needs fixing or updating or our evaluation of the complexity and cost of those fixes doesn't fit into your view of how things should be doesn't mean we "don't give a shit". I think our track record shows the opposite is true.

Anyways, its ironic to see this as Yarlen and myself have been planning out the next set of Rebellion fixes, updates and content over the last couple days. And this is addition to stuff that is already in development or has already been completed and hasn't been released yet. (As Yarlen pointed out, #2 is already done.)

Assuming base damage is nerfed in combination with good advent phase missile block technologies, I have no problem with phase missiles staying on bombers.

I dont have a problem with Vasari being a strong late game faction, too. I just dont want them to be owerpowered in late game.

Nobodys knows if improving fighters speed and agility will help them to do better against bombers so giving them much more damage against bombers only may be a very good idea, too.

For balancing reasons 100 fighers should decimate 100 bomber wings before those 100 bomber wings can do much damage:

Maybe it would help if bomber would rebuild significantly slower?

My tests show that fighters only decimate the numbers of bombers after the bomber carrier have run out of AM..... by the time this is happening all if your important ships are long dead.

A slower build rate for bombers would probably help alot on this account.

Maybe that is right, assuming low numbers of squadrons, where the bombers lack the firepower to do more than superficial damage. However once higher number of squadrons are fielded, fighters become more and more worthless. 100 Vasari Fighters wont make a dent into an Eradica..... 100 Vasari Bomber wings will pulverise it in no time. And 100 Advent fighter wings trying to defend the Titan will be incapable of stopping them in time.

Exactly.

What about a major buff to cleansing brilliance? Or making adaptive forcecield a passive as many mods already do - without breaking balancing.

Looks dont count!

QUOTED

FOR

TRUTH!

Sins developer support is exemplary.

Wow, this thread is filled with ignorance. Also, insulting the devs? Really? The MP community is small as fuck but still they try to make the game balanced for the MP guys with regular patches etc. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. I never visit the forum because it is always filled with incessant whining by guys who don't know what they are talking about. I'll try to fix the misconceptions floating around. Time for a rant m8:

Vasari Bombers now fire plasma wave cannons (a-la Skarovas Enforcers) instead of phase missiles

A very bad change. Vasari Loyalist have gigantic wave damage boosts, up to 70%, while Vasari Rebel have big phase damage boost researchs. This means bombers can be better used by rebels, while enforcers can be better used by Loyalists. If you make this change, this means Vasari Loyalist have better bombers, and better heavy cruisers. They already have better fighters, because fighters use beams and VL can increase damage by 40%, while VR can only increase beam damage by 20%. This would increase the gap between Vl and VR even more. (People pick VL 90% of time online)

Vasari Disruptor Nanites duration reduced to 30 seconds (at the longest)

A change I can support. 5 minutes of no regeneration because of 1 missile platform with tier 2 research hitting a target just once, cripples cap ships and titans massively for almost no investment.

Acceleration-deceleration and turn rates for all fighters significantly improved; maximum speed slightly improved significantly improved; maximum speed slightly improved

Bad change. Fighters are already vastly superior to bombers, buffing them is a really shit idea.

Next:

I realize that there are other issues to be dealt with (such as the Kol, the Radiance, and the Revelation being unusable)

In short, they're crappy ships that each only have one situational redeeming quality.

Really? Unusable? Crappy ships? Bold statement. Kol, radiance, and revelation aren't supposed to be caps that do a lot of damage or have a lot of useful abilites. Kol and Rad are called battleships because they just don't die in battle. You want a cap that does massive damage, has a shitton of useful abilities, sick hp, and is good at everything it does? Really? The first 2 caps do 1 thing well (situational redeeming quality, nice joke), and do that one thing extremly well: they are the best at it: Killing strikecraft, and Disabling ships. The revelation is good at for cuntton of things.

Kol: This cap ship is purely and entirely meant to kill strikecraft. Its stats support this. It is the highest effective health cap ship in the game, so it can't get focused quicly by a swarm of strikecraft, like say 50 bomber squadrons. At level 1, it only has to use its ability 3-4 times to kill TEC and advent bomber swarms. Really? A cap ship that at level 1 can solo 50 bomber squadrons with a sick AOE ability? (Granted it has full antimatter and hp and is next to a repair bay). Its second ability does sick damage against caps and titans when there are no strikecraft around, and its third ability can be used to make this cunt of a ship even more resilient against fleets and strikecraft, especially Vasari bombers. Its level 6 ability gives it HP regen, antimatter regen and AOE damage, meaning it can solo 100 corvettes, and does sick damage against anything but heavy cruisers. Unusable? Really? Worst statement of the thread.

Please upload a replay of the kol being used effectively... I bet you can't even find one.

What I just said wasn't true, this is actually the worst statement of this thread. Go scuttle your homeworld bro (lel). I cba to shift trough my replays because this statement is a joke, but I can guarantee you that strikecraft become a laugh whenever you pull out a Kol.

Radiance: This cap ship is just like the Kol a cap ship with extreme amounts of hp. An ability that gives extra armor and turns damage against it into antimatter? Really? 15 armor without armor research when you get level 7 or so? This motherfucker has more effective hp than a level 1 titan when it gets over level 6. Speaking of level 6, An AOE damage ability that roasts fleets? It's only slightly worse than the Marza's ability. And I haven't even talked about the actual purpose of this fucker. To disable caps and titans and starbases. That's rite. Level 5 Eridica titan? top lel, I have a lvl 3 radiance, your titan can't do shit on its own. Level 6 marza? I lol'd hard, your Marza can't use MB. level 10 progenitor veruss level 1 Radiance? Joke's on you, no malice or shield restore. Meteor storm on your starbase? Nope. Red button? Nope. Get the picture? Radiance doesn't do massive damage because, it has shittons of HP and disables big targets. Unusable? Second worst statement of the thread.

Revelation: Unlike the previous cap ships this cap ship actually is one of the lowest HP cap ships in the game. This is however well compensated by the fact that it has a very decent frontal damage output, has the fucking ability to disable an enemy cap ship for 20 fucking seconds at level 1 meaning no cap ship would ever escape if you play right. Best disable in the game. This noobstomper also has an AOE cooldown reduction ability. An AOE cooldown reduction ability. AOE. Cooldown. Reduction. Ability. when this ability is level 4, this fucker decreases cooldown by like 40% for like 35 seconds, every 50 seconds. That's right. Thought Eridica is OP? Try fighting against an Eridica with this guy next to it, or against a cap ship fleet with a high level revelation in it. Oh, and free scouting, instantly, for a 90 second duration, anywhere on the map, anytime. Really? Unusable? Oh, and its ultimate. 40% damage in 40 seconds. Wow, what the fuck. your planet has 6k hp? 40 seconds later it's 3k hp. At level 6 it takes this guy 220 seconds to kill ANY planet, regardless of planet hp. 220 seconds. You realise how short this is? 3 and a half minute. That's how long it takes A halcyon to kill a roid. The only reason I don't start with this cap ship as Advent is because the progenitor is the most OP cap ship in the game, doing massive damage with Malice, has an uncapped AOE healing ability and it can colonize planets. That ship needs to be nerfed so I can use other ships. Fucking shit, if you nerfed the progenitor, all you would see is Radiances and Revelations, as well as the occasional Halcyon.

As for not providing new toys and improvements I call bullshit. Ironclad and Stardock have constantly provided excellent support, new content, fixes and updates for the Sins series since 2008. I can count the number of game companies that do that as well as we do on one hand. Just because our priorities of what needs fixing or updating or our evaluation of the complexity and cost of those fixes doesn't fit into your view of how things should be doesn't mean we "don't give a shit". I think our track record shows the opposite is true.

Anyways, its ironic to see this as Yarlen and myself have been planning out the next set of Rebellion fixes, updates and content over the last couple days. And this is addition to stuff that is already in development or has already been completed and hasn't been released yet. (As Yarlen pointed out, #2 is already done.)

Legit. This is what I like to hear. I have one bug to report with the map maker though. I got the DLC, and I made a map with DLC planets in it, but when I try to launch it in MP, it says I need DLC. Then when I remove the DLC planets from the map, it'll launch, and the random planets on the map can become DLC planets. Strange.

 

Nobodys knows if improving fighters speed and agility will help them to do better against bombers so giving them much more damage against bombers only may be a very good idea, too.

For balancing reasons 100 fighers should decimate 100 bomber wings before those 100 bomber wings can do much damage:

Maybe it would help if bomber would rebuild significantly slower?

My tests show that fighters only decimate the numbers of bombers after the bomber carrier have run out of AM..... by the time this is happening all if your important ships are long dead.

A slower build rate for bombers would probably help alot on this account.

The last thing we need is to nerf bombers.

For balancing reasons 100 fighers should decimate 100 bomber wings before those 100 bomber wings can do much damage:

It takes 100 bomber squadrons a a lot of runs to kill a starbase, or a titan (provided its not level 1). They will kill weak cap ships in about 3 runs. 100 bomber squadrons, when all killed, will make a level 1 titan instantly level 4. Really? You want to implement a change that can make a level 1 titan level 4 instantly? (Red button does this, lel) Losing one cap ship to get the xp from 100 bomber squadrons is totally worth it anyway. Besides, you're a fool if you just leave your cap ships about to be destroyed when you know the enemy has 100 bomber squadrons. You know, 50 fighters counter 100 bombers easily. If you have anywhere near halfway decent micro you won't lose a thing.

Ok, rant over. Sorry. I never frequent these forums, but sometimes curiosity gets the best of me, and then I see dumb suggestions and ignorant posts, and I have to cure the ignorance.

Oh, and in case you're like: "Who the fuck is this guy telling me what to do I'll bang him up". I'm Grimm. Yeah, Grimm. You know, the guy nobody can beat online, except for Doci? Yeah, that's me. You think you know this game better than me? 1v1 me m8. Not one of you forum dwellers can beat me.I've got the best lategame around, because I actually know the strengths of the cap ships. The cap ships like Kol that are good for 1 specific task are the best cap ships in the game, because nothing is as good at the task of killing strike craft like the Kol.

Altough brave sins players, worry not. I'm working on a guide to help cure the ignorance that's festering in this forum. This way, whenever somebody makes another shit balance suggestion, just point them to my guide. Its halfway done now, I'll make a post on this forum when its done.

What a joke post grimm. You are 100% wrong in everything you say about the devs. Be on the lookout for my lengthy response tomorrow. In the meantime do try to post that kol replay of yours... bet you cant.

Interesting rant and I don't want to defend anything in this topic and I respect you and everyone else on these forums, but I don't really like micro-ing. I leave that to the AI. Please take that into consideration. You're microing and you're doing great, I'm fine with that. But I don't micro and I don't want to, I just accept the flaws in the AI, keep losing lots of units and keep building new fleets all the time. I'm fine with that because the AI also does the same thing. I suppose it's a different world. Maybe we just need better AI. Maybe a fighter-protection setting, where you can order carriers to protect a fleet or a ship and fighters will just stay close to that fleet or ship instead of spreading all around and getting destroyed by enemy fighters and flak while they chase some faraway bomber.

The devs are ok imho. They're occasionally patching the game. Before I started playing Sins I played Stellar Impact. That game is about 2 years old, has a crappy server, lots of bugs, a tiiiny multiplayer community, and it's already abandoned by the devs. No patches. No rebalancing. Absolutely nothing. It's a lovely game and I can't imagine why they abandoned it so soon. I suppose they just went for the big bugs, making a new game or something. There's not much profit in patching an old game after all. Imo the devs really love their game, that they are still spending time / resources on it after 4 years.

Good. Looking forward to it.

--

The entire bombers-fighters argument does bring this to mind though: http://youtu.be/EitZRLt2G3w

Bomber hordes are sort of a first-order-optimal (FOO) strategy. They provide convenient power and are easy to use while taking more skill to counter (microing of flak bursts and telekinetic pushes while sacrificing some of your own firepower by building fighters) such that at the highest metagame the bombers are considered weak (because everyone can counter them and get lots of XP) whereas at lower skill levels they're considered super-strong (because they have lots of easy click-to-kill power).

Vasari bombers are more FOO than others because they have an even higher power-to-skill ratio than normal bombers with their phase missiles, and have even higher skill-to-counter because of their resilience.

^^ Awesome.