Why does the Marza suck so much?

To be honest, I'm not sure these buffs would be enough....maybe the marza should just be a support ship like the hoshiko -- they are about the same in power...

Hoshiko more good Marza. It keep fleet life. Marza just no good.

Because too many players invest in interrupt abilities. These need a nerf.

I forgot to add that it would be nice to see which ship is the primary target for radiation bomb.

But lets get serious here for a moment.

TEC has 4 viable cap ship starts.

• Akkan
• Marza
• Kol
• Dunnov

Someone might argue that salvage cap is one but its too gimmicky to be any good without dunnov.

Akkan start is no brainier, and it counters any channeling ability cap. Its range aura is actually pretty good for flak and corvettes and many others and you can fight on -20% accuracy gravity wells and win hands down.

Dunnov is mainly to counter advent, it counters malice by removing AM, also it rapes shields with AoE, this hurts advent bad. It has also interrupt and limited anti fighter ability.

Marza can glass asteroid in seconds, its a constant pressure builder, nearer it is to lvl 6, the scarier it becomes. Marza lvl 3 can 1v1 un upgraded orkulus if it has 2 points in incendiary. However, marza is flimsy and easy to snipe. Marza start is actually very inflexible start, as it forces you to be on offensive or lose out.

Kol start is one of those pet peevees of mine, but its one of those cap ships that actually reach lvl 6 easy. It can tank whole fleet of 60 kobalts and win on lvl 6. Not as scary as marza, kol's lvl 6 AoE damage will kill fleet all the same, if you let it sit in middle of it. Nearly  un killable capship that serves as damage sponge at start and one man army middle and anti bomber flak platform late. It has also much under appreciated gaus gun that helps to snipe other players caps by slowing them down. Late game, however, building 2 other kols will help to keep the skies clear of bombers and fighters, so it is an investment of sorts. Not as strong early as others caps, but its hard to kill and it matures like fine wine, in to scary one man army.

Corsev is literally stomps half those caps you mentioned. Its like having a mini chastic burst at the beginning of the game that is uncounterable.

The main problem with the Corsev is that its capture ability is bugged and randomly kills the ship (for real) instead of capturing it once its hp gets to 0. Discussed in detail in https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/453667/page/1/ Since the non-boarded ships only do half-damage on their bang (and you have to pay/build them yourself instead of getting from the enemy), using the (unmodded) Corsev is a bit like playing the lottery. And I think people hate such luck-based mini-games in the MP game, like (ahem) the pirates...

Corsev needs dunnov, and it is buggy, high cool down, gimmick.

Fix the boarding, lower the cool down on the demo team 20% and make its ultimate lvl 6 ability applicable to titan (like dunnov's is), then we talk.

Corsev is literally unkillable at high levels due to salvage team... You are just not using it right...

Correct. A bit of testing convinced me that the salvage team is hugely bugged/overpowered! At the highest of the ability (level 4, which requires the Corsev to be at least level 7 overall) it's supposed to give to give the Corsev 35% of max hull points of boarded ships that die (and 25% if they're not boarded.) But in an actual test play, twice I've got the Corsev from its about 4300 hull (at level 7) to about 2200 hull by focus firing 50 Disciples on it. As soon as I used demo team on a captured Discple, the Corsev's health shot up back to 3800 hull!! That is 1600 hull points it gained, when it was supposed to gain about 173 points (35% of the 495 max hull of a Discple I was testing with.) So it's really 350% not 35% of the boarded ship that blew. No wonder it's unkillable.

Oh and the same Corsev gains about 1000 hull hp from demolishing an unboared (friendly) Cobalt; that's way more than 25% of what was this Cobalts' max hull of 714. So it's not just the boarded ships that are bugged/OP when it comes to salvage. I think it's now obvious what happens here. The 25% and 35% are not taken from the max hull of the friendly ship that blows up (as the ability's description says), but rather from Corsev's own hull, which is vastly beefier.

I think it's probably best we continue this side-discussion in the thread about the Corsev. https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/453667/page/1/#3471239

I do believe the ability is intended to get hull from any nearby destroyed ships...now, whether that percentage is applied to the destroyed ship or to the corsev could be a design decision, though I'm inclined to think it is a bug, or at least an oversight...

However, it being unkillable at high levels depends on the fleet compositions involved...I'm not sure that salvage ops is particularly relevant when SC spam dominates the battlefield....

Word on the street is that flak counters SC.

Not bombers.

FFS fix the stupid phase jump bug that affects capital ships and the marza does not need these buffs. As it stands right now, I lose way too many caps because they spin out of control uselessly for like 20 seconds.

It's actually a bug (or feature) that affects all ships in a "traffic jam". Any ship will turn around if it finds that the precise spot it wanted to jump out from is occupied by some other ship[s], be they friendly or enemy. It will then head back to phase lane looking for a free spot nearby. As the saying goes... may the movement bugs be ever in your favor! I'm surprised we don't find more on this forum about intentionally causing "traffic jams" as an exploit/tactic when chasing down important ships (caps, etc.)

To prevent traffic jams created by friendlies you need band select all of them and give them a single move order. (Do some shift selection too if you have non-combat ships like colonizers headed the same way, because band section will not get those together with combat ships.) With a single group-move order ships plot non-overlapping jump out paths (even if they are set to jump out unsynchronized, i.e. not all jumping at the same time.) If you give two or more orders (e.g. to different groups), all bets are off with respect to traffic jams when exiting the well. I don't know of a reliable way to prevent the enemy from causing a traffic jam on purpose. I haven't tested this in a controlled sandbox environment, but I have the impression that fleets of the same race seem more prone to creating traffic jams to each other than fleets of different races do.

Actually people do try to do it to caps and titans...they crowd their ships around it so the enemy can't jump in time to escape death...

Even if this did work (it doesn't by the way), players intentionally avoid doing this...when multiple ships are given the same move order, the group will move at the speed of the slowest ship...obviously if you are trying to escape as fast as possible, you want each ship to make the most use of its speed, and you don't want those LRFs or that colony cap to slow down the rest of your fleet that could otherwise make it out alive...also, if you have 2 groups of ships on opposite sides of the gravity well and you give them a single move order, they will both try to jump out at the same point of the gravity well, which means one group is going to be wasting a lot of time crossing the entire gravity well before jumping...

That being said, it definitely does not solve the problem...lone caps and titans (and I mean it is your only ship in the well) can get stuck, do 180s, fidget around, and do god knows what all on their own even if no ships (friend or foe) are around them...

I try to do this every time against the AI but without any luck, it needs so careful micro it's very hard to pull off (basically you only have some seconds to do things right), and your ships like to overshoot their target as well. Every time I try to do this the enemy titan just simply pushes away my ships, but if my titan is in risk, it will even do a 360 lol.

You can move them by ship type initially and when the fastest ones get close to edge of the well, then group all and give a single exit order. (You seldom have more than 2-3 ship types, so this isn't very micro intensive.) I never saw a traffic jam from a single group-move order, but if you'd be so kind to post a recording of that happening (or of a single ship doing it with no others around)... I'll stand corrected. The devs could probably use that recording to debug their movement code too.

Don't fixate on the term "traffic jam"...the issue here is when a ship is given an order to jump, sometimes it does not immediately jump when it gets to the edge of the gravity well...it might have to move itself to a position just to the side of it, and in that process it might do as much as two 180s...occasionally ships just seem to hang indefinitely (though it is possible they are strafing very slowly, hard to tell) at the edge of the gravity well, again not jumping when they have a jump order...

This behavior has been widely reported for caps and titans, and it has been a huge gripe from the MP community...it got really ugly with rebellion since titans are so valuable and it seems to affect them the most...you don't see threads on it recently because it was beaten to death for months after Rebellion's release, and nothing was ever done to fix it...

You can search for older threads on the issue, there might be replays, but I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't...lots of players turn off autorecord because it caused issues....it's not something you can replicate on demand, it just happens, and it most certainly does not require another ship to be nearby which is why the term "traffic jam" is probably not appropriate...

I have found it to be most common with Eradicas and Vorastras...whether it's because there is something about the meshes of those ships or because players are more aggressive with those titans I can't say for sure, but I've lost and killed numerous titans solely because of this pathfinding bug...I've had it happen with my prog too, which really sucks since the ship is more fragile and slower...

Whether it occurs with smaller ships or not I don't know, honestly most players aren't going to notice or care if one or two frigates does something stupid...you will notice some skilled players will intentionally move their cap or titan towards the center of the side they want to jump from before giving the jump order, as this issue seems to only happen on the edge of the phase lane "cone"...unfortunately, for some reason the devs felt it necessary for ships by default to go to the edge of the phase lane cone instead of the closest part of the gravity well edge, so it can be a pain in the butt to avoid...

They do go to the closest part of the arc resulting from the intersection of the well's edge and the phase lane, not to the edge of the "cone" as you write. Ships perform a local shortest path optimization inside a well when ordered to exit it (actually they do that regardless of what they'd have to do in next well for a multi-well path; there's no global shortest path optimization alas), meaning they'll pick the shortest route from their current location to a point they can jump out from. From most points inside the well, especially those on the other side of the planetary body relative to the direction of intended exit, that optimization results in them to wanting to jump out from one of the two extremity points of of the phaselane-well intersection arc. But it's not always the case that they exit from the endpoints of the phaselane-well intersection arc. If the ship is anywhere inside the "pie slice" (circular sector) formed by the phaselane-well arc and the center of the well, then it will go on a line that is basically a part of the well's radii (seen as a vector field), i.e. it will head "straight out" to the closest point on the arc, not to its extremities. But the ship has to be in this "pie slice" to want to exit the well using a non-extremity point. In the picture linked on Wikipedia, assuming the ship wants to exit to the left, if the ship is anywhere in the green sector, it will head straight out on a path along a radius, otherwise (if in the white sector) it will indeed go to one of the endpoints of the green sector's arc. I can probably whip up some graphic to make this more clear if it's not obvious how it works.

Yeah, I've certainly seen this before, and definitely with small ships, but experience it even when I am giving the ships a group jump order.  I usually see that, though, a bit more often when the frigates were already close to the jump line and the cap wasn't... then it comes in, pushes the frigates aside, then they sit there and try to realign themselves.

If I'm having to retreat, I tend to bring the various fleets back together first (if I even allowed them to split up in the first place) for a kind of "last stand".  Once I'm sure that's not even working, I will initially give the group jump move order until most of them are in position, then I turn it off so they'll start jumping immediately.  I do this in part because those ships with multiple banks (or if an enemy ship overshoots the whole group) will still fire back until starting to phase jump. ;)  In this way I'm able to keep some of my DPS up, the enemy ships that are focusing on some of the others in the lead will have something to shoot at longer (ie, they won't immediately retarget to something more valuable), and then (of course) when in position they can start evac'ing immediately instead of sitting there with their thumbs up their rears getting killed.

It happens in the center of the phase lane cone too.

Lol, the marza isnt the best TEC cap. it is the best cap in the game. (yeah, i am a tec player mostly)

As for Kol. It sucks until level 6 very hard. It has low frontal damage, so it is useless vs. vas. Vs. tec and advent it can be just ignored for a time too long, and in very late game it dies like any other cap.

The ability to destroy an entire fleet of 70 or more frigates within a few seconds and do it again after the cool down expires is insane. The Marza can also destroy a building starbase or an unpgrade one on its own because all its weapon banks are on the front. This coupled with incendiary shells at lv1 and a fleet just kills a slow vasari player because it can negate regeneration bays which only repair starbases at a rate of 15 hull points per second. 

Brute force is an understatement. The Marza Dreadnaught is a titan.