Poll: Worst Ship Of The (time interval) Award (II)

[Orelius]

Since 5.027 wasn't out yet, packed this in:

* Acid Sprayers:
** Base Attack from 450 => 600.  This puts the non-bonus cap-dps pretty exactly at the fighter's.
** Base Movement Speed from 40 => 50.  Now same as the ether-jet; this is a very short range ship and needs to be able to close the distance.
** Vs Hull Type Multipliers from 6 => 8.  The fighter's vs-polycrystal bonus is 5, for reference.
** Base Metal/Crystal cost from 0/300 => 40/180.  So 10% more expensive to build to cap than a fighter (though it's still twice as much energy).

Basically it's been made 33% better at hurting things across the board (to avoid being a specialist with no general use), 66% better at hurting the things it has bonuses against (including bombers, to make it a specialist that's actually better than the always-available tools for the job).  And cheaper, and faster.  If it's too much or too little, I'm sure you'll let me know

Nice.  I think that the most important buff you gave to most of the ships was a decreased build cost.  I feel that a major portion of many fleet ships' ineffectiveness is a result of how expensive they are.  I normally wouldn't bother even considering getting Acid Sprayers because they consume lots of crystal that I need to build spire stuff.  I'm really liking all these changes, and I sure hope you will have more of these polls!

(Speaking of which, I really think that all the ships that have all their cost focused on one resource needs to be changed.  This cost makes it almost impossible to work with in the early game, since it is so much more likely to bog down one's economy.  I'm looking at you, mirrors and space tanks.)

[TechSY730]

During the discorse (read, off-topic discussion) at http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9911.html
the subject of Implulse Reaction Emitters came up.
Considering that they are a likely candidate for the third "worst ship of the (time interval) Award (III)", I thought I would do some stats on energy usage.

Average energy use: 8338
Median energy use: 500
Standard deviation: 57037.7

with such a high standard deviation, I thought that maybe it would be useful to exclude the "huge, rare energy hogs" that are skewing the average
so
Average energy use (only including those within 2 standard deviations of the average): 3750.72

Then I realized there are a huge number of ships that use no power. Those are also skewing the average so
Average energy use (only for energy > 0): 10958.9

Combining the two filters,
Average energy use (only including those > 0 and within 2 standard deviations): 4943.0


So keep these numbers in mind when trying to determine "target average performance" of impulse reaction emitters.

I am assuming these are for high ship caps, as that is what is used in the internal ship definitions.

Admittedly, these values are still a bit suspect, because they do not take rarity and ship cap into consideration. (For some reason, the ship cap column is bugged, for many ships, it says 0 ship cap, even though I know they have a finite ship cap)

EDIT: For reference, the rate the IRE is getting damage is 1x extra damage per 1000 energy, with a minimum multiplier of 5. So, for both of the "high energy use filtered" averages, they will fail to break even their minimum damage in the average case. That seems a bit underpowered.

[keith.lamothe]

It's a bit simpler than that: it's basically never going to get a bonus against a fleet ship, and it will sometimes get a bonus against a starship, and it really gets a bonus against the big hogs.

But yea, I've already planned at least some buffing.

[Wanderer]

IREs are incredibly powerful but only in certain circumstances.  You have Golem-Exos, Spire-Exos, or FS-Exos hitting you.  In this case, they're practically indisposable.  It's a hyper-specialized ship I wouldn't want outside of that scenario, though.

It's a high-powered, high-difficulty ship that can work at 'meh' levels in the fleet ball if you're micro-happy.  My bias is showing, but this is one ship I'm not sure needs to be adjusted.  They EAT H/Ks.  For Breakfast.  Before they're awake and had a cup of coffee.

However, I would definately recommend a lower ARS occurence rate if Exos are not turned on for the current game.