Nominations for Worst Ship Ever

[keith.lamothe]

The title is a slight exaggeration.

What I'm actually looking for is: "what fleet ship type do you think most needs a buff?". 

We try to keep them all useful so that you don't groan when you get a particular type from an ARS.  But we also try to not let "a few players say it's useless" equal "it's actually useless", so trying to get a broader opinion, etc.

Anyway, just name your nominee (fleet ship types only right now, please, to keep it focused) in a reply to this and in a day or so I'll put up a poll to see which gets the most agreement   If the process works out, it can be repeated (though if so I'm likely to alternate between needs-a-buff and needs-a-nerf).  If it doesn't work out, well, it's comic relief

Thanks!

[PokerChen]

Careful what you wish for. If you give us time, we might even compile a ranking of all of the bonus fleet ships like King of Fighters and Smash Bros.

[Orelius]

While this isn't a high priority, I'd like to see armor boosters reworked.  If I recall correctly, all armor boosters give the same amount of armor boost (X3), meaning that higher mark versions do not really give that much more of a benefit compared to lower marks.

[keith.lamothe]

Careful what you wish for. If you give us time, we might even compile a ranking of all of the bonus fleet ships like King of Fighters and Smash Bros.

That's why I'm trying to get just one fleet ship type out of this, rebalance it, repeat

[Wanderer]

Spider.  I even avoid the Fabricators.

[Hearteater]

Tough call between: Infiltrator, Vorticular Cutlass, Ether Jet Tractor and Armor Ship.  If I was going to pick one, I'd probably say the Armor Ship or maybe Cutlass.

[Spikey00]

Most melee ships (especially cutlass; vampires seem okayish), armour ship, z elec bombers (especially it having neutron hull makes it useless vs forts, insta-killable), gravity ripper (squished between gravity drainers and paralyzer; only halts engine, single shot, expensive, only 52 spd), sentinel frigates (snipers are better, ignore ff), spiders, and teleport battle stations.  Spire battleships, leeches, teleporting leeches, z bombards are on the edge.

Forcefield bearers, blade spawners, autobombs, nanoswarm, and munition boosters tend to be my top-picked (notice those are mostly utility units), and fleet ships... generally anything that can be spammed without crashing the economy or too-severely biasing the usage of one resource, while of course being a decent unit.  I rarely choose low-cap ship types, high-cost low-use ships, or any of the direct melee ships.  Range is also significant because I often run a fleet ball.

[PokerChen]

I'll let you have a pick between just three potential candidates that don't *seem* useful:

(1) Spire gravity ripper, as said: not quite enough of a niche between gravity drains and zenith paralyzers. Some criterion of differentiation is needed between the grav. ripper and the paralyzer. It attacks only one target every 2 sec, but this attack seems to be very powerful (better than stealth battles-ships?). We should emphasise this in the description more.

e.g. Spire gravity rippers are defensive monsters aimed to prevent enemy attacking fleets from advancing out of the invading wormhole. Zenith paralyzers instead decrease the effective enemy attack strength, and are designed to go on the attack.

Potential solutions: Modify description. Give gravity rippers multipliers against fast fleet-ships. Change it's attacks to 4000x2 instead of 8000x1.

(2) Cutlasses. Too slow. Builds too slow. For a melee ship that's slower than fighters and bombers one can endlessly kite them. Shredders cover this problem by sheer self-replication - a unique trait that can justify their use alone. The problem behind these symptoms is that it's role is not clearly defined to us as users: is the cutlass a heavy assault ship? Is it a combat ship? If it's heavy-assault against AI worlds, which is what cutlasses seem to me now due to the blade attack-type and immunities, then this should be clear defined in the ship description. I've yet to try this with neinzul starships to counter the attrition problems.

Potential solutions: Halve build time, increase speed to 72 or something at least on par with fighters. Its stats feel kind of okay. Let vampires be the true vessel-hunters at 108 or increase their speed a bit also.

(3) Anti-armor ship/polariser. Just doesn't appeal to me in a standard game where armour isn't apparently important versus the default units in the AI arsenal. The only thing I associate armour is with AI fortresses and raider starships... guardians can be countered okay with bomber starships/plasma sieges. The triangle fleet does not quite gel together with the concept of armour, unless bombers are meant to the most heavily armoured.

Potential solutions: it might be better to re-work the concept of armour in the game.
 = = =
General comments: the fleet ship assembly are more balanced than they first seem. It is more likely that certain ship-types and intended uses conflict with the player's philosophy, or how the player *thinks* the units are meant to be used. With the currently observed variations in the way people play the game, it is kinda difficult to isolate a ship that is definitively worse.

For example, engine-damagers like spiders combine much better with players who actively use military-IIIs than any other play-style - perhaps they should be sold as mobile spider turrets. Logistic-users get much less mileage out of these creatures since the enemy is already slowed significantly.

We also have a phenomenon of bonus ships which seem like they're designed to counter other *bonus* ships, a situation which is far from likely to occur in a randomised AI game... tachyon microfighters, for example. No standard AI-ships are both cloaked and also pose significant threat - I have to take this with the expectation that they might come in handy when the AI unlocks them, but then I have several other options to counter cloaked ships. Best case scenario is that I'm a player who is poor at fighting cloaked assaults and wants a security blanket, or is playing explicitly against a stealth AI.

[keith.lamothe]

I didn't realize "nominee" was plural.  More seriously, thanks for the feedback

[TechSY730]

The mothership. Come on, they are absurdly expensive, and take so long to build. They are so bad, I've only seen them used once, ever. 

[Hearteater]

Just want to throw out there that several ship types will be tough to balance because they counter things the AI doesn't use a lot, but players do: Cloaking, Armor, Force Fields and Tractors.  So while I could see the Tachyon MicroFighter might seem bad, I feel the problem is really one of the AI needing more cloaking so we actually care about their Tachyon Beams.

EDIT: Added links to discussions.  Two down.

[chemical_art]

I'll just plow through some:

Polarizer / anti armor / armor rotter / impulse emitter / <any other craft using energy or armor as a damage mechanic>

These all suffer from doing poorly from the "standard" damage dealing and their ability is not nearly enough to compensate for the very niche cases where it works. In the case of armor ships, armor simply is not noticable enough. Indeed, unless a ship has over 10k of armor or so, I cannot casually tell. Probably something to do with ships getting damage boosts that easily overcome any armor at all. Or that a damage reduction of 20% is not useful if 50 ships are shooting at one. As for the impulse emitter, it does tiny tiny damage to the vast majority of targets, but in the few times it does find a good target the rareness is not justified because enough damage is not given.

<more to come>

[chemical_art]

armored and space tanks also fall into the armor problem. Their standard armor helps a little against smallish ships, but does not help much at all against any craft with a bonus, so they go down quickly still but now they cost more to repair.

unevaluated idea: make it so that in the damage mechanics it goes (damage shot - armor) * damage bonus

[TechSY730]

About armor and stuff, I made a new thread about that. http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9809.0.html

[PokerChen]

About cloaking, I'm suggest introducing a cloaking guardian or a combat version of the cloaker starship to the AI:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9812.0.html