Protector Starship Balance

[keith.lamothe]

For reference:
The original proposal http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=9755
And some recent balance feedback http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11735

So this thing is probably incredibly OP, right?

I wanted to do the finite-counter thing because it honestly looks a lot cooler than just deploying a lot of extra decoys, and it actually does worse against high-cap/high-rof stuff than low-cap/low-rof stuff (which is rare).

But I'm not sure the thing could be balanced with this mechanic unless:

1) Everything remotely huge-power (like an arachnid guard post, H/K, etc) were given immunity-to-finite-counters.  And I really try to avoid adding "flat out no" immunities nowadays since more granular stuff is more fun.  But to make this more granular it'd have to "consume" multiple counter-shots to counter a single incoming enemy shot, and at that point why not just do the decoys?  Because you'd really have no way of guessing how many shots the thing could really block if the counter/shot ratio was variable.

2) The number of counter shots would need to scale down with lower cap-scales, but then it instead of being "more effective against scaling types" on low caps it would be "less effective against non-scaling types" on low caps.  Again, we could just have the multiple-counter-shots-to-stop-one-round thing and have use more to stop the (inherently higher damage) shots from scaled-types on low caps... but is that a good solution?


Anyway, just looking for feedback on these.  Are they not actually that imbalanced?  FWIW if the enemies get close enough I think the enemy shots start getting through anyway (which is one of the things I find cool).

[chemical_art]

Two different lines of thought.

Giving shots internal weights will be a lot, lot of work.

On the other hand...if you set it up right, you could not have all the work be used just for this ship, it could be used in the future for other things, and that would be nice. You'd be lying the ground work now. That makes it more reasonable and even exciting.

[keith.lamothe]

Giving shots internal weights will be a lot, lot of work.

Actually that part's already done, the weight is called "damage"

Or would that not work?

[Tridus]

Maybe instead of stopping shots outright no matter the size, the ship should be able to stop a given amount of damage? So stopping a 20M shot would take more of its "blocking" ability than stopping a 30K shot. (Rounding up, so if it has even 1 damage left to stop it can stop another shot, even if that shot is 20M.)

Higher marks could stop more damage per second.

[Toranth]

Giving shots internal weights will be a lot, lot of work.

Actually that part's already done, the weight is called "damage"

Or would that not work?

If you wanted a weighting, then yeah, either Damage or Mark would seem to be the obvious choices.

Right now, an MLRS guardpost will crush up to 4 anti-missile modules.  However, no other guard post can do more than keep even with the reload rate. 
An alternate solution might be to slow down the reload interval?  Instead of 10 per second, make it 100 every 10 seconds.  Perhaps, make the reload hold off until the anti-module hasn't triggered in X seconds?  Similar to how repair works.  In that case, I suggest upping the max load, however.  100 * Mark?

Another alternate take is that there is no reload.  When the module runs out of shots, it self-destructs and will need to be rebuilt.

[chemical_art]

Giving shots internal weights will be a lot, lot of work.

Actually that part's already done, the weight is called "damage"

Or would that not work?

It would I suppose, although how would you judge bonuses?

[KDR_11k]

For something like the Arachnid post it could work to simply give those an ammo type that the protector doesn't have a module for (or make an ammo type for extremely low frequency attacks where the appropriate counter module also takes forever to reload).