Heavy Turret GFX suggestion

[RCIX]

The ship cap (or a related variable, I forget) does impact how many the AI gets when it gets them as reinforcements.  Not a cap, per se, but it maintains rough proportionality.

And having the MkIs with low HPs sounds like a good idea.  Basically a "budget" low-end version that still packs a punch; the corners were cut elsewhere.

Tell that to me after seeing how many Sentinel frigates reinforced on some planets

[HitmanN]

The ship cap (or a related variable, I forget) does impact how many the AI gets when it gets them as reinforcements.  Not a cap, per se, but it maintains rough proportionality.

And having the MkIs with low HPs sounds like a good idea.  Basically a "budget" low-end version that still packs a punch; the corners were cut elsewhere.

Tell that to me after seeing how many Sentinel frigates reinforced on some planets

Or the number of arachnids and snipers on a planet that I have a sniper/dreadnought beachhead on. I think the number of arachnids was nearing four digits, on a less than 2000 ship AI planet after couple of hours of bombardment. xP

There is some kind of selection logic there, right? If players have starships, they AI gets more arachnids? I just hope the AI won't decide it needs long range firepower and gets a dozen heavy turrets. O_o;

[Ozymandiaz]

Cool, might see this in a new beta soon then I take it?

[keith.lamothe]

Arachnids have special population logic, yes, which doesn't really relate to the ship caps at all.  Until relatively recently (pre 3.060) said logic was malfunctioning significantly in terms of reacting to relatively small numbers of starships, by the way.

As for the Sentinels, I don't know what to tell you, maybe it rolled Sentinel a *lot*

And yes, I'm hoping to get a heavy turret prototype into a beta soon, though I can't promise anything.

[MaxAstro]

As for the Sentinels, I don't know what to tell you, maybe it rolled Sentinel a *lot*

Actually, this has always seemed a bit weird to me.  Almost any time the AI deploys Sentinel Frigates, they get them in incredible numbers.  It's not at all uncommon for me to see 200-ship planets with 40-50 Sentinel Frigates.  It gets kinda annoying after a while, to be honest.  It seems like the AI either has no Sentinel Frigates at all, or simply silly amounts of them.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, I should check to see if it's having some sort of precision underflow or something like that.

[XRsyst]

How about stats & abilities along the lines of the Core Zenith Beam Frigates.  Nice to have an insta dmg and a mild AoE.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm going off the Beam Starship stats, actually, though we'll see how that works balance wise, ship cap, knowledge cost, etc.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, the prototype is working (those 2000 bombers were sure surprised to see red cylinders of death instead of the usual Riots from the past month). I still need to do some balancing before it's ready for beta.

[HitmanN]

*Sits and waits patiently* 

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, it's in for 3.081.

Basically they're balanced against the Laser turret line, except they cost significantly more knowledge (9000 total vs 5500), cost somewhat less metal/crystal/energy to build-to-cap, have a cap of 4 for each mark instead of 170, have about 1/8th single-target dps-to-cap (though the MkI beam turret beats this curve due to knowledge cost diff), and of course have the beam line-aoe attack.  I'm not sure how much the line-aoe counts for in real battle, but when properly used it can make that 1/8th dps thing look pretty generous.  When I tried to balance it as, say, 1/3rd dps things just died too ridiculously fast   As is, building all 12 Heavy Beam Turrets on a single planet in a decent funneling situation makes it possible to do an extreme amount of damage.

Anyway, balance is tentative, particularly on the dps vs. aoe thing, so feel free to chime in after you get a chance to use them.

[HitmanN]

Neat. Shall try them as soon as they're available, thanks. 

I was originally thinking more of a 10-20 cap turret per mk level, but we can try these very heavy editions first. Afterall, if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I'm trying for stationary starships here   But we'll see; particularly if we put later effort towards really heavy defensive installations it might make more sense for these to be 10-cap instead of 4-cap (same total power-at-cap).

[HitmanN]

Or you could have the Heavy Turrets increase tons in damage, but also drop a lot in build cap.

Like
mk1: 1x damage, 30cap
mk2: 3x damage, 12cap
mk3: 6x damage, 7 cap

Something like that. It would also make each turret level suitable for different tasks. Having one mk3 isn't always better than a few mk1's.

[keith.lamothe]

I'm not sure if there will be a prerelease tonight, but the new "Heavy Beam Cannon" line is shaping up fairly well.  I added an alternate beam mechanic for it to use, such that the beam starts off really really strong but loses power as it does damage (currently on a 1:1 ratio).  This allows me to pump the actual attack power back up to where I'd like it to be.  With the previous straight-up line-shaped aoe attack I had to keep it so low for balance that a mk I beam cannon only did 2x the damage of a mk III laser turret, which didn't fit in my mind since there's a 4:170 ratio of how much you can build.  Now it will vaporize a few bomber Is but not an arbitrary number that happened to be behind them.

FYI, my main balancing factor for dps-focused units like these is maintaining roughly the same "DPC-at-cap-per-K", that is:
Damage-per-cycle = attack-power / cycles-to-recharge (20 cycles per second)
cap = ship cap (170 for laser turrets, 4 for beam cannons)
K = knowledge cost for that tier
so:

( (attack-power / cycles-to-recharge) * cap) / knowledge-cost

Currently the beam cannon's DPC-Cap-K is slightly better at each tier than the laser turrets, to make up for the fact that 170 ships will have a much more flexible and probably efficient application of their total damage.

Metal, Crystal, and Energy costs are also balanced to be in the same ballpark, each shifted a bit to fit with the concept behind the unit (high energy, or high metal, etc).