I prefer option 3, but my system memory doesn't.Agreed :)
I think there are three reasonable options:
1} Rebalance them as normal-cap ships (the easy way out).
2} Buff their damage so initial cap-dps is higher than a non-swarmer cap.
3} Rebalance them with absolutely huge caps (3 to 5 times their current size) to take advantage of overkill.
Agreed. 2 is the option i find the best.
Thus, I would go for option 2.
Unfortunately, option 2 is already implemented.
The swarmers have 10-80% more Cap DPS than Fighters...
What about just giving them a higher cap-health, so killing a cap of them takes long enough that they're getting in a total amount of damage comparable to the more-individually-durable stuff?
Imo swarmers will never be good in the current balance. I wouldn't even consider Fighters swarmers by the technical definition, but if I just take some Riot MKIIs with me, or the new Saboteur bonus ship, or unlock higher level Siege Starships, or any other of dozens of options, I can just start a cascade effect which causes an infinite amount of "Swarming" ships to die within seconds.
This is why I play with Special Forces Guard Posts on difficulty 9+, and I can still take on thousands of small AI ships regularly without even accruing heavy losses. The biggest threat to me are bigger ships like Rams, Spire Maw, Spire Stealth Battleships, etc. Small ships really serve no purpose except to get evaporated, especially when I can just hide myself under a 10m health Champion shield 6 times in a row.
Ultimately to make smaller ships useful (especially for the AI), it will probably require an entire rebalance of the game. Ancient Shadows made it especially worse for them with the addition of new anti-swarm mechanics such as the Railclusters, Saboteurs, Champions, minor faction units, and more.
Yea, I think the main impact armor has on the game is "make swarmers stink" ;) For a while I thought the impact on high-rof was a good thing, but ultimately it isn't working.
I keep thinking through armor reworks, though, and I'm not really happy with any of the ideas thus far. Just taking it out altogether is honestly the most appealing option, though that also requires other adjustments.
The swarmers have 10-80% more Cap DPS than Fighters, and many of them have special abilities as well.
Only about 2/3 of fleetships have armor, and only 1/3 have armor values above 300. So, there's not a LOT of armor out there... just enough to mess with low-damage, quick-firing units.The swarmers have 10-80% more Cap DPS than Fighters, and many of them have special abilities as well.
Yeah the problem is that we keep using the basic cap DPS instead of cap DPS against target with X armor. And every damn ship in this game has armor.
I dont know why people believe there are fundamental problems in the current armor mechanic. There arent. The problem is that every ship has it.
Armor is basically a value of "how strong swarmers are against this ship", and thats how it should be used. Not as an arbitrary value given to every unit that is kinda suposed to be tough.
Most fleet ships should not have any armor at all. Even some starships could have their armor reduced to 0. Then swarmers would have a niche, given their cap DPS is high enough.
The problem might be with targeting. Small high-cap ships have low armor and health but high DPS, so they are probably going to be very high in the enemy target list. What this means is that your swarmers are going to be focused, but they are ALSO going to run out of targets they are good against because everything is focusing those as well.
I keep thinking through armor reworks, though, and I'm not really happy with any of the ideas thus far. Just taking it out altogether is honestly the most appealing option, though that also requires other adjustments.Damage multiplier=1-1/(?Damage/Armor)/100
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap: 272 | | |
Cap health: 10.716.800 | | |
Cap dps: 163.200 | | 231.200 |
Cap dps with bonus: 293.760 | | 416.160 |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap: 196 | | |
Cap health: 10.701.600 | | 12.661.600 |
Cap dps: 109.760 | | 158.760 |
Cap dps with bonus: 351.232 | | 476.280 |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap: 196 | | 272 |
Cap health: 5.213.600 | | 9.955.200 |
Cap dps: 109.760 | | 148.240 |
Cap dps with bonus: 263.424 | | 355.776 |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap:196 | | |
Cap health: 5.488.000 | | 11.524.800 |
Cap dps: 148.960 | | |
Cap dps with bonus: 357.504 | | |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap: 172 | | |
Cap health: 5.022.400 | | 6.742.400 |
Cap dps: 136.836 | | 175.058 |
Cap dps with bonus: 437.874 | | 560.185 |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap: 144 | | |
Cap health: 4.896.000 | | 8.352.000 |
Cap dps: 117.120 | | |
Cap dps with bonus: 468.480 | | |
Atm | | Buffed |
Cap:144 | | |
Cap health: 14.400.000 | | |
Cap dps: 113.280 | | |
Cap dps with bonus: 679.680 | | |
I dont know why people believe there are fundamental problems in the current armor mechanic. There arent. The problem is that every ship has it.No, there are fundamental problem with the armor system, and they've been explained multiple times in multiple threads on it. But the short version to catch you up on it has to do with different Mark ships:
A Mark I ships has half the health and damage of a Mark II. This effectively means two Mark I ships equal a Mark II. In a perfect world, the 2-on-1 ends with all three ships dying at the same time. Once you add armor, this breaks. Neither a fixed armor rating or scaling it with Mark works. Armor piercing causes similar problems.EDIT: Why should they die at the same time? Who cares?
@KahunaTrue
2 comments on the ships you listed:
I wouldn't buff Anti-armors quite that much. Yes, they will be one-shot by Missile Frigates. However, they have good range and decent speed. As-is, Missile Frigates can't even catch them.
Space Planes are amazing--if microed. They are not nearly as good in a fleetball, though. They have a Radar Dampening range that is shorter than their attack range, which gives them free reign to attack stationary targets. They are also fast enough to kite most enemy ships. Once the Ion Cannons and Radar Dampening Immune ships are gone, Space Planes can clear an entire planet. I've even used them to take out enemy AI Superforts with few, if any, losses (whatever AI ships spawned in the area before I could kite).
In short, armor indirectly does something the developers have explicitly stated they don't want in the game. That's why it is broken.Well then the only solution is to remove armor entirely. Boom! Problem solved!
It may not be quite that simple. There's controversy over whether the game's mechanics will be complex enough once armor is removed.In short, armor indirectly does something the developers have explicitly stated they don't want in the game. That's why it is broken.Well then the only solution is to remove armor entirely. Boom! Problem solved!
What I would like to do, assuming we remove the armor mechanic entirely, is have an entire thread devoted to giving each bonus ship a role, as voted on by the community, in the wake of armor's disappearance. This way we could get a nice consensus on what players would actually USE them for, instead of what would be good in theory (such as Spire Armor Rotters or Zenith Chameleons). I wouldn't even mind cutting down the amount of bonus ships by about 25% if the ones that were left were all extremely well-defined and useful, with little overlap. No reason to keep things around just for novelty's sake, but then again, I'm not a very sentimental person.
Since there was a little veering into armor, and since a good armor system will have an effect on what the multipliers can look like, I'll throw out a quick system that would make it easy to have ships specializing in armor piercing be different from those that don't, while also being both simple to both understand and implement:This isn't without a possible downside. Heavily armored ships that meet something with the appropriate Armor Piercing will get shredded. It may be better to instead of having Armor Piercing ignore the armor completely, have it half the effectiveness. Otherwise a Mark IV Armored ship which normally takes only 20% of all incoming damage will suddenly take x5 relative damage from its counter. At "half armor effectiveness" you'd take only x3 relative damage (60% from the ship with Armor Piercing IV compared to 20% from everything else).
Rate unit's Armor as Mark I - Mark V (with some ships have no armor, effectively Mark 0). Armor reduces all incoming damage by a percent as follows: Mark 0: -0%, Mark I: -20%, Mark II: -40%, Mark III: -60%, Mark IV: -80%, Mark V: -90%.
Armor Piercing is also rated from Mark I - Mark V (with some ships having no armor piercing, effectively Mark 0). If the attacker has an equal or greater Mark Armor Piercing than the target's Armor, then the armor is completely ignored. Otherwise the armor is fully effective. This means you have distinct matchups between ships. Mark V armor ships really want Mark V AP ships to counter them.
Armor Rotting reduces the Mark of Armor by one (and doesn't stack within a single ship type, but does stack between multiple ship types, so Acid Sprayers and Autocannons together could knock off 2 Marks of armor). This gives those ships the powerful ability, but also makes it very clear intuitively. Armor can't be reduced below Mark 0, so ships with no armor to start with aren't affected by armor rotting.
Lastly, Armor Boosting adds one Mark of armor, capping at Mark V.
It may be better to instead of having Armor Piercing ignore the armor completely, have it half the effectiveness.Real quick, but how does that vary from "ignores completely" + doubling the health of the armored types?
Wouldn't that be a buff against non AP ship types?It may be better to instead of having Armor Piercing ignore the armor completely, have it half the effectiveness.Real quick, but how does that vary from "ignores completely" + doubling the health of the armored types?
Wouldn't that be a buff against non AP ship types?Probably, my mind is split in a lot of different directions right now ;)
Wouldn't that be a buff against non AP ship types?Probably, my mind is split in a lot of different directions right now ;)
Split personality.. I knew it!Wouldn't that be a buff against non AP ship types?Probably, my mind is split in a lot of different directions right now ;)
I'm not entirely sure what you are asking :) . But the "problem" is, in case I wasn't clear, that assuming Armor Piercing is a fairly rare bonus that Armored ships will have their health set to sane values for ships that don't have Armor Piercing. As a result this would cause ships with Armored Piercing to do such a huge amount of damage (compared to those without) that that'd likely end up countering extremely hard. You can't increase the health of the Armored ships to compensate because that also makes them vastly harder to kill for ships without Armor Piercing.It may be better to instead of having Armor Piercing ignore the armor completely, have it half the effectiveness.Real quick, but how does that vary from "ignores completely" + doubling the health of the armored types?
Split personality.. I knew it!Yea, one side likes to see players lose, and the other side likes to see players lose while having fun in the process, and the other side likes to see players lose while running into hilarious emergent/unintentional behavior in the process.
Yea, I think the main impact armor has on the game is "make swarmers stink" ;)This is why I hold the position that tying armor damage reduction to damage-per-shot makes balance way harder than it needs to be.
Most other "Swarmer" units do not fit into this category however, because they have no cloaking, and no radar dampening, and they rely on the "brute force" method to be useful. Yet they simply get evaporated by TONS of different types of AoE weapons, and have so little health that it never really works out in practice. Swarmer units need some kind of epic survivability mechanisms like the Space Plane in order to be useful, otherwise they're just going to be an underpowered ship type.
Emphasize their Neinzul-ness. Make them dirt cheap to build/replace, not as effective as a cap of regular fleetships but way more expendable. Make them good for whatever the player might need cannon fodder for, basically.
This gives them a distinct role as a group, and makes the cap-strength imbalance less important.
The problem I see with Swarmers is that many of them could use Area of Effect Immunity.Isnt that thing supposed to counter them? By the way, those AOE starships we have can deal damage to unlimited number of ships in the area, right? We probably want that nerfed.
if Raiders.. immune to Ion Cannons...they would instantly become useful in a fleet.That very specific part, no. If ion cannons cant target raiders, they will target something else. something probably more valuable.
Make them dirt cheap to build/replace, not as effective as a cap of regular fleetships but way more expendable.Many swarmers already seem to be in that area. The problem is that every ship is pretty much expendable. Your capped fleet strength is what matters most, not the time it takes to rebuild it. I do love fighters for their great price, but if someone offered to make them 50% stronger and 100% more expensive, i would gladly accept.
The problem is that every ship is pretty much expendable. Your capped fleet strength is what matters most, not the time it takes to rebuild it.
The problem is that every ship is pretty much expendable. Your capped fleet strength is what matters most, not the time it takes to rebuild it.
This, this so much.
This is one of the biggest reasons why traditional RTS balance models don't work in AI war. In the current balance, once you get past the early game, the cost of individual (not ultra low cap) fleet ships doesn't matter, only cap costs. And even then, it is only when rebuilding do you care about their costs. (Note, I am talking about fleet ships only for this, starships and golems are expensive to care enough about individual costs quite late into the game)
Not sure if I would classify this as a problem with the current balance, or just something that is a unique "flavor" AI war has...
But it has been like this for as long as I could remember (again, once you are past the early game).
In every game I have lost, it was due to my economy not being able to replace losses. So for me, cost is everything.Well duh, if you could replace everything fast enough, you'd never be in trouble.
By the way, those AOE starships we have can deal damage to unlimited number of ships in the area, right?No, that's not true. The only "unlimited AOE" units in the game are warheads and martyrs. Every other form of AOE has a maximum number of targets that can be affected by the blast.
If you could replace your ships faster, then you could have fought back. But if you had stronger fleet, would you end up in such bad situation in first place?
If you are taking waves on low caps that are in the thousands, and exo waves with 10K+ FP, no amount of fleet strength will allow you to overcome it without significant losses.
If you are taking waves on low caps that are in the thousands, and exo waves with 10K+ FP, no amount of fleet strength will allow you to overcome it without significant losses.
Then a very large part of your total costs is stored in static defences, not in the fleet ships. Am i wrong? i'm asking because i actually might be
We could just make a cap of them much stronger than a cap of non-swarmers to compensate, but I have an alternative idea: emphasize their Neinzul-ness. Make them dirt cheap to build/replace, not as effective as a cap of regular fleetships but way more expendable. Make them good for whatever the player might need cannon fodder for, basically.I'm going to have to vote for this. Swarmers as a group can be a lot more useful if their value lies not in how powerful they are when grouped but the fact that you could feasibly set a couple of assisted factories to rally to a system you're killing without tanking your resources. That still leaves a couple of odd ones out, but that can be fixed with multiplier or numbers tweaks.
This gives them a distinct role as a group, and makes the cap-strength imbalance less important.